Dana Suesse(1909-1987)

Nadine Dana Suesse (pronounced Sweese) was born into a lively era in music and entertainment in Kansas City, Missouri on December 3, 1909. When Dana grew too tall for ballet, piano lessons were begun with Kansas City teacher Gertrude Concannon. Her first concert was in Drexel Hall, Kansas City on June 29, 1919. The seeds of orchestration may have been planted during her year of organ studies with Hans Feil, who presented Dana in an organ recital on December 17, 1922. Dana had an affinity with the southern side of her family (as a child she visited them regularly) and frequently volunteered Shreveport, Louisiana, as her birthplace (she told one interviewer it was Alabama). Furthermore, while she declared she detested the life of a child prodigy, all through her early career she subtracted a couple of years from her real age. In 1926, Dana and her mother traveled to New York to advance her studies with the great pedagogue Alexander Siloti (at that time one of the four surviving pupils of Franz Liszt), and Rubin Goldmark, a former teacher of George Gershwin. In New York, Dana began experimenting with the jazz idiom. She told an interviewer, "I just kept my ears open and began to understand that there was something very interesting called jazz and popular music. This was an unknown territory to me...I compromised and used my classical training to make a bridge between [classical] and what was new to me." Her composition Syncopated Love Song bridged this gap between "serious" and "jazz" forms. Written in 1928, it wasn't popularized until Nathaniel Shilkret recorded it in 1929. Leo Robin created a lyric, and it soon became the hit song "Have You Forgotten." She was teamed with lyricist Edward Heyman, and wrote two more hits, "Ho Hum" and "My Silent Love." Paul Whiteman, the most famous orchestra leader in the world, was planning another "Experiment In Modern Music," and wanted to introduce modern works, as he had done in 1924 when he introduced Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue. Whiteman and his arranger, Ferde Grofé Sr., accepted Suesse's Concerto in Three Rhythms without criticism, and Suesse performed it at Carnegie Hall on November 4, 1932. Beginning with Billy Rose's first Broadway show, Sweet and Low (1930) Dana contributed to all of Rose's spectacular revues, including Casa Manana, the Aquacade and the Diamond Horseshoe revues. "The Night Is Young And You're So Beautiful" (written with Rose) won fifth place on Your Hit Parade on the broadcast of February 6, 1937, and stayed on the program for six weeks. Suesse also contributed songs to the Ziegfeld Follies (1934), Earl Carroll Vanities (1935), The Red Cat (1934) and the score to the film, Sweet Surrender (Universal, 1935). Her song "You Oughta Be In Pictures" (lyrics by Edward Heyman) became her most successful song. Incidental music was also written for numerous plays, including The "Seven Year Itch (1952)," produced by her first husband, H. Courtney Burr. Suesse's concertos and other works were featured in Radio City Music Hall, Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden and the Metropolitan Opera House. Conductors such as Frank J. Black, Robert Russell Bennett, Frederick Fennell, Arthur Fiedler, Eugene Goossens, Ferde Grofé Sr., Nathaniel Shilkret, Alexander Smallens, Alfred Wallenstein, and Meredith Willson performed her works in concert halls and on radio. She was the only American composer other than George Gershwin to be invited to perform on the now legendary General Motors Symphony concert series of nationwide broadcasts. Suesse aspired to be a lyricist as well as playwright, but her attempts at play writing never achieved success. One comedy, It Takes Two (written with Virginia Faulkner ran a short time to miserable reviews in New York (February, 1947), but that did not prevent Dana from enjoying half of the $50,000 paid for film rights. She took the opportunity to fulfill a lifelong dream, to study composition with a master. She moved to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger for three years, composing canons, string quartets, rondos, analyzing Beethoven sonatas and re-learning orchestration. After her return to the States, Dana was fascinated with the new progressive jazz sounds created by such pianists as Cy Coleman, Marian McPartland, and Billy Taylor. Frederick Fennell, conductor of the Eastman School of Music, heard about her Concerto in Rhythm (later called Jazz Concerto In D Major for Combo and Orchestra), and requested she play it for him on the piano, after which he insisted he be the first to conduct it. Before a cordial audience of two thousand, Suesse played the solo part as Fennell conducted the Rochester Civic Orchestra on Saturday night, March 31, 1956. The Rochester Times-Union said: "This is melodic music, full of surging pulse and vitality, fashioned as a work of art and possessing some thrilling climaxes." Despite her success in music, Dana still aspired to be more than a composer, and wrote scripts for many plays, with and without music. After Dana's mother and stepfather had passed away, she became disenchanted with Manhattan and the post-War music business. In April 1970, she moved to New London, Connecticut, where she met her next husband, C. Edwin Delinks. In 1974, after three years of marriage, they decided to invest their own money in an all-Suesse symphony concert at Carnegie Hall. Dana engaged the services of conductor Frederick Fennell and attended to a million details. The concert was given on December 11, 1974, with Cy Coleman as soloist with the American Symphony Orchestra. The New York Times reported, "...The highlight of the evening came when Miss Suesse herself joined the Orchestra to play The Blues, which is the second movement of the Concerto she played with Paul Whiteman at her début 42 years ago." A year later the prestigious Newport Music Festival (Rhode Island) presented four of her works in a concert series devoted to women. In 1975, Dana and Ed Delinks moved to Frederiksted, St. Croix, in the Virgin Islands. After a number of health crises, Ed died in a Miami hospital on July 7, 1981. Dana, who still read The New York Times every day, decided there was more to life than white beaches and turquoise seas. She returned to Manhattan in 1982 and rented two adjoining apartments at the Gramercy Park Hotel. A revival of interest in American music made her popular again for interviews and songwriters' concerts. Dana had a few distinct musical favorites. She loved Debussy's only completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande. She saw it twice in Paris (once with Boulanger) and at least twice in America. The music she would take with her "to a desert island" was Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor. Just before Suesse's death from a stroke she was busily writing a new musical, putting the finishing touches on Mr. Sycamore, which had been optioned for off-Broadway, and was looking for a New York home for a straight play, Nemesis.