Perry’s substantial, wide-ranging catalogue contains more than a dozen symphonies and at least three operas, all exceptional. If, like most people in the world, you don’t know much about her, please understand that this has nothing to do with her talent, which was formidable, and everything to do with her status, or lack thereof, as a Black woman in the mid-20th-century United States. Until recently, Perry has been all but absent from the concert repertoire. Even ambitious, well-intentioned conductors who want to program Perry’s music face challenges. Many of her unpublished works went missing after her death, and several surviving manuscripts are mired in copyright complications. During her own lifetime, racism and sexism challenged but never deterred her; if anything, she worked harder to chart her own path. Her revelatory compositions deserve — and reward — our attention.

The fourth of five sisters, Perry was born in Lexington, Kentucky, to a schoolteacher mother and a physician father, who once played piano well enough to accompany the celebrated lyric tenor Roland Hayes in concert. The family moved to Akron, Ohio, when Perry was 10. She earned a scholarship to Westminster Choir College, in Princeton, New Jersey, where she studied voice, piano and composition, and then Juilliard, which led to her first Guggenheim Fellowship.

In 1948 Perry earned her master’s degree and presented her secular cantata Chicago, a setting of the 1914 Carl Sandburg poem. After impressing Luigi Dallapiccolla with Stabat Mater, her breakthrough composition, she went on to study with him at Tanglewood and later, in Fontainebleau, outside of Paris, with the legendary Nadia Boulanger, who taught everyone from Aaron Copland to Quincy Jones.

In 1952 Perry won the Boulanger Grand Prix for her Viola Sonata. She also won a second Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed her to resume her studies with Dallapiccolla in Italy. The premiere of her Study for Orchestra was a highlight of her second Italian sojourn During the summers of 1956 and ’57, she took conducting classes in Siena and directed a series of concerts in Europe for the Information Service of the U.S. State Department.

Perry wrote her final five symphonies while dealing with serious health problems and physical disability. In 1970 she experienced her first stroke, which left her paralyzed on the right side. Unwilling to give up her life’s work, she figured out a way to write with her nondominant left hand, practicing notation between stints in the hospital. Late works include her Symphony No. 11 (“Space Symphony”), Symphony No. 12 (“Simple Symphony”) and the Marching Band Symphony. She also wrote an opera about the Salem witch trials, Symplegades. Her last known composition was Bicentennial Reflections, from 1977, a concise meditation on the theme of American freedom for tenor, electric bass and chamber ensemble. On April 24, 1979, in Akron, Ohio, Perry experienced catastrophic heart failure and died at age 55.

A Closer Listen

The Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Christian hymn to the Virgin Mary depicting her agonized response to the crucifixion of her son, Jesus Christ. The text is widely attributed to the Italian Franciscan friar Jacopone da Todi, although some scholars believe it might have been written by Pope Innocent III. The title is derived from the hymn’s first line, Stabat Mater dolorosa (“the sorrowful mother was standing”). Many composers have written settings of the Stabat Mater, which is often associated with the Stations of the Cross. In 1727 it was adopted as a Sequence for the Mass of the Seven Sorrows of Mary (September 15).

Completed in 1951 and dedicated to her mother, Perry’s setting is scored for contralto voice and string orchestra. Perry, an excellent singer, performed it herself until 1953, when she elected to stop singing professionally so that she could devote more time to composition. Indeed, her career seemed to be thriving: Southern Music Company published her Stabat Mater, and she received the first of her two Guggenheim Fellowships. Despite her decision to stop singing it, multiple performances of the Stabat Mater took place and were warmly received. Unfortunately, interest in her work fizzled out before Perry could collect much profit.

Perry, who sometimes taught foreign languages to supplement her modest income, provided her own English translation of the Latin text. The story, she wrote, “consists of three characters— Jesus, Mary and the spectator. In the first half of the drama, the spectator stands apart regarding the awesome sight. In the second half, wishing to share the burden, he expresses his desire in the words fac me cruce custodire [Let the cross guard me.]”

Organized in 10 sections, Perry’s Stabat Mater encompasses the full range of grief, from heartbroken resignation to righteous wrath. Dissonant shadows flicker over celestial harmonies. A solo violin sometimes mirrors the singer, creating a trippy contrapuntal effect. Despite the momentous, miraculous example of Christ’s redemptive suffering, Perry stays focused on the human experience, embodied in the mother Mary, whose sorrowful compassion connects her to all the other grieving mothers throughout history.

Since at least 1827, Schumann had been trying, and failing, to write a piano concerto. In 1839, the year before their marriage, he wrote to Clara Wieck about his protracted struggle: “Concerning concertos, I’ve already said to you they are hybrids of symphony, concerto and big sonata. I see that I can’t write a concerto for virtuosi and have to think of something else.” (If he sounds testy, imagine the pressure he must have been getting from his fiancée, a former child prodigy and the most famous concert pianist of her time.)

In 1841 he presented the Fantasie in A minor for piano and orchestra to his young bride. She was delighted with the single-movement work, remarking in their marriage diary that “the piano is most skillfully interwoven with the orchestra; it is impossible to think of one without the other.” But after two private performances, the Fantasie foundered. Unable to sell it to a publisher, Schumann put it aside and focused on chamber music while his depression worsened.

From Fantasie to Concerto

At the end of 1844, a particularly wretched year, the Schumann clan moved to Dresden, and Robert returned to the concerto challenge. This time he had a plan. After some revisions, the Fantasie became the first movement of a concerto. In 1845 he added an intermezzo and a finale. Taken together, the three movements fulfill a promise he had made in an essay published six years earlier: “We must await the genius who will show us in a newer and more brilliant way how orchestra and piano may be combined, how the soloist, dominant at the keyboard, may unfold the wealth of his instrument and his art, while the orchestra, no longer a mere spectator, may interweave its manifold facets into the scene.”

He was that genius, of course, and, masculine pronoun notwithstanding, Clara was the soloist at the Dresden premiere on December 4, 1845.

A Closer Listen

Clara did more than perform the work over and over again until her death, a half-century later. She is encoded into its DNA. Take the lambent, yearning main theme, first sung by the oboe. As the late Michael Steinberg explained, “Bearing in mind that what we call B-natural the Germans call H, you can see that the first four notes of the oboe theme could be taken to spell Chiara, or CHiArA, using those letters that have musical counterparts (C/B/A/A) in this Italian version of Clara’s name….”

Despite being composed over four turbulent years, the concerto is a miracle of coherence. Schumann spun out a wealth of melodies for his second and third movements by reconfiguring the first movement’s main theme. The lustrous intermezzo shows off the skills he had honed during his chamber-music sabbatical. The finale contains some blazing bravura passages, certainly, but they’re not the central concern. Whether forging new melodic paths or supporting other instruments, the piano is always essential, but that doesn’t make it most important. Listen to the back-and-forth of the winds and the piano in the opening movement. Listen to the fervent cello-piano pairing in the Intermezzo’s second theme. Listen to the ways in which the opposing rhythms of two- and three-beat patterns —hemiola — galvanize the finale. This concerto shines because of its relationships.

Brahms’ fourth and final symphony draws on a lifetime of experience and immersive study, resulting in a work that’s both intensely experimental and deeply traditional. Although the E Minor Symphony is now widely considered to be the capstone of his career as a symphonist, it was not warmly welcomed.

After the composer and pianist Ignaz Brüll performed a two-piano reduction of the score for a small gathering of Brahms’ closest friends, an awkward silence fell. The conductor Hans Richter and the music critics Eduard Hanslick and Max Kalbeck, all loyal supporters, were unable to say a single nice thing about it. Hanslick later wrote, “I felt as though I were being thrashed by two extremely clever fellows.” Kalbeck told Brahms that the finale, now regarded as the very heart of the work, was unsuitable for a symphony and should be replaced.

Although the Fourth’s premiere, conducted by the composer himself on October 25, 1885, in Meiningen, was a great success, it flopped badly in later performances in Vienna. The Austrian composer and critic Hugo Wolf dismissed it as “the art of composing without ideas.” Even the conductor Hans von Bülow, who famously anointed Brahms the successor to Bach and Beethoven, tersely described it as “difficult, very.” For more than a decade, audiences were unmoved, if not openly hostile.

It was not until his final appearance in public — in Vienna, on March 7, 1897, less than a month before he died — that Brahms witnessed a positive response to his final symphony. His former student and biographer Florence May recounted the anecdote in poignant detail: “A storm of applause broke out at the end of the first movement, not to be quieted until the composer, coming to the front of the artists’ box in which he was seated, showed himself to the audience…. The applauding, shouting house, its gaze riveted on the figure standing in the balcony, so familiar and yet in present aspect so strange, seemed unable to let him go. Tears ran down his cheeks as he stood there in shrunken form, with lined countenance, strained expression, white hair hanging lank; and through the audience there was a feeling as of a stifled sob, for each knew that they were saying farewell.”

A Closer Listen

Today, in the wake of modernism, postmodernism, and all its atonal offshoots, we struggle to understand why Brahms’ contemporaries found the Fourth Symphony so perplexing. Although it is certainly cunningly made, its cerebral qualities never distract from its beauty. The repeating cycles of descending thirds, which appear throughout the symphony in myriad motivic patterns, unite contrasting moods. Darkness permeates light, minor shifts to major, and vice versa.

The springing Allegro theme of the first movement gives rise to an overt quotation from one of Brahms’s Four Serious Songs: “Oh death, how bitter you are.” The gorgeous Andante moderato begins with a theme in the medieval-church Phrygian mode — which Brahms understood as the expression of deep need, a longing for heavenly comfort — and then gives way to the scherzo like Allegro giocoso, a triangle-happy romp in C major.

Yet it is the finale, based on the almost archaic passacaglia form (a set of variations over a repeated bass line), that catapults us to the sublime. A masterful compendium of everything Brahms had learned as a symphonist, it’s loosely based on his death-drunk Cantata No. 150, “For Thee, O Lord, I Long.”