The Egyptian Helen

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Egyptian Helen, performed on Oct 6, 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Librettists have a strange way of disappearing from view as individuals in their own right. For instance, everyone knows that Lorenzo Da Ponte collaborated with Mozart on three of the greatest operas ever written–Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosí fan tutte–but his name survives primarily as a result of his association with the great composer. Of all the librettists who should not be subject to such a fate, Hugo von Hofmannsthal is the first who should come to mind. In German-speaking culture, Hofmannsthal retains a stature the equivalent of his musical collaborator, Richard Strauss. Independent of his many well-known works with Strauss, Hofmannsthal was an Austrian man of letters with outstanding accomplishments in poetry, prose, and drama. He was a founder of the Salzburg Festival. Even if he had never worked with Richard Strauss, his writing would be required reading throughout Germany and Austria.

Therefore, even though we often mistrust (with some reason) the self-evaluations of authors and composers, the fact that Hofmannsthal believed the libretto of Die ägyptische Helena to be the best he had produced should make us take a close look at it. The ambivalent response to this work as an operatic text is not recent; some uncertainty about its quality still persists. But as Bryan Gilliam aptly notes, the libretto has a rather peculiar genesis. What started out to be an effort at comedy turned in the course of its development into something quite different, something penetrating and psychologically resonant. Die ägyptische Helena is indeed a serious reflection on love, marriage, and forgiveness. Its subject matter, presented in a deceptively simple mythological vehicle, connects it within the operatic repertoire to everything from Le Nozze di Figaro to Lulu. Hofmannsthal’s decision to make actions of the original story’s phantom Helen into those of the “real” Helen changed the potential for comedy and a farcical dynamic between stage and audience into a more direct opportunity to go beyond the surface of mere romance into the complexities and contradictions of love, sexuality, and marriage.

Contrary to popular opinion and instinct, these issues are not universal categories. True they seem to plague every culture and generation, but they do so in quite different ways. For the turn-of-the-century generation of Strauss (1864-1949) and Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), an idealized category of the feminine from early Romanticism and the Christian conception of marriage were compromised by the work of two seminal figures whose influence cast a long and permanent shadow over European thought and culture: Richard Wagner and Sigmund Freud. Wagner, himself no paragon of marital fidelity, put on stage a narcotic mixture of music, poetry, and drama that revealed to his middle-class audiences the inherent tragedy in the tension between the pursuit of true love and the constraints of everyday life, including human nature. If Kierkegaard understood the Christian notion of love and marriage to be a terrifying stricture through which an individual could display true faith in the sense of self-denial and psychic transformation, Wagner’s work suggested another alternative. The pursuit of the standard moral and ethical claims of mainstream contemporary Christian thought–which demanded love of family, hard work, and fidelity from the civilized European–suddenly appeared to be sacrifices without any redeeming features whatsoever, let alone salvation. Tristan und Isolde celebrates not only the tribulations of intense passion, but the idea that its experience is preferable over the failure to experience it, despite the inherent risk that passion realized demands death. Wagnerian music and drama created a world of fantasy to which Europeans, trapped in the drab routines of respectable middle-class life, flocked. Wagner created an avenue of escape from the mundane into an arena of the heroic and the ecstatic, a space where each individual might realize the latent power of his own emotion and imagination. This is in part why Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe’s most articulate foe of Christianity, initially embraced Wagner, for he saw the composer as an apostle of an art which could transform modern Europe and cause it to cast off the shackles of Christian morality, and connect itself once again to the sense of human power and passion celebrated by the ancient Greeks. And there is of course the struggle with the real and idealized feminine of Gustav Mahler, Strauss’s colleague and contemporary, most powerfully expressed in his Eighth Symphony.

With the writings of Sigmund Freud (especially his Interpretation of Dreams whose insights ultimately found their way into literature, music, and painting), the traditional Christian denial of the sexual underpinnings of human behavior, the erotic and the Dionysian, was exposed and discredited in the eyes of the literate European public. What Max Weber called Entzauberung–the de-magification, as it were, of Western culture–reached its peak before 1914, suppressing both superstition and the hold of religion over the lives of modern, urban, European citizens. In this new context, the conventional claims and obligations of marriage, from the process of courtship to the raising of children, seem to collapse form their own obsolescence. Marriage rites, portrayed by Freud as dependent on the darkest sublimations of the human psyche, could be viewed as an act of hypocrisy, counteracting the true nature of humans, and extracting a toll of self-denial and deception that seemed ultimately destructive. The figure of the Bohemian flourished as bourgeois fantasy. In today’s parlance, the utopia of “family values” held little allure and plausibility. Conservative cultural critics at the turn of the century argued that Europe was in the grip of a degenerate aesthetic, subverting all that modernity had sought to achieve in terms of civility, science, and societal progress. Nietzsche and Wagner, the heroes of the young, were seen as the chief culprits.

This fundamental reassessment of values influenced the making of art in which an explosive interest in human psychology and sexuality came to play a central role. Both Hofmannsthal and Strauss were keenly aware of how difficult it was in their own age to draw upon the traditions of artistic expression founded by the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century masters–Goethe and Mozart, for example. Hofmannsthal made his early reputation while still a teenager as one of the most compelling lyric talents to write in German, but by the early 1900s he experienced a profound crisis, in which he came to the conclusion that the concept of language and poetry with which he had begun was no longer relevant to his own time. Strauss, the son of a great horn player, grew up with a youthful enthusiasm for the sort of music his father favored. A precocious young man, he began to write music in the conservative traditions we associate with Brahms, Schumann, and Mendelssohn. Like Hofmannsthal, Strauss too had an intense personal crisis, linked to an intense love affair with someone of whom his family did not approve. But personal and artistic transformation were synonymous events for both artists. In Strauss’s case his discovery of Wagner led to self-reinvention as a composer. A conservative now turned radical, he dazzled the world with his series of orchestral tone poems. After two failed attempts at both comic opera and tragic music drama imitative of Wagner, Strauss encountered sensational success with his operatic settings of Oscar Wilde and Hofmannsthal’s modernization of Elektra. These subjects certainly had special resonance for a public obsessed with sexual psychology and intricate family relationships. By the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, both Strauss and Hofmannsthal were at the peak of their powers, and began their long collaboration, of which Die ägyptische Helena is the last fully completed product.

Yet here is where Strauss’s own story becomes complicated. Despite his fascination with Wagner, Strauss was to his dying day not in accord with the fashions of the fin de siécle. For one thing, his true lifelong musical model never became Wagner at all, but remained Mozart. For another, in apparent contradiction to Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan, and Salome, Strauss, like Brahms, was thoroughly comfortable with the very middle-class lifestyle that was so under siege among his fellow artists, writers, and thinkers. His greatest passion was card-playing, and his personality seemed so commonplace that Gustav Mahler, after hearing Salome, is reputed to have remarked how inconceivable it was that someone so ordinary and bourgeois, so interested in lavish material comforts, could write such astonishingly visionary and brilliant music. Strauss was no Bohemian; he fashioned his life not only on the model of Brahms but of Haydn: he considered himself a highly disciplined, traditional craftsman.

Beneath a veneer of bourgeois ambition, egotism, and simplicity, there nevertheless existed in Richard Strauss a profound capacity for insight into the very contradictions and conflicts in values that characterized the modern human being and his culture. In this sense, Strauss did not indulge in the rebellion of the fin de siécle. With his marriage to Pauline d’Ahna (whom Strauss immortalized–not necessarily to her liking–in his autobiographical opera Intermezzo, with a libretto he wrote himself against Hofmannsthal’s advice), he entered into an obligation akin to Kierkegaard’s definition. His wife, once a great soprano, proved over time to be notoriously difficult, petty, and demanding. There is a famous anecdote associated with the premiere of Die ägyptische Helena, which recounts how when Strauss was trying to demonstrate a certain passage to the conductor Fritz Busch, Pauline kept disrupting the rehearsal by meddling onstage with the singers and their costumes. Strauss finally ceased conducting and, in the pregnant silence that followed, pronounced with characteristic irony the final line of Salome: “Kill that woman!” Nevertheless, unlike most of his contemporaries, Strauss saw in the self-discipline of martial fidelity and loyalty not the death of creativity, but its source. In the decade following the premiere of Die ägyptische Helena, Alban Berg set Frank Wedekind’s character of Lulu to music. Berg was supposedly the beneficiary of an ideal marriage, but as scholarship has since revealed, he had an intense and longstanding affair with the sister of Franz Werfel. No research, however, is likely to uncover any infidelity on Strauss’s part. The very nature of the vacuous bourgeois family served Strauss as an environment in which a human being might reach his fullest powers of imagination and find the best possibilities for inspiration. The dialectic between the ordinary and the extraordinary was for Strauss the dialectic between mundane living and art. One did not miss the few opportunities to transcend the ordinary through art by squandering them on an artistic lifestyle. Strauss’s self-imposed discipline in his own private life created a wide interior expanse from which a profound recognition of human everyday suffering and desire could flow forth in music. But Strauss protected his intellectual and philosophical ruminations from becoming visible, leaving them hidden under the mask of the ordinary.

Hofmannsthal was therefore an ideal partner for Strauss. His command of language and deep respect for literary classicism was powerfully augmented by an unusual musical sensibility. In contrast to some observations, it can be said that few writers of that generation were possessed of as much connection to musical culture as Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Beginning with Der Rosenkavalier, their most famous and commercially successful collaboration, the two men wrote a whole series of operas about love, loyalty, and marriage. But as a result of these operas, Strauss the composer of Salome and Elektra was accused of reversing his musical development and becoming a conservative. Despite its success, Der Rosenkavalier was considered a manifesto against modernism. For most of the century, the rest of Strauss’s output, particularly between the years 1914-45, was considered competent but not comparable to his earlier successes. He acquired the reputation of being a gifted composer who had peaked early and lived too long. Arabella, with a libretto that Hofmannsthal was never able to revise, became successful only as an echo of Der Rosenkavalier.

The Die äygptische Helena listener, however, should view the standard account and critical assessment of Strauss’s output with a hefty dose of skepticism. For when Strauss became the béte noir of all advocates of twentieth-century musical modernism (whether they were disciples of Stravinsky or Schoenberg), he still remained the only apostle of tonality and the Romantic gesture from whom one could not withhold respect. He hung around for the first half of the century like the ghost of Banquo, a painful reminder of a guilty conscience. Yet Strauss made his own pact with the devil by participating actively with and allowing himself to be used by the Nazis. While he was certainly not a rabid ideologue–his greatest motivations were his own venality and comfort, as well as a desire to take revenge on all his contemporaries who dismissed him–there is no way to defend his association with the Nazis. Strauss, who could render human frailty more compellingly than anyone, who rarely camouflaged the ambivalences and contradictions of human behavior and self-presentation, must not be rationalized by his biography. This aspect of Strauss’s life is relevant in part because modernist theorists such as Theodor Adorno have tried to link Strauss’s allegiance to the musical language he employed in Die ägyptische Helena with an aesthetic credo which was itself ethically compromised as a logical partner of fascism and oppression. This ideological linkage of aesthetic modernism and progressive anti-fascist politics itself needs to also be treated with skepticism, not so much to defend Strauss but to explain why composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Walter Braunfels, and Marcel Rubin–victims, émigrés, and in some cases, political progressives–shared Strauss’s anti-modern stance. Not every musical modernist was a progressive, and not every adherent to nineteenth-century musical romanticism was a fascist. As the score to this opera makes clear, one of Strauss’s contributions to modernism is his self-conscious and self-reflective recasting of traditional expectation and fragments of the past.

Since Strauss’s death, critical reassessment of his work has progressed much too slowly. There are some among us who have argued (without great acceptance) that Strauss’s work from the 1920s to the 1930s, particularly Die ägyptische Helena, are high points in his artistic career. His choice of musical language enhances not only the subject matter but Hofmannsthal’s verbal language. The filigree-like delicacy and complexity of Strauss’s orchestration and voice-writing always reveal the Mozart in him. Die ägyptische Helena is not simply a curiosity or an interesting if flawed work by a great composer, but rather it is the kind of masterpiece that needed a future generation to discover it and assign it to its proper place in the mutable canon of artistic acceptance.

The fact that the opera has seemed static to some perhaps reveals a reductive expectation of dramatic action. Strauss always urged conductors of his operas to take great care when dealing with the massive orchestration not to sacrifice the clarity of the sung words. As Mozart and particularly Wagner made evident, music’s greatest moment in combination with text is its capacity to augment and express inner thoughts that may not correspond to the spoken work, and in fact may occur in opposition to explicit expression: this is the ongoing internal dialogue that constituted our complex and ambivalent psychologies. On the operatic stage, thinking without actions becomes representable in a way that radically extends the possibilities of conventional theater. In this sense, a Strauss opera of the 1920s is comparable to reading one of the great psychological novels of the turn of the century–by Henry James, perhaps–in which the real events occur as internal perceptions, invisible to the external spectator but profoundly consequential.

Finally, in his mature years, Strauss achieved a synthesis of seemingly contradictory styles. His music reflects the same intense ability to transform and develop material that we so highly value not only in Mozart and Brahms, but in Wagner and Berg as well. To a 1920’s public enraptured by modernism and aesthetic radicalism and obsessed with the irrational, Strauss offered a contribution of his own which indicates how much he ultimately ran against the grain of his times by being keenly aware of it. He abandoned all need to follow fashion, but sought through the operation and musical traditions he so cherished to compel his listeners to confront the possibilities and consequences of heir own autobiographical struggles. He urged them to find individuality and creativity not in a perpetual sequential search to recover the excesses of new desire, romance, and fulfillment, but to accept the challenge that mortality and morality offer us: to love, to marry, to live productively in a necessarily limited world, and yet still to transform loneliness, suffering, and disappointment not into resentments but into occasions for self-recognition, wisdom, and the discovery of otherwise unimaginable beauty. Hofmannsthal was right: not only does Die ägyptische Helena possess his finest libretto, but it offers the vehicle for one of Strauss’s most intensely introspective and alluring artistic statements. In Die ägyptische Helena, we encounter the genuine modern heir to Mozart: a composer who enables us, with the help of a great librettist, to experience our own human frailties and sufferings without dilution, using the archetypes of musical theater and mythology. We should emerge from Die ägyptische Helena a bit more reflective about our own lives for that experience.

Opera and Oscar Wilde

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Opera and Oscar Wilde, performed on June 9, 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is unconventional, to say the least, to distinguish composers according to their moral outlook. But as a theoretical exercise, it is interesting to consider those whose work reflects their strict adherence to notions of absolute right and wrong, and those who seem more ambiguous and attracted by the frailty and compromises that constitute the essence of human nature. For the composers of this latter group, human weakness is inherently fascinating not merely as a pessimistic expression of worthlessness, but as an ironic source of individuality and uniqueness that has its own peculiar value. Among the sure-footed moralists, one might list Beethoven and Mahler; among the devotees to the ambiguous, Mozart perhaps, Richard Strauss certainly, and of course, Alexander Zemlinsky.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that both Strauss and Zemlinsky were attracted to the works of Oscar Wilde, the model of moral ambiguity who nevertheless offered trenchant observations on human nature and society. Wilde (1854-1900), the Irish poet, playwright, and author, was a dominant figure of what has been called the “decadent” or “aesthetic” movement at the end of the nineteenth century. His most famous works, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and Salome (1894; the basis for Strauss’s opera of 1905), are filled with characters who for better or worse enact the aesthetic’s ideal of turning life into a work of art, as Wilde himself tried to do. Underlying this ideal is the notion that life itself as a serious pursuit has lost meaning (if it ever had any) in the face of modernity and progress. The only recourse therefore is to obscure this deficiency by making every sensation and experience as beautiful (which does not exclude admiration for the grotesque) and artistic as possible—in other words, to make everything a matter of taste. But for all of Wilde’s personal and artistic championing of this aesthetic ideal, his fundamental ambivalence is also clearly demonstrated by the monsters this principle creates who repeatedly appear in his writings: Dorian, Salome, the Infanta. As Wilde explicitly promotes the aesthete’s way of life, he also continually exposes it as an inadequate chimera, desperately and unsuccessfully used to cover a heart of darkness.

The layers of deception, irony, and implicit commentary that characterize Wilde’s work make for great dramatic music. Wilde’s writings therefore bear the posthumous distinction of having been set to music more consistently than perhaps any contemporary, with the exception of Maurice Maeterlinck. Composers in addition to Strauss and Zemlinsky who made use of Wilde include Jacques Ibert, Franz Schreker, Bernhard Sekles, and several Russian composers such as Glazunov. It is clear why Wilde would have no allure for a composer like Gustav Mahler, who was perhaps more interested in fortifying the illusions and romantic ideals of life than in shattering them. But that of course only sharpens the irony and ambiguity of Zemlinsky’s operatic treatment of two of Wilde’s short works, for the figure and personality of Gustav Mahler hangs over both of these operas, as we shall see.

There is perhaps no better example of Wilde’s view of human nature’s profound contradictions than the event of his own life that made Wilde himself far more infamous than any of his writings for many years to come. In 1895, he lost a libel action against the Marquis of Queensbury (of boxing rules fame), with whose son, Alfred Douglas (the translator of Salome) Wilde had had a tempestuous and notorious relationship. Wilde could have avoided the scandal by discreetly remaining in Paris, but instead he chose to challenge directly the hypocrisy of the society he had so long criticized in his plays and poems—a rather principled action for a champion of aesthetic decadence. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to hard labor in Reading Gaol. A ruined and broken man, he died in Paris at age 46, just three years after his release. If we honor Wilde’s desire to have his own life perceived as a work of art, then it is certainly not out of the question to observe in the two source works for this afternoon’s performance the poignancy and tragedy felt and experienced by their author. Beyond the witticisms and aphorisms, there exists in Wilde’s work razor-sharp insight into the self-delusive, cruel and complex psychological interaction among people. And this, surely, Zemlinsky saw as well.

Wilde isolates the qualities to be criticized by removing them to a transparent and simplified atmosphere. In the case of A Florentine Tragedy, Renaissance Italy is the backdrop for both a universal story of a love triangle, and themes that resonate of the modern world as well, such as bourgeois commercialism and class prejudice. In The Dwarf, Wilde offers an orientalist fairytale in order to highlight the horrific consequences of human superficiality and apathy. The question that Wilde, like all master satirists, asks of us is this: how much of ourselves do we recognize in these distilled portraits? Do we, like the dwarf, know whether we are looking in a mirror, and do we recognize what we see there?

For Zemlinsky, the image that looked back must have been very clear indeed. The Habsburg Vienna in which he came of age was infused with the class divisions between a bored, privileged aristocracy and a wealthy middle-class, hungry for the rich art-objects that for them epitomized the nobility. Both strata of society of course despised each other, as Guido’s and Simone’s charged tête-à-tête suggests. And then there were outside observers to both of these strata, such as the Sephardic Jewish community to which part of Zemlinsky’s family belonged, the synagogue of which, in the Zirkusgasse, had its own musical and liturgical tradition distinct from other Viennese Jewish congregations (an influence on the composer only recently studied). Such observers on the margins realized that the pretensions of the aristocracy were matched only by the philistine consumption of the middle-class. Wilde had no sympathy for either division of the class line, neither the superficial upper class nor the parvenu middle class.

But that is not all that informs the human exchange in A Florentine Tragedy. Wilde’s text was left unfinished. It had been stolen from him and reappeared only posthumously. It appeared to many, including Puccini, to lack a proper opening scene. Zemlinsky’s affinity to this work has been a source of much speculation. Some have thought to find in the triangle a parallel to the affair between Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde Schoenberg, wife of the composer, and the painter Richard Gerstl. But the outcome of that real life circumstance contrasts sharply with the chilling end of A Florentine Tragedy. Mathilde was apparently talked into returning to Schoenberg. Gerstl shortly thereafter committed suicide and many have thought that Mathilde lived out the rest of her life in a state of isolation and unhappiness. No doubt these events were fresh in Zemlinsky’s memory, but they co-existed with the memory of another triangle in Zemlinsky’s experience: Alma Mahler’s affair around 1910 with the handsome, non-Jewish architect Walter Gropius. This affair had serious consequences for Mahler and seems strangely to have deepened his sense of attachment to his wife. While this biographical parallel is not a comprehensive explanation of Zemlinsky’s interest in this text, it nevertheless fills in Wilde’s displaced historical framework with intensified and fascinating significance. In Wilde’s version, we find a conflict between nobleman and commoner that might have struck Zemlinsky as also being comparable to the striking differences in background and personality of Gropius and Mahler.

Wilde’s reputation took years to turn around, so that we now assess his unique achievement as a writer rather than as merely a notorious, tragic figure. Alexander Zemlinsky did not live a life of such unconventionality, but he too has now begun to receive his due as an important composer. As recently as fifteen years ago, he was a figure one found primarily in history books as a subsidiary figure. His footnote depended mostly on the fact that, in addition to being Schoenberg’s older friend, mentor, and brother-in-law, he was the unfortunate whom Alma Mahler left for Gustav Mahler. Zemlinsky was actually considered a formidable talent during his lifetime, whose gift as a composer won the admiration of Brahms. He was also, famously, an ugly, diminutive figure (who happened to be, if one can believe Alma, a better lover than Mahler). Autobiographical parallels in The Dwarf do not require a stretch of imagination in this case. Ever since Rumpelstiltsken and Wagner’s Alberich, the use of the dwarf as a coded reference for a Jew had been commonplace. Infanta Alma, the beautiful, young coquette, daughter of a prominent non-Jewish painter, femme fatale, an artist of talent and facility, did break the heart of her little toy.

But unlike his operatic counterpart, Zemlinsky did not die of this grief. His career as a composer and performer proceeded. It was troubled in part because of his enormous facility and personal generosity. He seems never quite to have understood how to take advantage of others as his competitors did. He was an extremely generous colleague and teacher of such composers as Erich Wolfgang Korngold. During the first period of his career in Vienna, Zemlinsky was tireless in creating opportunities for the performance of new music by his contemporaries and in helping other composers. His own works also received performances, including some by Mahler at the Vienna Opera. Although Zemlinsky began as a composer in the spirit of Brahms, he developed in a trajectory of new innovations in the use of musical materials, and even was an early experimenter in symbolism in a kind of post-Wagnerian expressionist compositional strategy, though he never went in the direction of the more radical modernist innovations after World War I. He became increasingly well known as a conductor particularly in the opera, and an indispensable and significant force in the musical life of Prague. But he was rarely the beneficiary of reciprocated loyalty for the many protestations of friendship and admiration he received; indeed, even his relation with Schoenberg had become distant. Zemlinsky ended up emigrating to America, old, forgotten, and ill. He died essentially in total obscurity in Larchmont, New York in 1942.

It is one of the unpredictable outcomes of the shifting dynamics of musical taste during the last decades of the twentieth century that turn-of-the-century, central European composers, like their counterparts in painting and architecture, have been rediscovered and become objects of renewed interest. In Zemlinsky’s case there is a large body of work for orchestra and for the stage that has long been unfairly neglected. As we have become more eclectic and tolerant in our view of the leading currents of twentieth century music, he has no longer remained a footnote or a silent academic figure in the history of music. As you have your own aesthetic experience of this afternoon’s music, you will find how powerful, passionate, and distinctly original Zemlinsky’s voice is, and how it embodies Wilde’s suggestion that perhaps the final word belongs to the artist.

Scandinavian Romantics

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Scandinavian Romantics, performed on May 10, 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

We have become accustomed to categorizing composers’ musical styles and movements by national groupings. We speak with ease and confidence about French music, Russian music, the twentieth-century English school, and so forth. It is not clear, however, that national labels are always either descriptive or appropriate. Nationalism in music as it was understood during the late nineteenth century was partly the creation of observers mostly from German-speaking Europe. They construed the efforts of non-German composers as products of “peripheral” countries. Such music was often noted for use of materials stemming from local sources (sometimes categorized as “folk”). Viennese Classicism and the early Romanticism of Schumann’s generation were regarded as normative, categorizing the efforts of Tchaikovsky, for example, or Grieg and Dvořák as “exotic,” meaning that local materials were integrated into the symphonic form and the writing of piano and chamber music.

Nationalism also reflected a conscious ambition on the part of composers from countries surrounding German-speaking Europe who wanted to resist the hegemony of classicism and the air of arrogant cultural superiority on the part of the French and Germans. Cultural nationalism after 1848 worked to strengthen the role of local languages. During the second half of the nineteenth century there was a dramatic flowering of Polish, Finnish, Czech and Hungarian literature. These languages sought to compete with the presumed social and diplomatic superiority of French and intellectual dominance of German. Both England and Germany represented rapid industrialization and urbanization. In the regions to the north and east of Germany that had largely rural traditions, cultural nationalism functioned as an implicit critique of the urban, bourgeois, and modern. Concomitant to that was a sentimentalized and somewhat nostalgic embrace of a natural world of beauty seemingly endangered by the trends of modernity.

When one considers Scandinavia, issues of place, region, and nation become even more resonant. Nationalism in Scandinavia does not possess a uniform history. For example, the composer Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927) hailed from Sweden, once one of the great powers of Europe. Its moment of greatest glory was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Swedes were at the forefront of the Protestant cause. Swedish power extended well into Russia and receded through the eighteenth century. Sweden controlled what is today Finland until the early nineteenth century. Stenhammar’s nationalism was comprised of a linguistic, cultural, and religious tradition possessed of a great past and therefore without a deep sense of inferiority. Nevertheless, precisely because Sweden had receded in significance, Stenhammar shared a desire to assert a Swedish character in his music and build a strong musical infrastructure in his home country, while at the same time writing and performing in a manner that would not be marginalized in Berlin, Paris or London. Stenhammar came from a distinguished Swedish family and benefited from highly developed, albeit conservative, cultural traditions. Nevertheless, despite his privileged status Stenhammar sought to integrate his commitment to Classicism with native materials and colors without suggesting any sort of ethnographic authenticity.

The contrast with Stenhammar’s friend Jean Sibelius is instructive. Sibelius was born into a Swedish-speaking Finnish family. The Finland in which he was raised was under Russian jurisdiction. Later in life, Sibelius would be an outspoken critic of Russia’s effort to suppress the Finnish language and culture. In his early years, Sibelius’s primary language was Swedish. He possessed only the most rudimentary knowledge of his Finnish heritage. As he came of age as an individual and artist, he slowly shed his attachment to the Swedish traditions and their links to the European mainstream. He studied and advocated the tonality and rhythms of Finnish language, folk culture and pre-modern Finnish mythology. It took him considerable effort to command Finnish well enough to correspond with his wife, who came from one of the leading pro-Finnish artistic and intellectual families. Sibelius ultimately became a world-famous and internationally celebrated symbol of Finnish nationalism. This was an ironic achievement accomplished in part because of his own lingering ambivalence and because he never lost the outsider’s perspective. That perspective made his self-fashioning into a Finnish patriot, a clearly conscious task. As he acquired this new sensibility, he rebelled against Classicist and Romantic conventions in music, and embraced his own extrapolations of what he regarded to be authentic folk traditions and the musical implications of the ancient Finnish epic (paralleling Leoš Janáček’s derivation of a musical idiom from the Czech language).

Sibelius also found himself critical of modernity and modernism. At one time in his career he had been very close to Ferrucio Busoni, an early advocate of a progressive evolution of a universalist modern musical grammar. But he ended up inaccurately being hailed as a great exemplar of an organic, rooted reactionary musical language, particularly in America and England. He was touted by conservatives as an alternative to the corrupt and ugly modernism of Russian, German, and French innovators such as Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg. Sibelius found himself uncomfortably transformed into a darling of the Nazis; his music was understood as corresponding conveniently with Nazi aesthetic ideology. It was also unfortunate that Sibelius harbored his own right-wing, anti-Communist political prejudices in his later years. Indeed, until very recently, Sibelius’s music had been dismissed as old-fashioned and reactionary. However, as this his last symphony, reveals, he was anything but a conservative, old-fashioned composer. He was in fact a visionary and an innovator.

The case of Vagn Holmboe is equally fascinating and complex. Unlike Finland, Denmark was not oppressed for a considerable stretch of its history; rather it was a dominant power in Scandinavia for generations, united with Sweden until the sixteenth century and controlling Norway until 1814. However, tension with Prussia in the nineteenth century was palpable, including a war in which Denmark lost Schleswig-Holstein in 1864. But this defeat was followed by a period of widespread social and economic reforms, which transformed the country into one of the most progressive and prosperous in Europe. Ironically like the Swedes, the Danish language has deep parallels to German (as opposed to Finnish, which is a completely distinct language in origin and structure). The tension between the Danes and the Germans, despite such similarities, persisted and reached its apex during World War II, when Germany occupied Denmark. There was a strong and courageous Danish resistance, sparked in part by the house arrest of King Christian X and a historic effort to save the Jewish population.

Vagn Holmboe had been deeply influenced by Bartók, and like Sibelius and Stenhammar sought rural folk sources that could function either as an alternative to or within German Classicism and late Romanticism. Owing in part to the influence of his wife, a Romanian pianist, Holmboe was deeply interested in the folk materials of the Balkans. But he also studied Danish street-cries, using the local urban culture as a potential source of inspiration.

Holmboe, the youngest composer on tonight’s program, reminds us, however, how seriously we need to consider Scandinavia not as an amalgam of separate nations of but as a coherent region. Both Holmboe and Sibelius retreated early in their careers from the city and lived in near isolation in the Scandinavian landscape, close to nature. It is precisely the natural environment and the light of Scandinavia that help create the cultural coherence of the region. Both composers developed elaborate theories about the mystical relationship between light and the natural world and the experience of nature and the expressiveness of music. Both took a position against what they believed to be an artificial construct of music-making that they believe was, characteristic of much of twentieth-century modernism. However, it would be incorrect to consider their approach to musical form as conservative or reactionary. They both shared a more organic approach, resisting both formalism and the post-Wagnerian narrative program. Holmboe and Sibelius represent an especially evocative Scandinavian spirituality within music-making that flowered in the twentieth century. This was only suggested by Stenhammar. Although Sibelius studied in Berlin and Vienna, he (like Holmboe and Stenhammar) owed the refinement and quality of his musical training to the institutions and traditions of music education, composition and performance which flowered in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Göteborg during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Stenhammar died young, cutting a promising career as pianist and composer short. Sibelius, one of the most psychologically impenetrable figures in the history of music, was overwhelmed by self-criticism and alcoholism. He fell silent as a composer for nearly three decades at the end of his life, at the moment of his greatest fame and reputation. Holmboe is the composer least known outside of his homeland. But of the three he enjoyed the longest life and most consistent productivity. He was a force to be reckoned with, not only as a composer but as a teacher and a writer.

Listeners tonight have a chance to encounter an alternative to French, Russian, and German modernism represented by two generations of Scandinavian composers. We encounter first Vagn Holmboe’s most famous symphony, one linked intimately to the Danish landscape. We then turn back to Stenhammar’s unique synthesis of mainstream European tradition with his own particular sensibility. We close with the greatest of all Scandinavian symphonists, one of the towering figures of twentieth-century music. His final tortured and profoundly innovative reflection on the expressive capacities of symphonic form and sonority has been often considered his greatest single work of music. Taken together, these composers tell a story of resistance to trends and fashions within composition and criticism. They reveal the search for a distinctly northern voice.

Strauss’ Musical Landscapes

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Strauss’ Musical Landscapes, performed on April 14, 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The perception of late Romanticism in music has been shaped partly by a rather set of facile dichotomies and contrasts. Among these contrasts is the distinction between so-called “absolute” music and program music. With the publication of Eduard Hanslick’s 1854 tract “On the Beautiful in Music,” the idea that music is purely self-referential and grounded in the play of moving sound within abstract or artificial structures became widespread. Hanslick’s conception was said to influence and represent the ideals of several generations of composers well into the twentieth century. One of the most prominent of these was Johannes Brahms, a friend of Hanslick who actually was somewhat doubtful about the famous critic’s judgment and views.

In this familiar tale, the other side of the dichotomy was represented by the “New German School,” spearheaded by Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. For them, Schumann’s early Romanticism and the very essence of Beethoven implied that music told some sort of story and conveyed emotions. While the procedures of musical composition doubtlessly contained aspects of self-reference and a grammar all its own, there were undeniable connections between musical meaning and the extra-musical. Liszt and his successors therefore pioneered an instrumental music that was explicitly connected to some sort of literary or poetic idea. They replaced the conception of the symphony as a multi-movement work forged into a coherent whole only through the internal connections between musical materials with the ideal of a large-scale instrumental composition whose musical procedure either echoed or was driven by a narrative or a single idea that could be expressed in both musical and non-musical terms. This approach to composition soon took on the odd appellation “program music.”

This neat division may never have been anything more than a convenient, reductive way to explain the evident rivalries between several generations of European composers of concert music. Personal antipathy tended to be translated into and exacerbated by an appeal to aesthetic principles and incompatible ideologies. Brahms, for example, found Wagner’s pretensions repellent, but deeply admired his gifts as a composer. For his part, Wagner’s dismissal of Brahms (much like his virulent campaign against Mendelssohn) can easily be reformulated not only as an aesthetic judgment but as a reflection of his own well-known insecurity regarding the virtuosity and facility of rival composers. Brahms’s explosion onto the scene as both composer and performer easily inspired jealousy. Furthermore, a similar revision of motives can also be perceived in the rivalry of Bruckner and Brahms. The gulf in social origins, religious conviction, and personal styles was as significant as aesthetic incompatibilities. Indeed Bruckner offers the most revealing example of how much closer both schools of composition were in their fundamental views than is generally thought. Bruckner was deeply influenced by Wagner, but when one considers not only his music but that of Wagner alongside Brahms’s, one hears that there is something within the musical communication of the late nineteenth century (despite evident differences in musical procedures) that is shared. There was, as there was in Beethoven, a common effort to communicate meaning beyond the range of the purely musical as it was narrowly defined by aesthetic theorists. Perhaps there is ultimately little difference between what aestheticians once loved to call the “musical” as opposed to the “extra-musical.”

It was in a world preoccupied with such mania for musical factionalism, in which radical and irreconcilable camps and schools of thought within music sprang like mushrooms, that Richard Strauss was born and came of age as a composer. His father, a great Horn player, was an avowed anti-Wagnerite, who held an absolutist position dominated by a deep regard for the heritage of Viennese classicism. Richard Strauss’s first success as a composer came under the aegis of the pro-Brahms club led by that fallen angel from the Wagner circle, the cuckolded husband and great pianist and conductor, Hans von Bülow. Strauss’s earliest career reflects this association: he actually wrote symphonies in his youth as well as other music that followed the formalist anti-programmatic pattern.

But then, for a variety of reasons that are still the subject of intense scholarly scrutiny, Strauss’s direction and ambitions shifted. Through close study of Wagner’s achievement, Strauss became enamored of new possibilities and made contact with a generation of post-Wagnerian contemporaries who, in the wake of the master of Bayreuth’s death in 1883, vowed to carry on his legacy. Strauss began writing instrumental music that conveyed extra-musical significance and meaning to the audience. The first work on today’s program, Aus Italien (1886), marks the beginning of Strauss’s “second” period, during which he produced some of his best known music, including the great tone poems Don Juan (1888), Death and Transfiguration (1888), Till Eulenspiegel (1895), Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896), and Ein Heldenleben (1898). This was also a period in which Strauss made his debut as an opera composer beginning with Guntram (1893), Feuersnot (1901), and in 1905 and 1908, Salome and Elektra.

But Strauss’s most fascinating development during this period was actually not his newly found allegiance to the paradigm of Liszt and Wagner, but the synthesis he created between his classical training and early predisposition, and this new ideology of how music could communicate and express meaning. Strauss employed with uncommon virtuosity the musical armament not only of Classicism and early Romanticism, but the innovations of Wagner that included a new harmonic sensibility and a unique skill in linking musical gesture with ideas, personalities, and emotions. Wagner added a layer of comprehensibility in musical language that could appeal to a wide audience. He made it easier to use musical procedures derived from classicism to tell a story or to express one’s reaction to the external world. Finally, Wagner helped invent a form of musical prose and an orchestral sound that Strauss mastered with unequaled virtuosity and flexibility. By the turn of the century, he catapulted himself into a position as the most important and revolutionary successor to Richard Wagner.

This status Strauss achieved not through opera but in instrumental music that expressed love, death, apotheosis, sexuality, Nietzschean philosophy, and biography. By the composition of his final tone poem, Symphonia domestica (1905), Strauss had so perfected the integration of musical formalism and extra-musical narration that he was able to depict through music in an uncannily powerful way the most trivial details of everyday life, such as bathing the children or having a domestic quarrel. Indeed, precisely because of his excessive gift for musical representation, Strauss dragged this musical genre down from the elevated regions of philosophical idealism to the quotidian depths of the mundane. Even his first forays in this genre foreshadowed its ultimate trajectory: for instance, a tone poem inspired by one of the most complex of Shakespeare’s heroes (Macbeth, 1888), and today’s travelogue Aus Italien, an obvious debt to the tradition among German intellectuals and artists from the time of Winkelmann and Goethe who traveled south to Italy for aesthetic inspiration and relief from the oppressive harshness and stolidity of Europe north of the Alps.

Strauss’s attainments by the date of the completion of his last major large-scale piece of instrumental music, An Alpine Symphony, were not immune from doubt and contestation no matter how celebrated the composer had become. Among the useful rivalries in the history of music that it has been fashionable to repeat, much has been made of the tense relationship between Strauss and his contemporary, Gustav Mahler. Unlike the case of Wagner and Brahms, there is here a record of friendship and considerable contact as well as mutual admiration. Mahler desperately wanted to conduct the premiere of Salome in Vienna, but was prevented by the imperial censors. Mahler’s repertoire as a conductor included many of Strauss’s pieces, including Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan, Ein Heldenleben, Till Eulenspiegel, Death and Transfiguration, Symphonia domestica, and Aus Italien. Strauss in turn organized the premiere of the first several movements of Mahler’s Second Symphony in Berlin. No doubt the wives of both composers, each rather notorious in their own way, helped to fuel the impression of privately held antipathies between the two composers. There were indeed important aesthetic differences, but there are also a number of similarities and mutual debts. Mahler ultimately never completed an opera of his own, although he toyed with the idea and wrote music that certainly contained operatic elements. His early symphonies carried explicit extra-musical programs similar in character to those upon which Strauss relied, such as the life and death of heroes and the relation between humanity and nature, and even the setting of a text by Nietzsche and the evocation of resurrection. But unlike Mahler, Strauss remained loyal to Nietzsche. Often Strauss is depicted as a superficial man lacking profundity. But in fact, he was well read and committed to a philosophical point of view, for which he credited Nietzsche. That view involved the need for humanity to transcend Christianity. For a long time the sketches for An Alpine Symphony contained the title of one of Nietzsche’s last works, “The Anti-Christ.” This symphony is an effort to explore man’s experience of nature and the presence of nature as a way to overcome the limits of Christianity and its disfiguring influence. Mahler, in contrast, never lost his fascination with Christian mysticism.

Yet there is in addition a fundamental and audible contrast in the work of these two composers, and they seem to have written music with the evident consciousness of a gulf between them. Early in his career Strauss abandoned the framework of the symphony. Mahler stuck to it (even in Das Lied von der Erde) and sought to reshape and reinvent it. But Mahler altered his direction and the use of literary or poetic programs. Mahler returned to the ideal of absolute music, whereas Strauss, particularly in An Alpine Symphony, adhered to Beethoven’s model in which music functions as a mirror of feelings and ideas. Strauss reveled in chromaticism; Mahler retained a diatonic frame. Both expanded the sonorities and instrumental possibilities of the orchestra, but to Strauss some of Mahler’s work seemed overwritten and over-orchestrated, and to Mahler, some of Strauss’s work seemed a bit glib. The rivalry and contrast between these two composers are important of course to the genesis of An Alpine Symphony. When Mahler died in 1911, there is little doubt that his early death shocked Strauss and left him not with the sense of an open field for himself (despite his venality and ambition), but with the sense that his only truly great contemporary passed away. Having attended premieres of Mahler’s symphonies and looked carefully at them, he remembered his own early foray into symphonic form. Particularly in the Third Symphony of Gustav Mahler, Strauss knew how successfully Mahler had inverted his own strategy. Listeners tend to remember the subject of a Strauss poem before its thematic material. Listening to Mahler, the overwhelming power of the musical material and its treatment can successfully obliterate the implicit presence of a literary program. Mahler’s Third Symphony may once have been about nature, but finally that seems irrelevant, as Mahler’s own later disavowal of any relevant programmatic content to his early symphonies indicates.

As Aus Italien suggests, one of the most traditional avenues for program music since Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony was the subject of humanity’s response to nature and the external environment. Engagement with nature is central not only to Mahler’s Third Symphony, but with the recurrent sounds of birdcalls and cowbells as well as the presence of humans in the natural world to marches and Horn calls, the theme of nature and man’s place in it persists throughout Mahler’s oeuvre. The challenge left to Richard Strauss after the triumph of Der Rosenkavalier in 1912 (shortly after Mahler’s death) was to explore the avenue that Mahler had charted and which Strauss had abandoned. An Alpine Symphony is Strauss’s effort to revisit the possibilities of symphonic form in a manner that is both responsive to Mahler and representative of an alternative method. Ultimately it was Beethoven rather than Mahler that took hold of Strauss’s imagination. Strauss finally depicts not only a landscape but also a journey as perceived through the eyes of a narrator.

The ghost of Gustav Mahler nevertheless suffuses An Alpine Symphony. At the end of the work, beginning with the “Setting of the Sun” and through the “Ausklang” (“Echo”) before the return of night, there are direct musical references to Mahler, including the figuration of the violins and the harmonies before the onset of “Night.” These references are cast against the clearly Straussian character of the entire symphony. As if to identify with Mahler as the outsider who never finds a home, and possibly referring to Strauss’s own inner isolation despite all outward appearances of sociability, on the brink of night’s return Strauss directly quotes the motive from Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. After all, both Mahler and Strauss owed an enormous debt to Wager, and none of Wagner’s work so exemplifies the lonely fate of the artist in a musical manner that evokes the classical traditions of composition as does The Flying Dutchman.

What is most ironic about approaching An Alpine Symphony through the example of Gustav Mahler is the recognition of how ultimately neoclassical and conservative Strauss’s solutions are in that work. It was indeed Mahler who resurrected an old, venerable form, the symphony, which Wagner had derided as passé, and used it as a vehicle for musical innovation. In contrast Strauss took on the appearance of radicalism with the notion of the tone poem, which actually only cloaked an intense inner conservatism which he never quite abandoned. An Alpine Symphony, along with much of the music Strauss wrote after Der Rosenkavalier (until the Indian summer marked by the composition of Metamorphosen in 1945), has sometimes been dismissed as lesser Strauss, the repetitions of a smug, self-satisfied virtuoso. There is little truth in this view, particularly from our present post-modern vantage point. An Alpine Symphony is in fact a fascinating experiment and marks a new direction away from the facility and strategy of the Symphonia domestica, which is the transitional work between the early narrative tone poems and An Alpine Symphony. Strauss liked the work very much and recommended it to Hugo von Hofmannstal and at the end of his life to the conductor Josef Keilberth. He hoped the work would provide a musical expression of hope that “when Christianity has disappeared from the face of the earth,” a “better humanity” might come into being. Man’s command and engagement of nature was one route, just as it was man’s ambition to scale the earth’s highest peaks. Consider these entries from Strauss’s own diary from May 1911:

“Gustav Mahler, after being sick for a long time, died on the 19^th of May. The death of this striving, idealistic, and energetic artist is an enormous loss. I have just read Wagner’s riveting autobiography with feeling.

I am also reading Leopold Ranke’s German History in the Age of the Reformation. It provides evident confirmation that the factors that encouraged culture in the past are no longer capable of doing so, just as the great political and religious movements can only for a given period of time be truly productive.

The Jew Mahler could still find something uplifting in Christianity. As a wise old man, Richard Wagner, under the influence of Schopenhauer, descended to Mahler’s level. It is absolutely clear to me that only through the emancipation from Christianity can the German nation assume a new power for action. Have we really progressed no farther than the times of the political consolidation of Charles V and the Pope? Wilhelm II and Pius X?

I want to call my Alpine Symphony the ‘Anti-Christ’ because of what is there: ethical purification out of one’s own agency, liberation through one’s work, and the adoration of eternal, splendid nature.”

Listeners to this massive Mahlerian extravaganza of sound, description, experience, and color, to this homage to the lost colleague, and who have an acquaintance with the very last period of Strauss’s music, will recognize the lifelong debt that Strauss possessed to classicism. In the end it was Mozart rather than Wagner who remained his guide, and in that debt to Mozart was a cultural conservatism that kept Strauss from looking beyond the Alps or even Italy. The son of Bavarian business folk, Strauss had little connection with anything that could remotely be considered exotic. It would be left to Mahler the outsider, the discomforted Jew from the non-German speaking realms of the Habsburg Empire who struggled for acceptance in an anti-Semitic Europe, to look in his later years to China and to the exotic as fresh forces of musical form and material. But as perhaps a final note of irony, the indisputable prophet of a new way Arnold Schoenberg, who owed an enormous personal debt to Mahler, was also helped and influenced by Strauss, to whose work he referred constantly in his 1911 “Treatise on Harmony.” Aus Italien and An Alpine Symphony are peaks in the startling career of the last great exponent of a uniquely European cultural language, who during the nineteenth century reached the height of his flexibility and capacity to mirror and comment on the human experience. But as Schoenberg knew, unlike Mahler Strauss stuck to the self-contained, closed formalism that music made uniquely possible. Indeed Schoenberg would formulate a philosophy of modernism that was, technically speaking, more Straussian than Mahlerian.

As these two works by Strauss on this afternoon’s program suggest, this fin-de-siécle European tradition of instrumental music sought to celebrate the individual in the massive expanse of landscape and world around him. These works were written at the height of the conflict between the urban and the vanishing rural landscape. Strauss’s musical evocations, however, are not critical of man’s engagement with nature, and do not seek to render the individual meaningless and irrelevant, but instead grant his agency in understanding the world around him as observer and artist. Rather, as in the opening of Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, Strauss, using music as his medium, followed Nietzsche by inverting the idea of the individual who thanked the sun for smiling on him. Instead Strauss offers us the conception that the sun owes a debt to the individual for constructing meaning in such a way as to grace nature with sacred significance.

Dante’s Inferno

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Dante’s Inferno, performed on Jan 25, 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The choice of sources of inspiration for musical composition makes for a fascinating study, especially when a source is one of the great and canonic works of Western civilization. Like Shakespeare, Dante poses a daunting task for the composer. How is one to translate his masterpiece La divina commedia (finished in 1321, the year of the author’s death, and originally entitled La commedia; the adjective divina was added posthumously), a work so seminal to so many generations of readers, into another art form without losing its resonance and enduring meaning? Many great composers found success with Shakespeare. Dante, however, has not proved to be as effective a source for good music. Precisely for this reason, Dante, a great figure who apparently crosses into musical circles with reluctance, offers a exciting opportunity to consider the relation between poetry and musical Romanticism, and the intertwining of reading and listening publics in the second half of the nineteenth century, when Liszt and Rachmaninoff composed the works on tonight’s program.

In both Germany and Russia, the idea of poetry aspiring to music was already well established by the 1820s. The more musical the poetry and the further it moved from prose, narration and description, the closer it seemed to come to music, the most infinite and abstract of the arts. Much poetry strived to a musical condition in which words lost their ordinary meaning within the formal construct of poetic form. In this respect, Dante possessed a special appeal to Romantic poets who, though they certainly created narrative masterpieces, focused on the sound and rhythm of language as much as on its signification. Dante’s work is an allegorical narrative, but its musicality has been identified as one of the poet’s most salient achievements. For the nineteenth century, then, Dante’s cantos regained a popularity they had not had since the Italian madrigal composers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries set his texts to music. The English Romantic poets felt a particular attraction. Byron’s Manfred, for example, owes much to Dante.

By 1830, music had developed an elaborate autonomous logic defined by Viennese classicism. But composers were confronted by a new and growing audience whose love of music derived in large measure from opera and theater. With the craze for Rossini and bel canto in the 1820s, the public increasingly demanded more than mere musical logic in some abstract sense; they wanted a concrete relation between music, narration, and illustration. As poetry moved from prose to music under the aegis of the Romantics, music ironically drifted toward prose and theatrical narration, away from an abstract condition. As in the novels they read, listeners wanted music to function as a psychological drama of inner thoughts and emotions. The popularity of Liszt’s virtuosic elaborations on operatic themes and the extent to which the traveling virtuosi of the 1830s and 1840s created their own sense of theater shocked many cultural observers, who decried declining standards and popular vulgarity in the subordination of music to storytelling and showmanship. This is the essential conflict that came to dominate the 1850s. Liszt and Wagner inclined toward the narrative and dramatic; others, like the young Brahms, were proponents of “absolute” music, or music which was without reference to programs or stories. In this contentious aesthetic environment, the two works you hear tonight tell their own ambiguous tale, and by virtue of the very text they used, draw into question both sides of this conflict.

Franz Liszt first attempted to express Dante in music with his piano works composed in the 1830s. At this point in his career, Liszt was known for a virtuosity grounded in two kinds of theatricality. The first sort can be understood as exquisite charisma revealed by technical feats and moments of extreme bravura. The second derived from Liszt’s fascination with literary narrative and visual images—extra-musical inspirations. Much of his work contains implied or real storylines, pervaded by philosophical implications and spiritual meaning. Toward the end of his life, Liszt affected a self-conscious image as a spiritual priest. His ethereal later works suggest a desire to reach a metaphysical sensibility through music. In Dante’s poetry, perhaps Liszt found both of the primary characteristics of his music: the great story and the metaphysical. Dante’s text is of course a highly detailed travel narrative, replete with a vast array of characters, vivid description of the landscape, adventure, and social commentary. That this narrative takes place in hell, purgatory, and heaven and that every person and detail are both historical actualities of fourteenth-century Florence and highly charged allegories makes the metaphysical level of the work compelling.

Why, then, did Liszt, encountering a work that seemed to combine perfectly his two desired goals of the narrative and the metaphysical, fashion a symphony, rather than an opera or more explicitly literary form? He does not even use any words of Dante but rather inserts the generic text of a Magnificat. His grand ending or coda is certainly bombastic in a Lisztian way, but the alternative second ending before the bombast suggests Liszt’s own ambivalence regarding his penchant for vulgarity and dependence on theatrics. Perhaps what he discovered in composing this Symphony (which he was not able to finish according to his original plan) was that the representation of Dante was best achieved without direct citation of the poetry itself. When faced with the profound musicality of Dante’s language and the infinite layers of meaning behind the explicit narrative, Liszt chose instead to make his own representation mystical, and only imply connection to the well known text and suggest ideas that unfold continually as if through a kaleidoscope. In the forty or so minutes of the Dante Symphony, Liszt leaves it to his literate listener to provide a synthesis between music and text. In this way, he obliquely achieves the cumulative affect of Dante’s poetry. Music provides an intensified résumé of the experience of reading a text decompressed by the listener who shares the composer’s intimate attachment. Despite his bombast, Liszt, the champion of program music, proceeds in a remarkably abstract way to comprehend Dante’s imaginary world.

Not everyone shared this approach. Many composers who set Dante tackled the episodic structure and essentially undramatic quality of the text by writing operas nevertheless. They focused upon the only section that contains a potentially operatic subject: Canto V, the story of Paolo and Francesca. Between 1804 and 1857, when Liszt’s symphony was first performed, there were already more than twenty Italian operas already composed based on this story, a fact not lost on Liszt himself. From 1804 to 1876, when Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky wrote his legendary Symphonic Fantasy, no fewer than thirty-six operas and cantatas took the subject of Francesca. Mercadante and Goetz are the two best known composers of this nineteenth-century operatic engagement.

Indeed in retrospect, despite the many subsequent attempts to render a musical account of Francesca after Tchaikovsky by such varied composers as Paul Klenau, Henri Pierne, and the American composer Arthur Foote, it is ultimately Tchaikovsky, with his intense, hot-blooded romanticizing of the story, who succeeds in terms of narration—again in a genre that does not make explicit use of text. Although Rachmaninoff was undeterred by Tchaikovsky’s achievement, in his own treatment he returned to the older convention of rendering a full operatic account of the Francesca story. Unlike his brother, Modest Tchaikovsky chose to incorporate direct textual references into his libretto. The disparagement of this libretto highlights the risks of attempting to transfer some of the greatest poetic text in the world into another medium without circumspection (something Boito and Verdi also learned in regard to Shakespeare). Indeed, the entire opera has been subject to some severe criticism as unbalanced (the Prologue and Epilogue are longer than the main body of the opera), and static (the only real action is in the course of the magnificent duet). But given the context of settings of Dante, it might also be argued that Rachmaninoff recognized that to do justice to Dante, the conventional operatic mode cannot suffice. The text is indeed sung, yet it is the orchestra that provides some of the work’s greatest moments. If anything, the opera seems to minimize the presence of words as literal purveyors of meaning in general. The lovers do not express the development of their emotion directly, but rather through the act of reading a story about other lovers, while the symbol of authority itself is rendered completely mute in the non-speaking role of the Cardinal. Perhaps what has been dismissed as improper treatment of operatic convention in this otherwise conventional story is an attempt by Rachmaninoff to comment upon the conventions themselves, and upon the elusive power of Dante’s language.

Rachmaninoff (and his predecessor Tchaikovsky) developed elaborate and powerful musical means to convey meaning well beyond word and image. His Francesca da Rimini, like Liszt’s Symphony, suggests the way even the most apparently programmatic music inclines toward expression. The music becomes “absolute” in the sense that it impels the listener to engage the imagination in a multitude of meanings and interpretations—just as Dante’s poetic text does. In reading Dante, both of these great composers recognized that the essence of Dante’s language lay not in the story or sequence of events alone, but in what the informed reader, who shared the author’s knowledge of the people, events, and universe to which the text refers, made of it all. Both composers therefore extended the presumption of their own knowledge to their listeners, and created surprising works that are best understood through common knowledge of the implied source. Like Paolo and Francesca inferring secret meaning from their book, the listener provides the narrative coherence to the music. Whether either of these composers captured Dante by these means depends in part on the listeners own relation to the text. It is the peculiar magic of music, however, that allows these works to make their point even to the listener who has yet to read the Commedia.

A World Apart 2001

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert A World Apart, performed on Dec 5, 2001 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Since the mid-1980s there has been a steady increase in interest in the achievements of the many European émigré artists and thinkers who were forced to flee Europe and Nazism after 1933. This fascination with the émigrés has strangely coincided with their gradual passing from our midst. When the first investigative scholarly foray into the “intellectual migration” and its consequences on American culture was undertaken by Bernard Bailyn and Donald Fleming in the late 1960s, the prominent émigrés were about to retire from leading positions in the academy and in cultural life. Such figures as Rudolf Bing at the Metropolitan Opera and Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago had already transformed the landscape of American intellectual life. Forty years later, they have entered into this country’s history, a generation whose presence has ended through the normal cycle of old age and death. But the continuing interest in those figures and their emigration has run parallel to the phenomenon of a general assimilation of the horrors of 1933-1945 into the narrative of our history. That process has included the establishment of Holocaust museums and the unwitting aestheticizing and sentimentalizing of the events and the tragedies in film and media. It is as if the generation that bore some responsibility for letting the Holocaust happen and for maintaining an at best ambivalent attitude toward the émigrés as survivors—particularly here in America—had also to pass from the scene before a candid assessment of the careers of the émigrés and a true celebration of their courage and achievement became possible.

Tonight’s program is about the achievement of some of these émigrés in music, but it is not designed to offer the familiar story. It is fitting to celebrate famous, endangered individuals who brought their brilliance to the United States, as well as to elsewhere in the Americas and England. These “happy endings” describe the transformative influence of these émigrés in the cultures into which they came; the nations that accepted them became the winners. In music, we think of Schoenberg and Hindemith. Countless American students (now middle-aged adults), graduates of conservatories and universities, are able to tell their neighbors and children stories of legendary teachers with thick accents and peculiar habits who changed their lives by introducing them to ways of thought and interpretation that the emigration brought to America. Indeed the emigration brought a level of understanding of Sigmund Freud, Max Weber, Heinrich Schenker, the Second Viennese School in music, Abstraction and Expressionism in art that changed the course of American arts and letters. In the sciences, particularly physics and biology, the émigrés catapulted the United States into preeminence.

But there are many strands in the story of emigration. In addition to its successes, there are cases like that of the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, individuals who came at early stages in their careers, and for whom the experience of emigration was a chance to reinvent themselves and achieve something of distinction, sometimes at cost to themselves, others, or truth. In these cases, it was the émigrés who were the winners, for they may never have been able to achieve great careers in their homelands. For them, the very discontinuity of their lives, despite its cost, allowed them to fashion new identities and embark anew with incomparable determination. Often, the younger the émigré the more promising the possibilities and less devastating the cost, as the examples of Lukas Foss and Andre Previn testify.

There was also a large group of professionals, however, that failed to acculturate and ever really feel at home. Some had achieved fame in the old country but lost it immediately in the new. Others, no matter who they were, could never adjust. The suicide of the writer Stefan Zweig in Brazil is a most poignant example. Many talented émigrés were unable to find a foothold in America. Their promising academic and musical careers were viewed as threats by an already highly developed American infrastructure of professionals. For every Walter Trampler and Felix Galimir who made it into the Boston Symphony or NBC Orchestra, there were countless others whose lives and careers were distorted by being forced out of their countries of origin. Here we can find music teachers, artists turned lawyers and salespeople, all artistic careers cut short and hopes dashed. Some émigrés were forced into premature retirement. This was particularly painful fate for Alfred Grünwald, the famous librettist of the last great era of Viennese operetta.

A significant percentage of these émigrés glorified the Old World. They were grateful for sanctuary, but their lives were laced by nostalgia, bitterness, and envy. Their failure in comparison to their fellow expatriates was not necessarily a function of quality, but of the countervailing pressures of opportunity, luck, happenstance, and connections. On tonight’s program, Julius Bürger falls in this nebulous category of an émigré who did fine work in relative obscurity. For these individuals, however, what made life worth living was the recognition of their fortune compared to those who did not make it at all, and the opportunity to watch their children flourish.

The difficulties and price extracted by dislocation become truly apparent when we look at the most promising but not fully established émigrés such as Egon Wellesz and Marcel Rubin. It is sometimes hard to focus on this category of émigré, especially when our tendency is always to commend the United States and other nations like England and Mexico, which gave the refugees the promise of life. Most importantly, the comparison is always with the truly forgotten ones, those who were not given sanctuary. When the Evian Conference was held in 1938, only the Dominican Republic expressed itself willing to take Jewish refugees from Europe, and the number they accepted was limited to 100,000. The United States turned away the St. Louis and used a quota system essentially to close its borders. Hitler would have been more than willing to let the Jews flee in the years 1933-41, but he discovered that nobody wanted to take them. It is disturbing to try to calculate the ratio between survival through emigration and death in the Holocaust. The emigrant, whether a Jew or a political refugee, was trapped in a bitter logic between the need to be grateful for having escaped and bitterness at the disfiguration of their lives and expectations.

With the exception of Korngold, the names of tonight’s composers are certainly not as well known as other émigrés such as Schoenberg, Milhaud, Weill, or Bartók, but that is just the point: to give hearing to those who successfully emigrated but whose careers did not quite turn out as they had wished or expected. An ambivalence toward their condition manifested itself in their work. Unlike the well-known modernist revolutionaries whose artistic idiom, despised by the regime they fled, necessarily became a statement of political resistance, tonight’s composers were not radicals in either art or politics. They continued to compose in the styles that resisted a pronounced break from the traditions appropriated by their oppressors. This artistic vision is obviously fraught with ambivalence and irony. Hitler mixed aesthetics with racism. A composer could write the most “proper” music, but still be forced to emigrate if he were Jewish, as did Korngold. Other émigré composers were something of a thorn in the sides of those, who, following the theorist Theodor Adorno, sought to link modernism with the cause of freedom. The rebellious Rubin turned to the example of French music rather than to that of either Strauss or Schoenberg. Wellesz, a student of Schoenberg, stands as a compelling reminder that, for all of their surface modernism, the achievements of the Second Viennese School were distinctly within a tradition of Viennese classicism. Wellesz demonstrates just how much Schubert, Mahler, and even Bruckner lay behind the compositional ambitions of Viennese modernism.

The émigrés on tonight’s program faced a nearly impossible position of being exiled from their native traditions but also not part of the well-defined musical resistance or the host culture into which they arrived. Their difficulty is reflected in their destinies. Egon Wellesz, like the other Austro-German émigrés Hans Gal and Hans Keller, maintained a life in music in England, but all three made their mark not primarily in composition and performance but in scholarship and writing. Fellow composer Berthold Goldschmidt lived long enough to experience a brief flurry of revived interest in his music after decade of obscurity.

Marcel Rubin didn’t like emigration for aesthetic, cultural, and political reasons and wanted to return after 1945. Erich Wolfgang Korngold, despite incredible success as a film-music composer in Hollywood, wanted to relocate to Vienna and take up his lost career as a composer of concert and operatic music. Unlike Kurt Weill, who so easily jettisoned his European past and embraced Americanism with alacrity, Korngold and Rubin simply waited to resume where they had left off. Many of their contemporaries thought this impulse deeply misguided. Schoenberg never wanted to return to Europe (and it is slightly ironic that his papers and archives are now back in Vienna). Yet many others did so, such as Adorno, Martinu, and Thomas Mann. But this was no solution either. Rubin was able to mitigate the contradictions when he returned to post-1945 Austria in part because of his deep left-wing political commitments. In this sense he resembles Hanns Eisler, who together with Arnold Zweig sought to establish a new society in East Germany. But Korngold, the great Viennese prodigy and once lionized by the Viennese public, was shocked to discover how unwelcome he was in post-war Vienna. It was as if the surviving native population was all too happy to continue living out the fantasy of a Vienna without Jews. In different ways it became apparent to each of these composers that the emigration experience could not be reversed, despite an ardent desire to do so. Whether they stayed, returned, or moved on to other locations in Australia or Israel, the émigrés continued to feel the powerful consequences of living in a state of constant transit, as it were—a condition of in-betweenness, in which their bags, metaphorically speaking, were never entirely packed or unpacked. Perhaps music is the most adept vehicle to communicate this complex response. This is the proposition that tonight’s concert explores.

From the Last Century

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert From the Last Century, performed on Oct 10, 2001 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In keeping with this orchestra’s mission, first articulated by Leopold Stokowski, the American Symphony Orchestra seeks to challenge in its programming our conventional definition and appreciation of the concert repertory. The ASO does this in many ways, most especially by reviving certain unjustly forgotten works as well as composers from the past and by reconfiguring the context in which we hear works with which we are already quite familiar. In looking at a musical work’s relation to other forms of life such as politics, visual arts, literature, and history, we try to change the way we hear and think about music. In an era when most if not all of the concert audience can become familiar with music through recording, the live concert must assume new roles. One of them is to expand the range of mainstream musical expectations and inspire the audience to reflect on how music works and how it is a part of culture and history.

Tonight, in the season’s opening concert, we take a look at a century that has confused and troubled a large segment of the traditional audience for concerts. The exploration of the twentieth century as history is exciting since it is still such a new task. Each member of audience has had some direct experience with the musical currents of the twentieth century as new music. The intensity of the conflicts about the new music of the recent past, as well as about the shifts and countercurrents in style still linger. As the history of the twentieth century begins to be written, old scores are being settled as the achievements and dominant character of twentieth-century music are assessed and revised. Despite the all embracing and welcoming pluralism of the present moment, the modernism of half a century ago is frequently derided and attacked for its presumed share of responsibility in alienating the old audience and failing to attract a new one, thereby placing the great concert traditions of music at risk.

One senses already that there has been somewhat of an overreaction. That is the proposition that tonight’s concert explores. All of the works represented here are by mid-century composers influenced in one way or another by radical notions associated with twentieth-century musical modernism. It has often been said that modernism, a dominant movement that came of age in the early and mid twentieth century, was too abstract, difficult and cold. It was too arrogant and too intent on either scandalizing or ignoring the audience. It has been accused of disregard for any tradition or context around it. But now that modernism is no longer very modern, we have a new perspective from which to determine the truth of this view. As with any movement, the great and the mediocre flourish side by side. For every measure of music written by J.S. Bach, there are thousands of boring measures of Baroque music that sound sort of like his music. The situation is even more extreme when one compares Mozart to run-of-the-mill classical music or Mahler to many of his post-Wagnerian contemporaries. No doubt there was a lot of forgettable but competent modernist music. But before we throw the proverbial baby out with the bath water, we need to take a look at a group of composers and their music who may never have been given a real chance and now deserve a rehearing.

Each of the composers on tonight’s program wrote music with an intensity and a sense of necessity that are remarkable. From our new “Monday morning” vantage, we can gain a new appreciation of their voices, where they came from, and what they accomplished. For example, each of these composers fashioned an audible originality. Yet they actually were also strongly influenced by their immediate predecessors the founding modernists, particularly those of the second Viennese school, including Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern. They did not find themselves drawn to modernism for mere stylistic or careerist reasons. The high point of modernism-from the late 1920s to the mid 1960s-occurred at a time when aesthetic choices were matters of fundamental social, political and ethical principle. Art meant more than entertainment. Gerhard studied with Schoenberg and Hartmann traveled to Vienna to take lessons from Webern. Luigi Dallapiccola dedicated Piccola musica notturna to Hermann Scherchen, a noted champion of radical modernism and a staunch anti-Fascist. Goffredo Petrassi is along with Dallapiccola one of the leading figures of the twentieth-century Italian avant-garde. His music is particularly admired by the leading living exponent of American musical modernism, Elliott Carter.

In a larger sense, the attraction these composers had to the modernist revolution reveals the connection each of them had to their environments. They all shared the conviction that musical expression in the twentieth century had to be adequate to the spirit of the times and therefore progressive. Their idea of progression was firmly grounded in an acute sensitivity to two contemporary stimuli. The first of these stimuli may be understood as the political and cultural realities of modernity. For artists born around the turn of the century, the political and cultural impetus behind any definition of musical style or means of expression was located in the trauma of World War I and in the reconfiguration of Europe in the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty. The emergence of Fascism and the enormous allure of Socialism and Communism coincided with deep uncertainties about the future of democracy and economic security. The Great Depression only further complicated a period of time in which an entire range of political engagement from ideological pacifism to virulent and aggressive nationalism constituted a definitive feature of the environment in which any artist worked. The modernists’ rejection of a surface Romantic expressiveness in music, their strong distaste for sentimentality and the bland, escapist sensibility of Puccini’s imitators and other traditional, conservative forms of music were political and ideological declarations against the tastes and culture of the corrupt society that had almost destroyed Europe.

When one considers the historical era not only in which these four composers came of age, but the years themselves in which the pieces on tonight’s program were written, the intense engagement of their music with the events of the past century becomes even plainer. With the exception of Dallapiccola’s work, all were composed during the 1940s. Two of them-the Coro di Morti and the Symphonic Hymns-speak directly to the horrific realities of World War II. But of all these composers, it is Dallapiccola, Italy’s most distinguished post-war, avant-garde figure, who be can most closely associated in his life and music with the political causes of freedom and justice. For him, as for the others on this program modernism in music went hand in hand with resistance to injustice and dictatorship. While Petrassi’s war time composition was performed close to the date of its creation, Hartmann’s, like much of his output, was a courageous, surreptitious expression of rage and despair that could and would only be heard in public many years later after the defeat of the Third Reich.

The second stimulus in the search for progressive expression in music derived from within the history of music itself. Since the days of Wagner, composers increasingly saw themselves as trapped in the shadow of history. They came to view their own achievements generationally; they were heirs to a lineage and legacy to which their own contemporaries in the concert audience were wedded. Such a view necessarily makes history a heavy burden, and young composers not surprisingly quickly developed a sense of the exhaustion of past models; they sought to create something new. But the conscious search for originality in an overt rejection of inherited models is really only a displaced reference to the past. Indeed, evocations of the history of music abound among the works on tonight’s program. Much of Gerhard’s Violin Concerto carries on a dialogue with previous violin concerti. Alongside quotations from Schoenberg, the startling virtuosity of the violin writing is an ironic encomium to the clichés and achievements of standard violin technique so familiar to concert-goers. Dallapiccola’s affectionate reference is obviously to Mozart. Petrassi evokes the tradition of Italian madrigal, while Hartmann looks back to Haydn and the traditions of Baroque composition.

It is the privilege of twenty-first century listeners to be able to leave the stereotypes of debate about twentieth-century modernism behind. As time passes and the context and legacy of these composers continue to crystallize, we can deepen our appreciation and newfound perception of their rich and thorough affection for musical tradition, and their sometimes personally risky engagement with the political and cultural events that surrounded them. It is time to rediscover the music of unfairly overlooked twentieth- century masters; the allure of the concert repertoire will only be enhanced. If contemporary audiences have come to love Shostakovich because of the riveting interaction of sound, allusion and emotion in his music, then the music of Petrassi, Gerhard, Dallapiccola and Hartmann should win new advocates in a new generation. These remarkable composers and their music remind us that the final word on twentieth-century modernism has not yet been uttered. As time passes they will be seen to share with Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and Debussy an allegiance to the creation of complex musical forms as an indispensable part of the human capacity to seek redemption and express hope.

After Carmina Burana

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert After Carmina Burana: an Historical Perspective, performed on May 16, 2001 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Tonight we bring our year-long series examining the relationship between music and memory to an end with perhaps the most difficult and emotionally fraught example. We present two works that many in the audience may never have heard before, the Catulli carmina and the Trionfo di Afrodite of Carl Orff. Composed in 1943 and 1953, respectively, both are sequels to a work that perhaps everyone in the audience has heard before, Carmina burana (1937). Even if you have never heard a live performance or one of the innumerable recordings of Carmina burana, chances are that this choral work is familiar to you from the films and television commercials in which it has been used ad infinitum. It is hugely popular among amateur and college choral groups, and is arguably one of the best-known works of the twentieth century. This kind of success for a single work easily evokes two questions: why does Carmina burana continue to thrill modern listeners, and why are the other two parts of the trilogy almost entirely forgotten?

Both the extreme popularity of Carmina burana and the relative obscurity of the sequels have everything to with the historical context from which they came. Carl Orff does not deserve to be considered a one-work composer like Leoncavallo. At stake in Carmina burana and the sequels is the question of Orff’s explicit aesthetic choices about what musical language was appropriate for the twentieth century. As Hans Jörg Jans elegantly describes, Orff as a young composer turned to the distant past for inspiration after World War I. He was director of the Munich Bachverein, had a special interest in Monteverdi, and staged Heinrich Schütz’s Auferstehungshistoria in 1933. His attraction for the past was not limited to music; he was an avid reader of classical texts, especially of the poet Catullus. He turned away from works by contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Franz Werfel, Bertolt Brecht, and the poet Richard Dehmel, whom we associate with Schoenberg. On the surface, such a move seems like an act of refuge when one thinks of the cultural conditions of the time. During the 1920s and 1930s, factionalism was intense, and one’s chosen allegiances, artistic and political, had definite consequences. The allure of a pre-modern world, an ancient past, seems like a nostalgic escape from the sharply divided ideas of the present. But as the case of Orff shows, this escape, even if intended, was impossible.

The engagement with antiquity among German artists, musicians, and poets was certainly nothing new. Since at least the eighteenth century, Germany shared with other imperialist nations (especially Britain) a desire to connect with idealized constructs of the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome. This desire resulted in the nineteenth-century archaeological explorations which created the collections of the British Museum and the Pergamon, turning Britain and Germany into the self-appointed guardians of the ancient world. It produced the flourishing of classical studies as an academic discipline. More pertinently, it ignited a tradition of neoclassicism in art, in which an idealized Greek and Roman spiritual legacy was incorporated into nineteenth and twentieth-century national art. Many of the concert halls built after 1870 display Greco-Roman iconography.

This reach into the ancient past for historical continuity had special meaning for German-speaking Europe. Before the unification of Germany, the persistence with which German poets and philosophers sought to forge a vital connection between the ancients and a modern renaissance of German culture indicated a proud sense of cultural achievement in the absence of a unified political entity. In imperial and Wilhelmine Germany (into which Orff was born) the cultural link between Greece and Germany that had been so eloquently argued in the eighteenth century had already been transmuted into a political ideology. The great German historian of Rome, Theodor Mommsen, was only one of the prominent intellectuals who helped popularize the notion of the German Empire as the new Rome. In subsequent years, a comparable political parallel between Athens and Germany also became popular.

The Weimar Republic produced a wonderful avant-garde in art and music, but this short-lived democracy after World War I was largely viewed as a failure by Germans. It became a source of embarrassment and shame for those for whom imperial grandeur had been so important. From the moment of its defeat in World War I, a German sentiment to restore itself to glory and world greatness was palpable. That sentiment found its realization in the Third Reich.

An aesthetic employed during the 1920s and 1930s inspired by antiquity and explicitly theatrical and accessible could not have been viewed as bereft of political consequences. As is still apparent today, political battles are fought not only in polling booths, but in cultural institutions as well. When Nazi protesters forced their way into theaters and lined the backs of concert halls during the Weimar Republic, they were making their prescriptive statement about what a proper national culture should be. In a torrent of propaganda, the official organs of the Nazi party hammered home the need to fight a cosmopolitan degeneracy in art and culture inspired by modernists and Jews. Many of the Nazis’ arguments against new forms of composition in music continued an anti-modernist tradition of criticism within German conservatism that dated back to the turn of the century, and preceded the creation of the Nazi party. But the context of such conservative nationalist cultural criticism in 1931 and 1932 was far different than it had been earlier. The specter of a government based on a racist nationalist ideology was a central component of this cultural criticism. Into this seething cauldron, the artistic works of a new generation were thrown. Works that used medieval and ancient materials to celebrate the communal enthusiasms of a closely knit, pre-modern society could not have escaped a political interpretation of its motives. Before 1933 the consequences of aesthetic choices were limited to the world of criticism and reputation. After 1933 they became matters of life and death.

When the Nazis seized power, they immediately took action against musicians of three types: those of Jewish descent, those from the radical left, and those who were proponents of a modernist aesthetic, the primary attribute of which was the rejection of tonality. It was not enough to be a conservative composer and a Jew, or an Aryan and a modernist. There was a great difference, of course, between these two situations. The modernist Aryan might make an about face and seek to find accommodation with the new regime. This is what Paul Hindemith thought to do (without success) with help from the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Or the composer might follow the path of Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who withdrew entirely from public life during the Nazi era and continued to write in an expressionist and modernist musical language explicitly out of Nazi favor. He made an inner emigration, as it were, and had the good fortune to survive. But for Jews, Communists and Socialists, there was little opportunity for heroism. They could emigrate, suffer hardship, sink into obscurity, or perish.

Carl Orff remained in Germany, as did most non-Jewish musicians. The question of his political allegiance during the Third Reich, however, has never been satisfactorily resolved. He is still regarded by some as complicit careerist and a collaborator, even though he never joined the Nazi Party. Others have linked him to the small but courageous German resistance movement. These questions may never be answered, which is precisely why we must turn as in this performance away from biography to consider his music directly. When biography is unclear, we are left with only the music and its context and reception.

The Trionfo trilogy is a case study of how music is affected by history and memory, and how art does not live in a world separate from the politics and social realities that dominate our everyday lives. We would like to believe that artistic works are derived from some higher form of inspiration and exist above the messy and ugly conditions that usually surround us. We also turn to music to create a distance between the mundane and the spiritual. But as this music—some of the most effective ever composed—demonstrates, sometimes the art that claims to be above politics becomes the most political of all.

Although after its premiere in 1937, a prominent Nazi critic derided Carmina burana as somewhat degenerate, particularly for its “jazzy atmosphere” and poor comprehensibility, the work nevertheless enjoyed extreme success and became arguably the most popular piece of new music to be produced under the Nazis. In a famous letter, Orff expressed anxiety before the premiere regarding the government’s reaction to the work, which suggests how sensitive he was to their power. Orff consciously sought a way to reconcile his notion of his own obligation to art with his desire to maintain a successful career as a composer in a public arena circumscribed by terror and inhumanity. The Nazis did not agree among themselves about what was precisely culturally acceptable and there was considerable conflict and competition concerning aesthetic policy both on the local and national level. George Steiner has argued that Carmina burana’s mixture of medievalism and modernity appealed aesthetically to Nazi supporters because it complies with a fascist vision of culture. The music is rousing and sweeps its audience up in an affirmation of community, solidarity, and ecstasy. It has a theatrical, visceral impact, and promotes a grand euphoria that was as effective for the Nazis then as it is for selling products on television today. At its premiere and all its many performances under the Third Reich, the German audiences that rose to their feet believed they were no longer infiltrated by Jews, blacks, homosexuals, Gypsies, Socialists or Communists. Whatever Orff’s intentions may have been, even if he was just trying as an artist to sustain some aspect of decency, the success of his work played into different hands.

As Hans Jörg Jans points out, the work was so successful that Orff was commissioned to produce sequels for the Vienna State Opera in 1941. Vienna had become a cultural jewel of the new Reich under the leadership of its art-loving Gauleiter. Orff also accepted a commission to write new incidental music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to replace the banned music of Mendelssohn. Riding on the success of Carmina burana, Orff composed the Catulli carmina in the darkening years of the war in 1943. Then again, in 1953, he composed the final part, the Trionfo di Afrodite. By this time, however, the war was over and the Cold War had already settled in. The Western allies were turning western Germany a bulwark against the Soviets, and deNazification had ceased to be a priority. The 1950s encouraged the suppression of memory and the avoidance of confrontation with the atrocities of the war within the general population. Why, in this context, did Orff choose to produce another work in the spirit of Carmina burana? Was he nostalgically reviving the appropriated aesthetic, or was he trying to suggest that his aesthetic could remain immune to political manipulation?

The young generation of French and German composers after 1945 had their own artistic response to the burden of recent history. They steadfastly embraced radical modernism in a conscious effort to break any connection with the aesthetics favored by the Nazis. Catulli carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite sank into obscurity in the wave of modernism that has only recently loosened its grip on contemporary music. It is only in our post-modernist and post-post-modernist environment in which a return of tonality, surface accessibility, and romanticism can occur without the political overtones from before 1945. That it took nearly fifty years for the connection between modernism and anti-fascism to give way even a bit gives some indication of the strength of that connection.

Now that World War II and its horrors have receded into history, what becomes of the music appropriated by the Nazis? Is it fair to censor any work of music because, whether or not its composer intended it, the music gave voice to sensibilities compatible with a hated regime? Do Catulli carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite deserve to remain so obscured by Carmina burana, and should we not reflect on why Carmina burana remains so popular?

Contemporary audiences continue to enjoy Wagner, for whose personality and music political distaste can easily be mustered. The argument can be made that our present culture, in which nothing remains in memory for longer than the length of a music video, and in which historical consciousness has been eroded by the increasing pace of information and communication, actually holds the virtue of being able to cleanse the questionable political overtones of art. But to give into cultural amnesia is to ignore so much of the complexity of the music, to falsify its history, and reduce music—particularly in the case of a work as brilliant as Carmina burana—to so many soundtracks characterized by the clichés of mass culture, of passivity, and uniformity. That reduction is reminiscent of the way the Nazis hoped to use music: to manipulate the listener into a thoughtless response that does not encourage reflection, resistance, and questioning. To believe that music and art exist independently of ideology and politics is to make it inadvertently work against individuality and the will to dissent. We can surely rejoice in the opportunity we now have to reconsider works like Catulli carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite, now that the present aesthetic climate encourages it. But we should also be aware that the same emotional response the trilogy triggers in us was part of the cultural fabric of an abhorrent regime. It is uncomfortable indeed to acknowledge such manipulation, but such acknowledgement points us on one hand to the skill of the composer, and on the other to our vulnerability, something we should remember the next time such music is used to entice us to buy beer and automobiles.

Remembrance of Things Past

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert After Carmina Burana: an Historical Perspective, performed on May 16, 2001 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Over the past forty years, Gustav Mahler has become one of the most discussed and performed composers in American concert life. He was the author of nine complete symphonies and a fragmentary tenth symphony, as well as a host of song cycles. Since we are devoting our entire season to the larger theme of music and memory, it is appropriate that we recall a time when Mahler’s music was not nearly so prominent.

By the time he died in 1911, Mahler had achieved considerable fame as a conductor and composer. Although there were many consistent advocates of his music among conductors –particularly Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, and Dimitri Mitropoulos–it was only after 1960 (the centenary of his birth) that Mahler’s music achieved the wild popularity it still has today. Much credit for his renaissance is properly given to Leonard Bernstein, for whom Mahler and his music became vehicles for profound personal attachment and identification. By the mid-1970s, Mahler was the focus of a continuing obsession and nearly cult-like reverence. Today Mahler’s presence perhaps rivals Beethoven’s in the standard orchestral repertoire. One somewhat ironic explanation for this phenomenon is that Mahler’s sonic-psychic journey benefited from the medium of high-quality recordings, which could be experienced in the solitary environment of one’s own room. Listeners find in Mahler a musical map of inner feeling, crisis, and ecstasy, a means through which each listener senses his or her own profundity and intensity of emotion. In Mahler the most intimate, the most painful, and the most grandiose seem immediately available, all shrouded in a complexity that makes the music seem like life itself.

Of course, whether this late twentieth-century obsession with Mahler has anything to do with the historical Mahler or his ambitions as a composer is quite unclear, and there is little doubt that there has been no small measure of cloying sentimentality in much of this Mahler craze. But perhaps most bewildering have been the attempts to make Mahler into a bowdlerized Freud. As with Freud, the awe-inspiring brilliance, innovation, and complexity of the work remain perpetual sources of fascination, despite the persistent presence of a reductive, commercialized caricature. If there is indeed any validity in the linking of Mahler and Freud (who were contemporaries) it is in the paradox generated by their posthumous reputations, which has created enduring clichés. Mahler’s music is ultimately only about the meaning it inspires in its listeners: its power to disturb, to force the listener to reflect and think on life, its joys and sorrows, its potentials and its limitations.

In his remarkable 1960 book on Gustav Mahler, the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno observed that “music becomes a blotting paper, an everyday thing that becomes saturated with significance.” For Adorno, Mahler is the musical equivalent of Proust, for in Mahler’s music as in Proust’s narrative the ordinary and familiar are the substance of a massive structure, through which the listener can experience the magnitude, complexity, and depth that life over time contains.

Mahler’s Seventh Symphony is perhaps the most controversial of all the composer’s symphonies. Both Schoenberg and his pupil Anton von Webern had a special affection for it. Yet few works have received such scathing criticism from Mahler enthusiasts. The last movement of this symphony has long been the object of intense dispute. Some have regarded it as an ironic reminiscence of an older tradition of grand finales and hear in it an undercutting of the heroic gesture of symphonic music. Other Mahlerians view it as an embarrassing failure, a grand mistake that was designed to express affirmation of the universe and its harmonies in a Beethovenian or Brucknerian manner. Yet all observers seem to agree that the Seventh Symphony has a sweep and range unequaled in other Mahler symphonies. It is a virtual panorama of emotions and musical strategies, with moments which justify the comparisons between Mahler and Charles Ives. Direct evocations of bands, tunes, and events in ordinary life are contained in the texture of the music itself. Here music acts as a direct trigger of memory. Mahler’s inspiration for the symphony’s opening came when he was rowing home across a lake and was struck by the sound of the oars. He wrote the work quickly, but then lingered over its revision and publication. He once described his compositional process as starting from the middle and working outwards.

The sheer variety of sounds in the symphony are best exemplified by the two “night music” episodes. These episodes invoke an earlier German Romantic tradition in which night becomes a metaphor for thought, solitude and recollection. Night also served as an emblem of peace and tranquility in the hectic pace of modern life and therefore a symbol of the repose and pensive tranquility of “nature.” The dangers traditionally associated with darkness became in this context internalized as regretful nostalgia and painful memories. Recently, one scholar has suggested a program for the second night music episode in which Mahler reminisces about a walk through a town at night. The listener can hear Mahler’s own impression of the music and sounds heard on his walk. But while the presence of both mandolin and guitar as well as cow bells in the symphony may record Mahler’s impressions, their more important function is to evoke in the listener images from their own memories of the rural landscape and the street–that is, their own night thoughts.

Listeners have always commented on the brilliance and range of orchestral effects Mahler achieves in this symphony. One needs to remember the obvious, that Mahler was writing large-scale orchestral music before the dominance of moving pictures and certainly moving pictures with sound dialogue. Listening to music was in part a journey of rumination and fantasy, much of it visual. The orchestration in this symphony has the effect of creating a complex sense of space and distance. The sound is sometimes close and sometimes far away. There are echoes, clashes, overlaps, confrontations. There is, in short, a sound world that is a condensed version of the conflicting and contradictory strands of daily experience. Mahler transfigures the everyday by endowing it with the meaning which each listener brings from his or her own memory. The brilliance of Mahler is that no matter how personal his compositions may be, he transcends his own experience without losing detail or specificity. He reaches beyond himself and makes the deepest personal and also most general metaphysical speculations possible for the listener. In this symphony the familiar becomes as Adorno suggested the musical screen upon which each individual can project his or her entire life, to an extent well beyond the limits of the composer’s intentions.

The Uses of History: Reincarnations of Beethoven

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Uses of History: Reincarnations of Beethoven, performed on March 30, 2001 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

During the first decades of the twentieth century Claude Debussy’s music was introduced into Germany. When it began to exert serious influence, some nationalist critics noted that, while it was all well and good for Germans to follow in the footsteps of French painters–since painting was never a field in which Germans dominated–when it came to music, to emulate a French composer was a travesty. Standing at the very center of the conceit that German culture defined music universally and normatively was the figure of Beethoven (in whom, not surprisingly, Debussy showed little interest). By 1900, the appropriation of Beethoven as a claim to legitimacy by subsequent generations of German composers had become an honored tradition. Not only did Wagner declare himself as the true successor to Beethoven, so too did the advocates of Brahms. Their master had become the “third B.” Later, Schoenberg and radical modernists in the 1920s also claimed a connection to late-style Beethoven as the harbinger of their own new aesthetic. Invoking the authority of Beethoven was one means of defending one’s approach to the future of music in the troubled early years of this century, when issues of modernity, innovation, and the interpretation of the past framed an intense debate about the purpose, nature, and future of music. Battle lines were drawn when both twelve-tone composition and a new brand of neoclassicism emerged in the context of the cataclysmic political transformation of Europe after World War I.

All three of the composers on tonight’s program were prominent figures in the musical culture of German-speaking Europe at the juncture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only one of them achieved historical superstardom–Richard Strauss (1864-1949)–although that superstardom was associated with music written before the War. When Strauss undertook this arrangement of the music of Beethoven, he was already considered a great composer well beyond his prime, though he would experience what subsequent generations termed a glorious “Indian summer” as a composer after 1945. This standard view of Strauss as an anachronism in his own time (that is, after 1912) has only recently come under sustained reassessment. In 1924 Kurt Weill wrote on the occasion of Strauss’s sixtieth birthday that he is “for me–at the threshold between the nineteenth and the twentieth century–a glance backwards and a challenge.” However, most critics in the 1920s considered both Franz Schmidt and Strauss to be conservatives in a world characterized by many incarnations of an avant-garde espousing either a break with the past or a radical shift. Schmidt (1874-1939), despite his personal regard for Schoenberg, was notorious in Vienna for his open hostility to Mahler, in whose orchestra Schmidt once played cello. Schmidt composed four fine symphonies, numerous sets of variations, a famous left-hand concerto (performed by the ASO in 1994), and his masterpiece, The Book With Seven Seals (performed by the ASO in 1997). In an era characterized by the Bauhaus and Surrealism, the music of Schmidt and Strauss could easily be dismissed as conservative echoes of the past designed to function as challenges to surface progress and innovation.

The assessment of Max Reger (1873-1916) in the conventional history of twentieth-century music and modernism is more difficult to describe. Since his death at age 43, widely viewed as a tragedy, occurred before the end of World War I, Reger as a composer and personality became part of history before the bitter controversies about the future and nature of modern music in the post-War era erupted. Reger was part of a generation of extremely talented composers who probably more than any other nineteenth-century group felt the awesome weight of history. Almost ten years younger than Strauss and thirteen younger than Mahler, Reger was always overshadowed by towering figures just a bit older than himself. Given the shortness of his career, it is startling to think that the distance between the death of Brahms and Bruckner and Reger is fewer than twenty years. But Reger’s fame and reputation in Germany during his lifetime were strong enough for him to be hailed as the hope for the future for the classical music tradition. Reger, the composer of numerous chamber and orchestral works including the Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin (performed by the ASO in 1995) possessed an extraordinary command of music compositional facility. Although regarded as a kind of neo-conservative deeply indebted to Brahms and an anti-Wagnerian figure, when one considers works such as An die Hoffnung and Eine Romantische Suite, both written around the time of the orchestration of the Beethoven Variations, one hears an expansive neo-Wagnerian romanticism which one would not usually associate either with a follower of Brahms or with Reger’s too-often cited reputation for academicism. Reger had many disciples and admirers, among them the brothers Adolf and Fritz Busch and the generation that carried on the Busch tradition, particularly Rudolf Serkin. From today’s perspective, it is reasonable to suggest that Reger’s time may now have come. He is no longer overshadowed by others and we now have the distance to rediscover the wealth of power, inspiration, and variation contained in his remarkable output of compositions.

It is fitting that Reger’s is the oldest piece on this program, because in Reger’s music his own contemporaries identified the finest realization of the German tradition of musical literacy and culture. His meteoric rise catapulted him to prominence as a symbol of the continuity of high culture in the guise of “absolute music” against philistinism, cultural decline, and the spread of operetta culture–the superficialities associated with modernity at the turn of the nineteenth century and traceable in the eyes of cultural pessimists in large part back to Richard Wagner. The reaction of German-speaking Europe against Wagner was not only motivated by an aversion to his theatrical enterprise. There were those who considered his musical strategies as corruptive not only of taste but of basic standards of musical literacy. Although Wagner claimed to be the true heir of Beethoven, he was considered by many as the ultimate bowdlerizer, who appropriated only Beethovenian gesture and abandoned the fundamentals of Beethovenian composition. Gone were thematic development and variation–the kind of transformation of musical material that Beethoven both pioneered and perfected. In their place was endless repetition and coloristic effect sustained not by musical logic, but by dramatic spectacle. This view was strongly propagated by the followers of Brahms (although not by Brahms himself). The anti-Wagnerian Romantics saw in Reger the ideal candidate to contain the dangerous direction that Richard Strauss, for example, had taken in his compositional evolution in the 1880s and well into the next century. Strauss, who had been brought up in a household with conservative musical taste, fashioned his earliest allegiances to Brahms and that reconverted Wagnerian, Hans von Bülow. But by the late 1880s a new Richard Strauss had emerged who had embraced the music of Liszt and Wagner. What few contemporary critics realized, however, was that Strauss’s conversion to the “enemy” was not pervasive. Classical form and techniques–the kinds associated with Beethoven–are integrated into all of Strauss’s music, even the most radically narrative such as Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) and the Symphonia domestica (1903). And Strauss returned to the symphony later in life with Eine Alpensinfonie (1915). Likewise the scores to Elektra and Salome owe a debt as much to the musical strategies of Beethoven and Brahms as they do to Wagner. Ultimately, at the heart of Strauss’s aesthetic credo was neither Beethoven nor Wagner, but Mozart, one of Reger’s key sources and inspirations as well.

In the case of Reger and Schmidt, it is not surprising that they chose for their themes ones that were widely recognized by the amateur listening and performing public. Beethoven was at the very core of middle-class tastes and expectations vis-à-vis music. Likewise, when Strauss adds his melodrama and invokes themes from the best-known symphonies, he too acknowledges a conception of musical communication shared by Reger and Schmidt that allied itself with the middle-class, urban, well-educated audience of the last third of the nineteenth century. There were literally in Germany tens of thousands of amateur pianists and violinists who played the Bagatelles and the Spring Sonata. Any moderately educated adult could identify the themes of the Third and Fifth Symphonies (critics and the lay public would have to wait for the generation of Thomas Mann and T.W. Adorno to award an equally privileged place to Beethoven’s later works).

By using some of Beethoven’s most famous themes, these three composers cut to the very center of what the musical debate at the time was really about. Mahler and later Schoenberg and many other modernists possessed anger and hostility toward the middle-class audience that reveled not only in its recognition of the themes chosen by Reger and Schmidt but in their capacity to follow the transformations indulged in by these composers in their sense of variations. Going to a concert was for most a delightful exercise cutting across generations in the timeless assertion of connoisseurship, the achievement of culture and taste, and the capacity for making discriminating assessments. Strauss too wrote for that public and never abandoned it even with Elektra and Salome. But much of modernism in the 1920s was an explicit act of rebellion and revolt precisely against the conservative middle-class culture and its construction of a cultural “establishment.” Thus late Beethoven, which like contemporary music was hard to grasp and had traditionally been far less popular, seemed a willing ally in the attack on the covert philistinism and ignorance masquerading under a veneer of education and culture, worn by the concert-going public. The source of the Beethovenian echoes in tonight’s music is the Beethoven loved by the lay public that radical modernists believed the public never really understood properly.

These three composers, cast reluctantly by history into the role of conservative standard-bearers intent on demonstrating the continuities between Beethoven and modernity, celebrating the centrality of Beethoven for modern times, helped define a struggle over the soul of Beethoven in the early twentieth century. The dimensions of that struggle as it existed are perceived now only by implication in the music like a ghostly shadow. But the point of the struggle retains its relevancy. These works are an affirmation of the value of continuing a tradition of composition and music education, amateur music-making and concert-going that Reger and particularly Strauss and Schmidt considered endangered not only by the transformation of contemporary life but by the aesthetic consequences of modernity. These works show more than a debt to the past. They are not only acts of homage, they are creations characterized by an aggressive counter-attack against the perceived insurgency against standards of taste and culture represented by the two most radical dimensions of twentieth-century culture: experimentation in the forms and materials of music and the rise of the commercial entertainment music directed at the brave new world of mass consumerism. They are an admonishment not to forfeit or distort history so readily.

Nostalgia: The Past Idealized Through Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Nostalgia: The Past Idealized Through Music, performed on Feb 4, 2001 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In 1861, the Paris production of Tannhäuser changed the course of music history in France. Charles Baudelaire’s famous essay helped secure Wagner’s place in the forefront of French musical life. The Revue Wagnerienne became a source of inspiration not only for musicians but for poets, novelists, and painters. Throughout the 1880s, Ernest Chausson, a man in his mid-twenties, was obsessed with Wagner. Indeed, he spend his honeymoon at Bayreuth in order to hear Parsifal.

Great composers must confront the models created by great predecessors. No one would think of denigrating Beethoven because of his debt to Haydn, or Brahms because of his connection to Schumann, and certainly not Mozart or Bach for their borrowings from predecessors and contemporaries. However, for obvious political reasons particularly in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the search for a French national voice came into direct conflict with the embrace of Wagner. French composers in the Third Republic struggled to come to terms with Wagner’s achievement. More than a century later, the traces of that political struggle are still apparent in the whole generation of French operas that remain in obscurity simply because they do not sound like Debussy. There is no reason to revisit the tired opposition between the German Wagner and the French Debussy, unless it is to see how that false polarity made historical casualties of the extraordinary group of French operas which includes not only Chausson’s Le roi Arthus (1895) but Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907).

No one would have been more sensitive to this dilemma of identity than Chausson himself. He was a polymath. Born into a wealthy family, his life story defies all the clichés we associate with the struggling artist. Although his personal wealth has been exaggerated by some detractors, Chausson never had to work for a living and was able to support less fortunate colleagues including Debussy. Like Felix Mendelssohn, Chausson was very well educated outside of music. Like Schoenberg he was a gifted visual artist, and like Schumann, he had literary ambitions as well, authoring short stories and working on a novel. Beyond these accomplishments, Chausson also studied law, even earning a doctor of laws degree and obtaining admittance to argue cases in the highest courts of France. His highly cultivated upbringing persisted into adulthood in his famous salon gatherings, in which the most distinguished painters, writers, and musicians participated. Chausson’s special engagement with literature is evident in his use of a short story by Turgenev as the basis for perhaps his most famous work, the Poème Op. 25 for violin and orchestra (1896).

Chausson studied with both Massenet and Franck. If Massenet represented to a more serious, younger generation a tradition of pleasant superficiality (although this traditional disparagement is as questionable as the similar and yet-to-be-challenged dismissal of Meyerbeer), then César Franck provided an alternative. Imbued with a mystic spiritualism, Franck’s music seemed to promise an adequate alternative for French composers in a world suffused by Wagnerian profundity.

Chausson was among the most gracious and supportive of colleagues and was at the same time riddled with self-doubt and anxiety. Despite Franck’s admiration for him, Chausson was particularly sensitive to the charge of dilettantism. In 1886 he assumed leadership of the Societé Nationale de Musique and became a pivotal figure in French musical politics. As the 1890s progressed, he was increasingly aware of the talent and originality of Debussy, whose work would eventually eclipse his own.

Chausson labored on Le roi Arthus for more than a decade and believed that in this work he had successfully de-Wagnerized himself and achieved a new, transcendent musical voice. The premiere took place in Brussels on November 30, 1903, but Chausson did not live to see it. He had died in a freak bicycle accident four years earlier, at the age of forty-four. Despite some attempts to revive the opera in the last century, it has been left to languish in undeserved obscurity. German critics have repeatedly identified it as the culmination of the French Wagnerian obsession, following in the path of Chabrier’s Gwendoline (1885), d’Indy’s Fervaal (1897), and Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys (1888). The efforts of d’Indy and Lalo to mask their debt to Wagner with references to Gregorian chant or French folk melody have been viewed by critics as transparent. In contrast, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) is embraced as the first original French achievement. Whether Wagnerian or in some manner distinctly French, Arthus must take its place in this distorted historical narrative as a great and original masterpiece.

The choice of Arthurian legend as the opera’s subject is fascinating in terms of its ambiguous emancipation from Wagner’s heroic subjects. It explicitly invokes an Anglo-French past, thus identifying Chausson among the group of French composers who sought for a French mythic equivalent to Germanic epic as a way both of defining themselves against Wagner and of eluding the tradition of trivial and charming music and subject matter associated with the French light opera of Gounod and Massenet. This effort is similar to that of Max Bruch, who searched for Homeric and biblical subjects to serve the same elevated function as Wagnerian epic without sounding Wagnerian. There are no doubt clear parallels that today’s listener will find between Chausson’s music and original libretto and those of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. But as Chausson himself noted, Arthus may possess dramatic elements akin to Wagner–betrayal of friendship, the tragic loss of love and friendship, an appeal to mystic Christianity–but these are generally features of high epic which need not lead to the same musical realization that Wagner envisioned. The choral sonorities, the harmonies, orchestration, and melodic usages make this music distinctly Chausson’s.

In his use of Arthurian legend, Chausson also finds a third way among even broader oppositions of modern culture and our memory of the past. In Arthus, a fictionalized account of the distant past is used to contrast sharply with the present. The modern world in which Chausson lived was one of rapid industrialization, dominated by an unprecedented obsession with progress, profit, and materialism. The reaction of nineteenth-century Europe to the far-reaching and uncontrollable social consequences of these changes was two-fold. On one hand, Victorian intolerance reigned. Puritan rectitude, middle-class values, and materialism masked the social horrors of extreme inequity and exploitation that fueled the industrial age. On the other hand, a younger generation rebelled against this ethic by indulging in an aestheticism and celebration of sensuality and amorality, which they saw as a means to escape from Victorian hypocrisy. France’s fascination with the “decadents” is evident in the tremendous popularity of Huysmans and Wilde. Against both of these social reactions Chausson invokes the figure of Arthur, ruler of a realm dependant not on material goods but on Christian virtues of solidarity and moderation. Chausson (whose alienation from Debussy was due in part to his disapproval of Debussy’s private life) does not allow Arthur to indulge at all in the ethos of Pelléas. There are few moments as poignant as the close of this opera, when Arthur, faced with the deaths of his dearest friend and his wife, transcends his worldly existence with undiminished commitment to idealized principles of Christian love, charity, and loyalty. As many have pointed out, the affair between Genièvre and Lancelot is not celebrated like that between Isolde and Tristan. The hero of this opera is neither of the star-crossed lovers, but the dignified and heroic title character. Chausson’s own commitment to these ideals is evident in the opera, but equally apparent is his nostalgic notion that such ideals are lost, possessed once but now departed with a passing age. Arthur’s closing lines and the chorus’s echo signal not only a critique of the present but the hope of redemption and the return of idealism. Debussy might question whether such ideals ever really existed or are pertinent, but for Chausson, the present moment is one of absence, sharply and painfully sensed through memory and its relentless capacity to imagine better times.

Forgotten Patriotisms: Music as Political History

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Forgotten Patriotisms: Music as Political History, performed on Dec 13, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

After forty years of cold war, and only a decade of post-cold war, it is not surprising that a tendency remains among many Americans to recall impressions of life in the Soviet Union as reductive caricature of state oppression and control. Our collective memory judges the Soviet Union as a failed experiment in state socialism, an “evil empire” empowered by strict and enforced prescription of private life, culture, and art. But the experience was far more nuanced, and now that one no longer need fear knee-jerk accusations of closet sympathy for the patent evils of the Soviet system, it is possible to search through the remnants of Soviet culture to see the more complex effects of state cultural domination. In this sense, this concert is an exercise in memory, not rehabilitation.

We go to the heart of the matter by focusing on both the most inspiring and the darkest episodes of Soviet cultural control: the immediate post-Revolutionary period and the era of Stalin. The first question to be asked is whether the state-approved, ideologically determined aesthetic standards which defined the appropriate art for the socialist cause (sometimes called socialist realism), were ever successful, or at least more successful than any of the other many historical attempts to promote homogeny through artistic and cultural expression. Were they more effective or much different than, for example, the efforts of the medieval papacy to render the liturgy, art, and practice of Christianity uniform throughout Europe? The question points to the unchartable region which art inhabits, the region between public discourse and private, personal belief. Under conditions of censorship, the authentic translation of private thought into a public artistic form of communication is disrupted. When public expression is controlled, will private consciousness alter itself to cohere with public expression (as the state intends), or will both become polarized? Some scholars have suggested that in Czarist Russia, with its own severe censorship policies, the artistic community had already developed a very strong, private discourse that could be understood as nascently existentialist. Artists and intellectuals considered the morally tragic condition of humanity secretly while creating public works that were acceptable to the state. This tension between the public and the private in nineteenth-century Russia was observable in the art itself, and can easily be imagined to carry over in the context of post-revolutionary Russia, though the terms had changed. Of course, one complicating factor was that just after the Revolution, there was an enormous amount of idealism about the possibilities of a new order and society. When those hopes dimmed in the 1920s and 1930s, the vitality of subterranean discourse became even more pronounced.

As negative as Soviet repression was, however, other aspects of the Soviet Union’s attitude toward art should give us a moment’s pause. The great irony in the state’s effort to use art and music to promote change in consciousness was that art and music were given tremendous prominence as official state enterprises. In the United States, we encounter exactly the opposite circumstance. Our government does next to nothing to support the arts or to recognize it as integral to the character of democracy. Consequently, art is left the beneficiary and prisoner of free market commerce and private philanthropy which is only mildly encouraged by the tax code. The government’s role is indirect at best, and the great cultural institutions and patrons of our country are private entities. Despite its apparent benefits, this system exists at the cost of art’s exclusion from a central role in the construct of the public and of the nation. The role of art and artists is greatly diminished in the eyes of citizens and society–except when controversy erupts, which is usually over a moral standard that instantly ignites the threat of censorship. In Soviet Russia, subsidy of the arts allowed artists to enjoy significance as genuine cultural presences (if only they could have expressed themselves publicly without restraint). Stalin and Shostakovich had direct contact with each other; in the United States, only Hollywood’s calls are taken by the President.

The appropriation of musicians and composers by the new Soviet state began very shortly after the Revolution. Nikolai Yakolevich Miaskovsky had already made a considerable reputation as a composer before 1918. He trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and by the time of the Revolution he had written five symphonies. The Sixth Symphony (1923) is essentially conservative in its musical idiom; one hears in it very little of the kind of experimentation that took place in the 1920s. Yet, during this period, the Soviet regime was enamored with progress and technology. In its first decade it encouraged aesthetic experimentation in design and literature, best remembered perhaps by the work of the Russian constructivists and stage designers. But Miaskovsky did not follow in that path with this work. He instead chose to use older models to write a masterpiece that commented on the desperate and difficult conditions his country encountered in the years immediately following the Revolution. However, this should by no means be mistaken for an expression of nostalgia. Rather, in recalling forms suddenly fallen out of favor, Miaskovsky rebuffs the fierce, affirmative patriotism of the younger generation and instead offers a picture of the ambiguity of this new civilization’s birth. The end of the old and the beginning of the new are responded to with a sense of tragic foreboding, vividly evoking all the inconsistencies, contradictions, and disappointments that attended the devastating social upheaval. Predictably, the work was accused of being a remnant of an old intellectual elite, and Miaskovsky was considered unable to grasp the possibilities of the new political reality. Yet there is something profoundly Russian and affectionate in this work. It is, as many commentators have noted, a worthy successor to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, the Pathetique. After the Sixth Symphony, Miaskovsky continued to work in the Soviet Union and had an immensely productive career. As a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, he exerted a powerful influence over a generation of composers, and was an intimate of Prokofiev. He survived the 1930s with his career and reputation intact, remained loyal to his native Russia, and adapted to the new political realities. The Sixth Symphony is now regarded by many to be his masterpiece, perhaps because it is a work written during that narrow window of opportunity, when the private and the public could come together openly.

In the generation of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, the relation between art and politics became much more awkward, difficult, and dangerous. Although Prokofiev was only ten years younger than Miaskovsky, the older composer encouraged Prokofiev’s career. Like Miaskovsky, Prokofiev had already made something of a name for himself before the Revolution, particularly with his First Piano Concerto. He had also won the Rubinstein prize in 1914. But shortly after the Revolution in 1918, Prokofiev left for America, where he stayed until 1922. He then moved to Paris and lived there for more than a decade, and except for a tour in 1927, remained outside the Soviet Union until 1936. It is not clear why Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union in 1936, which was certainly not an auspicious time. The grim realities of Stalin’s rule were quite plain, and Shostakovich had already suffered the dictator’s condemnation. Yet Prokofiev did return, settled in the Soviet Union, and made explicit attempts to come to terms with the regime. He participated in the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, and save for some brief tours in the late 1930s, remained in Russia until his death in 1953.

The listener must rely on his or her own judgment to determine whether there is any irony in the piece offered on tonight’s program. The archives of Prokofiev’s life and work will only be opened in 2003, so we will have to wait for scholars to comb through what are now sealed materials to shed any more light on the composer’s reasoning. As Maya Pritsker properly notes, however, Zdravitsa is not merely a piece of hack music. It cannot be discarded, as much other “occasional” music has rightly been, into that category of patriotic and politically sycophantic works composed at the request of rulers (especially dictators). Even when good composers write topical works on commission, the result is often something like the Centennial Overture of Wagner, or Der glorreiche Augenblick of Beethoven, or worse. But Zdravitsa was thought good enough to merit a substitute text after Stalin’s death. This fact highlights even more dramatically the contrast between the music and the original text, which can be only shocking to listeners who know that by1939, no one had no illusions about the extent of Stalin’s cruelty and butchery, which involved the systematic purging, exile, and murder of peasants, leading artists and intellectuals. While Stalin lived, this work served as a primary example of the way in which high-quality music was used to engage public consciousness and sentiment even in the face of an inconsistent reality. After Stalin’s and Prokofiev’s deaths, we are left with the troubling question of how a great artist like Prokofiev could have reconciled public expression and private truth that way. Better, perhaps, if he had written a hack work after all.

The case of Shostakovich is perhaps the best known and most controversial. After the tremendous impact made by his First Symphony, Shostakovich entered a period of experimentation with new musical techniques and styles. Here is an example of how compatible modernism and Communism were at first. Shostakovich indulged the notion of a new modern aesthetic that would reflect the triumph of science and constructive materialism through experimentation and thus advance beyond a decadent, bourgeois tradition. Communism, progress, and modernity were supposed to combine into a transcendent experience of ideological inspiration. For these reasons, the Second Symphony as well as the Third have in retrospect been set aside by most observers as merely works of propaganda. Even at the time of its composition, conservative observers were put off by the signs of modernist experimentation, and later in his life, Shostakovich himself disavowed these works. Today, conventional views of these symphonies deem them second-tier achievements. Yet, the idealism of the young Shostakovich, his embrace of a new way of making music, and his attempt to forge a relationship between that and a new political vision were widely shared in the 1920s not only in Russia but in the rest of Europe and America. Only recently has the traditional sharp distinction between Lenin and Stalin come in for reassessment. Even if Lenin was not the heroic figure he was once thought to be, the absence of irony in this symphony should not be the object of criticism but rather of investigation.

With its choral finale, the Second Symphony offers a powerful juxtaposition of the modern and the politically affirmative. It is a fine case study–deserving of a second hearing–of the difficulty of using music in general to dramatize an interpretation of social transformation. Shostakovich suggests the extent to which issues of politics, social change, and ideology can inspire and be liberating in their own way as bases for art works that are capable of transcending the ostensible context of their origins. However truncated, the choral finale harkens back to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, as well as to Mahler. Before dismissing the symphony for its naïve celebration of Soviet hope, consider whether claims for spiritual transcendence, Christian faith, or vague Enlightenment notions of universal brotherhood seem less complicated and more innocent than the praise of Communist revolution. The failure of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Mahler to inspire listeners to behave in a more Christian or humanist manner has never been held against them. Is it less idealistic or plausible that Shostakovich’s praise of the leader of the Russian Revolution and the promise he held may have warranted the same intensity as Beethoven’s attachment to Schiller’s vision of universal brotherhood, or Mendelssohn’s notion of a synthesis of Judaism and Christianity, or Mahler’s obsession with the spiritual? In all of these examples, music attempts to interpret the promise of history, however narrowly. The real irony, as Shostakovich later learned, is that history tends not to fulfill the promise of music.

Tonight’s program is designed to offer an aural evocation of the difficulty and power associated with the role of the artist in post-revolutionary Russia, and to permit us to remember the ambiguities and complexities of both the private and public opportunities and necessities. It is easy to understand the relation of politics and art when it involves those marginalized or excluded from power. We properly recognize the voice that has not been heard, the literature and music of the oppressed and excluded. But does genuine personal expression in art need exist only at the margins, or can works that have widespread and official sanction be compelling as well? In the Soviet Union, of course, artistic choices were weighted by the possibility of physical danger. Yet as we see here, composers encountered the problem of official “favor” in numerous and diverse ways. In our own time, the question has different terms but remains pertinent nevertheless. When fame and commercial success are lavished on contemporary artists, they may in a sense be as complicit as the composers on this program, who were the beneficiaries of official support, writing in the public realm on behalf of a centralized state that was neither democratic or capitalist. For the sake of our own times, it may be fruitful to recall a moment, even a failed one, when art was considered more than a separate aesthetic experience, when the only view of music was not solely for art’s sake, when mere formalism did not triumph, and when the making of art was an important part of an engagement with the well being of an entire nation. Before dismissing the music of the Soviet Union as the work of “sell-outs,” perhaps we should consider the larger potential role of politics and idealism, philosophy and social justice in the inspirational nexus of a composer. When art encounters power, and when the artist is afforded the officially sanctioned opportunity to influence social memory and interpretation, what should the artist do?

The Anxiety of Influence: Music as Historical Legacy

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Anxiety of Influence: Music as Historical Legacy, performed on Nov 19, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

On the surface of things, the concept of influence seems straightforward. An artist trying to define a space for himself or herself under the weight of tradition is inspired by precursors. She or he selects elements that are useful or admired, interpolates them with implicit commentary of his or her own, and arrives at an “original” production that nevertheless grasps what has gone before. Influence is pervasive and inescapable, even if the artist is a revolutionary and acknowledges the past only to condemn it. In this way history in the arts makes progress.

In 1973, the literary theorist Harold Bloom published a study which questioned this commonsense formulation. In The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Bloom explored the psychology of influence, and concluded that it was conflict of Oedipal dimensions between the poet and his or her literary forbearers. It is the struggle of the artist, Bloom argued, to find his or her own voice through an ambivalent, anxiety-ridden relation precisely with those precursors whom they most admire. Through creative misinterpretations of these shadowy figures, the artist, in the very act of holding up certain past artists as admired precursors, also imagines them as incomplete, failing for all their genius, and falling short of the mark that only the present artist is capable of reaching. If the present artist did not believe that, what would be left for him or her to accomplish? Admiration therefore necessarily becomes accusation, and the present artist only discovers his or her own power by distorting, demonizing, and then devouring those influences that he or she loves so much. Originality is achieved in the misinterpretation of the precursor as incomplete, which allows one to write the past according to one’s own agenda, that is, to influence (in imagination) one’s precursors instead of letting them influence one. One unconsciously takes credit for their work and completes their failed intentions in one’s own work. History progresses in the arts if only in the anxious unconscious of the artist.

Bloom’s analysis became enormously influential (indeed a Laius to an entire generation of critics), and has been widely applied not only to literature but many other artistic disciplines including music. A sociological aspect may be added to the theory (not that I am trying to complete it) if the anxiety of influence is also understood as a basically modern phenomenon, for it presumes that slavish imitation and deference to authority are not forced on modern poets and composers. The dilemma faced by Palestrina, for example, in adjusting his style to church authority is different from that encountered by most composers living in the early modern and modern ages, with the obvious exception of those living under dictatorial constraint, as is the case in two of our concerts this season which focus on music composed in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany. For the composer with fewer restrictions on the making of art, the abiding motivation since the mid-eighteenth century has been originality, and the oppressive regime has been embodied in those very figures from whom they learned all they know. Today it sometimes seems as though this quest for originality has deteriorated into an addiction simply to what is new. Many composers seem reduced to searching for the most superficial marks of distinctiveness in their desire to do something never done before. It is shallow achievement, however, to substitute novelty for art. As the eminent theorist Leonard B. Meyer points out, many of the greatest composers in the canon of music–Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn among others–were not fundamental innovators of style.

In today’s concert, perhaps the most classic case of the dynamics of the anxiety of influence in both stylistic and psychological terms is in the music of Ernst Krenek. As Matthias Schmidt points out, the young Krenek had the explicit intention of answering Mahler. Krenek exemplifies all six of Bloom’s stages of anxiety: clinamen, or the “correction” of Mahler; tessera, the “completion” of Mahler’s intentions; kenosis, the “emptying” of Krenek’s own egoistic ambition and hence Mahler’s; demonization, the suggestion that Mahler’s work only faintly reflects an artistry that was actually beyond Mahler; askesis, the “diminishment” of Mahler and of Krenek himself; and finally, apophredes, called the return of the dead, in which admiration for Mahler returns in a complete appropriation of his achievement. Can we really hear all this in Krenek’s music? Arguably yes, and if there is any doubt still that Krenek had a complex, personal response to Mahler, we may also consider the psychological implications inherent in the fact that, in addition to his intent to produce a legitimate successor and improvement on Mahler’s symphonic achievement, he also married Mahler’s daughter.

Eventually Krenek became one the most prolific and chameleonesque composers of the twentieth century. He was one of those great figures to whom homage is regularly paid verbally, but who is underrepresented in performance. His output was immense and he took on a striking variety of styles in his dynamic involvement with the influences of the past. In this sense he was much like Picasso, with numerous, distinct periods. But his music reveals that it was not originality in its superficial sense that motivated him, but complex distinctiveness in relation to established systems. In this symphony, notice the Mahlerian elements, and observe their magnificent distortions.

Krenek also wrote a splendid opera, Karl V (1933) as well as one of the most difficult yet outstanding works of choral music of this century, the Lamentations of Jeremiah (1941). He was born and worked in Vienna and spent time in Berlin. He was influenced by many figures ranging from Schreker and Busoni to Schoenberg. Perhaps his most famous moment in music history was his opera Jonny spielt auf (1926), a mixture of verismo and jazz in the German style. It was a sensation and became, to his credit, an emblem of the kind of degenerate music fascists did not appreciate. Krenek later emigrated to America and traveled about, teaching some of that time at Vassar College and Hamline University. He finally settled in Palm Springs, California after marrying the composer Gladys Nordenstrom in 1950. He lived to the venerable age of 91. In his later years, his longevity turned him into the last of the original central European proponents of the avant-garde. In addition to his huge compositional output, he was also a brilliant prose writer. His autobiography (written in English but strangely only available in German), his book on Okeghem, and his trenchant 1949 account of music in America, Music in the Golden West, are a few instances of the genius and versatility of an individual who rightfully became a legend in his own time. Ernst Krenek’s name and place in history are already assured, but we hope his music may come to be more fully appreciated by future generations. To this end we are pleased to participate in his centenary celebration with our chamber and orchestral performances.

The remainder of our program is devoted to two world premieres. It adds a special complication to the theory of the anxiety of influence when works are heard that have never been performed before. We have asked each of the composers to write a few words and by so doing we have tried to let them place their work in a context they consider helpful. Harold Farberman is a composer just celebrating his seventieth birthday, who came of age in the context of a variety of decisive influences. These influences are represented not only by the composers he admires, but by entire cultures, since these composers were very much focused on separating a distinctly American musical tradition from its European precursors. Born into a family of Klezmer musicians, Farberman became one of America’s most precocious and brilliant percussionists. Like Krenek he became a conductor, performer, and teacher. Through his experience as a member of the Boston Symphony, he came to know intimately the Russian and French music of the twentieth century. As a percussionist, however, he was never far from a profound affinity for indigenous American popular music and jazz, much like Copland and Bernstein. And like Bernstein and Gunther Schuller, he was one of the first Americans to embrace the music of Charles Ives, as is apparent in his use of explicit quotations in this work. Also like Bernstein, Farberman was an early proponent of Mahler. His reissued Mahler and Ives recordings have once again been embraced by aficionados as some of the most valuable readings available in the recorded archives. In today’s concert, his presence extends the anxiety of influence to performance as well as composition, since as one of America’s leading pedagogues of conducting, he has profoundly influenced many performers, including myself.

Our concert’s finale is a premiere by Philip Glass, arguably the best know if not the most celebrated American composer of his generation. Glass represents one of the most telling examples of the anxiety of influence in Bloom’s sense. A pioneer of a new style called minimalism, Glass’s most famous works seem to have nothing to do with the complex serial atonal work in which he was trained and produced early in his career. But Glass’s revolution may have been less revolutionary than its surface implies. His apparent departure from the legacy of Schoenberg and Webern may not be a renunciation as much as a fulfillment of their ideals. Schoenberg and Webern were after all ardent neo-classicists. They considered their music to have attained a classical simplicity, a clarity uncluttered by Romantic pretensions. Glass’s own responsive subversion of their techniques eventually led Glass to his own expressive form, the very essence of which is a lucid purity that subverts post-Wagnerian Romanticism. In this purity, one hears many precursors from Bach to the present, transfigured by distilled sounds and structures.

I can perhaps best illustrate the impact of Glass’s shift during the mid-1970s and early 1980s from the predicted trajectory of twentieth century composition and his attainment of his own “strength,” as Bloom calls the transcendence over precursors, with a personal anecdote. During my college years, having decided to become a performer, I vowed never to write music criticism. But in 1981, in a period of depression after the loss of my eight-year-old daughter Abigail, I was persuaded by a friend to begin work again by writing a piece for The New Republic on Glass’s opera Satyagraha. So scandalized was I by what I thought was some inexplicable, incomprehensible distortion of treasured modernist paradigms, that I wrote a vitriolic, defensive, and ultimately envious review. Once it was printed, I realized what I had written was not only embarrassing about what it said about me, but gratuitously unkind in its reactionary response to what was clearly an original and significant occasion in music. My subsequent mortification prevented me from taking advantage of any opportunity to break the awkward silence that persisted during the next few years. Then, as luck would have it, late one evening I had to rush from Caramoor to catch a flight to Europe. When I arrived at the airport, I entered the lounge to discover that the only other occupant of the room was Philip Glass. With characteristic courage and grace, he introduced himself to me with an expression of admiration for several ASO concerts that season. I was only too happy finally to apologize for my unkind and arrogant misrepresentation of his work. The incident reveals how easy it is to misconstrue and even resent the positive originality that results from the artist’s interaction with the past. Some time later, he contributed a setting of Psalm 126 for an ASO benefit concert for the Jerusalem Foundation. Tonight through the good offices and enthusiasm of Jonathan Haas, the American Symphony Orchestra is privileged to premiere Philip Glass’s Double Timpani Concerto.

The question I struggled with prejudicially in that review was the question of what kind of music Philip Glass should have written. The real issue for criticism was whether this new music–the turn in his style–was born of an authentic encounter between the historical moment and a person of talent and conviction–the best possible outcome of the anxiety of influence. The answer in the case of Philip Glass is clearly yes. In today’s performance, we express our belief that he and the other composers represented here will generate considerable anxiety for many generations of composers to come.

A Symphonic Saga 2000

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert A Symphonic Saga: Glière’s Ilya Muramets, performed on April 16, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In this afternoon’s concert, two recurrent features of the American Symphony Orchestra’s continuing effort to challenge the boundaries of the standard repertory (or the idea of a standard repertory itself) come into play. Ilya Muramets may be arguably the greatest composition of the Russian composer Reinhold Moritsevich Gliere, yet it is certainly not the most famous. If any symphonic work by him is familiar, it is the Red Poppy ballet (1927), or perhaps the Bronze Horseman ballet (1949). In Gliere we therefore encounter once again a composer only remotely familiar, with one or two works that one may or may not know. But also once again, this composer and in particular this work have among musicians and music enthusiasts a substantial underground aura and following. This Symphony is rarely performed (and may never have been performed before today in its entirety in this country) but is known by reputation. The founder of the American Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, was one of Muramets’ ardent defenders, but in true Stokowski fashion, he generated his own version, which deleted approximately half of the original material. Another champion of this piece is the American composer/conductor Harold Farberman (who will have a work premiered by the ASO next season). He made a historic recording–the first complete one–with the London Symphony Orchestra.

An epic work by a relatively obscure composer seems to court oblivion. These factors are compounded in the case of Gliere by several other historical factors. Gliere died in 1956, nearly forty years after the Russian Revolution. This particular work, however, was written at a unique point in Russian history, the three decades before the outbreak of World War I. This was a moment of rapid economic expansion, cultural vibrancy, and the evolution of both liberal and radical political agitation. The Russian monarchy had been deeply damaged by the Russo-Japanese War, with its humiliation of the Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima. The Revolution of 1905 ushered in a period of expectancy, optimism, and intense debate over the future of the Russian nation. If one wants to understand Gliere’s musical work from the perspective of Russian culture, the closest and most significant analogy is the work of the Russian painter Vasily Surikov (1848-1916). Surikov produced three large, brilliant examples of Russian historical painting including “The Morning of the Streltsy Execution,” (1885) “Boyarina Morozova,” (1887) and “Yermak Conquering Siberia” (1895). These three paintings are massive in scale, psychologically penetrating, unbelievably rich in detail, and dramatically structured with many variations in tension and repose. Each of them is bound by an overarching theme, yet they allude to dimensions of the crossroads facing monarchical autocracy. Russia in 1912 might have become more reactionary or moved toward democracy, or a socialist state, or possibly Communism.

The moment of transition that defines this period of time also finds an analogy in the matter of music. Gliere was at once the contemporary of Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) and of Stravinsky (1882-1971). He was caught between two conflicting directions in instrumental and symphonic music–towards modernism and towards the idea of musical realism. His command of music as a descriptive and suggestive medium fostered his reputation as a founder of the official art form know as Soviet Ballet. He had also been a student of Alexander Taneyev (1850-1918) and Anton Arensky (1861-1906). As Muramets demonstrates, he was familiar with the evocations of Russian nationalism by such predecessors as Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) and another teacher, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935). But when Gliere’s Symphony premiered in 1912, Stravinsky had already written The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka 1911), Debussy had gained a wide reputation, and Schoenberg was well on his journey away from post-Wagnerian chromaticism.

Gliere’s obscurity and particularly the neglect of this work can be attributed in part to politics inside and outside of music. Although a conservative composer, Gliere was a figure in the Soviet cultural establishment. He died just at the moment of the post-Stalinist thaw. Unlike Shostakovich, Gliere never benefited during his lifetime from the ebb and flow of East/West tensions. At the same time, to most younger generations, his music represented a throwback not only in its mode of composition and its sonorities, but also in the way the music interacted with narration, text, and illustration.

Anthony Burton has noted that at first glance the sheer scale of the Symphony suggests Mahler, but as Burton properly observes, there is not much Mahler in this work. Midway in his career, Mahler foreswore explicit program music and was never particularly drawn to the tone poem. If a German analogy is appropriate, one might do better to think of Strauss. But the genuine models of Muramets are indeed Russian, since the subject of the Symphony goes to the heart of the political debate in which all Russia was engaged at the time of its composition. Would Russia move further economically and socially in the direction of the West, or would it, as many contemporary painters and writers argued, seek sustenance from its folk past for modern inspiration? The inspiration of this Symphony suggests a parallel between Gliere and many of his eastern European colleagues, who struggled in the first years of the twentieth century to re-appropriate a national myth and history on behalf of the modern. These contemporaries include Dvořák , whose last orchestral works are tone poems based on poetic retellings of folk tales, and Bartók, one of whose first orchestral pieces is the tone poem Kossuth (1903). 

This work represents a pinnacle in the tradition of the use of the orchestra alone as the provider of an experience of listening that is suggestive and illustrative. Ilya Muramets is an opera in instrumental sound alone, without voices or text. It uses form and color to outline a story in a manner specific enough to help hold the audience’s attention, and yet it provides enough freedom enough to permit each listener to draw a myriad of influences about its meaning. By using instrumental sound alone, Gliere explores the boundaries between precision and ambiguity, and creates a space for interpretation that goes beyond what might be possible for the reader of a written account. Indeed the length and ambition of this work makes it akin to Jean-Christophe by Romaine Rolland, War and Peace by Tolstoy, or the novels of Sienkewicz, but it is also related to other contemporary forms and genres in theater, poetry, painting. In our current cinematic age we might identify the visual as the primary medium of storytelling. But this Symphony and indeed all great works in its class (even the unsuccessful ones such as by Siegmund von Hausegger’s Barbarossa) suggest that it is eminently possible to provide the listener with all the tension of the theater, the private engagement of the reader, the detail of the visual, as well as the indescribable, nearly spiritual sensibilities invoked by music, with the orchestra alone. And in this regard, Gliere is at his best. Ilya Muramets, despite its great scale, deserves a genuine place in the repertory. It resounds even for the jaded and over-stimulated ears of audiences in our time who have been subject to endless hours of movie and television music. Like the tone poems of Strauss, this work still makes its point by placing great music at the very center of the process of how the experience of time is transformed.

Beyond Good and Evil

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzshe and Music, performed on March 8, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on twentieth-century thought can hardly be overestimated. During his lifetime his popularity among his contemporaries was remarkable. Also sprach Zarathustra (1885) was to the fin de siécle generation what Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) had been to young people at the end of the eighteenth century. Nietzsche’s thought was later instrumental in providing the framework for the criticism of the nineteenth century that became central to modernism after 1914. His work celebrated the subjective, the power of the human individual and the triumph of the spirit. Precisely these ideas, however, permitted his work to be appropriated by pre-fascist and fascist movements. In editions skillfully edited by his sister, Nietzsche’s work was rendered popular in a manner fundamentally at odds with its own philosophical positions, and became a rich source of intellectual justification for the Nazis. It took many decades for English-speaking readers to shed the distorted view of Nietzsche as a proto-fascist. French readers, however, saw through the distortion more readily, and immediately following World War II, found in Nietzsche a key forerunner of existential philosophy. Indeed Nietzsche’s influence on Heidegger and Jaspers in the 1920s and 1930s sparked a revival of interest years later in Nietzsche as the father of existentialism. A related aspect of Nietzsche eventually emerged in American intellectual thought in the 1960s, when the image of his troubled brow became an icon for younger generations, and his famous epigraph “God is dead” found its way to many a graffiti-covered wall. This perspective on Nietzsche’s work is perhaps just as distorted as the fascist appropriation, but it clearly demonstrates the one consistent feature of his work: its profound elusiveness, and its shifting and enigmatic rhetoric that seem to lend themselves so easily to a variety of agendas. That protean rhetorical quality has more recently caused Nietzsche once again to occupy center stage in intellectual life, as literary theorists take delight in his breathtaking ability to “deconstruct.” Nietszche’s life has in no small way added to the ongoing fascination with him. He never married, became enmeshed in several triangular relationships, and finally suffered madness as a result of syphilis. Insofar as madness itself has been a category of analysis and criticism in contemporary thought, that fact alone has only inflamed the controversy about the seemingly infinite attributions of meaning behind his words.

What made Nietzsche so popular and electrifying in his lifetime, and what made his writing so important in the twentieth century to groups holding diametrically opposing views, is the fact that, with few exceptions, Nietzsche did not write philosophical treatises. He was first and foremost a poet–a poet in prose and verse. Nietzsche’s aphoristic prose, as rhetorically complex as any poem, was particularly inspired by Emerson, who used a dynamic rhetorical strategy to undermine explicitly the notion of an all-encompassing, logically constructed system. Thus two composers as diverse as Strauss and Delius can find radically contrasting sources in Nietzsche, contrasts which speak to the elusive and almost chameleon-like quality of Nietzsche’s work. It is often asserted that Strauss was no intellectual and could not possibly have understood Nietzsche, yet Strauss’s grasp of the irony, sarcasm, and inversion of conventional wisdom which are the hallmarks of Nietzsche’s writing suggest the deep affinity between philosopher and composer.

Indeed, it seems inevitable that Nietzsche’s philosophy should have a strong connection to music, since his writings are so much about language and the collapsing of those artificial oppositions that underlie our precious systems. What better language than music to escape the tyranny of a certain kind of logical thought? Nietzsche wrote extensively about music and musicians. He harbored ambitions to be a composer and was himself a pianist. He never lost his awe for musicians and for the power of music. In this sense he is a successor to E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) and Jean-Paul Richter (1763-1825), who saw in music an instrument of consciousness, expression, and meaning that eluded, transcended, and overpowered mere reason. Nietzsche was clear about his own debt to Artur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who privileged music above all other artistic creations in his philosophical analysis of human thought and action.

The one figure who seemed to hold the promise of the realization of music’s cultural power for the young Nietzsche was Wagner. Nietzsche understood Wagner all too well, and later came to revile and parody him. Much has been written about his ambivalent relation to Wagner, but as Kyle Gann correctly points out, Nietzsche’s musical training was (as was also the case with Schopenhauer) the result of a response to pre-Wagnerian romantic music that of the generation of Schumann and Mendelssohn. Wagner’s explosion onto the scene must have looked to Nietzsche like a violent new day, which later darkened into a realization of the dishonesty of Wagner’s aesthetic ambitions and philosophical pretensions. In his later life–his post-Wagnerian phase–Nietzsche greatly admired Bizet: he never lost his affection for Viennese classicism.

However, more important than Nietzsche’s own engagement with music is the blend of poetry and philosophy that constitutes his writings. There is a mystical side to Nietzsche, an affinity for the transcendent and reoccurring. Nietzsche’s fiery prose has remained an inspiration to those who seek to puncture the pieties about progress, religion, morality, and politics. To his readers it is evident that Nietzsche took no prisoners, as it were. In Also sprach Zarathustra he spares no profession of modern faith, including the conceits of science and the purveyors of political utopias. But as he exposed hypocrisy and the limits of language and reason, he reminded his readers that what is to be celebrated is the potential of the human being. He was the psychologist who anticipated Freud in a profound exploration of the complex and counterintuitive geography of the mind. He led a fanatical crusade against the internal mechanisms each of us develop to denigrate ourselves, to feel guilty, to submit to the authority of others, to imitate, to cower before self-proclaimed expertise, and to turn our potential individuality into a docile slavery to convention. Nietzsche hated the tyranny of modern mass politics and the world of journalism and fashion so aptly attacked by Balzac a generation earlier. He also had little use for his fellow academics and the pretensions of scholars and scientists, who in their confidence in explaining the world, reduce it to sets of useless and constricting categories. Amid this rubble left by unrelenting criticism and argument, the artist and the musician must remain unscathed, in order to make art and more particularly music seem in the modern world a still viable instrument for the realization of genuine individuality and originality. Music especially functions as an antidote to the self-imposed spiritual slavery brought to human kind by the wonders of progress.

These ideas were of course an intense inspiration for composers, and resulted in a long and diverse body of music related to the writings of Nietzsche. It is naturally impossible to catalogue tonight all of the ways in which Nietzsche asserted his influence, no more than it is possible for any one of the works performed here to offer the definitive “Nietzsche.” In tonight’s concert, therefore, we ask you to listen to two aspects of Nietzsche that are evoked by this music: the sheer beauty and power of his language, and the radical assertiveness of his allegiance to the creative individual. He is perhaps the greatest German poet after Goethe, and possibly also the thinker who most effectively argues that the making of art and the aesthetic sensibility are neither trivial aspects of humanity, nor the moral equivalents of a cultivated taste for “fashion.” For Nietzsche, the unique greatness of the human condition is best expressed by the capacity for music. We open with an example from Nietzsche’s own musical imagination, then turn to a great twentieth-century composer’s point of view. We then offer an early work by Frederick Delius especially reconstructed for this performance, after which we return to the twentieth century, and then conclude with one of the most familiar and triumphant syntheses of Nietzschean philosophy and music ever created.

Symphony No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 13 (1905)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Polishing the Jewel: The Genius of George Enescu, performed on Feb 4, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Symphony No. 1, Op. 13 vividly reflects Enescu’s training in Vienna, where he studied with Robert Fuchs and mastered the Brahmsian tradition in composition. At the same time, however, this work reveals the enormous French influence on Enescu that took hold when he studied in the 1890s with Massenet and Fauré. In 1905, Enescu was already well established as a violinist and some of his first pieces, including the Symphonie concertante for cello and orchestra, Op. 8, had already appeared. However, the numbering of Po. 13 belies the fact that Enescu had written four previous symphonies already which are now known as “school” symphonies. The fourth such symphony is in the same key as Op. 13 and was completed in1898.

When encountering an early symphony by a young composer, one might be struck by the enormous burden of the task, the great weight of tradition and accomplishment behind the form. It certainly struck Brahms, who waited decades before writing his first symphony. Enescu, however, had no hesitation in confronting his predecessors confidently–he chose as a key for this symphony E-flat major, inviting a comparison to the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven, not to mention Schumann’s Third Symphony as well. Like these two earlier works, the piece opens with a dramatic and stunning statement in 3/4 meter announcing not only the key but the basic thematic material. Both first and second thematic groups are related in the first movement, which is written in sonata form and marked assez vif et rythmé. Enescu makes good use of percussion coloring including triangle, cymbal, and bass drum. In a concession to the habit of dramatic extension characteristic of the later nineteenth century, he structures a fabulous closing coda to the opening movement.

The second movement, marked lent is based on a slow-moving eighth-note pulse and is particularly noteworthy for its original instrumentation. The use of bass clarinet, English horn, and trumpets and two harps, alongside an innovative use of timpani, give the movement a distinctly mysterious and French atmospheric sensibility. The movement has aspects of a free, improvisatory fantasy on a basic opening motif. It opens in A-flat minor and closes in B major, as it dies away with an eloquent evocation of the unique sonorities that the composer evokes.

Enescu prefigures a modernist tendency to rethink the four-movement symphonic form in the Op. 13. Instead of writing a scherzo and then a grand finale, he chose to write only a three movement symphony. The last movement the finale marked vif et vigoureux combines aspects of scherzo and finale. In this sense, the Beethoven and Schumann models, which can be brought to bear in an understanding of the first movement, become less significant in favor of a new idea. The examples of Brahms and Bruckner are left behind as well. Enescu mixes the rondo form and the sonata form, and explicitly challenges the tendency during the nineteenth century to shift the weight of the symphonic form away from the first movement toward the last movement. This is a process which began with Mozart’s last symphony and which was measurably popularized by Beethoven’s Eroica and Ninth Symphony. Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler sought to give the symphony an organic character by making the last movement the dramatic highpoint so that a symphony would not, as had become customary in the classical period, become defined by the opening movement. The third movement of Enescu’s Op. 13, however, is shorter than the first two, and is marked by tightly constructed episodes. However the movement shows a clear and concise architecture. It opens with rapid string figuration characteristic of a scherzo, above which is the thematic material of a grand finale. As the movement progresses, Enescu utilizes his mastery of orchestration to give increasing weight to the powerful dramatic gesture. The movement closes in a blaze of symphonic glory. In the final bars, the Viennese influence is present as Enescu slows the pulse of the work down, permitting a majestic ending to unfold, asserting with trumpet fanfares the framing tonality, E-flat.

Since Enescu is best remembered as a violinist and as an advocate of Romanian folk traditions, the choice of this work was motivated by the conviction that in Enescu the twentieth century possessed a great and overlooked master of symphonic form. All of the four “school” symphonies are worth hearing and performing. Of the works that Enescu himself considered worthy of publication, there are three symphonies in all, the last of which uses both chorus and piano solo. Further, there are also two more unfinished symphonies. It is clear that Enescu was throughout his career fascinated and compelled by symphonic form. Of all seven completed works, this one may be the most impressive. In the massive output of symphonic music after the death of Bruckner, the symphonies of Enescu deserve a better place in concert programs than they now occupy. This work reminds us that it is not sufficient for English and American and German critics and audiences to pigeonhole composers from Eastern Europe as merely ethnic and exotic, as figures from so-called peripheral cultures who have appropriated mainstream European forms. Insofar as there is any residual value to the claim that music transcends ethnicity and nationalism, the unexotic originality of Op. 13 is a straightforward tribute to the compelling talent of this great violinist and composer.

Polishing the Jewel: The Genius of George Enescu

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Polishing the Jewel: The Genius of George Enescu, performed on Feb 4, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Since World War II, many of the leading twentieth-century composers of Eastern Europe have become part of the standard concert repertory. But figures such as Szymanowski, Bartók, and Janáček, despite the popularity of their works, are still viewed through the prism of a simplistic notion of national identity. No doubt they were indeed nationalists, and used an array of folk materials and distinctive characteristics of their native language and culture in their music—but the same can also be said of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Yet we never marginalize these classical masters as idiosyncratically German or Austrian; they seem to transcend national characteristics. Despite the broadening of Western European and American tastes, our attraction to the composers of eastern European is still intimately connected to our sense that there is something exotic about their music. When these composers have tried to counter that sense and avoided highlighting an audible nativism, their music has been traditionally criticized as derivative. This double bind has been particularly true in the case of the lesser known twentieth-century Russian symphonists. We still fall into the trap of concentrating on what seems uniquely Finnish about Sibelius or Danish about Nielsen.

There are two composers from Eastern Europe who have suffered particular neglect because their work does not lend easily to reductive nationalist symbolism: Ernst von Dohnányi and George Enescu. The careers of both of these musical geniuses have unusual parallels. Each was a remarkable prodigy as an instrumentalist—Dohynanyi as a pianist, Enescu as a violinist. Each was trained in Vienna at a conservatory over which the tradition of Brahms held a profound influence. Dohnányi and Enescu both went on to achieve international success primarily as performers, and both contributed actively to the development of concert life and musical culture in their homelands, Hungary and Romania respectively, after 1918. Unlike Dohnanyi, however, Enescu honored a longstanding Romanian cultural connection, and went on to study in Paris, where he came under the spell of French masters and influences. In this regard, Enescu’s experience bears particular resemblance to those of Szymanowski and Martinu. Unlike the rest of Eastern Europe, the linguistic connection between Romania and France was quite intimate. Bucharest prided itself on being the Paris rather than the Vienna of Eastern Europe. As a result, Enescu more self-consciously than Dohnányi became a truly international and cosmopolitan figure, who lived not only in Romania and Paris but (again like Martinu) in New York.

As CD re-issues of his violin playing have made clear, he was a spectacular and original violinist, as well as a great violin pedagogue who found a way to integrate the French violin tradition with that of central Europe. His sound and interpretive strategy were completely different from the Russian tradition that emanated from Leopold Auer (which has left a distinct mark on our tastes through the artistry of such pupils as Jascha Heifetz), or the tradition which took hold in Berlin through the influence of Joachim and Flesch. In this regard, Enescu outpaces Bartók, Szymanowski or Janáček, because he maintained a virtuosity as an instrumentalist that was indisputable and lifelong. Perhaps only Dohnányi, who returned late in life to public piano performance, offers a legitimate comparison. But the comparison is a bit ironic, because even more than Dohnányi, Enescu saw himself first and foremost as a composer. Despite this conviction, however, most of his music is largely neglected today beyond the borders of Romania (though, thanks to the advocacy of Lawrence Foster, the opera Oedipe [1936] is experiencing something of a revival today). This is also ironic, because Enescu’s music cannot in any way be simplistically defined as Romanian, but rather is an innovative extension of the three traditions he knew—French, German, Romanian.

To acknowledge that Enescu artistically transcended nationalism is not to say, however, that he abandoned his native country. Rather, Enescu’s life and work serve to disrupt the hard and fast categorization of a restrictive nationalism in the first place. Unlike many of his equally famous Romanian contemporaries, Enescu managed to avoid both sides of a terrible opposition. He neither flirted during the 1930s with local fascist movements that exploited national pride, nor succumbed to the lure of distancing himself entirely from Romania through acculturation into an international world of artists (which is often a form of cultural conformism in disguise). Like Bartók, Enescu was a courageous and honorable individual in a world obsessed by nationalist hatred, xenophobia, fascism, and anti-Semitism. His tireless work to expose Romanian musicians to the range of European tradition and technique, as evidenced in his founding of Romania’s most important musical institutions, make Constantin Stihi-Boos’s comment on Enescu’s constant compositional revision–that he was “like a first-rate jeweler continually polishing precious jewels”—applicable to his service to his country as well. Enescu wanted to point out a direction for his native land towards an open, proud, and tolerant democratic society. He has been a national symbol in Romania in both the autocratic and democratic eras. The conservatory and leading orchestra of Bucharest are named after him, and there are Enescu streets and statues everywhere.

It is not, however, out of respect for Enescu’s life and personality that his music deserves to be reintroduced into the repertory. In one final comparison to Bartók, it must be acknowledged that Enescu was a great composer. To this end, this concert has been designed to provide as concise a snapshot of his orchestral output as possible. Two pre-World War I works show the full range of his mastery and appropriation of nineteenth-century traditions. One major work represents his most productive period in the 1930s, and there is one fine example of the music he wrote later in his career.

Die Liebe der Danae, Op. 83 (1940)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Richard Strauss, Die Liebe der Danae, Op. 83 (1940), performed on Jan 16, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When efforts are made to revive a major work that failed to gain acceptance at the time of its creation, it is revealing to explore the reasons for and value of the resuscitation, particularly when the work is by one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. Richard Strauss’s later work has gradually undergone a positive reassessment. This reappraisal is partly a consequence of the demise of the cult of modernism. But as Die Liebe der Danae (1940) may show, the reconsideration of Strauss an anti-modernist is too facile. This opera in fact has everything to do with the modern; it is uniquely a work of our time. In the midst of fascist Europe, the Depression, and the Second World War, a morality tale about wealth and the power of love was irrelevant at best, and in 1952 (the date of the public premiere in Salzburg), when the ravages of the war and the post-war economy made for a grim landscape (further compromised by the specter of Stalinism and the Iron Curtain) Danae was destined to fall on unsympathetic ears. But we now live in a period of extreme wealth and ruthless self-confidence about the power of money and its significance. Indeed those apparent contemporary qualities which put Danae out of step with the time of its composition in the late 1930s or it with its delayed premiere in the post-war early 1950s, make it a highly germane work for the present time, as we reflect upon what the last century has made of us.

In the score, Strauss achieves a modernist transparency in this opera, especially in his deft use of thematic development and harmonic color. The orchestration is distinctly twentieth century in its lightness and use of fragmentation and contrast. However, Strauss also integrates numerous musical references to the past (it opens with an echo of the music of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler) and to his own work, and thus forces the listener to engage the present through the lens of tradition and history. Like so many of his other operas, Danae is also filled with personal history–autobiographical references, self-criticism and self-reflection. But Strauss does not lapse into nostalgic sentimentality and grand empty gestures. The music in this opera is not the music of a contented craftsman, relying on the conventions he himself helped create. Although the opera has failed to be performed with any frequency at all and is not available in any complete recording (there is only one heavily cut CD version of the 1952 premiere), audiences that have embraced the music of Philip Glass, John Adams, Arvo Paart, and David Del Tredici, John Corigliano and an even younger generation of American composers will find old Strauss remarkably up to date.

The explicit moral lesson the opera draws about money requires little explanation in this day and age. The inhabitants of Danae’s world do not earn their money the old-fashioned way like good nineteenth-century industrialists, nor do they even acquire it as the inherited privilege of landed aristocracy. Gold is a magical occurrence for them, almost like day-trading on the internet. And just as today, when Midas’s touch may be the click of the mouse, the spontaneous accumulation of wealth instantly reduces all value to market-value. This is evident in the pathos of Pollux, whose lack of capital makes his royal rank meaningless, while a donkey-driver with wealth can instantly acquire a kingdom. Indeed, in making Midas’s wealth a reward from the gods, Strauss alters the traditional myth of Midas, who is cursed with the golden touch as punishment for his greed. Midas rapidly learns the value of things other than gold when he finds he cannot eat or touch other humans. Of course the most powerful image in the confusion of money with intangible values is the shower of gold itself, the opera’s only erotic event. Unlike other erotic visions or fantasies (for instance, Europa’s bull) the shower has no parallel symbol for physical sexuality: the gold is erotic purely by displacement, as a kind of fetish. On the most explicit level, then, the opera’s conflict seems so simple as to be a major cliché of the century: money is no substitute for love.

But to accept the opera only on that level is to miss Strauss’s true modernism, his Joyce-like appropriation of the mythic and mundane life. Like Joyce, Strauss does not use myth to reduce the present to a tired maxim, but to complicate the maxim itself. That Strauss might want to complicate this particular maxim is made clear by certain autobiographical facts. Strauss was very aware that he was reviled for being interested only in money. He was after all among the leading advocates of copyright protection, but his advocacy was profoundly self-centered. He reveled in the economic success of his work. He was known for his love of comfort and took pride in his house in Garmisch, which he boasted was the result of his fabulous royalties. To many contemporaries and critics, his musical efforts after 1918 were not true reflections of creativity but the work of a calculating old man interested only in exploiting his fame and reputation. Furthermore, Strauss had a difficult, Junoesque wife who thought of herself as socially superior. Having come of age in a society dominated by families grown rich in the brewing industry, Strauss understood very well both the petit-bourgeois mind and the industrialist.

But the old Strauss also had his memories, especially of his youthful, passionate affair with Dora Wihan. This moment of idealistic love, opposed by his parents, lingered on well into the years in which his marriage with the decidedly unpleasant Pauline had settled into a comfortable domestic routine. Strauss was unquestionably a devoted and loyal husband and cherished the ideal of the family and his love for his wife until the end of his days. But however mundane his domestic life might have been, a sense of gleaming youthful ardor, audible in the Danae/Midas duets, remained with him. For Strauss it was neither naïve nor clichéd, but rather a dream, an ideal to be sustained if not in life, then in art. If Strauss chose to live in Jupiter’s golden castle which Danae forsakes, then in some room of that dwelling of capitalist success and respectability, there still remained the passionate, rebellious ideals of youth. It is remarkable how much Strauss’s valedictory, this nearly unperformable, complex work, seems more the product of excessive youthful ambition than of the learned economy of experience.

And yet, Danae possesses the music of experience as well. Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who conceived the scenario upon which Josef Gregor based his libretto, were not so naïve as to present their bourgeois audiences with a simple moral about the power of love over wealth. Strauss embeds a somber yet provocative commentary into this moral tale through the use of myth, music, and the depiction of human relationships. In the figure of Jupiter, we may see one of those self-conscious reflections for which Strauss is known. Jupiter is not a youthful presence. As the literal source of the most sought-after commodity, gold, he is already at the summit of success. But his persistent desire defines the limits of gold from the outset–he wants love, especially the love that characterizes youth. In this sense he resembles the Marschallin of Der Rosenkavalier, whose wistful reflection about her aging (which may seem an over-reaction these days) edges the aspirations of the youthful lovers with more than a touch of sadness.

But Jupiter also evokes the example of Wotan, especially in Danae’s closing scenes. There are few operatic occasions so glorious for a low male voice (albeit a lyric baritone) and so tragically evocative of self-realization. Although Strauss in his later years turned increasingly to Mozart as a model, and there is much neoclassical flair in this work characteristic of twentieth-century neoclassicism (including the canon from the third act), there are also strong hints of Wagner transfigured. Danae’s and Jupiter’s third act duet is reminiscent of Wotan and Brünhilde (as well as of Sieglinde and Siegmund, especially with its reference to the glint in the eyes, the thinly veiled disguise, and the libation in the context of domestic hospitality). Like Wotan, Jupiter is a god with an ambivalent, competitive, interventionist and jealous attitude to human existence. The musician Strauss in this opera is in conflict with his double Jupiter. While Jupiter graciously confronts his own limitations as a god, as an aging man his composer, without disagreeing, flaunts his youthful inventiveness in the music itself. It could well be argued that the closing scenes of this opera is Strauss’s most successful counterpart to the end of Der Rosenkavalier, his most popular operatic achievement. Among the particular twentieth-century aspects of this score are Strauss’s intricate use of rhythmic displacement and cross-rhythm, his angular and daring harmonic adventurousness, and his integration of dissonance and tonal ambiguity. The score can be compared to the work of Bartók and Janacek, two composers who never abandoned a tonal framework, but who went well beyond post-Wagnerian clichés. In its placement in Strauss’s career, it stands as Falstaff and Otello do in the career of Verdi.

On the most conventional level of the narrative, Jupiter is the loser, and Danae and Midas the winners who acquire the ideal love that the god cannot experience. His golden dreams are rejected by the lovers’ embracing of fulfillment in each other in a relentlessly ordinary, non-magical existence. But Jupiter’s plight in its musical context–some of the most glorious that Strauss ever penned–gives him a force that imbues the young lovers’ circumstance with a dreadful irony. His presence drives home the fact that this dream of perfect love and simple joy in the absence of any other ambition by two people willing to sacrifice everything just to live with each other in a hut, giving away all their aspirations for wealth and power, is itself among the most terrifying of illusions perpetrated on ourselves in modern life. If Midas could not eat because his food turned to gold, he and Danae may not find food any more easily now in their poverty. The experienced Strauss was all too aware of how remote for himself and others the fulfillment of this dream was. More than most, he knew how difficult and how unrealistic such pure devotion is to sustain in any relationship. How then can we take such an implausible lesson to heart? In the end, are not the pathetic Pollux and his entourage, easily mollified in the third act by the shower of gold, a more realistic, honestly human depiction? As our contemporary culture makes too plain, it seems much more natural to imitate the gods and seek wealth and dominion over others than to try to sustain love over time?

Though the opera’s mythic convention may seem to suggest that the mortals find their true destiny in a Rousseau-like rejection of materialism, it in fact offers a pertinent question: where exactly is the myth, and where the reality? Jupiter realizes that humans, unlike gods, are blessed with a capacity, unique to themselves and linked absolutely to their mortality, for a kind of love completely independent of any distinction or achievement. This is the same point apparent at the end of one of Strauss’s own favorite operas, Die ägyptische Helena (1928), in which the epic figures of Helena and Menelaus must come to terms with each other as ordinary, modern husband and wife faced with a history of infidelity. But this modest and poignant gift of humanity is precisely that which humans have the most difficulty realizing. It is the domestic bliss of Midas and Danae that is the myth, a tantalizing but forever elusive ideal.

But as Jupiter–the catalyst of this sequence of events, and the most interesting and complex figure in the opera–demonstrates, this beautiful myth is not to be dismissed. Strauss does not pillory entirely the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elaborations of love, desire, and romance in favor of a twentieth-century devotion to avarice. Regardless of its unfeasibility, this intangible ideal of human contact is something to be celebrated and treasured, even if modern life will not allow for it. And it is the figure of Jupiter himself that symbolizes the reason for this. Alone at the end of the opera, Jupiter resigns himself to his role as a god, a creator who cannot directly participate in the activities of his creations. His power and immortality are all characteristics and aspirations of the modern artist and composer, and ones so eminently achieved by Strauss himself. Jupiter embodies most fully the realization communicated by the musical form of the opera itself: that the one solace surrounding the failure of human relationships and the key instrument to sustaining human relationships may be the art of music itself. Jupiter’s observations in the glorious end of this opera are plausible precisely because of the transcendent power and stunning beauty of Strauss’s musical invention. Music, that wordless language, is probably the only effective instrument of human love. Strauss, the elderly seer, makes it plain that the idealization of love and its search can be a curse more painful than Midas’s touch. Its failures are so utterly human and engender so much suffering. But they are redeemed not by their fulfillment but by the fact that they end up necessitating art and music as the only instruments of survival and hope.

Die Liebe der Danae is an overlooked masterpiece (marred perhaps only by the absence of Hofmannstal’s elegant prose). The impracticalities associated with the work, such as the difficulty of the Jupiter role, have not helped. But the time has come to give this work a new life. To that end, this performance is being recorded for commercial release as the first sound document of the complete opera. Audience members are respectfully asked to minimize extraneous noise.

Goldmark Violin Concerto

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner’s Divided Vienna, performed on Dec 1, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Asked what he did for a living by an old lady with whom he found himself traveling, Karl Goldmark (1830-1915) is said to have answered, “I am a composer-I am the composer of The Queen of Sheba.” “Ah yes,” the lady responded, “and does the post pay well?”

Apocryphal it may be, but the incident underlines the fate of a certain kind of composer. There are composers we celebrate for an entire oeuvre; and then there are those whose names have come down to posterity linked to just a single title. One such was Anton Rubinstein, long known at one time only for his Melody in F (and even that has largely disappeared from current view); another was Henry Litolff, whose Scherzo, from the Concerto symphonique No. 3, enjoyed warhorse status half a century ago among romantic pianists.

The Hungarian-born, Vienna-based Goldmark’s choice of The Queen of Sheba as self-evident calling-card may seem to put him in the sympathy-evoking category of the “one-work composer.” His case, however, is a little more complicated. There may be few music-lovers or even musicians today who can claim acquaintance with the whole range of his production. On the other hand, the category must be expanded in this instance from one work to three-though perhaps never all three at the same time. During the last forty years of his life, the Goldmark work of note was indeed that first of his six operas, premiered in Vienna in 1875. By the middle of the twentieth century, Sheba had been passed in popular esteem by Rustic Wedding, composed in 1877. A vividly atmospheric symphonic poem, it was one of those slightly off-the-beaten charmers that formed a major segment of Sir Thomas Beecham’s repertoire.

By now, with its other great champion Leonard Bernstein no longer among us, Rustic Wedding in turn has lapsed into relative obscurity. And so for practical purposes we are left with the piece that has, through all these vagaries, maintained at least a degree of currency thanks to the advocacy of such star soloists as Ruggiero Ricci and the late Nathan Milstein: the A-minor Violin Concerto, also dating from 1877, and sometimes referred to as “No. 1” though all trace of its putative successor seems to have vanished.

If he is to be relegated to “one-work composer” status, the Violin Concerto is as deserving of being that work as either The Queen of Sheba or Rustic Wedding. Indeed, it may be fairly described as combining Goldmark’s best qualities in the highest concentration. A skilled orchestrator, thanks in part to his experience of playing and also scoring other composers’ music during years of working as a violinist in Vienna’s theater orchestras, he achieved in the concerto a finely effective balance between solo and tutti, often reinforcing the pyrotechnics of the violin part by backing it with unobtrusive but firm woodwind lines in longer note-values. This technique is used with particular flair in the colorful finale, whose rhythms at once recall the “polacca” style of the last movement in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and foreshadow the bolero meter of the finale in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto.

If skill in orchestration comes partly from training and experience, the gift for lyrical melody is essentially inborn. Goldmark possessed it in abundance, and it comes to the fore in the warmly expressive lines of the central Andante movement. Along with those two qualities, and reinforced by the enthusiasm for Wagner that marked Goldmark’s critical writings (and had led him in 1872 to take a leading role in the formation of the Vienna Wagner Society), was a taste for expanding the scope of his themes beyond merely lyrical proportions. Thus, in the first movement, after a brief orchestral exordium, the solo violin’s first entry spins a rapturous line, marked by turns “cantabile,” “dolce,” and “espressivo,” suggestive of Wagnerian “endless melody,” before dashing off on a flight of more conventional bravura.

The soloist’s subordinate theme is even more expansive in its melodic reach. And there is a nice touch at the recapitulation, where, after a vigorous orchestral fugato based on the spikier opening theme of the concerto, the violin enters after a short silence with a demonstration that she can play at that game too-but soon returns to her original expressive cantilena as if to say: “But this is what I am really about.” Clearly, that is also what Goldmark was about, and it is what has kept the appeal of this tuneful concerto fresh for more than a century.

Bruckner’s Divided Vienna

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner’s Divided Vienna, performed on Dec 1, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Rarely have politics and music engaged each other with such tenacious consistency as in the case of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Vienna and German-speaking Austria. The recent elections in Austria that have enlarged the power of Jorg Haider and his People’s Party may seem at first glance to have little to do with tonight’s concert. But as the politics of the Salzburg Festival in recent months have shown (in large measure through the insightful commentary by Cornell historical Michael Steinberg) culture, particularly surrounding music, has long been political in Austrian life. The president of Austria, Thomas Klestil, and Haider have all attacked the current leadership of Salzburg in terms strikingly similar to the critical vocabulary used at the turn of the century against Mahler and his innovations at the Vienna Opera.

The consistent politicization of music stems from the divisions that occurred in the rapidly growing metropolis which Vienna was after 1867, when constitutional reform made migration to the city from within the Empire much freer. The pieces by Brüll and Goldmark were written and premiered in the twilight years of a liberal era in Vienna. The 1860s and early 1870s had been a time of rapid economic expansion and massive physical reconstruction in the city. But the stock market crash of May 1873 ushered in a long era of disillusionment and decline. By the time the Löwe version of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was first heard, a new radical politics was in the ascendancy, marked by a nostalgia for pre-industrial artisan economy, anti-Semitism, and the aggressive assertion of the superiority of Germanic culture and people. Despite the fact that Vienna was a multi-ethnic and polyglot capital, by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a place that mixed an open and creative cosmopolitanism with a narrow-minded provincial rigidity most often expressed in rabid anti-Semitism. Jews were the city’s most visible and significant minority. Their visible and extraordinary contribution to cultural life was widely understood.

The political divisions between liberal traditions and a new radical political conservatism which was nativist and reactionary had their musical mirror. Brahms who settled in the city in the early 1860s was identified with the liberal tradition. He was north German and Protestant, and his friends were predominantly liberals and included many Jews. Brüll (who had the distinction of having his portrait painted by Franz von Lenbach) was one of Brahms’s closest friends. What linked them was not only Brahms’s admiration for Brüll’s spectacular pianism and Brüll’s allegiance to an anti-Wagnerian compositional tradition, but a shared outlook which was open to progress and to tolerance. It should be noted that Brüll’s music was more successful and is more compelling than recent scholarship suggests. More of his music deserves a hearing. Even though Goldmark absorbed many Wagnerian habits and was an enthusiastic admirer of Wagner’s, in the politics of Vienna, Goldmark and Brahms were allies and friends, despite differences in compositional and aesthetic outlook. Goldmark, a Hungarian Jew, was an outsider in the terrible racial politics which engulfed the city.

The career of Anton Bruckner denotes the other side of the story. Brought to Vienna from Linz as an organist and teacher of counterpoint and legendary as an improviser, Bruckner was anything but cosmopolitan. Unlike Brahms, Brüll, or Goldmark, he remained true to his local roots, resisted the pleasures and blandishments of elegant urban life, proudly displayed his regional dialect and remained devoutly Catholic. His rise to fame among a younger generation of students and musicians in the 1870s and 1880s was only in part due to his embrace of the Wagnerian. Bruckner seemed the true heir to Schubert–a genuinely local genius whose strength appeared to derive from things decidedly Austrian and Catholic. Although Löwe was himself of Jewish birth, an important source of support for Bruckner as an antipode to Brahms and later even to Mahler (who deeply admired Bruckner and performed his symphonies, albeit with cuts) came from Bruckner’s willingness to be used as a cultural symbol against what was perceived to be the growing influence of foreign elements in Viennese culture. In this debate cosmopolitanism took on the negative connotation which it has retained to this day as a code word for “Jewish” and the influence of the “other.” Bruckner permitted himself to be the honorary head of a new academic Wagner society in Vienna, distinct from the one Goldmark helped create, which had as one of its bylaws the explicit provision that no Jew could be a member. The right-wing press and politicians lauded Bruckner, and he developed the aura of a local Wagnerian master whose genius was underestimated and unrecognized as the result of a conspiracy of Jews and cosmopolitans who controlled public opinion and who failed to understand the spiritual essence and greatness of Bruckner’s music. Bruckner became the embattled, marginalized master, struggling against people like Eduard Hanslick, institutions such as the Neue Freie Presse and an apparent cabal of influence peddlers and second-rate foreign artists including Brüll and Goldmark, who were supported behind the scenes by Brahms. Brahms did not think much of Bruckner’s music, and there was little fondness between the two men, who ended up dominating the musical life of the 1880s and 1890s.

This was the ugly world into which Gustav Mahler stepped in 1897 and in which the young Arnold Schoenberg struggled to make a career. This was the environment in which psychoanalysis was branded as a Jewish science and alliances on behalf of new art, literature, and music, were constantly threatened by provincial politics, anti-Semitism and intolerance. As Benjamin Korstvedt makes clear in his essay, Bruckner, who was genuinely a spiritual and harmless figure surrounded by intense and loyal admirers, was deeply uncertain about the final form his symphonies should take. It is true that this insecurity may have derived from the difficulties he encountered among Viennese critics and with Viennese audiences.

But some of Bruckner’s uncertainties were compositional in nature and not political. He had relatively little experience with orchestration. As a result, Bruckner like any other composer shared his work with loyal admirers and often took their advice. He was grateful for the support he received, given that he was by no means an unqualified public success. Among his first supporters was the Viennese publisher Gutmann and Löwe, both of whom were of Jewish origin. In the case of the Fourth Symphony, he clearly agreed to and endorsed the first publication and the changes it contains from earlier versions. But the contemporary suspicion that foreigners had meddled with the true Aryan and Austrian master who was helpless against the “evil whisperings” of people really incapable of understanding his true essence, survived in Brucknerian circles and among Wagnerians well into the 1920s. It should therefore come as no surprise that when a new critical edition of Bruckner came into being under the aegis of the Nazis, that Löwe’s version of the Fourth would be discredited. Bruckner was probably Hitler’s favorite composer, and his music was, as Bryan Gilliam has convincingly argued, considered a source for an alternative to both Christian and cosmopolitan spirituality. Bruckner’s music provided the sounds of a new Aryan religion.

The restoration of the original versions in the critical edition had the effect of bringing back to the stage an often more austere orchestral sound and less concise forms of many of the symphonies. Only a few conductors, out of instinct, championed the versions published in Bruckner’s lifetime, the versions which had helped make many of the symphonies including the Fourth world famous. These included Eugene Ormandy and Hans Knappertsbusch. A new generation of scholars including Benjamin Korstvedt (whose pathbreaking scholarly work on the Fourth Symphony in part inspired this program) and Crista Brüstl, have pierced the veneer of objectivity and scholarly care associated with the work of Haas and Nowak, the editors of the critical edition. The fingerprints of Nazi cultural politics have now been exposed. The irony is that in this case the Nazis did not invent history; they simply extended and augmented an attitude spawned during Bruckner’s lifetime.

Tonight’s program therefore offers three individuals who represent the spectrum of Viennese taste in the 1870s and 1880s. On the most musically conservative side stands Brüll. Here we see the irony of an alliance between musical conservatism and progressive liberal politics. In the middle we find Goldmark, who managed a synthesis between Brahms and Wagner. The modern, represented by the figure of Wagner, was linked to reactionary nationalist politics. In Goldmark’s career art and politics become separate. Aesthetically he was more inclined to Wagner, but socially and politically he kept his distance from Wagner’s political implications. In Anton Bruckner we hear a profound religious conviction, a brilliant and inspired appropriation of Wagnerian techniques and new impulses within symphonic form. Although he seemed a naïve individual, grandeur, profundity and subtlety have legitimately become the hallmarks of Bruckner’s music. For most of the twentieth century, outside of Austria and Germany, the tensions between Brucknerians and Brahmsians which seemed sharp and unbridgeable to their contemporaries in the 1880s disappeared long ago. Conductors from Mahler on have performed the works of both composers with equal conviction and allegiance. It is tragic, however, that as the memory of World War II and the Holocaust recede, the Viennese political discourse which accompanied the creation of the works on tonight’s program is still relevant and continues to wreak its havoc.