Music of the Other Germany

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music of the Other Germany, performed on Jan 25, 2009 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is hard to believe that twenty years have passed since the fall of Communism. Almost until the very end, the idea that Communism would be a permanent albeit evolving presence in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union was a firmly held belief among the most sophisticated and knowledgeable observers. The wisdom of hindsight (the metaphorical retrospectroscope) should not diminish the momentous and unexpected character of the collapse of the Communist system. Part of that Cold War structure was a divided Germany. Until 1989 the unification of Germany was at best a vague aspiration, and it too occurred with breathtaking rapidity.

Among the nations that were part of the Soviet sphere of influence, East Germany developed a reputation as a stable and doctrinaire socialist state. Its loyalty to Moscow was unquestioned, and it provided a reliable reactionary counterweight to progressive developments in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and 1960s. East Germany was literally the front line between east and west, the physical locus of that famous phrase the “Iron Curtain,” the most powerful symbol of which was the Berlin Wall. Berlin became the epicenter of spy novels and intrigue, a microcosm of what appeared to be the permanent division in Europe, the geographical and ideological bequest of the defeat of Nazism.

In the twenty years since 1989, there has been a tremendous amount of historical revisionism regarding what actually happened in East Germany after 1945. Conventional wisdom before 1989 held up the creation of a separate East German socialist state as a de facto victory over Fascism. But as it turned out, there was as much continuity between old and new in East Germany as there was in West Germany. A large portion of both bureaucratic and intellectual elites remained in place despite the regime change. Over time, the East German secret police, the Stasi, became emblematic of all Soviet-style secret police agencies. The Stasi successfully infiltrated every dimension of life, including art, culture, and science.

At the same time, however, East Germany as a separate entity began and ended with some measure of idealism. The émigrés and exiles who returned to East Germany in the wake of Hitler’s defeat included Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and Arnold Zweig. They hoped they could create a radically new world founded on principles of social justice and equality. Even when the wall fell, there were many who thought—perhaps rightly—that there were traditions and beliefs identified with the East and that could and should be preserved in a united Germany. There was something of value to be cherished. For them the fall of Communism did not mean a blanket vindication of Western practices and conceits, particularly in the area of economic and social policy. In the arts in particular, East Germany had developed an enviable system of state subsidy, supporting a fabulous network of theater groups, opera companies, orchestras, publishing houses, and educational institutions, much of which quickly disappeared when the subsidy ran out, depriving the East German population of its local traditions of affordable, excellent artistic achievement and cultural access. It is for this paradoxical reason that the life and culture of East Germany has been such a successful subject for films marked by irony, humor, and a sense of loss, such as the recent Goodbye, Lenin (2003) and The Lives of Others ( 2006).

Ultimately, however, the collapse of Communism particularly in East Germany was caused by a massive gap between ideological rhetoric and reality. Whether in industry or in the arts, the illusion of success and health was really only that: illusion. East Germany was always especially vulnerable to a process of critical self-recognition within its population because of demographic and familial links between East and West, and modern communications, notably television. It was hard for the East German government to isolate its population completely. During the run of a famous television show imported from America named Dallas, the joke was that the theaters and concert halls of East Berlin were empty when Larry Hagman could be seen driving his Rolls Royce around his Texas ranch.

It would, however, be a mistake to dismiss over forty years of cultural and artistic activity in East Germany as negligible or valueless merely because of the complex and compromising role played by the state and ideology. What the music on today’s concert suggests is that composers in the East faced, albeit under different circumstances, problems not entirely dissimilar to those of their Western contemporaries. Given the close association between the musical language of late Romanticism and strains of populism with Fascist aesthetics and Nazi ideals of “healthy” art, what sort of music could and needed to be written that would match the aspirations for a new era?

One central difference between East and West was that in the East there was never– either officially or unofficially–anything approximating the engagement with history, especially regarding the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, that there was in West Germany. The official triumph of socialism in the East over its arch-enemy Fascism, made any public debate or soul searching seemingly ideological superfluous. Nevertheless, the aesthetic problem remained and Hanns Eisler became the central figure in the first decades of East Germany’s musical culture. Although he had an early phase influenced by the radical modernism of Schoenberg, already in the 1930s Eisler rejected modernist developments as somehow detached from people and human experience. He sought to craft an accessible language of music that could at once reach the public and yet be distinguished aesthetically from both commercial Western popular music and the appropriated traditionalism so dear to the Nazis. A moral equivalent of socialist realism in literature ultimately became the ideal in music. But for a composer to find a language that corresponded with ideology and yet was authentically personal or subjective, two ingredients were required that were not in the recipe book of the East German regime. The first was freedom, and the second the consequence of freedom: the expression of individuality. The critique of individuality and freedom as bourgeois illusions could hold sway ultimately only as rhetoric. Therefore each of the composers on today’s program pursued a path which created a dialogue fashioned in coded and particularly personal ways with history. Radical modernism argued that music in the modern age needed to shed history and confront tradition by highlighting its absence. East German composers understood this as a delusive imperative, since history and tradition never failed to hang over the modernist movement that gripped West Germany during the 1950s and 1960s, for instance in the music of the then most celebrated protagonist of modernism, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

In Paul Dessau’s case, history and tradition meant his own past as a Jewish composer and as an idealistic socialist whose perspective ultimately differed from that of the regime. For Rudolf Wagner-Régeny, the past meant an internal dialogue with his own early career that flourished, though with ups and downs, under Nazi rule. And for Eisler, the past meant not only the interwar experimentation and political agitation, but the experience of exile to and deportation from the United States. Above all for Eisler, the past also held the hope that the most treasured part of the German heritage could be celebrated without an obvious connection to Fascism or destructive nationalism, the era of Goethe and Schiller and classical Weimar. It could be reborn in a new Communist Germany without the reservations inherent in the critique of Enlightenment contained in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. Despite the deconstruction of Enlightenment, if there was one thing that bridged East and West Germany after 1945, it was the effort to reclaim a “good” Germany rooted in the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment—the Germany of painting, literature, architecture, and music before the onset of modern nationalism.

For the younger generation of East German composers, represented on today’s program by Matthus and Zimmermann, the past meant not one that was experienced but one that was imagined. After 1968, East German composers were more able to absorb influences from developments in the West. Modernism could be adapted for purposes that still put forward ideals compatible with the socialist state. Tradition, as is audible in Matthus’s Responso, could be reborn and reconfigured. In Zimmermann’s music, the discreet use of J.S. Bach and the relation between text and music could justify a measure of experimentation. In both of these works we encounter the special gift of music: its indeterminacy as music with respect to ordinary meaning and significance. Zimmermann’s text is a memorial elegy to Federico García Lorca, the great Spanish poet and victim of the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. That war was after all a common post-World War II ground between East and West: the so-called last great cause, a lingering symbol of freedom and idealism placed in resistance and contrast to brute force, tyranny, and apathy.

The purpose of this concert is to inspire a tolerant and candid engagement with our past. East German life and culture before 1989 are easily susceptible to ridicule. They are undeserving of nostalgic sentiments. The suppression of freedom, the violence of the state, and the corruption and hypocrisy should not inspire admiration. But at the same time, through music, more than one generation of talented composers in East Germany sought, despite tyranny and the pressure to conform, the redemption of human possibility through music. They employed tradition and innovation in unique and memorable ways. We acknowledge without difficulty that East Germany provided many distinguished contributions to performance practice, from the era of the theater director Walter Felsenstein to that of Kurt Masur. There is a parallel richness to be discovered in the work of East German composers as well, those who lived in the German Democratic Republic between 1945 and 1989.

Music therefore has unique possibilities as a means of human expression, even in eras of censorship and under regimes of autocracy and terror. It is harder to speak of collaboration and complicity for composers than it is for writers and painters, not so much in regard to personal conduct, but in regard to the nature of the works of art themselves. When it comes to music, we should give the period of the German Democratic Republic the same latitude we have afforded to the Soviet era and the era of Metternich.

Against the Avant Garde

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Against the Avant-Garde: Romanticisms of the 1920s, performed on Dec 7, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The act of writing history inevitably forces the historian to simplify and generalize. The object of historical writing seems in part to be the finding of ways to articulate coherence in what appears to be the chaotic occurrence of events that mark the passage of time in human society. We end up speaking of the “roaring twenties,” the “gilded age,” or most perniciously, sections of time with imposed beginnings and endpoints that are distilled through a descriptive characteristic: a Renaissance or an Enlightenment. Some such characterizations survive, but others such as the “Dark Ages,” have now been discarded because they represent an implausible, one-sided simplification of the past.

The reigning generalization about European art and culture after the First World War has, despite variations, remained tied to a focus on the development of new forms of expression in literature, painting, and music. The center of attention regarding the fin de siècle has remained modernism and, particularly after 1918, the call for the rejection of old pre-war traditions of art-making and canons of aesthetic beauty. World War I had exposed the hypocrisy of cultural and social norms (not to speak of the politics) that dominated before 1914. A new art for a new age, reflective of the power of modernity in all its mixture of brash optimism and harsh impersonality rooted in technological progress, was the clarion call of an avant-garde.

Memories, however, are selective. The focus by journalists on a certain group of artists, the preferences of the market place, the dynamics of fashion and fame in the age of mass communication and the propagandistic talents of a few darlings of elite taste-makers can all be adduced to explain how and why some artists, writers, and composers become heralded as emblematic of an historical moment or the prophetic voices of the age. In this sense the 1920s are said to belong to the move to twelve-tone composition by Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, to the neoclassic innovations of Stravinsky and his imitators, to the operatic innovations pioneered in Germany by Kurt Weill and his contemporaries, the hard-edged, modernist functionalism of composers like Hindemith and, in their own way, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

At the same time, however, our picture of the past is not only genuinely one-sided, but as a picture, it obliterates anything beyond its bordered field. Reality turns out to be far more complicated. During the 1920s, there was a vibrant musical life involving new composition by composers who were either opposed to or uninterested in modernist developments. These composers include individuals who believed that the claims of the avant-garde were fraudulent because they called for the violation of fundamentally true principles of musical composition and expression. They felt the innovations of the avant-garde were temporary aberrations of passing historical significance. Tradition, they argued, did not have to be jettisoned, and the vocabulary of classicism and romanticism needed only to be adjusted and given new voice. Those unconvinced by the avant-garde did not lack creativity. They were not mere imitators. They were not second-rate. Only some of them were self-styled and polemical conservatives. Yet only those anti-modernists to have earned a place in history have been arch-conservative (Hans Pfitzner is a case in point). Some individuals retained their place because they had already achieved fame when twentieth-century modernism broke on the scene. The most conspicuous example in this category of composer was Richard Strauss. An important figure who held the promise of potentially bridging the modernists and romantic traditions within the framework of tonality (therefore avoiding a radical break with the past) was Max Reger, but he died at a young age in 1916, before the serious and sustained onset of modernism.

Today’s program features three composers who are probably unknown to American audiences. Each was a composer of enormous distinction and originality, requiring no condescension or qualification. But they have been forgotten, because in our penchant for simplification in history they have been deemed out of step with the presumed dominant tendency of an historical epoch. In retrospect, we may in terms of art reconsider the twentieth century. In such a revision, these three composers may find a more prominent and deserved place in our account of the past.

Perhaps the most familiar name is Walter Braunfels. His most famous work, his opera The Birds (1919), is now being revived in Los Angeles. The conventional assessment of Braunfels work and career stems less from the reputation he achieved in his own day and more on the fact that he was one of the composers who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. His half-status allowed him to remain in Germany even though his music was banned. But the damage was done. Braunfels died in 1954. The period right after the war did not provide him a platform to regain his former reputation. His music represented an allegiance to a late-romantic post-Wagnerian tradition, and during the 1920s his orchestral and choral music earned him a place alongside Richard Strauss as a proponent of aesthetic continuity. His music was championed by conductors who favored a more conservative approach to new composition, notably Bruno Walter and Hermann Abendroth. For Braunfels, the challenge, as his work on today’s program shows, was to create new music by engaging tradition and the past in an overt manner, not by declaring fealty to a progressive ideology that rendered the surface of tradition irrelevant. It needs to be remembered that the most vilified of avant-gardists, Arnold Schoenberg, was himself a radical conservative, who believed that what he was doing was nothing less than restoring the musical principles championed by Mozart and Brahms—precisely the figures whose musical legacy can be discerned in Braunfels’ music. But it is the ethical impulse to investigate the fate of victims that has prompted a resurgence of interest in Braunfels’ music, rather than a generalized curiosity about the anti-modernist strain in the musical life of the 1920s.

This brings us to the context in which to consider the work of Herman Suter. Suter was a Swiss composer known also as a fine conductor and teacher. He was a profoundly self-critical man, which is why so little music of his received formal opus numbers. He was an extremely prominent and leading figure in Swiss musical life. His most famous work was an oratorio on the subject of Francis of Assisi. The oratorio was premiered in 1926 by Wilhelm Furtwängler, just five months before Suter’s death. Most of Suter’s music has drifted into obscurity even in his native Switzerland. One near exception is the Violin Concerto of 1924. The work was written for the legendary violinist Adolf Busch, a member of that remarkable family of anti-fascist, non-Jewish German artists. Adolf Busch was a disciple of Max Reger who exerted a profound influence on American music as a result of his emigration and his promoting of the quartet literature and the culture of chamber music. His legacy remains vital today in the form of the Marlboro Festival, whose guiding spirit was none other than Busch’s son-in-law Rudolf Serkin. Suter’s Violin Concerto is one of many unknown romantic concerti that deserve a regular place in the repertory. The work is intimate, elegant, and supremely beautiful without being derivative. Like much of Suter’s work it takes its inspiration from the composer’s conception of the relation between music and nature. The first movement reflects a dedication to lyricism that suggests the blossoming of the natural world. The second movement suggests the picture of a wanderer in the midst of a storm, and the last movement returns the listener to an open landscape of sunlit optimism. There is something distinctly poetic and noble about this concerto that justifies Suter’s allegiance to the inherent ideals of an earlier romantic artistic tradition.

The last work on this program is a symphony which also owes its existence to a pre-modernist compositional strategy for the orchestral essay: an expressionist appreciation of nature. The Autumn Symphony of Joseph Marx is acknowledged to be the composer’s masterpiece. It is of Mahlerian scope, and shares with Mahler a philosophical and spiritual ambition. Joseph Marx was a powerful figure in Austrian and Viennese musical life, yet his career presents somewhat of a paradox. He was born in 1882 and by the outbreak of World War I, he had risen to prominence primarily as a composer of Lieder. He was a committed man of letters who had studied literature, philosophy, and art at the University of Graz. His penchant for the theoretical and the intellectual led him to assume a post in 1918 as a professor of theory at the Music Academy in Vienna, where he became the rector during the 1920s. As his interest in pedagogy increased—his pupils included the conductor Artur Rodzinski, the pianist Friedrich Wührer among dozens of composers and performers—so did his interest in writing criticism. He became a leading journalist and critic in Vienna during the 1930s. Not surprisingly, his compositional output slowed considerably; most of his music dates from before 1933. Although Marx died in 1964, there is practically no music that dates from the last twenty years of his life. Perhaps his silence as a composer was a reflection of the extent to which his vocabulary seemed entirely out of step with post-World War II trends. The collection of his writings was entitled appropriately Reflections of a Romantic Realist. Nevertheless his music , especially that of the period of the Autumn Symphony, is of commanding quality.

Marx’s career and reputation, like Braunfels’s, suffered from politics—but for precisely opposite reasons. By the time the Nazis took power in Austria in 1938, Marx, who was not Jewish, exemplified the approach to music that the Nazis favored. A Joseph Marx Prize was established by the new regime, and Marx received financial support for his work. The Nazi’s ideologically inspired allegiance to tradition fit well with Marx’s tastes. In 1940 he wrote a quartet “in the classical mode,” and in 1941 he composed a four-movement “old Viennese” serenade for the Vienna Philharmonic to honor its centennial. When the Nazis created a category of officially sanctioned artists, Joseph Marx figured prominently on the list. Unlike his contemporary Franz Schmidt who died before World War II, Marx remained a well-known figure in Nazi Austria.

But there is little evidence that his participation with the Nazis was enthusiastic beyond his role as a recipient of the regime’s largesse. This sets him apart from Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan, the musicologist Erich Schenk, and that odd-man-out Nazi sympathizer Anton von Webern. Marx’s prominence in post-war Austria as a teacher and cultural figure can be viewed as less problematic than that of many of his colleagues. He held fast to an aesthetic perspective fashioned at the turn of the century and championed by him long before the rise of Nazism. But as in the case of Richard Strauss, candor about the political dimension of Marx’s career needs to be reconciled with appreciation of his gifts as a composer and the profound and authentic aesthetic commitments he brought to bear. His belief in the power of music and his aesthetic commitments make him more of a fellow traveler with Gustav Mahler (with whom he shared a comparable world view about art and nature). That he lived long enough to enjoy the enthusiasm afforded by Nazi cultural politics should not deter us from revisiting the bulk of his musical output, which was written before the intelligentsia and artistic elite of interwar Austria made their calculated pact with evil.

Le roi d’Ys

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Le roi d’Ys, performed on Oct 3, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys (1888) represents the latest foray in one of the American Symphony’s longstanding projects: to revive interest in the French operatic repertoire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the past the orchestra has presented concert performances of Bizet’s Djamileh (1872); Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907); Chausson’s Le roi Arthus (1895); and Chabrier’s Le roi malgrè lui (1887). Our ambition is in response to the oversight one encounters regarding French opera beyond the operas of Gounod and Massenet, themselves the victims of critical snobbery. The assumption that there is little of note between Bizet’s Carmen (1875) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) is in our view groundless.

There are in fact a striking number of French operas from the turn of the last century that possess commanding musical and dramatic qualities. The cause of the short shrift given to late nineteenth-century dramatic French opera is itself complex. On one hand there is a sense that, however well-crafted they are, any of the works written between 1875 and 1900 reflected too deeply the overwhelming influence of Wagner. They do not seem, from a reductive point of view, French enough. The idea of an implacable rivalry between the German and the French in politics and culture became commonplace during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet in no other nation outside of German-speaking Europe were examples and aesthetic ambitions of Wagner so influential. Beginning with Charles Baudelaire’s famous embrace of Wagner after the notorious premiere of Tannhäuser (1845) in Paris in 1861, a large segment of the French intellectual community became perfect Wagnerites in their own way. But on the other hand, that way was not so much devotional as it was creative. Wagner inspired an outpouring of new operas that included Chabrier’s Gwendoline (1885), which bears a close resemblance to Tristan und Isolde (1859). Not surprisingly, the centrality of Wagnerism in France and its leading journal Le revue Wagnerienne sparked its own reaction. Chausson’s Le roi Arthus is filled with Wagner’s influence—it even contains moments of indirect citation. But Chausson also struggled to emancipate himself from the nearly narcotic attraction of Wagnerian harmony and use of musical time. The closing scene of Le roi Arthus is a choral apotheosis that has no parallel in Wagner. Although Debussy’s originality has its root in Wagner, particularly the Wagner of Parsifal (1882), Pelléas marked the beginning of a new modern, distinctly French musical idiom, seemingly free of Wagnerian rhetoric. Therefore, the French opera that preceded Pelléas seems neither original nor modern.

Despite French admiration for Wagner, the bitter political rivalry between Germany and France that resulted in three wars had its parallels in the formation of cultural stereotypes. The French never took to Brahms (or Mahler, for that matter), with the ironic exception of the composer of today’s opera, Lalo, and his frequently underrated contemporary Camille Saint-Saëns. German music was viewed as heavy, pedantic and distinctly non-theatrical or entertaining. French music by contrast was viewed by the Germans as light-hearted and frivolous, full of empty tunes and vacuous sentimentality. The French were specialists in style and perfumed formlessness, not substance. To the Germans, even Pelléas was unconvincing. It lacked not merely robustness from the German point of view, but musical substance. At a performance of Pelléas Richard Strauss is said to have turned to Romain Rolland (the Nobel Prize winning pacifist, writer, and distinguished musical authority) and asked, “Tell me, where is the music?”

The composers of serious French opera inspired by Wagner were well aware of the need to cultivate a distinctly French tradition and were in no sense slavish imitators. In fact many of them were fervently nationalist and indeed chauvinist in their attitude. Wagner had given them a means to create musical drama, which they wanted to appropriate for distinctly French purposes. The irony of Wagner’s influence was that the most chauvinist of composers outside of German-speaking Europe found in his ideas and strategies ways of writing music that could be detached from Wagner’s own nationalist ambitions and racist signifiers. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, said that without his repeated encounters with Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera, he would not have had the inspiration during the Dreyfus trial to write his epoch-making declaration of Zionism, The Jewish State (1896).

It is in this context Le roi d’Ys, one of the great French operas of the nineteenth century, should be considered. Lalo chose a distinctly French subject, a myth closely tied to the landscape of his wife’s native Brittany. The work employs French folk material; indeed there seems to be nothing Germanic about this opera. Le roi d’Ys succeeds in presenting a highly charged psychological drama framed by a suspenseful plot. At the core of the opera is the juxtaposition of personalities: two male roles and two female roles. One might argue that it pulls some elements from Tannhäuser (the miracle of redemption through the salvation of the leading character, in this case Margared) and from Lohengrin (envy and treachery are defeated and order restored through self-sacrifice). Brabant is saved by Elsa despite her weakness, and so too is Ys rescued by Saint Corentin in response to Margared’s recognition of her own guilt. But although the story is mythic, unlike their Wagnerian counterparts these characters are sympathetically human. Their impulses of jealousy and rivalry are recognizable. There is none of the sort of disproportion in their characterization that one finds in the heroes Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. The music of the opera is distinctive and has an economy and clarity that provides the opera a compelling dramatic arc. Action and gesture are larger than life only when they need to be. Lalo’s characters are ordinary people dealing with human nature, with all the pettiness and weakness to which it is prone, in addition to the occasional capacity for heroism and transcendence.

Although inspired by Wagner, Lalo created what all commentators have observed as a French national drama. Lalo changes the original folktale with its Atlantis-like fate to one of triumph and miraculous intervention. For those who might have attended our performance last season of Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, you may recall another waterlogged ending in which the sea swept in over the hapless lovers. Here, however, the onrush of the ocean is stopped by greater forces, permitting a happy ending for the city and the more benign of the two couples, Mylio and Rozenn. Death is given meaning as the cause of the nation overtakes personal passion and interest. Perhaps this patriotic lesson is why the opera is entitled The King of Ys, even though as a character the King is a relatively minor presence. He puts the drama in motion, but like Sophocles’s Laius, his actions are only a catalyst for a story all about the children.

One of the circumstances that prevented this opera from remaining in the repertory, despite its acclaim in France, is that its composer wrote only four operas, and of those Le roi d’Ys was the most successful. Lalo is much better known for his instrumental music. His Symphonie espagnole (1874) has been a staple for star violinists for decades; his Cello Concerto (1876) has enjoyed similar popularity. But like Chausson’s Le roi Arthus, this is a French opera quite distinct from those of Gounod and Massenet. It has a dramatic and musical intensity, a sonic sweep and energy that lend it excitement and gravity. Its central theme is jealousy, and in that Le roi d’Ys way can be seen as a counterpart to Carmen, but cast in a mythological framework. It is hoped that the consistency and quality of the music and the drama will lead ultimately to more well-deserved revivals outside of France both in the concert hall and on the stage.

Finally, if one can be permitted a perhaps too facile but timely observation, given the Katrina disaster, the pervasive fear of global warming, and the idea that our own coastal cities could be engulfed by the oceans, perhaps the celebration of some sacrifice for the national common good is cause for reflection, particularly if it might help spare us the fate almost suffered by Ys.

Spatial Explorations

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Spacial Explorations, performed on June 1, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This final concert of our 2007-2008 season was inspired in part by the death of György Ligeti, who died two years ago on June 12. His biography can serve as a mirror of the course of twentieth-century history. Ligeti was born in Transylvania, a Jew in a multi-ethnic and polyglot region of what is now Romania but was once part of Hungary. Among Ligeti’s artistic ancestors was his great uncle Leopold Auer, the legendary violinist and pedagogue. Although his parents were sent to Auschwitz, the young Ligeti was condemned only to forced labor by the Nazis. After the war he studied composition and ethnomusicology in Budapest. Having grown up in the unstable and violent context of interwar Eastern Europe, dominated by competing nationalisms and anti-Semitism, Ligeti subsequently experienced the first decade of Hungarian communism in all its Stalinist rigidity. In the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Ligeti moved to the West and lived long enough to witness the fall of communism and the resurgence of provincial nationalism in Eastern Europe. By the end of his life, György Ligeti had secured a deserved reputation as a great composer and prophetic voice who was able to transform modernism in a way that allowed it to breathe more freely. His music is music of our time, entirely independent of the clichés of both modernism and post-modernism—a truly original voice.

Ligeti’s experience of the volatile twentieth century encapsulates the essential nature of modernity: the reconfiguring of the relationship of the individual to the world. Directly related to the politics and history of the period, and indeed a significant outgrowth of it, was the twentieth century’s transformation of our understanding of the universe and of space and time. It is no coincidence that the unprecedented disorder and destruction of the past that characterized the first half of the twentieth century was accompanied by utterly original thinking about physics and the relative universe, and that many groundbreaking technological achievements were made possible by advancements in modern warfare. Our realization of the enormity of the universe and the absence of any notion of absolute space and time reflected, at least in part, a reaction to our sense of the instability of the modern world, and a fundamental questioning of our place in it. Only the ages of Galileo and Newton witnessed similar fundamental intellectual sea-change in the way we perceive reality.

The twentieth century was marked by the consciousness of an expanding universe and the increasing recognition of the humble place occupied by the earth. Among the seminal events of the twentieth century was the onset of space travel—of satellites, interplanetary probes, and moon landings. These innovations were presented as advancements, and offered a sense of optimism and faith in scientific progress and human imagination that countered the memory of war-time devastation, and offered a sense of security during the Cold War. The conquering of space, the rise of technology, seemed to camouflage the instability of society with a vision of connectedness and collective human endeavor that promised to provide some sort of lucid justification of ourselves. Both optimism and ambiguity were promoted in science fiction: 2001: A Space Odyssey (in which may be heard Ligeti’s Atmosphères), Star Trek and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

But there was (and is) also a pervasive anxiety about the questions raised by our explorations of the universe and of physics. The pondering of our infinitesimally small occupation of space is an uncomfortable notion for many (which has helped inform a resurgence of religion among other forms of conservatism). In terms of popular culture, for all the wonderment of Star Trek, there are also xenophobic wars with the alien species, or the image of the mad scientist with his finger “on the button.” Our curiosity is tinged with a fear of leaving familiar understanding behind for the unknown, of having all our cherished conventions uprooted in favor of something that possibly, once proven, may not be ours to control. Instead of science offering us the comfort of knowing at last exactly what our position is in the cosmos, we are left with the same question that our earliest ancestors asked—just where are we?

This conflicted reaction to the modern world and its ever-changing philosophical and scientific premises deeply informed modern art and music. All of the composers on today’s program were interested in the idea of space—not just outer space but sonic space as well. Their breaking away from a unidirectional construction of sound, the conventional experience of the concert hall, reflects both the liberating spirit of experimentation that characterizes the modern, and an intense self-reflection regarding how we hear, the relativity of our position, and the accuracy of our perception. Their breathtaking parallel between the cosmos and the microcosm of our individual experience conjures the thrilling and disquieting relativity of the modern world. The very concept of space is scrutinized in these remarkable works, and the distance between performers and listeners becomes as speculative as the distance between planets.

If Ligeti’s achievement and originality framed the inspiration for this concert, he himself was inspired by an isolated, early twentieth-century innovator, almost the Charles Ives of Scandinavia, Rued Langgaard. As Peter Laki points out, Langgaard’s Symphony of the Spheres was an important influence on Ligeti. Andrzej Panufnik, like Ligeti, fled communist Eastern Europe (in Panufnik’s case, Poland) during the 1950s. Panufnik is one of the twentieth-century composers whose music should not be permitted in the midst of our anti-modernist enthusiasm, to fall into oblivion. Finally we thought it best to open this unique concert with a composer whose voice, in terms of originality, can be fairly compared to Ligeti. Born in the same generation, Tōru Takemitsu, who died in 1996, helped to reconceptualize sound. Like the other composers on this program, he was inspired by the lone, individual human fascination with space, time, and the universe of which the earth is part. The sonic response to existential contemplation is most brilliantly reflected in this work that bears the title of one of the more famous constellations. The structure of the work reflects the way the constellation appears to the naked eye—from the vantage point of our small planet.

All of these works turn to speculation about the universe, space, and time back into the human experience of music, so that the listener can experience sound on many different planes by restructuring the way sound is produced, where it comes from spatially, and how it is perceived and remembered. This is music that can only be heard acoustically and can never be accurately documented by recording. The multi-dimensional experience of space in the imagination is transformed into the multi-dimensional experience of sound in the concert hall. It is fitting to note that the heavens have long provided inspiration and a structural metaphor for composers. This concert is a modernist version of a tradition that dates to antiquity and the Renaissance: the notion of the harmony of the spheres as an aesthetic ideal for music.

A New Italian Renaissance

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert A New Italian Renaissance, performed on April 18, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Commenting on the death of Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) observed that despite the different musical paths they had taken, which led to a breach in their relationship, Respighi’s “point of departure was the same as that of our entire generation: the necessity to leave the outworn, sterile atmosphere of verismo as soon as possible, that is, to abandon the art of the preceding generation.” Indeed, all the composers on tonight’s program, with the exception of Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909) and Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), were represented on the first concert of a new Italian national music society on March 16, 1917. For Casella’s generation Martucci was considered a forerunner and the founder of a new resurgence of creativity in Italian music. He had taught Casella and Respighi and in 1895 advised the parents of the young Casella to send the talented boy abroad, for there was no one in Italy who could nurture his talent in a manner competitive with the progressive developments taking place in France, Germany, and Russia.

The notion that at the turn of the twentieth century many Italian musicians considered themselves in a relative backwater seems incredulous. Italy had long been regarded as a vibrant cultural alternative to the darker traditions of northern Europe. In the era of early Romanticism, during the first half of the nineteenth century, German intellectuals flocked to the south to gain new inspiration, following a path already charted by Winckelmann and Goethe. Italian opera dominated the European scene for generations before Wagner. The music of Chopin and Liszt is unimaginable without considering the influence of bel canto. Following Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti came the towering figure of Giuseppe Verdi, represented tonight by arguably his best-known music from his best known opera Aida. Close on the heels of Verdi came the verismo style that Casella so despised.

Italy indeed was no nineteenth-century backwater. Nevertheless, despite the centrality of opera, its musical traditions—precisely because of their international currency—struggled to adapt to the rapidly changing political and social realities that overwhelmed the Italian peninsula after 1848. Under the adept leadership of the Piedmontese monarchy, war was waged against Austria (who controlled much of northern Italy, including Venice) and an alliance with France was consummated, leading to a nearly unified kingdom of Italy by 1860. A decade later, owing in part to the ability of Italian nationalism to create a united front between monarchists and republicans like Giuseppe Garibaldi, a new Italian nation came into being, almost simultaneously with the unification of Germany. Count Camillo Cavour, its architect, was born in 1810 and was just three years older than Verdi. He had been one of the founders of a newspaper dedicated to Italian nationalism in 1847 entitled Il risorgimento, the name of which became attached not only to a political ideal but a cultural one. Alessandro Manzoni’s epic novel The Betrothed was a jewel among that new cultural nationalism’s many literary achievements. But no one equaled Giuseppe Verdi as a symbol of the post-1848 spirit of a reborn Italy free of foreign political influence. The Triumphal March from Aida, which premiered in 1871, is a thinly veiled celebration of the political accomplishment of his generation: the bringing together of all the Italians.

But as late as 1913, younger Italian artists, intellectuals, and writers found fault with Verdi and his generation. Casella wrote an article that year (of which he was later ashamed) that was severely critical of Verdi. It was only decades later that Verdi’s greatness became apparent to him, as “the creator of new musical beauties. . .the man who strove, full of a sense of responsibility toward his art.” The problem for Casella’s generation was not so much with Verdi but with the artistic ideals that seemed compatible with the founding generation of national Italian political consciousness. The genre of opera and its overwhelming domination of the Italian scene were barriers to the engagement with modernity. Casella was fond of the following quote regarding Italian opera: “a special kind of artwork, built on the brink of an abyss of ridicule, which is upheld by the force of genius.” As Casella concluded, opera “demands of the spectator and the listener a real willingness to believe in that blind faith which is required by every heroic or religious act.”

For Martucci and those who followed in his path, the opportunity for a new contemporary Italian musical voice lay in the instrumental realm rather than the operatic. It is significant that Italy’s greatest conductor of the turn of the twentieth century, Arturo Toscanini, bridged the gulf between the operatic (including verismo) and the instrumental, finding reconciliation in an all-encompassing patriotism reminiscent of Verdi. Gian Francisco Malipiero (1882-1973) considered Martucci “a genius in every sense of the term.” The Second Symphony is his masterpiece, and despite the reservations expressed in the program note by Harvey Sachs, it calls for no apologies. It is astonishing that only the music of Respighi has managed to hold a place in the international repertory. Idlebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is an entirely forgotten figure, and Malipiero and Casella have both suffered in part because of indirect political associations with Italian fascism.

The failure of this group of Italian composers to sustain a wide following and international reputation is perhaps the result of the fact that none of the individuals on tonight’s program can claim to having originated a new or distinctive style in the manner of Debussy, Stravinsky, or Schoenberg. Casella, for example, radically varied his approach to composition during his career. Just as Martucci is accused of being derivative and too dependent on a Brahmsian model, Casella’s early dependence on French and Russian influences is held against him. Malipiero has emerged, in retrospect, as the most compelling and original composer of this generation. Unlike others, he sought to downplay his earliest work. Pizzetti in contrast represents almost the reverse case. His first period was his most original. He was, among other things, an early admirer of Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue. Pizzetti throughout his career exercised a powerful role in music education in Italy. But he was also one of the signatories of a notorious reactionary manifesto against modernism written in 1932.

The link between all the composers on tonight’s program is not merely generational. What binds them is the historical moment in which a new kind of nationalism and approach to life were in vogue that encompassed a rather Nietzsche-like ecstatic and immediate embrace of creative action, the mysticism of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the radical egalitarianism inherited from Garibaldi, and above all, a shared fascination and romance with Italy’s history. All these composers at one time or another looked backwards to two singular moments when the Italian peninsula dominated the world. In the political realm, as Mussolini’s brand of fascism revealed, it was the glory of Rome that held sway. In the arts, it was the overwhelming superiority of the Italian Renaissance in music, architecture, painting, and poetry that was revisited in the form of a distinct neo-classicism. Furthermore, this new cultural nationalism kept its distance from the Rome of the Catholic Church and continued the strong anti-clerical strain of the mid nineteenth-century Italian risorgimento.

Despite the accusation of eclecticism, each of these composers produced more fine music than is represented in this program or in orchestral repertoire generally. Once again, greatness in music ought not be reduced to a criterion of originality that is perceptible and audible only on the surface. The originality of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart cannot be located by looking for markers of a new style. Yet in the post-Wagnerian era we are prisoners of the privileging of a certain kind of stylistic originality. The heterogeneity of influence audible in these composers’ work should not be a barrier to responding to the beauty and power of their achievement. Insofar as the reputations of Pizzetti, Malipiero, Casella, and to a lesser extent Respighi, have been damaged by tacit and active endorsement of Mussolini, it should be remembered that much of Europe in the 1920s thought well of Mussolini. These individuals were not alone in failing to recognize the disastrous trajectory inherent in fascist nationalism, particularly when it was combined with dreams of renewed imperial grandeur. The time has come to rethink our relationship with the music of these early-twentieth century Italian masters of non-operatic composition who shared with Verdi and Martucci an enthusiasm for a new, unified political future and present for Italians—one that could put an end to the enmity and rivalry that dominated Italian politics before 1870 and still does today. They sought to fashion not only works of art but institutions of education and performance that would represent a new modern Italian renaissance that mirrored in culture the political emancipation from foreign domination. Their efforts were not in vain. Without the musical advances made by this generation, the nearly unrivaled creativity in the realm of new music in Italy after 1945 would be unthinkable.

The Destruction of Jerusalem

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Destruction of Jerusalem, performed on March 16, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Not all attempts to reconstruct our musical heritage—or redress the distortions in standard accounts of music history by rehabilitating works once popular and now forgotten—are self-explanatory. Simply dusting off a forgotten masterpiece in the hope that it will spontaneously recapture its former glory may not always be enough. We may want to believe that aesthetic criteria are somehow stable over time, and that a great work will appear great no matter when and where in history it came from and when and where it is performed. But aesthetic judgments are fluid; they change with generations and circumstances. Some works that once were marginal have become famous; others have moved from the periphery to the center (or the reverse) with ease, because new generations of observers forge new connections between these works and their own experience. In literature, for example, Virgil’s Aeneid was long admired as a poetic model. It became a staple of general education in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then, in the last century, it fell victim to a revived enthusiasm for Homer and was relegated to a secondary position. Now we find it appearing once again in new translations and in course syllabi as current readers find salient analogies between Imperial Rome and contemporary America. Just last year, Beowulf became a familiar name once again to millions as the subject of the first full-length digitally generated non-cartoon film (though its resemblance to the ancient epic is hazy, to say the least). In music history, perhaps the most famous example of revival and restoration was the music of Bach in the 1820s in Germany, best symbolized by twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn’s 1829 Berlin performance of the St. Matthew Passion.

Closer to our own time, the rejection of the conceits of twentieth-century musical modernism and the renewed interest in Romantic musical expressiveness have led us back to many anti-modernist composers of the twentieth century and lesser-known composers of the nineteenth, who just a few decades ago were considered irrelevant in the elite world of art music. Some of these composers whose reputations now enjoy a new stature in the repertory include Zemlinsky, Dohnányi, Suk, Glazunov, Elgar, Rimsky-Korsakov, Chausson, Chabrier, and Szymanowski. Today’s renewed enthusiasm for Sibelius and Shostakovich is in part a consequence of the Mahler revival that began in the 1960s.

But there is a second category of music that also deserves a new hearing, but which has never benefited from a favorable turn in the historical tide after its initial success. Works like Ferdinand Hiller’s The Destruction of Jerusalem were once familiar, loved, and respected, but the attachment to them was grounded in a set of cultural assumptions and values we no longer seem to share and appreciate. The music may be of the highest quality, but our perception of its value in our altered historical circumstances denies us immediate access to it—except as an object of archeological interest. This is certainly the case with Hiller, and even more so with two of his older contemporaries, Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859) and Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864). Hiller may have composed one truly great large-scale masterpiece, but Spohr and Meyerbeer both produced a large corpus of works that were consistently well-received in their lifetimes. Meyerbeer was the most successful and beloved opera composer before Wagner. Spohr was, in the opinion of Johannes Brahms, the greatest composer of his time, the last in a line of giants that began with Mozart and Haydn. Hiller was certainly very well known in his day, and the work on today’s program was championed by Robert Schumann (see his two reviews reprinted in this publication). That figures like Hiller, once formidable in their day, have become so unfamiliar now begs for an explanation of what could have happened, both to them and to us, to cause such a sharp disconnect between past and present. The quality of the music per se is not at issue, in view of the respect accorded to it by composers we still revere today. Then what happened?

Many of the assumptions that influence us today regarding what it is that constitutes musical genius and greatness evolved in the later part of the nineteenth century. They were most compellingly articulated and disseminated by Richard Wagner. In his legendary 1870 essay on Beethoven, Wagner posited that what was then considered the least accessible music of Beethoven—the Ninth Symphony, the late piano sonatas, and quartets—were in fact Beethoven’s greatest achievements. This idea represented a reversal of the way Beethoven’s genius and music had been understood before the mid-nineteenth century, when his middle “heroic” period was judged his most important work, and his late period often derided as the obscure efforts of a deaf, eccentric old man. Wagner (his own image not far from his mind) argued that the more removed the composer was from reigning tastes and fashions, the more alienated from his own age—even in Beethoven’s case, to the point of being insulated by deafness—the more visionary and original his music became; therefore, the more authentic it was as true art, and the more attuned to future generations. Ferdinand Hiller had the misfortune to come of age at a time before 1848 (the legendary watershed in nineteenth-century history), and then to survive well beyond it, dying at the age of nearly 75 in 1885, two years after Wagner’s death and at the height of the rage for Wagnerian modernity. Because Hiller was rooted in a fundamentally different conception of music and its relation to the public from that expressed in Wagner’s essay, Hiller was branded in his later career as an obsolete conservative.

Indeed, as Robert Schumann’s assessment demonstrates, Hiller shared with Felix Mendelssohn an idea of the composer that was diametrically opposed to Wagner’s glorification of the isolated and alienated artist, the artist as prophet of the future. For Mendelssohn and Hiller, large-scale musical composition needed to speak entirely to the present moment, communicating simply and without undue evidence of a narcissistic desire to shock the audience with startling originality and lay waste to the past. Hiller wanted to interact with a public, and in his case that public was a widely engaged one of literate, urban, middle-class, dedicated musical amateurs and connoisseurs.

Perhaps this eagerness to engage with the known public of their day (rather than with Wagnerian visions of future adoring crowds) was due in part to the fact that Mendelssohn and Hiller were members of the first full generation of affluent German-speaking Jews to enjoy the benefits of emancipation and tolerance. They enjoyed acceptance as serious contenders in secular European arts and letters. This was the generation of Heinrich Heine, when assimilation coincided with the opening of opportunity for leading talents of Jewish origin to assert themselves as cultural leaders. It was only after the revolution and reaction between the years 1848 and 1860 that rabid and populist nationalism, and its concomitant anti-Semitism (strongly advocated by those such as Wagner), that the brief age of tolerance that produced a Mendelssohn and a Hiller came to an end. After all, it was an important part of the Wagnerian ideology that no Jew could possess the kind of artistic genius that Wagner attributed to Beethoven.

The Destruction of Jerusalem therefore should remind us of the beauty that can result when the composer’s ambition is defined exclusively by his contemporary public and not by posterity. In Hiller’s world tolerance, optimism, and acceptance seemed dominant, as opposed to the fear, chauvinism, suspicion of religious and cultural difference, and paranoia of enemies within, that came to characterize Wagner’s generation. Ironically, the subject matter of Hiller’s oratorio itself is a parable of that very difference in sensibility.

But despite its religious connotations, Hiller’s oratorio is not a religious work. Rather, it represents a startling effort to define a new participatory cultural form: the secular oratorio based on religious subject matter. More so than Mendelssohn’s St. Paul (1836), to which this work is only partially indebted, Hiller’s oratorio is decidedly designed for public performance in a secular venue rather than a house of worship. Biblical texts and stories are stripped of their sectarian identification and turned into narratives designed for cultural edification. Unlike Mendelssohn, Hiller does not lean heavily on eighteenth-century models of Bach and Handel. Rather, he blends traditions of the eighteenth-century oratorio with techniques derived from contemporary opera, creating a form of musical drama that is theatrical but dispenses with the apparatus of the theater, relying instead on the sequential progression of music and text as vehicles of expression in a concert setting. As Hiller wrote to Mendelssohn, he wanted his oratorio to be played in a “noble concert hall” because its purpose was the generic “celebration of religious feeling.” The oratorio demanded that it be “dramatic” and be organized in a way that delivers to the audience sharp contrasts without the apparent devotional solemnity of, for example, the St. Matthew Passion. St. Paul offered an idealized and secularized religiosity. The Destruction of Jerusalem takes religious history as a source for epic storytelling. Hiller’s innovation led to a long tradition of secular oratorio writing that lasted well into the early twentieth century in England, France, and Germany. Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius; Dvořák’s St. Ludmila; the stunning oratorios of Max Bruch; César Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns, Anton Rubinstein; these are only part of the legacy of the nineteenth-century secular oratorio based on the experience and tradition of religion. In this continuum, The Destruction of Jerusalem was one of the earliest and among the most popular and influential.

The musical strategy Hiller employs is the very opposite of that which Wagner sought to praise in his singling out of late Beethoven. Hiller’s music is eminently accessible, straightforward, and direct in the best sense of the word. He presents us with one possible musical equivalent of the historical painting that flourished in Hiller’s day: a massive canvas of representation not dependent on mysticism, symbolism, and philosophical abstraction. Rather, transparent and powerful figures illuminate the essential elements of human emotion and expression.

We do not live in an age in which the work of Ferdinand Hiller can communicate to us so readily anymore. His music speaks to a rare and brief moment when several communities in Germany co-existed peacefully, an age soon to be shattered. But listening to Hiller again should at a minimum help us try to envision a moment in time when concert music had a central place in civic life and when there was still hope that the spread of culture and enlightenment could lead to a better world, and where the universality of experience was more important than national differences and distinctions of religion. But it is also hoped that this work, though highly prized by contemporary observers—not the least of whom was Schumann, whose own great oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri (1842; performed by ASO last season and previously at the Bard Music Festival) was in part inspired by Hiller’s success—will win among today’s audience new admirers because of its evident beauty. In an age that has seen a re-engagement with musical simplicity and accessibility, perhaps the time has come to set aside our Wagnerian inheritance in musical taste (and the politics it implies) and reexamine the elegant and moving legacy of pre-1848 musical works.

Russian Futurists

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Russian Futurists, performed on Jan 25, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The period from the mid-1890s to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, particularly its last years, has been termed the “Silver Age” in the history of Russian art and culture. This was an era that witnessed rapid economic development and, after the Revolution of 1905, the hesitant beginnings of political liberalization. But the First World War was a disaster for the czarist regime both at home and at the front. The success of the Bolshevik coup during the War led to years of internal strife, including a civil war and a war with the newly constituted Poland. Nevertheless, the 1917 Revolution created a sense of euphoria and optimism, particularly among Russian intellectuals and artists. From the beginning there was a group of younger but prominent figures such as Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and the violinists Nathan Milstein and Jascha Heifetz for whom the communist Revolution spelled disaster; but for many of their contemporaries—even those without direct sympathy for the new regime’s ideology—the sense of hope prevailed, particularly concerning the role of culture in the new Russia.

In the leadership cadre under Lenin, many such as Leon Trotsky saw in the great flourishing of artistic innovation in the years leading up to the Revolution an implicit support for the regime in terms of the spread of new ideas and new directions—particularly regarding the role of art in society. It was Trotsky who coined the word poputchik for artists and intellectuals who were not members of the communist party nor subscribed to the tenets of socialism, but who had clearly despised the czarist autocracy that had been overthrown. Indeed, from 1917 to 1934, when the communist party under Stalin formally adopted the doctrine of socialist realism in art, the Soviet government (albeit with warring factions and endless disputes) supported a rather eclectic range of artistic effort in all fields from literature to painting, theater, and music. The 1920s was therefore a time of exciting and explosive experimentation and innovation. The oversight of the arts was handed to Anatoly Vasilievitch Lunacharsky (1875-1933), a playwright and a Bolshevik, who described himself as “an intellectual among Bolsheviks, a Bolshevik among the intelligentsia.” His musical tastes ranged from the classical to the mysticism of the silver age, particularly the music of Scriabin. It was he who appointed Arthur Lourié to administer the field of music. Under Lunacharsky’s leadership, Russian constructivism in painting witnessed its heyday and the visionary and theatrical daring of Vesevolod Meyerhold was celebrated. These were also the years of the experimentalism of Marc Chagall and the Kafka-like absurdist drama of Vladimir Mayakovsky.

From the outset, however, there was an ironic continuation of the tradition of czarist censorship. Intervention by the state constituted a present danger. The poet Anna Akhmatova’s husband was executed in 1921 for anti-Soviet activity. One year later Akhmatova herself was criticized as a bourgeois holdover, and after 1925, her work was prevented from being published. Nevertheless, particularly in music, the opportunity for experimentation and innovation was real and apparently encouraged, even though Arthur Lourié was one of the first to see the handwriting on the wall, as it were, and precipitously left for Berlin in 1921.

The decisive influences in the Russian context on the composers represented on this evening’s program include Russian populist and nationalist tendencies evident in the work of Rimsky-Korsakov, the more traditional yet distinctly Russian romanticism of Glazunov, the ethereal spiritualism of Liadov, and the harmonic innovations of Scriabin. But the crucial inspiration of the 1917 Revolution was the idea that history had in some profound manner stopped or come to a definite end. With the Revolution there was the sense that an opportunity had been created for a new art that could accompany a socially just future, a new age radically different from the past. Despite all this innovation, however, there was no immediate need, as there would be later, for the regime to erase or revise history. Lunacharsky saw to it that there was some substantial continuity in the cultural institutions that had come into prominence during the silver age. There is perhaps no better image of this sense of a freely determined modernist future visible against a recognized past, than perhaps the well-known—albeit late—example of the Soviet aesthetic of the 1920s: the building that won the competition for the construction of a tomb for Lenin. Lenin’s tomb, a familiar image throughout the world, is a stark example of modernist architecture, bereft of all ornament and decoration and utterly rational in its geometry. This tribute to the great leader of the Revolution was placed right next to the Kremlin, a compound that contains powerful historical examples of Russian religious and secular architecture. It is located in Red Square, diagonally across from St. Basil’s, itself a source of Russian Orthodox faith. The tomb sits across from a nineteenth-century version of a European arcade, an ornate historicist building that would become GUM, now home to Russia’s high-end consumer culture, filled with boutiques selling unimaginably expensive luxury items from the West. What the tomb signifies is the notion that the art that accompanies a rational and true end of history in communism must itself be visibly rational and logical, without superfluous and arbitrary aesthetic individualism.

The equivalent in music to the formalist experiments in art and architecture, particularly the idea of a non-objective use of form, color, and line in a manner consciously departing from traditions of realism and abstraction, are most starkly audible in Mosolov’s legendary The Iron Foundry, part of a ballet written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. The familiar aesthetic rhetoric of beauty and sentiment is set aside and modernity is embraced, as is the triumph of industrial progress. Just as social and industrial advancement are adopted as suitable subjects for art, ambient sounds of industry and progress move to the center of music itself, obliterating conventional distinctions between consonance and dissonance. This overtly radical departure into a new aesthetic was, of course, not quite as radical as it appeared. Lunacharsky and Trotsky understood the importance of supporting continuity between the explicit modernism within the silver age’s romance with symbolism, particularly its attendant forays into new kinds of harmony and sound. Mosolov would not be comprehensible without Scriabin, just as the new literature of the Soviet 1920s was a direct outgrowth of the great poetic achievements of Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok. This mixture of past and present elements informs the aesthetic of Shcherbachov’s Second Symphony and even his choice of Blok. Blok was the great Russian symbolist poet whose later work engaged the idea that Russia had a unique historical destiny. The Revolution, which Blok embraced, seemed proof of his apocalyptic sensibilities. Unlike Akhmatova, who suffered for decades under the Soviet regime until her death in 1966, Blok died in 1921. He was depressed and isolated from all factions, but was spared the radical disillusionment caused by the increasing tyranny of the Soviet state. Ironically, it was Blok’s death that inspired Akhmatova to write the verses that are set by Lourié on tonight’s program.

But from the outset, there was never unanimity about what new Soviet art and music was supposed to be like. All believed that the Bolshevik Revolution demanded art forms to which the masses and workers could immediately relate. Certain factions believed these forms required simplicity and tunefulness, accessible music that clearly rejected bourgeois claims of aesthetic judgment, refinement, and originality. The self-indulgent individualism and the sentimentality of late romanticism had to be purged in favor of a common aesthetic denominator. But others questioned if the role of the artist was not to educate the masses so that they could appreciate artistic creation of a higher order. Was there indeed a legacy of artistic creation that could be adapted to the new political and social ideals? If so, then the new art required a sharp leap forward into an austere, rational modernism. Or was the route to art that could serve the new state best connected more directly to transparent and recognizable folk and popular traditions?

Radical modernists like Mosolov believed their new approach to sound and music-making obliterated false refinement and created a common ground for solidarity within a radical new utopian vision, ennobling the experiences of everyday life such as working in factories. This is the ideology that also informs Gavriil Popov’s Symphonic Suite No. 1. This Suite derives from music for a film celebrating the Komsomol and the bringing of electricity to the masses. Film became a central medium in the Soviet 1920s, because it was at once modern, new, and utterly accessible. In its “silent” phase it presented an opportunity to combine the visual with musical accompaniment and literary narrative. Film quickly became an emblematic instrument of the new age, and Russian filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein pioneered camera techniques that came to define the conventions of cinematic storytelling for the rest of the world.

The question of whether to make revolutionary art into a tool that could educate the masses in the sophisticated aesthetics of modernity, or to base musical art on a language of anti-bourgeois simplicity that the masses already understood, was never resolved in practical use. When Stalin (a fan of Western classical music and secretly of cowboy films) assumed power, many in the modernist camp would be accused of self-indulgent aesthetic narcissism and bourgeois individualism because their music was “formalist,” hard to comprehend and justified only in relation to the history of art, not the history of the proletariat. Stalin effectively ended the period of artistic freedom and experimentation in the 1930s. The conclusion of little over a decade of optimism after 1917 was abrupt and cruel. The silencing, imprisonment, internal exile, persecution, and execution of artists, writers, and composers ensured that this period would be largely forgotten in later years in the assessment of the history of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s deadly suppression of “non-revolutionary” art is well understood, but the irony of what he and his cohorts promoted is sometimes overlooked. Their intent was to appropriate pre-revolutionary forms of musical expression, popular and folk music, as an accessible form of realism. Aesthetically, their revolution was no revolution at all, but the co-opting of familiarity for propagandistic purposes. We may smile today at what seems to be the propagandistic subjects of Mosolov and Popov, but they are not very propagandistic after all because these composers really believed these subjects to be suitable for the advanced music they envisioned. It was not until after 1930 that musical methods were forced upon composers and their task defined as composing for a state that understood art as nothing but a means of mass indoctrination and manipulation.

The consequences of Stalin’s rise to power were devastating for both Mosolov and Popov. The 1920s were Popov’s finest years, but he was condemned publicly along with Shostakovich in the mid-1930s. Although he would later win several official prizes, Popov retreated into a much more conventional and safe mode of composition. He died in 1972, never having realized the enormous promise and brilliance evident not only in tonight’s work but also in the 1927 Septet and the 1934 Symphony No. 1 (premiered in the US by the American Symphony Orchestra in 2003). Mosolov died one year after Popov in 1973. In the early 1930s he took the brunt of the rising criticism against modernism by advocates of proletarian simplicity. He was arrested in 1938, and after his release he spent the remainder of his career in the study of folk traditions. Mosolov and Popov demonstrate how easy it is for terror and autocracy to crush artistic expression and free speech. Although Lourié escaped and moved from Berlin to Paris and then the United States, the act of emigration was sufficiently traumatic to prevent him from producing music of the quality suggested by his early work.

Shcherbachov was an important and influential figure, particularly as a teacher, in the years following 1917. Like Popov (one of Shcherbachov’s students), he had his finest moment during the 1920s. He helped develop the curriculum of the Leningrad Conservatory and was permitted to make frequent trips to the West, allowing him to keep abreast of contemporary developments. In 1930 he was forced out. He eventually returned but was again condemned in 1948 and died in official disfavor in 1952.

The most well-known and compelling figures who came of age before 1917 were Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Prokofiev emigrated to the West but ultimately returned in the 1930s. Shostakovich was eleven years old when the Revolution occurred, and never left Russia. His is the most interesting and controversial case. He was the new Soviet regime’s poster boy. He experienced enormous acclaim with his First Symphony in 1926, and became famous abroad as the most promising new modernist voice of Soviet Russia. But his love affair with the regime came to an abrupt end in the mid-1930s when his music was condemned, probably by Stalin himself—particularly his extremely popular opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). Unlike Popov and Mosolov, Shostakovich rebounded and found a way to continue to compose in a manner that appeared to reconcile artistic individuality with the strictures placed on a state-sponsored composer. But Shostakovich’s output can only be understood as emerging from a desperate and dangerous crucible created by the Soviet state and its relation to the arts.

Shostakovich’s music for The Bedbug exemplifies the most experimental and courageous phase of his career. Meyerhold, the great director (imprisoned and executed by Stalin in 1940), discovered the young Shostakovich, and encouraged and collaborated with him. Meyerhold was among the most visible symbols for the possibilities of modernism in the new Soviet state. At his suggestion, Shostakovich agreed to write incidental music to the era’s most adventurous and well-known poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930 (or was perhaps assassinated).

Here, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we live in a time in which the accepted consensus regarding music written in the so-called classical tradition is that it has lost its relevance. The important cultural and political music of our time exists outside the confines of the concert hall and opera stage. It is therefore perhaps not so easy to understand what it meant to write the compelling and daring music of nearly a century ago at a time and in a nation where those in power believed orchestral and operatic music and the work of composers was not only important, but also potentially dangerous. The significance placed on the work of these composers and the pressure to which they were subjected are hard to imagine for us, who live in a time and place in which freedom is taken for granted, individualism prized, and “high art” music in the concert and operatic traditions is most often heard as background for commercials. It was incredibly difficult to be an artist or composer in the Soviet era, when the State listened to everything that was composed and written; but as an exiled Russian poet whom I met in the 1970s and who had been sent to prison for her work told me: although in Soviet Russia one could be arrested for writing love poetry, in the United States, writing poetry—even verses that condemn politicians and the government—goes entirely unnoticed and unread.

Human Elements

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Human Elements, performed on Nov 18, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is ironic that the four composers on today’s program, whose work ranges from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, should be inspired by one of the most ancient theories of human nature. The concept of the four elements reaches back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. They believed all matter to be composed of fire, air, earth, and water. From that quartet, Hippocrates and Galen derived a theory of human psychology based on biology: fire corresponded to the preponderance of yellow bile in the human body, and produced a choleric temperament, passionate and energetic; air corresponded to blood, endowing a sanguine disposition of hope and cheerfulness; a connection to the earth through black bile meant a melancholy, depressed personality; and those who displayed a penchant for logic, serenity, and unemotional behavior could attribute their character to the dominance of phlegm and its association with the element of water. This theory held sway throughout the Middle Ages, and was a primary principle of alchemy.

But by the time the composers on today’s program were alive, the four temperaments had long ceased to be a scientific explanation of human nature. The onset of the scientific revolution based on empiricism and the Enlightenment had replaced that simple theory with more sophisticated hypotheses regarding the physical universe, biology, and the human mind. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the humors were well on their way to becoming folklore, more appropriate for the poetry of Alexander Pope than the experiments of William Harvey. Today’s four composers knew they were choosing an antiquated notion for their inspiration, and they were conscious that their audience knew that too. What possible attraction, then, could this model have for them?

A look at both the recurrently alluring nature of the theory and at the context in which these artists lived might yield some clues. Although the humors are obsolete, they reflect a persistent impulse in human civilization: the need to describe the way we all are, and to provide a more intuitively coherent picture of the external world. This is not so far from the objective of modern science. The humors provide an elegant explanation for the makeup of human character with the additional bonus that the theory is remarkably reductive and therefore simple. It is a primitive precursor of the contemporary engagement with the structure of DNA and the human genome. The pattern of four temperaments has a populist symmetry to the four points of the compass, the four seasons, and the four winds. It has a common-sense appearance that eludes the arcane findings of modern science. And the humors theory also suggests claims that are still cogent today, particularly the idea that temperament may derive largely from biology and is therefore subject to an almost alchemical intervention (Prozac neutralizes black bile, presumably). This may be why, despite its reductiveness, the theory has continued in modern popular psychology, as in the work of David Keirsey. Even though the theory of temperaments and elements long ago lost its prestige in science, it continued to thrive in poetry and painting, and in the popular imagination.

The social transformations that occurred in the world from the era of Johann Strauss Sr. to that of Frank Martin reflect the triumph of modernity with all its complications and continuous, rapid change. Strauss’s industrializing-nineteenth century Europe was consumed by a debate over the nature of music as a significant activity of the human mind. The debate concerning music as a distinctly human activity had been sparked by another more fundamental debate regarding language and expression in general. Since the Enlightenment, political philosophy has privileged the notion that human society was ideally a social contract. If humans were considered capable of negotiating their differences, compromising, and organizing social and political structures in which equal participation and membership were essential elements, it was because of a universal capacity for language, as opposed to superior strength or aggression. The utopian ideal of democratic reform and social contract theory rested on the premise that language, precisely because it was available to everyone, could supplant violence and subjugation and instead operate on principles of civil liberty, consensus, and the self-imposed discipline of citizenship.

Inevitably, this focus on language as a universal characteristic influenced a parallel belief regarding art as a basic form of human expression. Music was particularly interesting in this regard, because it seemed at once universal and at the same time profoundly individual. What was it that touched the emotions of everyone, but in a thousand individual ways? The activity of music can be understood as connecting all the people of the world, but yet no two individuals have identical tastes and reactions. Nineteenth-century thinkers pondered whether music revealed something about humans that language could not, and whether and how it transcended ordinary linguistic communication. From Heinrich Helmholtz and Ernst Mach to Oliver Sacks, the question of how music works on the brain and body have fascinated scientists, psychologists, and therapists.

Amid the social and philosophical debates, and in the midst of the thrilling and terrifying advent of modern society, these composers turned back (as so many others would and still do) to a persistently compelling and useful framework. As Noga Arikha chronicles in her recent book Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, the four temperaments continue to provide in their very obsolescence an effective and convenient metaphorical framework to understand human behavior. From a composer’s point of view their division of emotion into four discrete contrasts is as brilliant as it is convenient. The transformations that a composer creates with musical materials become audible through repetition, variation, and contrast. Unity and difference may be reconciled in a composition through a basic strategy that is capable of realizing seemingly limitless variety comparable to the human mind. And yet commonality remains. In the everyday world, we repeatedly reveal in the course of a single day all four temperaments, yet we sense (it is to be hoped) a continuity in our selves.

Musical variation and transformation work with similar flexibility and adaptability. The four movement structure of a symphony (particularly after Beethoven) for example, was understood to be an essay in both unity and contrast. It is fascinating, therefore, to borrow as a framework an eminently familiar and even comforting scheme of human nature, to insert it into our chaotic, unstable world, and use it to invoke the inexhaustible transformations of music.

In this context, the elder Johann Strauss takes full advantage of the venerable notion that music could profoundly impact the humors by manipulating moods and emotions. He was a pioneer in deepening musical response by pairing listening with physical motion through the waltz. The waltz represented a controversial arena of human interaction. On one hand it seemed provocative and obliquely sexual in the way the two partners interacted. On the other hand, the music displaced or sublimated the confrontation of the two individuals. It was an opportunity for subtle emotional communication within a context that tested but did not exceed notions of propriety. As the subject of a waltz, the four temperaments crystallize the psychological aspect of the physical conversation between the dancers.

Carl Nielsen uses the four temperaments to lend a self-conscious frame to symphonic form. Music, as all listeners know, transforms our perception of time. Just as the engrossed reader of a novel experiences imaginary chronologies that do not correspond to the actual time it takes to read the novel, so too listening to music expands and contracts our relationship with real time. A listener can become absorbed in an emotional or reflective state that is not contingent on an impression of the passing of time. That capacity for temporal transformation is partly located in the way we ascribe meaning to music. The four humors viewed as states of being therefore lend themselves well to musical characterization that seeks to concentrate our awareness of imagined time and our own personal states of mind, without the external influence of image or text.

Paul Hindemith’s connection to the subject is more akin to that of Strauss. It derives from a visual and choreographic impulse. Once again words are set aside and music becomes the medium of physical gesture in a manner that is appropriate not only to signaling emotion but expanding its experience so that the listeners, by the confrontation with music, deepen their sense of the character and quality of emotional states of being. Finally, with Frank Martin we return to the physical foundation of the theory of humors, the four elements of matter: earth, air, fire, and water. In a way, this work provides the best metaphor for the four elements and temperaments in music. As simple as the four elements seem, one of the triumphs of modern science has been the revelation of the dynamic atomic and sub-atomic structure they share. Beneath the deceptive surface that common sense shows us is a fantastic, multi-faceted reality. So it is with music: simple shared elements like pitch and rhythm are transformed by the human imagination into unique and differentiated works of art.

The Wreckers

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Wreckers, performed on Sep 30, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When a work the scope and magnitude of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers is brought back into the public arena (in America for the first time) over a hundred years after its first performance, inevitable questions come to mind. Why this long neglect? Is there some sort of flaw or inferiority that justifies its obscurity? Furthermore, even if the work possesses powerful qualities, will a revival in an entirely different historical context bring it back to life in a current sense, so that it might receive future performances?

All such cases are complex. Often, “masterpieces” survive the ages not only because of elements of excellence, but because historical circumstances favor their endurance. Perhaps they evoke the consummate achievement of a figure such as Wagner who seems to lend a sense of coherence and comprehensibility to the time in which he lived, or perhaps they succinctly exemplify a nation or sensibility, such as Elgar’s Cello Concerto (helped too by the advocacy of a famous artist). Conversely, if they do not fit the scheme properly, they can be set aside to be discovered at a later time, as was the case with late Beethoven.

Or, if they can claim none of the advantages that have traditionally marked success, such as, for instance, deriving from a culture with a dominant musical legacy, or even being composed by a white European man, they may never even come in for consideration as masterpieces. The neglect of The Wreckers has multiple sources. Before Benjamin Britten’s success as an opera composer, English opera was an object of disregard even inside England. The most famous composer of the English musical Renaissance, Edward Elgar, never wrote an opera, despite the enormous impression Wagner had made on him. Although many non-comic English operas were written, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century, (notably by Delius and Vaughn Williams), they never seemed to have taken hold. The public’s taste was clearly weighted towards the German, Italian, and French operatic repertoire. Ironically, the best known of English opera composers, Frederick Delius, experienced, like Ethel Smyth, whatever success he had in Germany and his stage works received their greatest response in productions in the German language.

The English lack of support for native opera was difficult enough, but added to that in Smyth’s case are the realities of being a Victorian woman. The often brutally restricted lifestyle of British women at that time is so well-known as to be a cliché, though it is just as certain that Victorian women of a certain class resembled the ladies of Upstairs, Downstairs about as much as twentieth-century American women resemble the idealized housewives of 1950s television. It was, after all, an age of repression but also the age of the suffragettes, women who risked social and physical danger for the sake of human rights. Of these Smyth was a notable member; indeed she was imprisoned for her activities along with her friend Emmeline Pankhurst. Even among the extraordinary women of the time, however, Smyth in her lifestyle and achievements stands out. Born to wealth, she lived a complicated and varied life. Among her remarkable circle of friends (some of whom were also her lovers), were Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, the wife of her teacher and one of Brahms’s closest friends and pupils and herself a musician of considerable talent. Smyth was also close friends with the wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, the wife of Queen Victoria’s private secretary, the former Empress of France Eugenie, the millionaire Mary Dodge, and most famously, Virginia Woolf. She was an accomplished sports enthusiast. She held her own in the company of the great English composers whom she befriended in her lifetime, and among the admirers of her music were Sir Thomas Beecham, Artur Nikisch, and Bruno Walter. Besides The Wreckers, there were the operas The Boatswain’s Mate, as well as the earlier Fantasio and Der Wald, both of which received their first performances in Germany (Der Wald was the first opera composed by a woman to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera). On her seventy-fifth birthday in 1934, under Beecham’s direction, her work was celebrated in a festival, the final event of which was held at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of the Queen. Heartbreakingly, at this moment of long-overdue recognition, the composer was already completely deaf and could hear neither her own music nor the adulation of the crowds.

The greatest appeal of The Wreckers is not an overwhelming lyrical or melodic element, but the drama as manifested in the interaction of voices, orchestral sound, and storyline. The Wreckers’s libretto, unlike that of Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet (1907), is not based on the work of a great author such as Gottfried Keller; the text itself, by Smyth’s sometime lover Henry Brewster, possesses little in the way of redeeming poetry, especially in its somewhat awkward English-language version (it was originally to be produced in French). But the story is compelling in its personal and moral dimensions. It is the sonic canvas Smyth produces primarily through the use of orchestra and chorus that gives the opera its memorable moments. To contemporary audiences this was, as George Bernard Shaw observed, a matter of some irony. When many artists, including Elgar, called for a vigorous, muscular music indicative of the British character, these are precisely the qualities to be found in abundance in Smyth’s music, both in The Wreckers and throughout the corpus of her work.

The Wreckers, though not perfect, is perhaps the finest opera written in modern history by a woman before World War II. But it is not through a legitimate desire to rectify a long standing prejudice against female composers that one needs to take a second look at this opera. The story Smyth chose to set presents a tale that should be of intense interest to contemporary audiences. It concerns an isolated community in Cornwall that possesses a religiously based fanatical self-regard that leads it to justify theft and murder as God-given rights and virtues. Led by its own pastor who invokes Christianity, violence becomes the instrument of realizing God’s will. The opera depicts the consequences of mass hysteria and populist justice, Draconian in its nature against those who resist the imposition of a moral code based solely on perceived divine, not human, justice. The toxic roots of this fanaticism are ignorance, poverty, and economic despair.

Though the story is fictitious, the existence of wreckers on the British coast was a historical fact. In small, desperately poor villages, bands of villagers formed secret cadres that at critical moments extinguished the beacons established on the coast to guide ships, thus forcing them onto the rocks and then plundering the cargo and murdering the crews. The time period in which Smyth chooses to set the opera suggests that she knew of the great Methodist minister John Wesley’s unsuccessful attempt to stop the practice of wrecking. But Smyth’s minister, Pascoe, uses religious enthusiasm for a very different end. The potentially dangerous power of unquestioned religious faith and the twisting of a moral system to justify violence will resonate with audiences today even more than with the audiences of Smyth’s era, and yet, her prescient subject matter suggests the omnipresent shadow of religious extremism throughout history, and not only among societies different from our own.

The Wreckers is a work of many strengths and some flaws, but what it has to say is more than enough reason to warrant its return to the stage. The style, as many have observed, is both distinctive and eclectic. There are ballads and ensemble pieces of an affecting simplicity, and dramatic touches vaguely reminiscent of both German and Italian practices. There are moments, particularly in the prelude to the second act, when one can hear the influence of French modernism, notably Debussy. The entire opera is framed by a powerful display of orchestral writing, memorable motivic recurrence, and a brilliant use of chorus; the final scenes of Acts I and III are particularly on a par with the finest moments in the operatic repertory. Smyth’s treatment of the recitative-like moments that advance the storyline and link the larger musical moments are not always handled with the same assurance one might expect from an experienced opera composer, and that puts a burden on the protagonists to sustain the drama. But there is little point to asking whether this work stands up to the often arbitrary and inconsistent standards that have come to define the greatest operas of the repertoire. Regardless of the many evaluations it should and will provoke, The Wreckers stands as a significant achievement in the fin de siècle, and is distinguished for its casting of the perennial twin subjects of opera, love and death, into a commentary about community, social change, and the heavy weight of inherited tradition—especially religious—that is passively accepted. This is an opera that Smyth, in her political engagement, wanted to speak not only to her musical colleagues, but to the society at large in which she thrived, fought, and sought to improve.

One final curious note. If the subject matter (not the story) of The Wreckers seems vaguely familiar, perhaps it is because the topic was visited again more recently in an even more popular medium than opera: film. Alfred Hitchcock chose the subject (based on Daphne Du Maurier’s novel) for Jamaica Inn, his last film made in Britain. Whether Hitchcock was aware of The Wreckers is unknown, but his choice suggests that Smyth’s subject is one of enduring interest, and a compelling vehicle for what can legitimately be considered her masterpiece.

Uncommon Comrades

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Uncommon Comrades, performed on June 3, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The history of European Jewry is frequently written according to a narrative that suggests an inexorable logic leading to a tragic destiny. The persistence of anti-Semitism over centuries throughout Eastern and Western Europe is often understood to suggest the inevitability of the Holocaust and the imperative of Zionism particularly in its incarnation as a political movement dating from the early twentieth century. Whatever merits such an account may have, it tends to obscure those dimensions of European Jewish life that do not fit neatly into such a perspective. This comment is not a criticism, for few enterprises in modern history were so efficient and overwhelming as Hitler’s effort to exterminate the Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe. The community from which Mieczyslaw Weinberg came—that of Polish Jews—numbered over three million, of whom about ten percent survived. Of the six million Jews who died during the Second World War, the vast majority of the victims were Eastern European Jews. Unarmed, non-combatant civilians, they were murdered in concentration camps, or, like many of Weinberg’s relatives, in the ghettos created by the German occupation. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, composed in 1962, deals with a third manner of mass murder: the shooting of civilians over open graves. On September 29-30, 1941, as many as 33,771 Jews were shot at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev in the Ukraine, one of the great urban centers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish life.

The not-very-hidden secret of the Holocaust’s effectiveness is that, while the impetus came clearly from German Nazism, the campaign would not have been so successful had not local populations from France to Russia cooperated. The Catholic majority of Poland during the war may have been fiercely patriotic, courageous, and steadfastly anti-German, but on the issue of the persecution and extermination of the Jews, they largely either turned the proverbial blind eye or at worst, actively assisted. As Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem makes explicit, Ukrainian and Russian collaboration in the extermination of the Jews was equally prominent and essential.

Along with unimaginable masses of victims, a vital and variegated dimension of European culture was obliterated. The popular image of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before 1939 has been inadvertently simplified. To a limited extent, the image of the shtetl Jew, the devoutly religious inhabitant of small villages and towns, is accurate. Indeed, contrary to the perversely persistent logic of anti-Semitism, the vast majority of the Jews who died were in fact poor. But the cultural characteristics within the worlds that were destroyed were actually much broader than that. In large cities such as Warsaw, Vilnius, Budapest, and Kiev, a Jewish life flourished that was middle-class and acculturated (if not assimilated) into the dominant national and linguistic cultures as much as anti-Semitism would permit with or without conversion.

The Warsaw in which Weinberg grew up had many examples of this form of Jewish life. This was effectively depicted in Wladyslaw Szpilmann’s memoirs The Pianist, the basis of Roman Polanksi’s recent film. We recall this accommodation between Jewish identity and so-called mainstream European civilization most often in the case of Germany, but it flourished as well in Eastern Europe. More significantly, particularly in Eastern Europe, in pre-war Poland, and in Soviet Russia, there were forms of Jewish life grounded not in Zionism, in Hebrew, or even in religion. A vibrant Jewish culture centered on the Yiddish language helped to define Eastern European Jewry. Within that culture there was a strong socialist streak with its own form of utopianism. New Yorkers have perhaps a better opportunity to remember this Yiddish and socialist heritage, since so many of the Jewish immigrants to New York from the late nineteenth century on carried those traditions with them to the new world.

Today’s concert can be seen in a way as an homage to this dimension of European Jewish history. Weinberg’s Warsaw in the decades immediately preceding his birth was an urban center in the farthest western region of the Russian empire. An independent Poland came into existence only one year before he was born. After the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin and the invasion of Poland in 1939, Weinberg made a decision that would save his life. He fled eastward, ultimately to find himself in Tashkent, where he met Dmitri Shostakovich.

Weinberg’s father had been a musician in the Yiddish theater, and Yiddish was to him and clearly to many of his fellow Jews the central language, the language of identity, of the home and of social intercourse with other Jews. Yiddish was the lingua franca of Central and Eastern Europe for Jews both in its quotidian and literary form. Weinberg married the daughter of Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948), the legendary Yiddish actor and director who maintained his own lifelong allegiance to socialism.

For the Jews in Soviet Russia who survived the German invasion, the euphoria of the German defeat was short-lived. It is easy to lump Hitler and Stalin together in light of their terrifying similarities. Stalin’s impact on Soviet ideology and practice was in part to lend it a pronounced nationalist quality, and in so doing, he gave ample room to anti-Semitism. In theory, communism was designed both to eliminate nationalisms and render residual ethnic identities equal. Being a Jew in Soviet Russia was accorded the official status of a nationality, presumably in the context of multi-ethnic equality. In reality, this was not the case. Stalin’s anti-Semitism stemmed in part from his rivalry with and resentment of colleagues of Jewish origin from the Bolshevik Revolution—Leon Trotsky most prominently. It is a startling and tragic fact that not long after the end of the war Stalin sought to take up where Hitler had left off. Mikhoels used his prominence as an actor and visible representative of the Jews to assist survivors and those returning to their homes. But on January 13, 1948, Stalin had Mikhoels killed in a staged car accident in Minsk. The great Yiddish actor’s death marked the beginning of a process of suppression of Jewish cultural institutions and Jewish life, including whole scale removal of town populations into the Gulag. In Stalin’s final years, his obsession with anti-Semitism took the shape of the notorious Doctors’ Plot, the allegation of a conspiracy of Jewish doctors, among whom was an uncle of Weinberg’s wife, a physician attached to the Kremlin. In February 1953 Weinberg was arrested and jailed because of his connection to the Mikhoels family. It was his luck that a month later Stalin died. Weinberg was released after three months, and it is his release that holds the key to the connection between him and Shostakovich.

Shostakovich remained all his life a loyal citizen of Soviet Russia, a hero of the State and an “official” composer. That he believed in the ideals and premises of the Soviet system there can be little doubt. At the same time, through his music he gave voice to an undercurrent of expression in response to the suffering that the repressive regime generated. This dual function in his music lends it its intensity, sardonic wit, and irony. Although steadfastly loyal, he suffered humiliation at the hands of the Party twice, first in the 1930s and then in 1948. Toward the end of his life Shostakovich distanced himself from the dissidents of the Brezhnev era, much to the dismay of many of his admirers. Shostakovich seemed perpetually frightened for himself, his career, and his family, and was disinclined to put himself at risk.

There was, however, one exception, and that exception is itself powerful and striking. Anti-Semitism among Russian writers, artists, composers, and intellectuals was commonplace. It spans the eras of Gogol and Dostoevsky to Stravinsky. The absence of anti-Semitism in Shostakovich’s life and work is therefore remarkable. He became friendly with Weinberg during the war. Weinberg remained close to Shostakovich, performing and recording with him. When Weinberg was arrested, Shostakovich did something highly improbable. In the full knowledge that his every action private and public was being watched, he not only offered to help Weinberg’s family, but he wrote to the head of the secret police, Lavrenty Beriya, pleading for Weinberg’s release. When it came to resisting anti-Semitism and assisting his Jewish colleagues, Shostakovich displayed uncommon (and, one might judge, foolhardy) courage. He believed rightly that Mikhoels and Weinberg, like so many of his other colleagues of Jewish origin steeped in the Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe, were genuine patriots and citizens deserving of equality in the Soviet state.

1948, the year of Mikhoels’s assassination, was also an unpleasant one for Shostakovich and Weinberg as composers. It was the year of the famous Zhdanov resolution, condemning once again formalism and modernism. In 1948, albeit briefly, Shostakovich found himself shunned and ostracized. Weinberg too was out of favor as an ideologically rigid construct of true Soviet music was promulgated. It was in this period that Shostakovich wrote his famous song cycle On Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79. Although not published or performed until 1955, its composition was an eloquent act of artistic and ethical resistance.

By 1962, when Shostakovich wrote his Thirteenth Symphony, much had changed in the Soviet Union. Stalin had died, Khrushchev was in power, and there was an air of optimism in the wake of de-Stalinizaiton. But that apparent liberalism did not extend to telling the truth about the role of the Russian people and the Soviet state with respect to anti-Semitism and the facts of the extermination of the Jews. One of the most visible figures of the early 1960s was the young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko who wrote a poem commemorating the killings at Babi Yar, an historical event that was suppressed by Soviet authorities. The poem came to Shostakovich’s attention through his friend Isaak Glikman (himself a Jew). Shostakovich immediately set the poem to music and began to work with the poet.

But because Soviet liberalization was only skin-deep, the authorities were none too pleased and put pressure on Shostakovich and Yevtushenko. It took considerable courage for the original performers to present this work, and in the end Yevtushenko, as Laurel Fay recounts, caved in and changed some lines—changes Shostakovich never accepted. Nevertheless, in December of 1962, despite official pressure, the work was premiered. But for years thereafter its performance was discouraged. The authorities could not intimidate Shostakovich, but the incident surrounding the poem and Symphony marked the end of the most liberal moment of Khrushchev’s tenure. Khrushchev is reported to have quipped that in matters of art he remained a “Stalinist.” Although the swarm of party officials had persuaded Yevtushenko to rewrite the poem to give the impression that Jews were not the only victims, that Russians and Ukrainians died at Babi Yar as well (which was not the fact), to place the Jewish plight more in the background, and to give way to expressions of gratitude to Russia’s war against fascism, Shostakovich would have none of it.

Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony exemplifies the composer’s ironic use of the musical attributes of marching songs, dance, humor, and macabre tone-painting in a manner designed to mock the official aesthetics of the Soviet state. As the last movement of the Symphony makes plain, there is also a dimension of self-mockery, of an almost cloying confessional. Shostakovich exploited Yevtushenko’s highly sentimentalized example of Galileo as a means by which to express his hope that despite the necessity to compromise, recant, and submit oneself to a repressive political authority, in the end “the truth in one’s art,” just like the truth of Galileo’s science, will prevail. The final section considers the price one must pay to continue to work. In his own engaging and populist manner, Shostakovich unabashedly seeks forgiveness through an ironic exercise at self-justification, mitigating his lifelong collaboration and abnegation before the authorities with the suggestion that he nevertheless was able to speak the truth. What better medium could there have been for this moment of self-revelation than Yevtushenko’s unmasking of the plight of Russian Jewry at the hands not only of the Nazis but of their fellow Soviet citizens?

The Thirteenth Symphony offered Shostakovich the opportunity to express a lifelong conviction that the fate of the Jew mirrored the fate of artists. Artists risked being branded as outsiders and destroyers of public order, as challengers to convention and uniformity. For Shostakovich, belief in the power of art even as a covert instrument of expression and the necessity for the individual artist to retain integrity and autonomy at least to some degree required the capacity within a society to accept Jews as Jews and as equals. The proverbial Jewish attribute audible in Weinberg’s music and central to the character of the Yiddish language of “laughter through tears,” was closely linked in Shostakovich’s mind to the function of art in a society without freedom.

Weinberg outlived Shostakovich for more than twenty years. His output was enormous, and the quality of his music, as evidenced by this Symphony and Concerto, has yet to be discovered fully by American audiences. In the shadow of Shostakovich are several powerful and important composers who worked in twentieth-century Russia, including Weinberg, Prokofiev’s friend Nicolai Miaskovsky, and Gavriil Popov. But in this concert, we celebrate something we take for granted but rarely understand fully: the perseverance of friendship as an act in defiance of repression. If being a friend is merely convenient and puts us at little risk, we can enjoy it just as an ornamental component of life. But loyalty and personal relations can become a matter of life and death, particularly in a society characterized by terror, surveillance, and lack of freedom. Today we hear the music of two friends who took risks to remain friends. They worked, as it were, in tandem. Weinberg’s Sixth Symphony would have been unthinkable without Shostakovich’s Thirteenth, particularly in Weinberg’s use of material from Jewish life and culture. Shostakovich had broken the taboo that lasted well after the Stalinist state anti-Semitism in 1948. In their separate and distinct ways, the works on today’s program help remind us not only of the richness and vitality of Jewish life in Eastern Europe—as well as its acute tragedies, particularly during the Soviet era—but also of the value of the genuine absence of prejudice and the commitment to friendship.

The Distant Sound

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Distant Sound, performed on April 15, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When the American symphony Orchestra decided some years ago to present a concert performance of Der ferne Klang in the spirit of the courageous and innovative mission bequeathed to it by the Orchestra’s founder Leopold Stokowski, neither I, nor the staff, nor the board of directors were aware that this performance would be not only the first performance in the United States, but in the western hemisphere. Stokowski consistently championed new and unusual repertoire. He gave the first American performances of Berg’s Wozzeck and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. But those performances took place in near proximity to the dates of composition and the premieres of those works. It is a sobering commentary on the programming habits of opera houses and orchestras in the United States that the premiere of a work of such historical importance as Der ferne Klang and by such a prominent figure as Franz Schreker should take place ninety-five years—nearly a century—after the work was first performed.

Of all the witnesses to the importance of Der ferne Klang, the most important may have been Alban Berg, who prepared the vocal score. What made Der ferne Klang so significant was not only the multiplicity of musical ideas and innovations, including the mixture of sonorities, the complexity and layering of musical materials, but Schreker’s almost prophetic concern with the connection between sight and sound. The emancipation of harmonic usage within tonality from short-term structure and the wide palette of orchestral sound suggests the influence of visual experiments at the turn of the century, particularly in Austrian and German painting. What we like to call expressionism, in which the illusion of realism is distorted by the counter-intuitive use of color, the variegation of the painterly surface, the focus on the subjective experience of the imagery as well as the imagination and fantasy of the viewer, needs to be remembered alongside the movement in the visual arts known as symbolism, in which the philosophical, the psychological, and the spiritual are evoked through the dramatic and often shocking departures from the traditions of nineteenth-century painting. Furthermore, as Christopher Hailey has persuasively argued, the music of Der ferne Klang, the way voices and language are treated, and the pacing of the drama all anticipate hallmarks of the emerging art of the cinema, particularly during the interwar years in Germany.

The fact that Franz Schreker’s name is not as well known as it ought to be is a tragic consequence of the intolerance and brutality of mid-twentieth-century politics. Schreker was born in Monaco in 1878. His father was of Jewish descent and a court photographer. His mother was a Catholic of aristocratic birth. Schreker was ten years old when his father died and the family moved to Vienna. He trained as a violinist at the Vienna Conservatory but later turned to composition. His graduation piece was Psalm 116 (performed by the ASO earlier this season). In the early part of the century his music enjoyed considerable success, and Schreker began to work in Vienna as a conductor. His first opera, Flammen, had its premiere in 1902 in a version with piano at the leading recital hall in the city of Vienna. He conducted at the Vienna Volksoper, and in 1907 he founded the Philharmonic chorus, with whom he premiered both Psalm 23 of his friend and colleague Alexander Zemlinsky (also performed by the ASO earlier this season), and most importantly, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder.

The connection between Schreker and the cultural foment of turn-of-the-century Vienna is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that his music for Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Birthday of the Infanta” accompanied a dance pantomime (whose staged premiere in America was also performed by the American Symphony), that was created for the 1908 Kunstschau, an exhibition which featured the second wave of Viennese modernist painting after the Secession of 1897. The Kunstschau featured such artists as Kokoschka and Schiele. What captivated Schreker and those artists was, as many observers have noted, the hidden psychology of the individual. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), its brilliance notwithstanding, was an achievement that cannot be understood in isolation from contemporary literature and philosophical speculation. The exploration of dreams and the unconscious and of hidden meaning was an obsession. The discovery of a geography of the unconscious suggested not only a new way to understand overt behavior, but also to reconsider the essence of the human spirit, particularly the role of sexuality, childhood, and memory. This metaphorical exploration into unseen dimensions of the psyche lent the power of music, especially in its sensual and atmospheric use (so audible in Schreker), enormous prestige. From Wagner to Schreker, music assumed the role of a coded language of understanding and revelation.

If the making of art and music in the nineteenth century was grounded in John Ruskin’s concept of art as possessed of a moral and spiritual power, by the first decades of the twentieth century, the making of art was perceived as having a unique capacity as expressive of the psyche. The complexity of human behavior and motivation and the hidden reaches of the psyche and imagination found their proper medium through art. The shattering of the conventions of literary narration, visual representation, and therefore the parallel habits of musical realism in use of harmony, melody, and form, were justified not merely by aesthetic criteria. The quest by Schreker, and for that matter Schoenberg and Berg, for new modes of musical expression was not driven only by a search for originality or radical individualism. Rather, new ways of painting, literature, and music were valued for the extent to which they could tell the truth about the inner workings of perception and consciousness. Clearly those revelations had a distinctly rebellious character, attacking the inherited hypocrisies regarding love and sexuality. Schreker’s connection to the visual artists from his Viennese milieu extended to the choice of designer for the production of Der ferne Klang, Alfred Roller. Roller had been a member of the Vienna Secession and Mahler’s colleague during the latter’s tenure at the Vienna Opera, during which radical new productions in the visual sense were mounted of Mozart and Wagner. Roller was also the designer for Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.

Schreker’s primary medium became the opera. By the time of his death in 1934, he completed nine operas. By 1920 he had become controversial but was also widely heralded as the most significant opera composer in the German-speaking world since the death of Wagner. A more logical choice might have been Strauss, which seems right from our perspective, but in the 1920s Strauss’s reputation was on the decline. He was considered old-fashioned, a holdover from the previous century and an enemy of modernism. What Schreker seemed to have that Strauss did not was the Wagnerian conceit of having created a new dramatic music for the future, with commitment to progressive musical innovation. For that reason, Schreker was singled out by the influential critic Paul Bekker and anointed—rather like Schumann’s anointing of Brahms—but this time as the true heir to Wagner. It was therefore no surprise when Schreker was appointed director of the Hochschule Fürmusik in Berlin in 1920. Under his tenure as director of that legendary school of music, he recruited not only Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith, but the pianist Artur Schnabel, the violinist Carl Flesch, and the cellist Emanuel Feurermann. To his lasting credit, Schreker was not only a great director; he was a great teacher. The list of his pupils is a veritable star chart of mid-twentieth century music, including the composers Berthold Goldschmidt, Alois Haba, Ernst Krenek, and Karol Rathaus. In an era where great performers were also composers, it is understandable that his pupils also included the pianists Victor Babin and the conductors Artur Rodzinski, Jascha Horenstein, and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, as well as long time collaborator and friend of Karol Szymanowski, Jerzy Fitelberg.

Schreker’s wide-ranging style did not always endear him to critics, Bekker’s advocacy notwithstanding. Schreker had more than his share of difficulties with negative responses to his work. In one of the rare instances when a composer is compelled to respond to his critics and is able to do so, Schreker simply took complete quotes from a host of critics and listed them one after another. Each of them said something completely contradictory and all the claims canceled one another out so as to appear ludicrous. In this humorous and biting amalgam in “Mein Charakterbild,” all Schreker did was respond to his critics by revealing their lack of logic, their hypocrisy, and their prejudices and ignorance.

The 1920s were a productive and largely rewarding decade in Schreker’s life. He was at the height of his fame and pioneered in collaborations with new technologies of recording and broadcasting. In the early 1930s he also engaged in the production of films of concerts in an effort to use the new medium. But politics intervened. Not only was Schreker not Aryan, but his music fit directly into the pseudo-moralistic category of “decadent.” Performances of Schreker’s operas were routinely interrupted in the years leading up to 1933 by Nazi hooligans. Schreker was forced to resign even before the Nazis seized power. He was officially removed from all his posts in September 1933. The shock of the success of the Nazis was for him particularly acute. His colleague Schoenberg, who was born of Jewish parents but converted to Protestantism, had the option of embracing Judaism; he reconverted and turned into an ardent Zionist. But Schreker had no reason to consider himself Jewish except by the most regressive standards of racial thinking. He had little reason to expect the fate that befell him. He had a stroke in December of 1933 and died in March the following year, at the age of 56.

What doubtlessly infuriated the right-wing anti-Semites of the early twentieth century was the sacrilegious claim that Franz Schreker was modernity’s Richard Wagner. Even though Schreker’s achievement is unthinkable without the example of Wagner—including the scale of his ambition and his role as his own librettist—not only in Der ferne Klang but also in all of his subsequent operas, the idea that this visionary composer could somehow inherit the mantle of the apostle of the myth of the Aryan race was too much to endure. Furthermore, the comparison with Wagner highlighted the enveloping and seductive experience of Schreker’s use of sound. Here was a new kind of “total” work of art, in which text, the visual, and the audible worked together as a magical unity. And it did not help that Schreker’s ardent apostle Paul Bekker, the leading critic of interwar Weimar, was himself a Jew. Schreker’s case only fueled the idea that not only aesthetic modernism but also modern psychology and science, (e.g., Freud and Einstein) were part of a massive Jewish conspiracy to corrupt the moral fabric of European culture. Bekker fled to New York and died in 1937, reduced to writing criticism a daily German-language newspaper.

Since Schreker died well before the war and never had the chance to emigrate, he was not among those survivors who at least had the opportunity to restart their careers after 1945. Also, he was not a direct victim of the war or Holocaust, and although identified by others as Jewish, he remained a Catholic his entire life, and therefore his cause never seemed unique nor lent itself to a sympathetic, posthumous revival. Furthermore, since his forte was music for the stage, and music for chorus and voice, there was not the depth of repertoire for orchestra and solo instruments or chamber music sufficient to jumpstart a revival of interest in his music. Operas, even on a concert stage, are expensive and complicated to mount. Finally, the taste of the decades immediately following the Second World War were directed toward a more astringent and less expansive modernism. Only with the explosion of interest in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the literature, art, and architecture of turn-of-the-century Vienna, did serious attention begin to return to the achievements of Franz Schreker. The revival of interest in Vienna of that period also corresponded with the decline in taste in the kind of radical musical modernism more closely associated with Webern and Schoenberg. The postmodernist romance with turn-of-the-century Vienna led rather to a renewed appreciation for the early Schoenberg, in Berg, and finally Schreker. For members of the audience interested in hearing more of Schreker’s music, I would recommend, in addition to his later operas, his Kammersymphonie (1916), and his settings from the 1920s of the poetry of Walt Whitman.

Many individuals have made this performance possible, including Christopher Hailey, who deserves the overwhelming credit for pioneering a revival of interest in Schreker’s music, particularly to the English-speaking world; Thurmond Smithgall, a long time advocate of this opera who has been instrumental in bringing it finally to the United States; our intrepid cast; and also the musicians of the American Symphony Orchestra, who have worked hard to make the best case for this music. It is our hope that this performance of Schreker’s best known and most influential work can help spark a Schreker renaissance in the United States, leading to long-overdue staged productions of the musically cogent, dramatically engaging, and psychologically penetrating operas that are the distinguished legacy of Franz Schreker.

Making Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Making Music: Composer-Conductors, performed on Feb 9, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Compared to other fields of musical performance, conducting is a relatively recent and modern phenomenon as a primary activity for a musician. It became a common and widespread profession only towards the end of the nineteenth century. Hans von Bülow (1830-1894) is remembered as one of the founding fathers of professional conducting. His place in the history of music is secured by the elevated standards he brought to orchestral performance, primarily through his leadership of the legendary Meiningen Orchestra. But Bülow was also one of the great pianists of his age and (unsuccessfully) the author of a number of musical compositions. His best-known work, Nirvana, Op. 20 (1866) is a failed attempt at a Lisztian tone poem. In the generation following Bülow, Arthur Nikisch (1855-1922), one of the most alluring, seductive, and charismatic personalities of the podium, was heralded exclusively as a conductor, though he began his career as a violinist in the Vienna Philharmonic.

Despite the emergence of conducting in the twentieth century as a discrete profession in its own right, to this day conducting by its very nature, unlike other arenas of music performance, ought never properly be the sole pursuit of a musician. One may have a dream of being a conductor from the outset, but the craft, which despite skeptics demands distinct technical proficiency, cannot be mastered without a foundation in some other branch of music. Hans Keller, the legendary critic, violinist, and chamber music specialist, once wrote that there are three “phony” musical professions: conductor, critic, and violist. This wry remark was a perhaps somewhat exaggerated way of saying that to excel in any of these specializations, an individual has first to be accomplished in something else within music. In history (until extremely recently) the greatest violists began their careers as fine violinists. The most valuable and enduring criticism has been penned by composers. And most conductors have been accomplished instrumentalists, or composers, or in some cases (one thinks of Hermann Scherchen and Ernest Ansermet) theoreticians and scholars. Perhaps the most fruitful combination has been that of conducting and composition. Indeed, one might say that it is extremely difficult to become a conductor without experiencing the struggle of composition. To prepare a work for performance, a conductor needs to be able to think like a composer.

It is not surprising, therefore, that if one looks beneath the surface at the majority of successful conductors during the twentieth century, one will discover that they often had greater or lesser degrees of experience and exposure as composers. Tonight’s concert selects four individuals who did more than attempt composition; they all produced admirable bodies of work. They excelled in both arenas, and yet, in the careers of some of them, one may also find a degree of irony. Given the close connection between conducting and composing, some of them found themselves in something of a balancing act. As conducting evolved into the celebrated and celebrity-obsessed profession it is today, many composer-conductors had to make choices. Sometimes historical circumstances forced these choices upon them. In all cases, these composer-conductors experienced the symbiosis of composing and conducting, and at the same time, the unique difficulties these parallel pursuits create.

These ironic paradoxes were already presaged by the legendary conductor-composers who preceded them. Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss were of course renowned both for composing and conducting. Mahler complained that he had only the summers in which to compose, since he was so busy performing during the season, first in Vienna and later New York. Strauss, unlike Mahler, ultimately limited his activities as a conductor in order to find more time to compose. Another group of artists made a different choice. Wilhelm Furtwängler and Otto Klemperer are still honored as great conductors, so much so that veneration for them has inspired periodic attempts to revive the music they wrote which, however well-crafted and competent, has remained unpersuasive. But perhaps a more poignant case is that of Bruno Walter. This legendary conductor also composed, but unlike many of his contemporary colleagues, he had shown a good deal of promise early in his compositional career. After some early success, he lost his nerve in part owing to the absence of encouragement by his mentor, Mahler. At a concert two seasons ago, the American Symphony Orchestra gave the first modern performance of Bruno Walter’s First Symphony. Based on the success of that performance, the Symphony will shortly be available in its first commercial recording with NDR–Hamburg (where Walter and Mahler first met).

George Szell’s case is most closely analogous to that of Walter. Szell was a prodigy not only as pianist but as composer, almost rivaling the early success of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. He was the youngest of all of Max Reger’s pupils, and he was given a contract by the Viennese music publisher Universal at age fourteen. Like Walter, Szell’s compositions, which include chamber and orchestral music, show amazing facility. But despite acclaim, Szell came to a personal conclusion that his music was unoriginal and too derivative. Furthermore, his success as a conductor was so meteoric that he decided to concentrate on that, leaving his career as both composer and concert pianist behind. Although his music had been published with a prestigious firm, he never looked back. But did the rise of this great conductor have to mean the disappearance of perhaps an equally great composer? Chances are that you are familiar with Szell’s conducting—now hear him as a composer.

The case of Paul Kletzki is tragically different from those mentioned above. Kletzki is remembered as a highly respected conductor who once directed the orchestras of Liverpool, Dallas, and Bern, and who was a frequent guest with the Israel Philharmonic. But as a conductor he never achieved the postwar eminence that Szell did, and his career was genuinely damaged by the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. One of the reasons for this is that before 1939, Kletzki really focused on composition. In addition to the early success described in Timothy Jackson’s fine program notes, Kletzki was singled out as a young compositional talent by the conductor and great Liszt scholar Peter Raabe. Raabe championed the young Kletzki until the Nazis came to power, at which point Raabe joined them, eventually to became Strauss’s successor as head of the Reichsmusikkammer. The only Jewish composers whose reputations could outlast the conditions in Germany and Austria were established and internationally prominent figures such as Schoenberg and Kurt Weill. But Kletzki had too fragile a foothold. The fact that two of his primary advocates—Raabe and Furtwängler—collaborated with the Nazi regime and therefore abandoned his music made his situation even worse.

Timothy Jackson deserves a great deal of credit for the recent revival of interest in Kletzki’s music. My own interest in Kletzki, however, is also somewhat personal. He and his family were friends with my grandfather’s family. His was a name I heard as a child. I had the privilege of meeting him when he was conducting in Mexico and visited my uncle. I recall even then an aspect of resignation, if not bitterness, which the history of his career makes all too understandable. There has been a great deal of recent interest in those composers whose careers were cut short by the Holocaust. The trauma of displacement and suppression and, ironically, the good fortune of survival (only ten percent of prewar Polish Jewry survived), brought Kletzki to a comprehensible but compelling condition: that of silence. It is my hope that this performance of his Violin Concerto will assist the overdue reexamination of Kletzki’s achievement as a composer.

The two remaining composer-conductors on tonight’s program are American Jews. Harold Farberman, to whom I owe a personal debt of gratitude as my teacher, was born into a family of Klezmer musicians on the Lower East Side. A wunderkind percussionist, he became the Boston Symphony’s youngest member when he was barely twenty. During his tenure in Boston, he turned to both composition and conducting. One of his operas, The Losers, was chosen to open the Juilliard Opera Theater. As a conductor, he was an early champion of the music of Charles Ives. He became the chief conductor of the Oakland Symphony and guest conducted throughout Europe. In the 1970s, he turned his attention to the teaching and training of conductors. He founded the Conductors Guild, and in the early 1980s, the Conductors Institute. He is the author of one of the leading conducting textbooks, The Art of Conducting Technique. Among those who have studied with him are Marin Alsop, Paavo Jarvi, and Guillermo Figueroa, music director of the Puerto Rico and New Mexico Symphonies. The work on tonight’s program is a new work that brings into focus Farberman’s unique command of percussion instruments.

Finally, there is perhaps the most familiar composer-conductor of all to the present generation of American audiences: Leonard Bernstein. Like Szell, Bernstein was a fantastic pianist. Indeed, he played the piano part in the Second Symphony in its initial performances, though the pianist most commonly associated with this work is Lukas Foss—yet another example of a supremely multi-talented musician with powerful accomplishments as a composer, pianist, and conductor.

Bernstein’s career is perhaps the most complicated example of the difficulty active conductors have encountered maintaining a parallel life as a composer. Bernstein pursued both avenues at full throttle, as it were. If that were not enough, he wrote not only concert music, but theater and film music as well. He also tried his hand at writing about music. His most famous composition is certainly West Side Story (1957), but there is as well a large body of work in the classical concert tradition. Bernstein’s so-called “serious” compositions have been the subject of widely divergent criticism. Many of his works reveal a dimension of imitation. If Szell’s music reminds one of Strauss, much of Bernstein’s music evokes Copland. Nevertheless, there are in Bernstein’s canon of music for the concert stage works that are original and justifiably celebrated. These include the Serenade (1954) and tonight’s offering, the Second Symphony (1949/65).

But perhaps the most remarkable dimension of Bernstein’s achievement, apart from his brilliance as a conductor and composer, is the role that he played as a musician in the public sphere. Blessed with an incredible intelligence, eloquence, and the privilege of a fine education (including an undergraduate degree from Harvard), Bernstein became the last century’s most powerful advocate for the importance of great music as an indispensable part of the culture of American democracy. His use of television, his activities as a mentor, and the superstardom he achieved in part through his charismatic personality and the success of West Side Story, made him an inspiration for generations of young Americans, incipient professionals, and audience members alike.

Pioneering Influence: Cesar Franck

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Pioneering Influence: César Franck, performed on Jan 7, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In the history of music, the influence exerted by a composer and his work has had little correlation with whether the composer ever engaged in formal teaching. Not all composers of genius have been interested in or been adept at teaching. Mozart had pupils, but none of them have been of real consequence. But in close historical proximity to Mozart came Beethoven, upon whom Mozart’s music had considerable impact. At a greater chronological distance, Mozart became the model for the aesthetic ambitions of Richard Strauss. Neither Beethoven (who took pupils) nor certainly Brahms (who did not) can be said to have been effective as teachers, though in both cases they had their share of imitators among younger composers. Anton Bruckner was a skilled teacher, but of counterpoint rather than composition, and no school of composition can be said to have emerged from his pedagogical efforts. As he once replied to a student who asked him why he was so conservative as a teacher when his own music seemed so forward-looking, students should never imitate a teacher’s work. Carl Czerny’s study under Beethoven did not make him memorable as a composer (perhaps unfairly), but he was a great teacher and every piano student knows his seminal piano studies. Robert Fuchs is another composer whose works are no longer remembered even though many of the finest composers of the first half of the twentieth century were his pupils.

Ironically, perhaps the most influential composer in the second half of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner, enjoyed an effect that was pervasive and international, but had no pupils in the strict sense of the word. Like his father-in-law Liszt (who nevertheless loved to teach), Wagner was suspicious of institutions of learning—particularly conservatories. The conservatories in the late nineteenth century more than amply returned the favor; most of them fulminated against the corrosive influence of Wagnerism on a young generation. Early in his career at Harvard, John Knowles Paine, the first full-time professor of composition in that venerable institution, was said to have suggested to his pupils that exposure to Wagner’s music was bad for one’s health.

However, there have been examples of those who were teachers as well as compositional masters and innovators with a lasting influence on future generations. Consider, for example, Arnold Schoenberg, Aaron Copland, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. But perhaps the most impressive record of confluence between enduring artistic greatness and a commitment to teaching through formal instruction may be found in the French musical tradition. The list of great composer-teachers is impressive and includes the Belgian-born César Franck, Gabriel Fauré, Paul Dukas, Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez. Indeed, the history of French music reflects the consequences of a dramatic centralization of institutions of art and learning that began in earnest under Louis XIV, continued through the French Revolution, and was largely completed by Napoleon. Paris was among the first modern national cultural capitals where (in contrast to Washington, DC or Brasilia) secular culture, religion, and political power flourished symbiotically in the same locale. The institutions of French music of the Conservatoire, the Prix de Rome, the great churches with their imposing organs, and the opera and public concert life all created a framework that acted as a magnet for ambitious, international talents. Paris, far more than London, was a cultural center at the start of the post-Napoleonic era and was home to the likes of Chopin, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Wagner, and Offenbach. In the last third of the nineteenth century, as France expanded as an imperial power, Paris also became a central gateway to the non-western world: Africa, Asia, and the Pacific.

But perhaps precisely because of its remarkable history of political and social coherence (especially compared to German-speaking Europe) in terms of the overlap of language, geography, and religion, France’s discrete and solid national identity was especially vulnerable to non-French influences in music. Operatic life in the first part of the nineteenth century was dominated by Italians, ranging from Cherubini and Rossini to Verdi. French romanticism in music by native composers stood (with the sole exception of Berlioz) in the shadow of two foreigners, Chopin and Liszt. After the failed revolution of 1848 and the coup d’état of Napoleon III, French musical culture, despite that country’s political and economic strength, experienced its most radical domination from outside its borders. This took the form of the profound French enthusiasm for the music of Wagner. One of the most influential instruments of cultural influence was none other than the journal Revue Wagnerienne, and the rabid partisanship for Wagner that extended from Charles Baudelaire to the young Claude Debussy.

But the Germanic influence of Wagner in the second half of the century was selectively transformed just as Beethoven’s influence had been earlier in the century, particularly on Berlioz. Two composers who were popular with audiences around the world but not particularly in France, Brahms and Mahler, suggest the unique and distinct Wagnerian vision among the French. The Wagnerian co-existed alongside a parallel French attraction for the exotic (from a French point of view) that extended to Spanish and Russian music. But it was a normative non-exotic ideal in French music that remained—with the possible exception of Georges Bizet—almost embarrassingly contingent on the Wagnerian (for or against) towards the end of the nineteenth century, as Emmanuel Chabrier’s Gwendoline (1886), a compelling French operatic response to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (premiered 1865), reveals.

This highly simplified and reductive account can nevertheless help us understand commonplace German prejudices about French music as decidedly superficial: consider, for example, the way Gounod and Massenet were received when set alongside the German parallels of Brahms and Wagner. In the context of the deadly political rivalry and conflict between France and Germany that came to a head in 1870 with the Franco-Prussian War, and which was revisited in various crises from the Dreyfus Affair to the most brutal of all, the First World War, there was an understandable and intense search among French musicians and intellectuals after 1870 to define a contemporary concert musical culture that was distinctly French and independent of German influence.

And indeed, a self-consciously French school of composition did emerge. The founding figure in that development during the second half of the nineteenth century was César Franck. With broad brush strokes one might paint a narrative canvas that links Franck to Messiaen and Dutilleux. Along the way, we can locate as descendents of Franck not only the composers on today’s program but also Vincent d’Indy, Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saëns, and the members of Les Six. Interwoven into the continuity of that line is a French engagement with Catholicism and sacred music in a manner that was distinctively characteristic. It includes an impressive output of music for choir and, above all, the organ. In no other nineteenth-century European culture has the most grand, traditional, and pre-modern of instruments held such sway. One thinks immediately of Charles Marie Widor (1845-1937). The influence of the organ can be heard particularly in the music of Franck but in a manner very audibly different from the influence of the organ on, for example, Anton Bruckner’s symphonic music.

Franck’s originality ironically stems in part from a dialogue with Wagner, particularly in the constructs of musical duration and syntax. Franck inspired through his music a French penchant for cyclical structure and an intense interest in color and the spatial atmosphere of sound. The example of César Franck led many French composers to adapt classical procedures of musical transformation and development to recalibrate the listener’s perception of time away from the linear and narrative. Perhaps one could suggest that Wagner’s obsession with the connection between music and the dramatic—with epic and language—led Franck and his followers to connect music to the one arena in which Wagner was clearly weakest: the visual. If German-speaking Europe confidently evinced superiority in music during the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century (an arrogance that extended from Mozart to Schoenberg), it was during precisely that same time period that the French dominated the European scene in the visual arts in architecture, sculpture, and painting, as well as the decorative arts of design and fashion. Their predominance in the visual dimension also made the French pioneers in the area of photography and early film.

It is therefore not surprising that so many observers have commented on the affinities between French music and the visual experience. The use of music in a painterly fashion by the French pioneered a direction in the creation of instrumental sound in which Debussy would come to occupy a preeminent place. It is this attachment to visual culture that might be adduced as one of the inspirations for the unique modern tradition of French musical orchestration and harmonic usage. Wagnerian innovations were reformulated and the visual given its own musical expression in the theatrical and dramatic—even by composers like Saint-Saëns, who sought to follow more in the path of Liszt and Brahms than Wagner. Indeed all the composers on today’s program, with the exception of Franck himself, were masterful composers of operas, as Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907), Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus (1895), and the unfortunately lesser known operas of Magnard suggest. When it came to the large dramatic form, Franck himself excelled in the oratorio.

Furthermore, as the work by Chausson on today’s program demonstrates, one also cannot discount the impact on French music of the distinctive sound of the French language and French poetry. The rhythms and sounds of speech are easily identifiable in music of certain other European national traditions, such as sounds of Czech in Janáček and Hungarian in Bartók. But the same link between language and music may also be heard in the music on today’s program.

With the exception of Franck’s Symphony in D minor, the works on today’s program have never enjoyed wide popularity. Paul Dukas, himself an influential teacher whose most famous pupil was Messiaen, was pathologically self-critical and left only a handful of works to posterity. But even so, his fine Symphony has never approached the popularity of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897). Among Chausson’s works, only the Poème for violin and orchestra, Op. 25 (1896) can be considered a staple in the repertory. There is sadly not a single work by Magnard that has received regular attention by performers and listeners. But the Franck Symphony became one of the pillars in what emerged as the standard repertory in the twentieth century. It benefited from the advent of recording. Its popularity during the mid-twentieth century was almost extreme and excessive. Few works were so generously represented on the old 78 rpm format and on the long-playing record. By the mid-1950s, the work had become if not a cliché certainly a war-horse, rivaling the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, the Pathétique. But fashions change, and Franck’s Symphony has experienced in recent decades an audible measure of neglect. It is relegated more often than not to the margin of near-pops concerts. The generation for whom Franck’s Symphony was a welcome and familiar part of the repertoire has passed on, leaving the contemporary audience of today the opportunity to rediscover it and the greatness of Franck with a fresh perspective.

Symphonic Mexico

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Symphonic Mexico, performed on Nov 17, 2006 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The fact that too many Americans, even those with a college education, know as little about the history of Mexico as they do is a cause for consternation and wonderment. The relations between the United States and Mexico have long been complicated and troubled. The ongoing immigration to the United States from Mexico constitutes the most important influx of new population in modern American history since the massive wave of immigration from eastern and central Europe between 1880 and the mid-1920s. Furthermore, in the nineteenth century Mexico and the United States were at war. What is today a large part of the United States was once part of Mexico. Yet all that remains in the popular imagination are the textbook versions of the Mexican-American War, images of John Wayne at the Alamo, vague clichés of romanticized Mexican revolutionaries such as Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, and the Mexican food industry in the United States. Mexico for many northern Americans has been little more than a locus for tourism, an object of fascination for its pre-Columbian Aztec and Mayan civilizations, or for a few extremists, a cause for paramilitary patrols.

The European conquest of Mexico which began in 1519 was among the most brutal and traumatic examples of European expansionism. Ultimately, over centuries the Spanish presence in Mexico created a unique and powerful synthesis between colonizers and colonized, the survivors of destroyed civilizations. Religion, language, and daily life in Mexico are a powerful amalgam of European and indigenous traditions framed in large part by a long painful history of radical inequality and economic exploitation. In the nineteenth century, Mexico experienced several phases of revolutionary political change. The central figures in the history of an independent Mexican political tradition were Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla (1753-1811) and Benito Juárez (1806-1872).

Part of that political story involves the imposition by European powers of a monarch, Maximilian, the brother of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef. Franz Josef, suspicious of his far more gifted younger sibling, conspired with Napoleon III to install Maximilian and his wife Carlotta as the rulers of Mexico. Ironically, Maximilian turned out to be a sympathetic figure who became deeply attached to Mexico. Despite the presence of French troops, the Emperor was ultimately executed by Juárez when the Republic of Mexico was established. (Interestingly, it was the experience of the French soldiers returning from Mexico that inspired the imagination of the painter Henri Rousseau, even to the point of his falsely claiming he had been to Mexico himself.) But this hard-fought independence led to a persistent oligarchy that was challenged in the Revolution of 1910, in the era of Francisco I. Madero (1873-1913). That revolution remained incomplete, even though it resulted in a democracy that has persisted to this day, albeit with constant tensions and accusations of failure to institute genuine democratic institutions and agrarian reform.

The United States has played a constant but dubious role as Mexico’s near neighbor, and has with some justification been seen by many Mexicans as a force against genuine democratization. At the same time, the sustained population growth of Mexico has led to the influx of Mexicans into the United States, which has resulted not only in an intense economic exchange but also a rich mutual influence of cultures. In the 1920s, the government of Mexico, much to growing American displeasure (despite FDR’s “Good Neighbor” policies) took a turn to the left under the presidencies of Plutarco Elias Calles (1877-1945) and Lázaro Cárdenas (1895-1970). In this period, the oil industry of Mexico was nationalized and the Mexican government took a proud position during the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the republican cause and socialism. Mexican democracy in this era deepened its sharp secular and anti-clerical posture.

It was also in the 1930s that Leon Trotsky lived in Mexico and the renaissance of Mexican painting, particularly the muralists, took place. Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and his wife Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), now made popular by books and movies, were what we now term as left-wing intellectuals, as was the last of the great muralists, David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974).

The twentieth-century achievement in the visual arts in Mexico, from Orozco to Tamayo, has received the most attention north of the border. Next in line have been the great writers of modern Mexico, such as Mariano Azuela, Rosario Castellanos, Octavio Paz, and Carlos Fuentes. In literature and painting, the twin influences—European and indigenous—have continued to make their mark, with the addition of the appropriation of European modernism. Music, however, stands as perhaps the least disseminated dimension of the cultural renaissance of twentieth-century Mexico. Music for the concert hall written by Mexican composers since the early 1900s also reveals a strong allegiance to distinctly Mexican traditions and an adaptation of European models. The main concert hall of Mexico City, the Palacio de Bellas Artes, was begun in 1900 although it was not completed until 1930.

The European influence in music in the case of Mexico dates from the sixteenth century, but it became especially profound from the 1930s on. Mexico became a destination for European émigrés particularly after the fall of the Spanish Republic. But other Europeans went there as well, notably Marcel Rubin, the Austrian composer, and Henryk Szeryng, the great Polish-Jewish violinist who made Mexico his home. He was one of many émigré European musicians, some of whom taught at the National Conservatory. Erich Kleiber, the justly legendary Austrian conductor, who was not Jewish but an anti-fascist, and who arranged Revueltas’s film music into the suite on tonight’s program, fled to South America, a fact that led him to develop a long-standing interest in the composers of Latin America.

Significantly, one of Carlos Chávez’s closest friends was Aaron Copland, who fell in love with Mexico in the 1930s and made it his second home. One of Copland’s greatest achievements was his pioneering support for his Latin American colleagues, especially Chávez (1899-1978). Copland was tireless in his efforts to promote the work of his Latin American contemporaries and bring their achievements to the attention of the American public. Like Copland and Rubin, Chávez was influenced by French modernism both in music and literature. Chávez’s Symphony on tonight’s program reveals the sustained symbiosis between Mexican intellectuals and artists and twentieth-century French culture.

It is safe to say that the twentieth-century Mexican achievement in art, music, and literature rivals that of the United States. While Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940) will probably be remembered as the most distinctive and compelling compositional talent, and the composer with the most persistent interest in the indigenous Mexican traditions, the pride of place in terms of leadership in musical culture must be given to Chávez, without whom most of the prominent musical institutions in Mexico would not exist. He was a tireless organizer and a brilliant conductor, who created the infrastructure that has sustained Mexican musicians since the middle of the last century. One of my most memorable experiences from my adolescence, when I spent summers with my grandparents and uncle, who emigrated in 1946 as Holocaust survivors to Mexico City, was to listen to Chávez conduct the orchestra he had founded. Also in Mexico I had the privilege to hear Stravinsky when he and Robert Craft conducted the National Orchestra in Mexico City.

The oldest and arguably the most conservative composer on tonight’s program is Manuel Ponce (1882-1948). But despite the Romantic surface of most of Ponce’s music, in his Violin Concerto one encounters the canción, a particularly Latin musical genre related in part to Caribbean equivalents, replete with distinctive rhythms and dance-like qualities. The canción ranchera is in fact closely associated with the Mexican Revolution of 1910. Like other forms of canción, it stresses a deep emotionalism and settings of text that frequently describe the travails of soldiers. In Ponce’s Concerto, this distinctly Mexican element is integrated into a European concerto model.

As Leonora Saavedra aptly points out in her program note, this late work became an object of controversy among Mexican critics. This in turn reflects the fact that in cultures that have experienced the confrontation between European conquest and domination, and indigenous traditions, varying avenues of artistic expression present themselves, each of which competes for legitimacy as authentic and distinctive of a national identity. The European musical traditions that emanated from Europe, particularly France and Germany, have contained within themselves the unspoken conceit of objective aesthetic merit. Cultures considered as being “on the periphery,” whether those cultures are Russian, Hungarian, Scandinavian, even American, and certainly Mexican, have, for the artists within those cultures, often inspired a debate over the modes and propriety of adaptation.

But for both the composers and their audiences, there is no need to apply a simplistic notion of an authentic national voice. Béla Bartók may have argued against what he regarded to be a corrupt notion of what was truly Hungarian (in that case, gypsy-influenced music), but there is no right or wrong in what ought to be regarded as genuinely Hungarian. The power of musical composition as an art form rests in the fact that it is ultimately the expression of an individual voice that is a construct of many influences and inspirations. It is this which makes composers starting with Liszt and reaching to Ligeti in their own way individualistic, universal, and Hungarian. The same eclectic appreciation needs to be applied to the case of Mexican composers. Each of the composers on tonight’s program reveals a distinct brilliance and originality. Each work played tonight is suffused with a deep commitment to the richness of the Mexican national and cultural heritage.

If each possesses a cultural essence, it is developed out of a unique interpretation of identity. In point of fact, the history of any nation—Hungary, Mexico, even Germany and France—shows that cultural identity is fed by many sources and is always in a state of flux and flow. Indeed, is this not how cultures have always enriched themselves? To try to build a security fence around cultural identity is a fool’s endeavor.

One of the enduring virtues of the United States is its history as an immigrant nation that believes in its unique hallmark as an open and free democracy. The privilege of being an American in this day and age is the opportunity to protect that legacy. The traditions brought by Mexico have long been part of America’s tradition, and they certainly extend beyond language and simplistic markers of national identity and origin. Tonight’s program is a tribute to the ongoing vitality of Mexican music, and its glorious achievements beyond the familiar folk and popular forms. The Mexican concert music in the classical tradition presented tonight by the American Symphony Orchestra (in proper fulfillment of the adjective “American”) is just a sampling of the richness of the repertoire for the concert hall by Mexican composers of the twentieth century and of today.

The Art of the Psalm

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Art of the Psalm, performed on Oct 22, 2006 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Romanticism in the nineteenth century followed the so-called Age of Enlightenment, in which reason was celebrated and religion was tarnished as superstition, rigid doctrine, and the blind acceptance of authority. Romanticism championed the wondrous diversity of nature rather than its Newtonian predictability and regularity. A revival of religion accompanied romanticism. The art of music benefited from this revival. Music seemed to invoke the boundless and the mysterious, even the mystical, and certainly the spiritual. The religious revival that spread throughout Europe before 1848 among Protestants and Catholics alike reveled in man’s capacity to sense the divine and live in awe of it. Perhaps no vehicle is more appropriate to express the compatibility between the avowal of the distinctly human and the humble acknowledgement of God than music. Among Lutherans, the power of music was privileged, for in Luther’s claim that faith within the individual was the goal of the religious experience, music seemed to be the natural and most effective means of access and confirmation. Following the moral of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis, man’s ambition to understand the divine through language and logic was replaced, curiously, by the celebration of something distinctly human but not necessarily divine: the ability to make music. The great achievements of music-making were not viewed as competitive with divine truth in the same way that made philosophy and science, by contrast, consistently suspect. Rather, the greater the music, the more it mirrored human respect for and love of God. In keeping with the Romantic idea that great art was a matter of inspiration, music could be perceived to be the inspiration from God granted to the individual’s religious sentiment, a communication of His grace and divine nature.

For Catholic Europe, the role of music in religious devotion and its connection to secular romanticism was a bit more complicated because of the influence of medieval church traditions, Papal authority, and varying disputes about the “right” music to accompany the liturgy. As the criticism, even in the late-eighteenth century, of the Mass settings by Mozart and Haydn by church representatives reveals, the Catholic clergy was suspicious of the use in sacred works of secular musical styles that were linked to the everyday and the sensual. Consequently, the practice of borrowing from Protestant models during the nineteenth century, as the music of Liszt, Bruckner, and Reger suggests, flourished. This practice aimed to reconcile liturgical traditions and counter-Reformation orthodoxies with trends in contemporary music-making outside of the church. Catholics, like Protestants, sought to fashion musical religious expression into something desirable in the context of the church service, so that the communal awareness of the body faithful could be deepened. Hymn-singing in the Protestant tradition created a natural bridge to the secular choral tradition. The Catholic communities of Bavaria and Austria adapted this Protestant model in a manner compatible with Catholic doctrine and canonical stricture.

Concurrent with this historical process spanning the nineteenth century within Europe’s Christian communities, was the gradual social, cultural, and economic emancipation of Europe’s Jewish population, particularly in German-speaking regions. Legal emancipation began first in the 1780s and it led to a powerful movement of reform and modernization among Jews that sought to reconcile Jewish traditions with secular life outside of the ghetto. The pioneer in this integration of Jews into European society as Jews was Moses Mendelssohn. The irony, of course, is that his famous grandson was converted and became the most significant composer of Protestant church music in the first half of the nineteenth century. However, the appropriation of traditions of secular concert music and even Christian religious music by Jews was not always connected to conversion and the abandonment of Jewish faith and identity. Felix Mendelssohn and the musical practices of early romanticism resulted in the development of a modernized music for the Jewish service and liturgy. The most famous practitioners of this movement were Louis Lewandowski (1821-1894) in Berlin and Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890) in Vienna. Sulzer was the chief cantor and overseer of music for the Jewish community of Vienna. Liszt and Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s advocate and an arch-critic of Liszt, were both great admirers of Sulzer’s prowess as a singer and musician. The sounds and practices of secular music therefore made their mark in the modernized expression of Jewish faith among acculturated Jews in the major cities of German-speaking Europe.

There is no part of the Old Testament that has functioned more effectively as a bridge between Jews and Christians than the 150 Psalms. In the Jewish tradition, these were the work of David, not a prophet but a king and a musician. Music has always been a central part of the manner in which Jews have expressed their faith. The Levites were second only to the priestly Kohanim, and were the musicians of the Temple. None other than Arnold Schoenberg would mirror this long link between music and faith among Jews in his opera fragment Moses und Aron (1932). Its central subject is the inadequacy of language as the communicative medium of divine truth. Moses stuttered, and Aaron, his fluent brother, was inadequate to the true understanding of the divine. But in Schoenberg’s hands, Moses spoke through music, like King David.

Among Christians, Jesus was said to have descended from David, and therefore the Psalms were easily interpreted as compatible with Christ’s teachings. That is the cosmopolitan aspect that links all four works on today’s program. Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) was a devout provincial Austrian Catholic, a nearly fanatical believer in the universal legitimacy of the Church and its liturgy. Franz Liszt (1811-1886), who took minor orders in middle age, was a truly Romantic Catholic, immune to doctrinal rigidity, but devoted to the authority of Rome. Max Reger (1873-1916) represents a bridge between Catholicism and Protestantism. His compositional ideal was none other than J.S. Bach, and he appropriated Protestant musical traditions for his sacred work. Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) was born into the Sephardic Jewish community of Vienna and would, like Schoenberg, convert as an adult to Protestantism. Franz Schreker (1878-1934) was born and raised as a Catholic, but had sufficient Jewish heritage to qualify him under the Nazis, much to his horror, as an object of discrimination, and, had he lived longer, as a candidate for extermination.

This strange and poignant amalgam of religious heritages encouraged each of these composers to turn to the common ground of the psalm for the expression of their musical ambitions. Liszt’s Psalm 13 focuses on a text that theologically is the most challenging of the five psalms presented here. It picks up a theme articulated by Job: the fear of God’s abandonment. Liszt sets, with nearly operatic gestures, the plea of the psalmist for God’s grace. What attracted Liszt was the last line of Psalm 13, in which the musician promises God that in return for salvation, he will sing unto the Lord. Bruckner, in a work written late in his career, turned appropriately to the last Psalm, which is a psalm of praise. Fittingly enough, the highest praise humanity can provide God from the humble station of a mortal yet articulate creature is the unique praise of musical sound. The breath of humanity for the psalmist takes shape in trumpets, harps, stringed instruments, cymbals and organ. The young Franz Schreker, with characteristic ambition, chose a psalm of thanksgiving, Psalm 116. The account of faith and gratitude is marked by its emphasis on the consciousness of being the servant of God through a public demonstration of fidelity. What better medium for that public rather than private expression of faith than music? Zemlinsky turned to possibly the most famous psalm of all, the one familiar to individuals of all faiths, Psalm 23. Although this psalm celebrates the confidence that true faith brings despite the trials of mortal life, it curiously has become the psalm read at funerals, both among Jews and Christians. Since faith is an attribute of the soul and not the body, for Christians, Psalm 23 can represent the immortality of the soul and the triumph of faith over death. For Jews the psalm can signal the faith of the living faced with the finality of the death of those fellow humans closest to them, whom the living are chosen to survive. The last psalm on this program, Psalm 100, is a psalm of joy that celebrates the human debt to the divine, the acknowledgement of God’s presence, God’s power, and immortality. Once again music itself becomes the medium of reflection, for as Reger’s setting makes evident to the ear, the praise of God takes the form of a joyful noise that expresses happiness and gratitude for God’s everlasting truth. Psalm 100 evokes God’s merciful and triumphant nature.

The connecting musical attributes audible in each of these composers’ works adapted to each setting of the psalms are an emphasis on counterpoint and the employment of fugal writing. Through the density and multiplicity of simultaneous individual voices, human ingenuity is displayed. Imitative counterpoint becomes a sign of respect for the brilliance and complexity of God’s creation. The unique character of extensive counterpoint is not only located in its dynamic logic but in its inevitable drive to dramatic and affirmative resolution. Dramatic counterpoint leads to a musical representation not only of the power of faith but an affirmation of the clarity and rightness of divine justice.

The works on this concert date from the second half of the nineteenth century, when, as in the mid-eighteenth century, human confidence in rationality and science reached new heights, pushing mysticism and the irrational dimensions of spirituality somewhat to the margins. Yet, at the same time, these overtly tradition-bound works that reflect a debt to conservative practices both musical and intellectual, possess uncanny suggestions of twentieth-century modernism, a movement that would flourish as a secular rebellion during the first decades of the twentieth century. In each of these works, one can find the suggestion of the innovative music of the twentieth century. Music, that unique human gift used to communicate the affirmation of humility in the presence of the divine, becomes wittingly in the hands of these masters a means to express individuality and originality, the inexhaustible power of the human imagination, the freedom of the spirit that for all of these composers was God’s greatest gift to humanity.

From Russia with Mozart

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert From Russia with Mozart, performed on June 11, 2006 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The history of Russian music in the classical tradition is well understood in terms of the ambivalences and contradictions in its development. During the nineteenth century, issues of national identity became intertwined in an art form that was initially perceived as an aspect of Russia’s forced Europeanization or Westernization. Since the days of Peter the Great, Russia’s legendary modernizer who built the magnificent eighteenth-century city on the sea that bears his name, the Russian monarchy and aristocracy emulated the ways of their neighbors to the West. This created a conflict with religious orthodox traditionalism and rural customs and culture. The notorious eighteenth-century monarch Catherine the Great, German by birth, further deepened an ambition to bring Russia into the West through art, architecture, music, and learning. The language spoken at court was French. But even despite Russia’s crucial role in the defeat of Napoleon, which gave it a permanent presence in European politics, western Europe—England and France, and the German-speaking principalities—viewed Russia as strange, vast, and exotic—an “oriental” backwater. Alexis de Tocqueville helped popularize the idea that Europe’s future was contingent on the twin pillars of grandeur and barbarity: America and Russia. This sentiment was echoed repeatedly by European intellectuals throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In the field of opera and concert music, Russia was a relative latecomer. The Russian court patronized Italian opera. Indeed Verdi’s La Forza del Destino was premiered in St. Petersburg in 1862. But professional music-making got off to a late start in comparison to the rest of Europe. The milestones of Russian musical history in terms of classical music date exclusively from the nineteenth century and point to seminal contributions by non-Russians, including Liszt, who toured Russia in the 1840s. Russia, like America, remained a frontier well into the early 1900s.

But Russia’s leading composers and writers were both fully aware of their position as “provincials” and yet proud of a long and venerable cultural heritage. Pushkin may have admired Byron, and Tolstoy George Sand, but they were equally keenly aware of something particularly Russian which deserved to be celebrated. After the revolt of the Decembrists in 1825 and the bloody suppression that followed, a permanent émigré community formed, based primarily in Paris, where Turgenev, for example, lived. Indeed, absence from a cold, harsh autocratic homeland seemed to become a prerequisite for Russian artists and intellectuals in search of the Russian spirit. Perhaps because of an identity sharpened by exile, an influential and original Russian voice emerged in both literature and music after 1830.

The unequivocally towering figure in the history of Russian arts and letters was Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), who died in a duel at the age of 37. For Russians, he is perhaps the most beloved of all writers. There is often more than one statue to him in the major Russian cities where flowers placed by appreciative readers may still be found. Vladimir Nabokov’s edition of Eugene Onegin and the controversy surrounding it generated by Edmund Wilson is just one recent example of the continuing allure of Pushkin’s work. One is hard pressed to find a Russian composer who has not set some of Pushkin’s verse. Even Prokofiev wrote incidental music for Eugene Onegin.

Pushkin himself, not unlike many of the greatest artists and writers, was profoundly self-critical. In Mozart and Salieri, the tension between the two figures has an autobiographical dimension. One might assume that Pushkin represented the Mozart of Russian letters. But Pushkin thought his contemporary, the romantic poet Mihail Yurievich Lermontov (1814-1841; author of the seminal novel A Hero of Our Times) was actually the true Mozart of poetry. It was Salieri, the hardworking, politic also-ran, deprived of the spontaneous genius of a Mozart, with whom Pushkin identified.

The irony of that identification is instructive. Ever since Amadeus, Peter Shaffer’s dubious popularization of Pushkin’s drama, Mozart has been associated with a post-romantic notion of childlike undisciplined genius, whereas Salieri has suffered from a characterization of labored mediocrity. But Pushkin knew that was not quite the case. That anachronistic assessment drastically undervalues Salieri’s music and accomplishment as well as his marked influence in music history. Similarly, there was nothing naïve, blasé, or undisciplined in Mozart’s musical creation.

The figure of Mozart—precisely because he represented an elaborate and refined eighteenth-century classicism that contained a powerful political subtext of criticism—was deeply significant to Russian artists and audiences. In the context of the courts and urban patrons of Europe, Mozart had managed to give voice to an intense expressiveness combining music and text. He left a legacy that far outlasted his more conventional contemporaries. For Russian artists in the early nineteenth century trying to fashion a balance between individual expression and tradition, Mozart was an icon of transformative originality, a symbol of the triumph of the individual artist. He thus became a seminal figure, invoked repeatedly in Russian music in the most unexpected ways. Tchaikovsky, for example, wrote his fourth suite, Mozartiana, in 1887, and paid a lengthy homage to Mozart in the loaded pastoral of the second act of The Queen of Spades (1890, also based on a Pushkin text).

Perhaps it is not entirely surprising then that Pushkin, already deeply engaged with Mozart, chose for one of his last works a subject indelibly associated with the composer: Don Juan. The Stone Guest cannot but help invoke Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The overwhelming power of Mozart’s setting of Lorenzo Da Ponte’s brilliant libretto, and the subtlety with which Mozart treats the issues of infidelity, desire, and the libertine privilege of the aristocratic class, have made the opera an object of continual, intense scrutiny. The figure of Don Juan was originally derived from the behavior of a notorious Spanish king, but Mozart’s depiction led the figure to become eventually a symbol of the romantic movement, as evidenced by the interest of Byron, Pushkin, and Kierkegaard. Especially for Russians living under an autocracy in which crown and church worked hand in hand, one of the most intriguing dimensions of Mozart’s version of Don Juan was the tension Mozart created between the overt moralism audible in the exercise of retribution by the Statue and the heroic exercise of liberty by the Don. There can be no more poignant emblem of cold authoritarianism than The Stone Guest. Mozart’s Don Juan refuses to repent and in so doing suggests the rebellion of the individual against the iron hand of authority. Don Juan becomes a model of human fearlessness, devotion to mortal existence, and resistance to superstition and religion, despite the evident terror evoked by his ultimate fate. Pushkin renders Don Juan even more sympathetically than Mozart. Don Juan is an iconoclast who exercises freedom. His death is not the consequence of immorality or compulsive seduction, but of the aesthetic capacity to recognize beauty and persuade a woman who knows exactly who he is to respond to him. More than in Mozart, the death of Pushkin’s Don Juan is a reminder of the hollowness and hypocrisy of codes of honor and morality. The Stone Guest appears to be a simple morality tale, but precisely for that reason, in the particular Russian context defined by censorship and submission to authority, the hero’s expression of individuality, independence and resistance to the restriction of freedom and choice took on an encoded political suggestiveness.

If the drama The Stone Guest suggested Mozart’s opera to his audiences, imagine what setting the drama as an opera evoked. But that is exactly what Alexander Dargomizhsky (1813-1869) intended. A contemporary of Mihail Glinka, Dargomizhsky was one of the pioneer Russian composers, technically an amateur and largely self-taught. Like Glinka, he sought success in opera. But it was Glinka who set the tone for the Russian operatic tradition through a marriage of nationalist Russian subject matter and materials to western European formal models in musical composition. After a sojourn abroad, Dargomizhsky rejected his early efforts as too imitative of French grand opera. Like Glinka, spending time outside of Russia made Dargomizhsky return to Russian roots. Specifically for Dargomizhsky, those roots were the peculiar and special attributes of the Russian language. What better and more ideal synthesis could be found than Pushkin’s The Stone Guest? Its subject matter was European, but its realization and the power of its text pure Russian. Its setting would be too.

Like Mozart, Dargomizhsky planned to alter the traditional model of opera and create an innovative kind of drama with music. In this case, it took its form directly from the literary source. Thus what we can hear in the opera is Pushkin’s text, not a revised libretto. The Stone Guest became Dargomizhsky’s most important project. In 1859, he entered into the circle of Balakirev, whose project it was to develop a distinctly Russian voice in music. By the end of the nineteenth century, particularly in the field of opera but also in instrumental music, that initiative had grown into a decided rift between the “Westernizers” and those intent on putting a distinctive Russian stamp on western forms of musical composition.

Unfortunately, The Stone Guest was left unfinished at Dargomizhsky’s death. It was completed by César Cui, a key figure in the nationalist school who had worked closely with Dargomizhsky, and by Rimsky-Korsakov, the great proponent of a distinctly Russian musical character. Both had witnessed many informal rehearsals of the opera with Dargomizhsky (who played Don Juan, while Musorgsky played Leporello, and the future Mrs. Rimsky-Korsakov sat as accompanist). When completed, The Stone Guest was a triumphant and important event in the history of music in Russia. It deeply influenced Musorgsky, who was perhaps the most daringly original of Russian composers, and whose own setting of Pushkin, Boris Godunov, has remained (apart from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin) one the most famous Russian-language operas ever composed.

Despite its historical importance, however, The Stone Guest is not well known and is rarely performed today, even in Russia. But to hear it alongside Rimsky-Korsakov’s setting of Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri is to acknowledge the powerful twin influences of Mozart and Pushkin in Russia’s artistic heritage.

As a composer and teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov can be regarded, along with Tchaikovsky, as one of the most seminal figures in Russian music. He was the teacher of both Stravinsky and Maximilian Shteinberg (later his son-in-law), who in turn was the teacher of Dmitri Shostakovich. But although audiences are familiar with many of Rimsky-Korsakov’s works, such as Scheherazade, and the operas The Golden Cockerel and Sadko (the last owing in large measure to Valery Gergiev’s advocacy), Mozart and Salieri, an elegant and powerful gem, has been rather left out of the limelight. It represents a wonderful appropriation by Russian composers of an eighteenth-century tradition that had no parallel in Russia itself, except for the way in which the Mozartean discipline and classicism influenced the shape and character of Pushkin’s remarkable achievements as a writer. It centers on the legend of Salieri’s poisoning of Mozart and includes quotes from Mozart’s music, such as Don Giovanni, and, most significantly from the Requiem. It was written in 1897, in the middle of the so-called fin de siècle Mozart revival which occurred throughout Europe. If Mozart had been accused by some of his contemporaries of writing music that was too difficult, then it is a historical irony that in the mid-nineteenth century Mozart was dismissed by many as too light and facile. However in the years following the centenary of his death, a new generation that was weary of the excesses of Wagnerism recognized in Mozart the unique combination of crystalline clarity, emotional depth, and structural complexity. The two unsurpassed orchestrators of that era, Richard Strauss and Rimsky-Korsakov, were acutely aware that Haydn’s prediction upon hearing of Mozart’s death had been all too true: that no comparable talent would be seen for at least another hundred years.

Through both of the works on this afternoon’s program, listeners can contemplate the ironies in the evolution of Russian musical tradition. Setting out to emulate western European models, the genius of Russia’s native composers ultimately created a legacy that altered western European music forever. The enduring impact of Russian music on Europe and America is strikingly symbolized by the profound influence of Stravinsky. For all the claims of national essentialism in both performance and composition, the history of Russian music suggests the dynamic complexities and inexorable exchanges from which all culture is constituted.

Alexander Gerschenkron, the economic historian, once put forth a brilliant thesis regarding Russia’s economic development. In comparison to the West, Russia before 1900 might have been considered “backward,” particularly in terms of industrialization. But that “backwardness” turned out to be Russia’s powerful advantage; for Russia, in a condensed period prior to 1914, began to leap over the generations of development that other nations had endured. The historical priority of England’s industrialization had ironically by the late nineteenth-century led it to the verge of obsolescence. Similarly, Russian “backwardness” in terms of the development of musical culture, experienced an analogous circumvention of the grandiose clichés of European Victorian and late Romantic music. As a result, twentieth-century modernism owes much to the Russian masters of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The two works on today’s program give ample indication of how two brilliant Russian artists turned what could be regarded as a deficiency into an opportunity to create path-breaking approaches to composition that ultimately commanded a leading place in the forefront of the development of music in the last century.

Swiss Accounts

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Swiss Accounts, performed on May 21, 2006 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Switzerland’s place in modern history has been exceptional. The nature of that exceptionalism has shifted its character depending on one’s point of view as framed by the historical moment. For example, what is most striking today about the Swiss is their apparent capacity to live in tolerable harmony (albeit not closeness) with one another despite sharp differences in language and religion. Its seems nothing short of miraculous that at a moment when ethnic and religious strife are obsessive barriers to peace in other parts of the world, in Switzerland Catholics and Protestants, Italians and Germans and French, and small communities high up in the mountains who speak the dying and arcane language of Romanche, all manage to maintain a federal democratic republic, transact business, sport a thriving tourist trade, and provide for their fellow citizens sufficiently to avoid extreme poverty and social degradation.

Indeed Switzerland has often been touted as an example of a type of democracy that we might well look at more closely as worthy of emulation. In retrospect one may have wished for the possibility of a Swiss-style solution in former Yugoslavia. That solution involves much greater autonomy for constituent states (the Swiss cantons) and therefore a much weaker federal government. Currently, it may be that Spain is moving toward a Swiss-style federal democracy, in which regions have vast self-governance compared to the American states.

But the multi-ethnic and multi-religious stable little miracle that is Switzerland has its own problems, limitations, and tensions. Jean-Jacques Rousseau idealized his native Geneva and took his place in history as a French philosopher. He was one of many French Swiss figures whose connection to France was far deeper than it was to German Switzerland, that is, to his own countrymen (toward whom many French Swiss have ambivalent feelings). By the same token, among the greatest of nineteenth-century Swiss writers was Gottfried Keller, a major figure in German literature. Of the three major regions of Switzerland, the Italian Swiss have enjoyed comparatively less affluence and prominence. The German Swiss portion has always vied with the French portion for industrial and economic dominance. Although the French Swiss made their mark in the watch-making industry, in finance, and in pharmaceuticals for example, it was the German Swiss, and primarily the radical Protestant Swiss, that advanced in industrial Europe. It is no accident that the MIT or CalTech of Europe is the ETH in Zurich, whose alumni include Albert Einstein. Many of the greatest Swiss, because of the small and insular character of the nation, have made their careers abroad. There are probably more Swiss living outside of Switzerland than within it. Honegger lived most of his life in Paris, and Martin spent considerable time in the Netherlands. Of the composers on today’s concert, only Othmar Schoeck stayed at home.

The Swiss are also historically famous for their hospitality because of their role as innovators in the business of tourism; Switzerland’s reputation as a resort destination has much to do with its mountains, lakes, and legendary scenery. All three Switzerlands participate in this. The Swiss landscape with its sublime mountains and lakes, is also the setting of many legendary stories and events, a magnet especially for the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual. The novel Frankenstein was written in the shadow of Switzerland and the greatest scene in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain is located there. It was to Switzerland that Liszt fled with his first mistress, Marie d’Agoult.

Switzerland’s reputation as a safe haven and a place for the restoration of health for Europeans also has to do with its long history of so-called political neutrality. Lenin took refuge in Zurich just as Richard Wagner did more than a half-century earlier. The list of émigrés from pacifists to revolutionaries is impressive and includes an endless array of literary and musical figures, such as the aging Richard Strauss. Political neutrality of course survived at the pleasure of the great European powers. The sociologist Max Weber once observed that neutrality in world politics probably cannot exist, and if it does, it is at the price of greatness, ambition, and importance. What have the great powers gained from tolerating a little mountainous landlocked piece of real estate in the middle of Europe? One of the answers rests in the legendary gnomes of Zurich, the banking industry that lent Geneva and Zurich their reputations as financial centers. Swiss banks have made themselves useful as literal depositories of wealth that could neither be traced nor extracted. This tradition was legitimately tarnished by Switzerland’s ambivalent and somewhat compromised relationship to Nazism and Germany during World War II.

The theme of today’s concert suggests that the multi-linguistic and religious heritage of the Swiss made a simple solution to framing national identity through culture difficult. Wilhelm Tell is a Swiss hero, but primarily for the Germans, and he is best remembered as a figure in German literature and Italian opera. The German spoken in Switzerland is broken into a manifold and colorful array of smaller dialects of which the Swiss are justly proud but the rest of German-speaking Europe regards with a mix of wonderment and bewilderment. Even the Swiss have difficulty understanding themselves. Therefore the language of schooling is High German. The French spoken in Switzerland has some unique vocabulary, but for the French Swiss, as Honegger’s career suggests, the center has ultimately been Paris, just as the dominant cultural trends for the German Swiss have come from Germany to the north and Austria to the east. Ironically, before the arrival of conductor Ernest Ansermet to Geneva, the musical culture of that city was dominated by German musical traditions. The Italian Swiss have a prominent role in history for supplying for years the highest percentage of the Papal Guard in Rome. Internal political and cultural allegiances appear to be hard to find among the Swiss except for pride in their unique historical status, love of the land, and a shared sense of exclusivity vis-à-vis everyone else.

What then is Swiss culture? Swiss democracy provides one answer. Despite their differences, the Swiss unite in a remarkable social welfare system and the almost puritanical rejection of wealth as a primary marker of public distinction. The operative principles of democracy, including military service, in Switzerland seem to be what help make the people of that land Swiss. But the generosity and benefits of Swiss democracy have always been severely limited to the Swiss themselves. Swiss neutrality has been maintained at the price of significant xenophobia and hostility to foreigners as anything more than visitors. During the Second World War, Switzerland was not particularly generous in opening its borders to desperate refugees. Individual Swiss citizens committed acts of heroism, but the federal government, dominated by the German cantons, evinced considerable sympathy for the Nazis beginning in 1933. Several of the Swiss cantons had their own police forces dedicated to monitoring foreigners. Citizenship remains impossible to obtain except by inheritance. The benefits of Swiss society work very well for the Swiss, but behind doors that have been tightly closed. Swiss xenophobia has always been apparent in the country’s enormous resistance to new circumstances, such as membership in the United Nations or the European Community. Switzerland was one of the last of the modern states to extend suffrage to women.

And yet one cannot fail to admire Switzerland’s institutions, particularly its schools, museums, nursing homes and hospitals, and the fairness with which access to these institutions is provided to its citizenry. In Switzerland one can still find remnants of direct democracy, town meetings, and regular referenda. But as Rousseau observed more than two centuries ago, the Swiss model probably works because of its small scale with a population that is not too densely distributed. Like England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Switzerland developed an admirable civic tradition of music making. In the schools and in the home, its heritage of musical institutions thrives to this day and includes fine conservatories and a host of amateur ensembles. The city of Zurich is one of the few cities that still have more than one excellent large retail establishment dedicated exclusively to the sale of instruments and sheet music in the traditions of domestic and classical concert music. New York no longer has any.

Switzerland’s avoidance by its very nature and structure of many of the traps of late nineteenth-century nationalism placed a peculiar burden on its artists. What has been the Swiss contribution to music, literature, and painting? Hermann Hesse, Arnold Böcklin, and Paul Klee were certainly geniuses of their respective arts. One cannot forget the great era of the city of Basel as well, once the professional home of Nietzsche and the Swiss Jakob Burckhardt, a giant in the study of modern history. In music, however, one tends to think of those composers who spent time in Switzerland, rather than native-born and trained composers. Even the great 1895 Tonhalle of Zurich, which Brahms (who lived for a time in Switzerland) helped inaugurate, was designed by Austrian architects in direct imitation of Vienna’s Musikverein.

But precisely because of the diverse and peculiar character of Swiss politics, and the centrality of Switzerland as a temporary home for distinguished transients (including Igor Stravinsky, Georg Solti, and Hermann Scherchen), a foray into Swiss musical life in the mid-twentieth century is an intriguing task. On today’s program we have three representative examples. The first is Othmar Schoeck, who was perhaps the most original composition talent of the twentieth century from German Switzerland. His reputation outside of Switzerland has been compromised not by the quality of his music—he wrote nearly three hundred songs of startling beauty. The American Symphony Orchestra has performed his early Violin Concerto. But he was indisputably a Nazi sympathizer, much like his contemporary Volkmar Andreae, the distinguished conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra. Schoeck was a classic example of the cultivated, civilized, German-centered Swiss, whose “neutrality” did not prevent the deformation of ethical judgment.

On the other extreme is Arthur Honegger, a French Swiss by birth, who became an important part of Les Six and spent his career outside of Switzerland. In stark contrast to Schoeck, Honegger’s political sympathies tended in the direction of communism. The third composer on today’s program is perhaps the most uniquely Swiss, Frank Martin. Like Schoeck, Martin identified with Switzerland, but he was a French Swiss—unencumbered by pro-German politics and more in sympathy with his country as a neutral place, the home of the League of Nations, and the democratic island of civility. Martin’s music boasts a refined eclecticism in its shifts in style. Son of a Calvinist minister, his primary influence was J.S. Bach. Martin’s music deserves to hold a much more central part of the concert repertoire from the twentieth century than it does. Honegger’s place in history was already secured in his lifetime by the admiration of listeners, performers, and colleagues ranging from Cocteau to Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Many people may not even realize that Honegger was Swiss and not French. Martin, in contrast, is suggestive of the cosmopolitan musical culture of Switzerland and the peculiar advantages of being a Swiss artist, the ultimate insider as outsider. Freed from apparent complicity by virtue of citizenship in a neutral country, with the greatest explosions of violence in twentieth-century history, eclecticism did not represent either escapism or compromise as cowardice.

If I may be permitted a personal note: Switzerland extended the privilege of its enigma into my own history. My brother, sister, and I were born in Zurich. My parents lived there for twenty years, as foreign Jews from Poland, beginning with their entrance to medical school until their emigration to the United States. The members of my family who survived owe their lives to the Swiss. But for those twenty years my parents lived on six-month temporary visas and were routinely urged to leave. My mother was even once expelled from the canton of Zurich in the late 1930s and took refuge in Lausanne. Despite devoted and brilliant service to the medical school and the hospitals of Zurich, my parents were never granted the right to practice medicine outside of the university and were repeatedly denied citizenship (although both of them served well beyond the call of duty during the years of Swiss mobilization during the war). My siblings and I all grew up in a household defined by a mixture of nostalgia, admiration, and disappointment. Especially in light of the recent revelation of Swiss collaboration with the Nazis and the abject failure of the Swiss banking industry to honor the claims of survivors on the assets deposited in Switzerland by Jews who perished during the Holocaust, neutrality continues to be a puzzle. Does it indeed really exist? Nevertheless, this concert evokes the overriding sentiment within my family: that of gratitude.

The Gathering Storm

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Gathering Storm, performed on April 7, 2006 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The history of English music since the emigration of Georg Friedrich Händel in 1712, is connected to the remarkable economic and political prominence that England enjoyed well into the twentieth century. By the time of Franz Joseph Haydn’s visit to London in the 1790s, England had fully developed a large-scale musical life, which often valued European continental composers even more than the continent did. The English engagement with music was cultivated and enthusiastic, reflecting the rapid growth of an educated and affluent middle class and a burgeoning group of musical organizations including numerous choral societies. These hosted historic music festivals in the nineteenth century, which led to the creation of some of the most important works for chorus and orchestra, including Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1846) and Dvořák’s Requiem (1891), both of which premiered in Birmingham.

It was part of Händel’s legacy, and of the Hanoverians generally, that the wealth and vitality of English musical life were engulfed by German influences. Liszt’s final major public appearances took place during his triumphant visit to England shortly before his death in 1886. The famed conductor of Bayreuth and Vienna, Hans Richter, left the continent and took up residence in England at the end of the nineteenth century and left a lasting impact on his adopted British home. Max Bruch, Joseph Joachim, and Johannes Brahms were favorite figures and recipients of many English honors. There were of course leading names in English composition who sought, before the turn of the last century, a voice that was distinctive from the overwhelming models that emanated from Germany. Edward Elgar struggled with this issue, despite both his admiration for Strauss and Brahms, and Richter’s devoted patronage. Similar concern was also felt by Elgar’s contemporary, Charles Villiers Stanford. But for other English composers, Germany was a focus and a haven. Dame Ethel Smythe’s first ventures into opera were produced and performed in Germany. Frederick Delius’s major operatic venture, A Village Romeo and Juliet (1901), was based on a Gottfried Keller story and first known to audiences in its German version.

The symbiosis of English and German music continued through the years of tacit but growing political rivalry that marked the reign of Wilhelm II of Germany, who had an ambition for Germany to compete with England as a naval power. But when that rivalry erupted into the First World War, and the House of Hanover discreetly changed its name to Windsor, the desire to develop a distinctly British musical style accelerated rapidly.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose ancestors include Josiah Wedgwood and Charles Darwin, belonged to the group of composers that wanted to distinguish themselves as something other than German disciples, even before the War. Arthur Bliss came partly from an American family and lived for a short while in Santa Barbara. Although initially inspired by French and Russian influences, during the early part of the century he rediscovered his Englishness in large measure through the example of Elgar. Frank Bridge, the least known of the three composers on tonight’s program, was primarily a composer of chamber music. He was determined in the last decade and a half of his life to find a style that would set him apart from the French and Austrian composers who had influenced his earlier work. The indication of his success may be found both in his own music from the 1930s, and in his influence on his great pupil, Benjamin Britten.

The First World War was a traumatic event, particularly for England. Although victorious, Britain’s imperial pride was permanently damaged by the War’s carnage. The longstanding decline of England’s economic and political importance was also exposed, for it took the American entry in 1917 to break the stalemate and secure the victory. The years following 1918 were marked by a depth and variety of intellectual and artistic stimulation. It was an era of renewed interest in both religion and an equally fanatical equivalent among the English: pacifism. English foreign policy had been defined by a reluctance to become enmeshed in the instabilities of continental Europe since the fall of Napoleon, and its echoes lived on after the First World War. But by 1930, just when Bridge was completing the single-movement Elegiac Concerto on tonight’s program, there was pressing reason for the English to be concerned regarding the direction of continental European politics. The few democracies on the continent were weak, and fascism had made its initial successful appearance. 1929 marked the end of the superficial prosperity of the age. John Maynard Keynes had warned, following the First World War, against a vindictive victor’s peace. He turned out to be prophetic, as Weimar Germany reeled from one crisis to the next. The League of Nations was evidently a failure. The specter of future conflicts was not hard to imagine.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the prospect for peace and prosperity, let alone freedom and democracy, faded rapidly. Bridge’s Concerto spans those few years when the English political landscape changed forever. Composed in 1930, the year after the market collapse, it was not performed until 1936, during some of the darkest hours of twentieth-century history. Just a short while earlier, in April 1935, Sir Adrian Boult premiered the Fourth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams. It is a work of intensity, angularity, and darkness, and it led immediately to the assumption that the composer had written music in response to the grim events abroad. But Vaughan Williams angrily denied any spiritual or programmatic basis for this view of the Fourth Symphony. He claimed that the only object of music was beauty, and even though he confessed several years after the Symphony had been written that he was not sure it was beautiful, he was certain that at the time of its composition, he wrote it solely out of a conviction of its merit simply as music. The Symphony shows many debts to the rhythmic and thematic fire of Beethoven’s symphonic writing. Despite Vaughan William’s disclaimer, the Fourth Symphony has never shaken its association with the sense of impending doom that began to descend on the British during the mid-1930s, and that was clearly understood and perceived by British intellectuals (except for those who were sympathetic to Hitler).

Arthur Bliss’s Concerto is dedicated to the American people and was premiered in June 1939, a few months before the outbreak of the War in September. The music, like much of Bliss’s output, is sprawling and varied. The work had been written for the World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens, and its premiere featured Solomon, the great English pianist. The influences of French modernism are audible, but equally evident, notably in the work’s closing moments, is the distinctly English voice that Bliss borrowed from Elgar with its anthem-like character.

All three of these works represent an interesting and complicated facet of pre-war Britain. As many will recognize, the title of this concert derives from Winston Churchill’s famous account of the years leading up to the War. In spite of the more than ominous events of Europe, the predominant sentiment in England was that of denial and appeasement, much to Churchill’s dismay. It was a stroke of unexpected good luck that the fascist sympathizer Edward VIII fell in love with an American divorcée and abdicated. Bliss’s dedication to America would become all the more poignant as President Roosevelt, against the wishes of the majority of Americans, helped an unprepared England survive during the more than two years of World War II before Pearl Harbor, when England stood alone.

Three composers, akin in their traumatic reaction to the First World War and their subsequently pacifist hopes, created works that marked turning points in their styles and careers. Frank Bridge produced a dark musical Oration, imitative in structure of a funeral elegy replete with evocations of war and death. Bliss, a master of illustration and sentimentality who reveled in writing virtuosic fireworks, wrote a massive Concerto that ranges wildly from the intimate to the sentimental, and from the nostalgia to the triumphantly proud. Vaughan Williams’s seemingly contained notion of beauty took a strange and provocative turn in the direction of the Fourth Symphony after 1933. Despite claims for aesthetic autonomy, did Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries tap into the undercurrent of the moment, creating works that not only intimated the anxiety of the times but through that very anxiety forged a distinctly British musical sensibility? Perhaps these composers, like many visual artists as well, were driven even indirectly by the clouds gathering over them to reevaluate their influences and ambitions. The events surrounding their activities as composers may have sparked a transfigured act of self-reflection and opened up new paths, thereby generating novel foundations of twentieth-century British music.

Paradise

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Paradise, performed on Jan 29, 2006 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The reputation and fame of Robert Schumann rest on two contrasting but allied achievements. The first and foremost is his music for the piano, voice, and chamber ensembles. As a composer Schumann has been most celebrated for works in small form, the condensed instrumental evocation of sentiment, character, and literary idea. The piano was Schumann’s primary vehicle. He had, as is well known, a tortured relationship with his own ambition to become a concert pianist. Whether his failure to succeed derived primarily from self-inflicted physical injury or psychological barriers remains unclear, but the piano remained his dominant medium of musical expression throughout his life.

This was fortuitous, for in Schumann’s generation the piano emerged triumphant as the indispensable and most widely disseminated transmitter of musical culture. It was indeed the first standardized instrument of musical reproduction and instruction. It was through Schumann’s desire to study with Friedrich Wieck, a leading piano pedagogue of the era, that Schumann met his future wife Clara, Wieck’s daughter. She would become one of the nineteenth century’s greatest pianists. In addition to the music for piano solo, Schumann’s genius flowered in the form of the song, making him the composer most celebrated, after Schubert, for music for voice and piano. Then there is his music for strings, particularly strings and piano, notably the Piano Quintet.

As a composer for large forces, particularly in the genre of the symphony, Schumann’s work has been, comparatively speaking, a subject of controversy. To this day there is still doubt and debate about his skill as an orchestrator. Indeed, Schumann conceived of musical textures and figuration in pianistic terms and had little direct experience with other instruments, in contrast to Mendelssohn. Until the mid-twentieth century, conductors routinely “improved” the orchestration of Schumann’s four symphonies. Even Brahms, who revered Schumann, had his doubts about Schumann’s orchestration. But recently the insights we have gained into the use of period instruments has brought this habit of revision to an end. If one takes into account the size and character of the instrumental forces for which Schumann wrote, the orchestrations are in fact not wanting, but remarkable in their color and transparency.

The second achievement that has given Schumann a central place in the history of music is his prose criticism. Schumann once said that he learned more about writing music, and music in general, from reading the works of Jean-Paul Richter than from any composition textbook or teacher of music. Indeed, as a young man, Schumann’s ambitions wavered between the literary and the musical. The fusion between the two is what inspired the innovative musical forms of his early piano music and the striking and original use of harmony and rhythm. Schumann’s place in the development of musical romanticism can be located in his capacity to transform the literary and the poetic into the musical. Although after his death Schumann would be regarded as an inspiration to a so-called “absolute” or “autonomous” school in musical aesthetics (seemingly in direct conflict with that of Liszt and Wagner), it was Schumann, a contemporary of Liszt, who sought to create a connection between prose and poetry and music without words. The same ambition was shared by Mendelssohn, Schumann’s friend, colleague, and supporter.

The rift between warring factions in musical life after Schumann’s death greatly exaggerated the elements of contrast. Indeed Liszt and Wagner both held Schumann in high regard. In Wagner’s case the main criticism of Schumann was that his originality had been compromised by the deleterious influence of Mendelssohn. Nonetheless Schumann’s role as a critic was decisive in the establishment of a new aesthetic and rhetoric of musical romanticism. In that construct of romanticism, the connection between the poetic, the visual, the subjective, the intimate, and the musical became central. New forms were generated. Schumann heralded the work of Berlioz. He waged a war against mere virtuosity, academic imitation and philistinism. He particularly decried the embrace of the theatrical and crassly sentimental. Art became elevated to a status with sacred principle possessed of noble spirituality.

In his vigorous defense of Chopin, Schumann called on his generation to follow the path he believed had been charted by the greatness of Beethoven, toward a music that reached well beyond entertainment into the realm of the infinite and the profound. The poetic was an integral causal element in inspiring composers to develop a language of expression that exceeded illustration and decoration. Music was the greatest of the romantic arts because it was boundless, infinitely poetic, and emotionally intense. Interiority and the subjective, the intensity of feeling, became the province of music, and therefore forms of music-making tied to intimacy and intimate spaces. Schumann’s criticism ran parallel to his own career as a composer of works for solo piano, the single auditor, and for lovers and friends.

It was however the close relationship between Robert and Clara Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn that helped Schumann expand his compositional horizons. Indeed, in the 1840s, his activities as a critic receded as his work as a composer expanded in scale and scope. Schumann not only sought to enter the realm of the symphony and the concerto, but he turned to two genres central to the period and indispensable to the career of a successful composer: opera and oratorio. The engagement with such large-scale works involving texts was a natural outgrowth of the writing of instrumental music with a textual substratum and songs. Opera had become a popular national medium, particularly in Germany. Carl Maria von Weber was the central figure in the development of a distinctively German operatic tradition. Although Wagner ultimately would come to dominate the field, Schumann’s lone completed opera Genoveva would be heralded by none other than Liszt as the finest German opera of the day not composed by Wagner.

The oratorio form represented a narrower and more complexly sensitive option. After the fall of Napoleon, particularly in Protestant Germany, the oratorio remained an important part of musical life. Throughout German-speaking Europe, choral societies made up of amateurs developed. These voluntary associations, the most famous of which was the choral society in Düsseldorf founded in 1818, were one of the few civic organizations tolerated in the repressive, reactionary climate of post-Napoleonic German-speaking Europe. Even in Düsseldorf, a Catholic region, one of the sons of the King of Prussia was an eager supporter of the Düsseldorf Chorus and intervened through the help of the Catholic ecclesiastical authorities with the King to permit the creation of a Lower Rhine festival featuring choral music. Oratorios were written with these large, amateur choruses in mind. Even the young Wagner toyed with this idea. The subjects that formed the basis of these German-language oratorios were part sacred and part secular. Composers cherished the models of Bach and Handel.

The most successful composer of the early nineteenth century in the oratorio genre was Mendelssohn. His success with St. Paul (composed for the Düsseldorf Choir) in 1836 was extraordinary. It impressed the young Wagner, as well as Schumann. It is not surprising therefore that Schumann, from the 1840s until his attempted suicide in 1854, turned a good deal of attention to choral music, both sacred and secular. In fact he became, during the last stage of his career, the director of the chorus in Düsseldorf, a post that had earlier been occupied by Mendelssohn.

Unlike Mendelssohn, Schumann’s connection to religion and theology was tenuous. Schumann had been somewhat of a rebel and Bohemian as a young man. Friedrich Wieck, who opposed Schumann’s marriage to Clara, did so for good reasons. Schumann had already developed a reputation for alcoholism, unstable moods, and personal behavior held in high suspicion, including rumors of homosexuality. There was gossip about his close relationship with Norbert Burgmüller, the gifted young composer whose early death Schumann took very hard. Certainly Schumann never affected the piety and conventional morality that dominated Mendelssohn’s life and career. Nevertheless, Mendelssohn valued Robert Schumann’s genius and admired Clara’s greatness as a musician. Robert and Clara accepted Mendelssohn’s patronage with gratitude despite their residual anti-Semitism, envy, and resentment.

This all provides the background for Schumann’s foray into the choral orchestral dramatic form, including the oratorio. He completed several major works. The two best known choral dramatic works are the unusual Manfred, a setting of Byron that is really not an oratorio but a drama set to music, and the work on this afternoon’s program, Das Paradies und die Peri. As Christopher Gibbs remarks in his notes on the program, this work, although nearly forgotten today, was perhaps the greatest single triumph in Schumann’s career during his lifetime, and deservedly so. Given the enormous popularity afforded the oratorio form, success in writing a large public work of this kind was like the opera, a key ingredient for success and fame. And Schumann, with Das Paradies triumphed.

Whatever the motivations behind Schumann’s decision to try his hand at an oratorio, the choice of subject was brilliantly suited to his sensibility. It also set him apart from Mendelssohn. The distinguished German interpretive sociologist Jürgen Habermas is known for his analysis of an emergent public sphere in early nineteenth-century Germany. There was indeed a phenomenal growth in the reading public. Schumann’s father was a figure in that historical transformation. Among other things, he translated and published Walter Scott in German. The pre-1848 reading public was enamored of the romances of the north. Mendelssohn had been inspired by Ossian, the fraudulent northern Homer, whose works were actually written by the eighteenth-century Scotsman James MacPherson. Sir Walter Scott was among the most popular authors of the period.

Instead of turning to a biblical or classical subject, or a subject indirectly related to Christianity linked to the Crusader period, Schumann instead took the work of a minor contemporary of Scott’s. The irony of his choice was that his turn away from the Italian or the French to the northern European, in the case of Das Paradies und die Peri, involved a circuitous bridge to a burgeoning fascination with the East. What was compelling in the poem was not only its appeal to romantic fantasy but also its evocation of a strange non-Christian world far removed from the European everyday. Although some have wished to see in Schumann’s oratorio an inherent Christian message, it is precisely the appropriation of the non-western spirituality which lends the work its uniqueness.

Das Paradies und die Peri is unusual as an oratorio because it is conceived dramatically in near operatic terms. Indeed, one needs to recall that when the work was written there was a widespread practice of performing choral music with tableaux vivants. This involved costumed, static depictions of characters arranged in the form of paintings that illustrated the action in a stylized wordless pantomime. Das Paradies und die Peri lends itself to this kind of visualization, and indeed there have been performances in recent years in which such reenactments and stagings have been undertaken.

However, it is the greatness of the music of Paradies that makes its relative obscurity so hard to understand. There is no work by Robert Schumann on the scale of this oratorio that is so consistently convincing, including the masterful use of the orchestra. The beauty, lyricism, and drama of the work are flawless. It is well known that Johannes Brahms was devoted to Schumann’s music and memory. There is perhaps no greater compliment to the musical genius of Das Paradies und die Peri than Brahms’s unmistakable allusion to it in his own German Requiem.

The year 2006 marks the 150^th anniversary of the death of Robert Schumann. He died incarcerated in a mental institution as the result of the suicide attempt. Modern scholarship has identified Schumann as a classic manic-depressive, whose life was tormented by the vacillation between euphoria and despair. In that terrifying mix was genius. Tragically, toward the end of his life, in the years preceding the suicide attempt in 1854, Schumann’s health deteriorated steadily. It was in a period of extreme depression that the young, handsome, and compelling Brahms was introduced into the Schumann household by their mutual friend Joseph Joachim. Robert and Clara were each enamored of young Brahms and Schumann went so far as to declare Brahms the future hope of German music, a prophetic claim that would haunt Brahms for the rest of his life. In this Schumann anniversary year, there is the opportunity not only to revisit all of the well-known great accomplishments of this seminal composer and writer, but to restore to its proper place in the repertoire Schumann’s greatest large-scale composition, one of the great masterpieces of nineteenth-century dramatic and lyric music.

Creative Links

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Creative Links: The Career of Witold Lutoslawski, performed on Nov 18, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The composer Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) is frequently quoted as having said, “The most fundamental aim of any piece of art is its reception by the audience.” On the face of it, this claim seems obvious enough, but for a composer born in 1913, whose career spanned the mid-twentieth century through neoclassicism, high modernism, minimalism, neoromanticism, and eclecticism (pardon the excessive number of isms), this comment is exceptional. The twentieth century can be seen as an era in music history when the relationship between composers and audience was deeply troubled. In the early part of the century, the successful spread of musical culture from the previous century generated its own reaction. The modern piano was the ubiquitous instrument of a remarkable democratization of high musical culture. A staple in a growing number of middle-class homes, the piano and music education in general became widespread sufficiently to generate a commercial opportunity for the manufacture of instruments and the publication of sheet music. Parallel to this came the explosion of music journalism and the extension of interest in art and concert music through daily and weekly publications. The decade before World War I was the high-water mark in the sales of pianos, the number of publications devoted to music, the frequency of public concerts, and the ubiquity of amateur organizations including choruses and chamber music societies. This explosion in public and private musical activity coincided with the acceptance of a generalized vocabulary of musical expression that we now recognize as the clichés of late Romanticism. Expressivity and melodiousness were integrated with a variegated color achieved in part through elaborate chromatic harmonies. Furthermore, given the extent of amateurism there was an extraordinary premium placed on virtuosity and on the brilliance of technical finesse characteristic of the professional performer.

All this, including the overheated gestures of the post-Wagnerians, struck a new generation of composers beginning in the early twentieth century as troublesome. Along with the noble extension of musical taste and the expansion of public concert life, came what appeared to be an increasing conservatism in taste. A canon of classics was established which still influences concert repertory today. Among composers, the dominant middle-class taste soon became the object of scorn and contempt. Surface familiarity with the great literature of music, Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata or Chopin’s Nocturnes, actually became for some an indication of philistinism. The result was a modernist revolt against Romanticism and the “standard” language of musical expression, which may roughly be compared to realism in novelistic technique. The quest for new language of musical expression was also a self-conscious attack on the smug taste and attitudes of the concert audience.

This sometimes violent clash between modern music and its intended audience took place not only in Vienna and Paris but throughout Europe, first on the eve of World War I and then with greater frequency in the 1920s. Its consequences are still being felt as audiences today continue to flee from the names of Schoenberg and Ives as difficult, incomprehensible, and certainly not enjoyable. Despite the many analogies one would like to make between musical modernism and modernism in visual art, audiences for music have never approached the acceptance of abstraction, non-objective and conceptual art that art lovers exhibit. The alienation between composer and audience has been both justified and reviled. There is little doubt that the extent of the degree of the breakdown in communication created the conditions that encouraged the abandonment of the modernist compositional strategy beginning in the mid-1970s. Having lost the audience, a new generation of composers abandoned the credo of its teachers and returned to the idea that new music needs to be written to which an audience will respond. Gone is the critique of the bourgeois and of the middle-class concert-goer as agent of capitalist oppression, false expressivity, consumer mentality, and materialism.

More importantly, composers during the last quarter of the twentieth century understood that the breakdown of contact between composer and audience failed to be repaired because something else entered the vacuum left by the aggressive retreat of early twentieth-century modernism. In western societies more popular musical genres emerged, fueled by new hospitable technologies such as the gramophone and radio. Popular music diversified from song and dance music into music for the theater, movies, and television, and eventually created its own vocabulary of musical expression. The integration of jazz and folk elements, both urban and rural, led the way from Tin Pan Alley to the modern rock band. The cultural need for music did not diminish but it was now satisfied by the personalities of popular music. No classical composer of the twentieth century could aspire to the political presence and activity that Wagner attained in nineteenth century Europe, but Bono has done precisely that.

All this provides a context for understanding the path of music in a part of Europe that gained its political independence only in 1919. Lutoslawski was born in a nation that was held together only by culture and religion. He was born in the Russian part of Poland. In fact Lutoslawski spent part of his youth in Moscow, returning to Poland only at the end of the Russo-Polish war in 1920. Lutoslawski’s father and uncle were executed in 1918 by the Bolsheviks for their participation in military efforts to create a free Poland. The Poland created by the Treaty of Versailles out of the defeated Germany and Austria-Hungary was geographically different from the Poland we know today. It bears repeating for American audiences that the Poland for which Lutoslawski’s father died included what became in 1945 part of the westernmost section of the Soviet Union. Part of the price of the victory of World War II was the forced transfer of population by Stalin, shifting Poles from what had once been the eastern part of Poland to the west, to regions of modern day Poland that had been part of Germany. The Germans were moved westward to east Germany. The most notable example is Wroclaw, formerly Breslau, where the population until 1945 was heavily German. The Poles of today who live there are largely descendents of Poles who were transferred from Lvov and other locations in the eastern part of Poland.

In spite of this admittedly confusing and somewhat tragic political history, and well before it from the late eighteenth century onward, there was always a Poland in the minds of Poles from the intelligentsia, aristocracy, and peasantry. Despite its poverty and high rates of illiteracy, a Polish national consciousness existed based on language and Catholicism. In a near second place as an instrument of nationalism, there was music. The national folk music of Poland can be heard not only in Chopin but also in Lutoslawski’s Concerto for Orchestra (1954). Beyond folk music there was a national sensibility among Polish composers. That sensibility was given greater emphasis in 1919 when Poland achieved its political independence. No greater symbolism is needed than the fact that the first Polish president was Ignaz Paderewski, a world-famous concert pianist, mediocre composer, and renowned editor of Chopin’s piano music.

It is because of this special national/cultural history that an attitude to the audience marked by contempt, disregard or snobbery even for an avowed modernist would be unthinkable for a Polish composer. The making of music was understood as an essential dimension of keeping a spirit of independence, freedom, spirituality, and community alive in the face of oppression, both of foreign powers and later a more complicated and often subtle internal sort. That internal oppression first initially took the form of a proto-fascist dictatorship in the interwar period dominated by Jozef Pilsudski, and then was replaced by the oppression imposed by Polish communism. True freedom for the Poles began only in earnest with the Solidarity movement and the fall of communism.

Lutoslawski lived through this complex maze of political circumstance. He grew up in a semi-democratic Poland of interwar years and witnessed the brutality of the Nazi occupation. He made his reputation as a composer during the most restrictive Stalinist era before the thaw of the Gomulka government. He became part of the Polish avant-garde of the 1960s which included Polish cinema and theater and was feted in the west, particularly in France. (One can observe in the careers of Chopin, Szymanowski, and Lutoslawski the enormous affinity between Polish and French culture.) France represented liberation from the political and cultural dominance of Russia to the east and Germany to the west. The Polish avant-garde represented during the Cold War the liberal possibilities of communism. Since culture had always been the medium of national self-expression in the absence of political independence for Poles, it was not surprising that after 1945, despite nominal political independence, culture would continue its independence as the medium of individual freedom in the presence of totalitarian communism (even Polish communism). It is unreasonable to condemn those of Lutoslawski’s generation (including Lutoslawski himself), for having believed in the possibilities of communism in Poland, throughout the Cold War, even after 1968 when the Polish regime shifted to the right. National pride overcame revulsion with the limits of communism and the overbearing presence of the Soviet Union.

Throughout his career, despite important shifts in his musical strategy, Lutoslawski always retained the belief that he was an artist with an obligation to his contemporary audience. His music had to make its point emotionally and viscerally to a public that needed art. The First Symphony was designed to provoke the reaction of the authorities. It was an artistic response to two forms of oppression, one associated with Hitler and the other with Stalin. The second period, during which Lutoslawski sought to retain his place in pubic life, he composed the music of Musique funèbre. Written in the 1950s, it seeks to integrate a self-conscious avant-garde, a twelve-tone method. This was also a period in which Lutoslawski paid homage to Bartók and employed folk materials. In this way, Lutoslawski balanced adherence to official aesthetics with an undercurrent of resistance. The last period examined in this concert is an era in which Lutoslawski used his fame in the west as well as in Poland as an instrument of covert expression of resistance. The Third Symphony and Chain 2 are works composed during the era of conflict between Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. The Polish government could not afford to do what the Russians tried in the Brezhnev era: to expel internationally visible cultural figures such as Solzhenitsyn. Lutoslawski was among one of Poland’s most revered and respected figures. His music of the 1980s, in its integration of chance elements and accessible expressivity, was an act of cultural solidarity with the Solidarity, movement as the composer confessed privately to many of his younger colleagues.

The elaborate framework that Polish politics of the twentieth century offered Lutoslawski represented an amalgam of limitations and opportunities. It offered him the chance to defend the use of modernism as more than an aesthetic strategy. It became an essential means of communicating to a people after 1945 struggling to reconcile political independence with freedom and social justice. A proper musical language for such a condition could not be nostalgic, reminiscent, or sentimental. At the same time modern music could not be abstract, unemotional or ambitiously clever. Every note in tonight’s concert reflects intensity and integrity, as well as originality.

Lutoslawski will remain one of the great masters of twentieth-century music. He will be remembered as the greatest Polish composer after Chopin and Szymanowski. Like his two predecessors, his music has a consistency in its originality, craftsmanship, economy, and elegance. But perhaps the most telling mark of greatness in his music is that when all of the political elements have been forgotten, his music, precisely because it was created to reach the hearts and minds of an audience, lends itself to the construction of meaning by all audiences from different times and nations. Music essentially always has specific and local origins, but the translation into extended, wordless musical forms permits music to emancipate itself from that which is bound by time. Lutoslawski’s music will continue to be played by musicians in New York, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Kuala Lumpur. Some day future audiences may hear something in Lutoslawski’s music when Poland is for them at best merely a place on the globe. Of its politics, history, and language they may know practically nothing. And it is to Lutoslawski’s immortal credit that to respond to his music they will not need to know.