George Crumb

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Crumb, performed on April 19, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

We have become accustomed to assuming that composers who are employed by universities deserved the designation “academic.” Indeed, with the exception of John Adams and Philip Glass, since the 1960s composers who were not also performers (e.g. Bernstein and Foss) and who did not have the good fortune of independent means, relied on employment by colleges and universities for their livelihood. The expansion of university activity to include the teaching of composition (which began quite late with John Knowles Paine’s formal appointment at Harvard in 1875) has indeed been a great gift to music. The list of composers who have taught in the halls of academe rather than conservatories since the 1940s is extensive and impressive.

At the same time, the rift between the audience and modernist music during the mid-20th century has led to some suspicion about music fostered within the university. On the one hand, commercial and popular music of all kinds has flourished since 1945. On the other hand, seemingly impenetrable and abstruse music has been written under the non-commercial (if not anti-commercial) aegis of the university. Consequently, the use of the term “academic” to describe music or a composer does not connote flattery or praise. The idea of the “academic” has been hijacked and misleadingly turned into a pejorative. What has made that possible is the fact that serious scholarship and expertise often defy common sense. They are hard to understand and made even more daunting by the use of jargon. Music is no exception. Furthermore, some of the composers we readily associate with the American university during the second half of the 20th century include quite complex, brilliant, and rather forbidding personalities whose music is equally complex, brilliant, and forbidding. One thinks of Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions, and Leon Kirchner.

It is therefore refreshing and delightful to realize that George Crumb, whose music burst on the scene in the late 1960s, was for his entire career a distinguished member of a university faculty. He taught in Virginia, Colorado, and for most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania. His compositions, however, marked a powerful shift in the history of 20th-century music. It reached the public at first hearing. Crumb can be compared in this regard to Ligeti and Kurtag. Crumb’s music, economical and elegant from the start, has mesmerized and enchanted broad audiences as well as fellow composers and musicians. He has made us think about time and sonority in new ways and has forged contemporary links between music, sentiment, and ideas, without the off-putting philosophical and conceptual verbiage in which many fine composers have sought justification and refuge.

Yet some of Crumb’s greatest contributions have come from his teaching. The fact that so many of his students have become the leading composers of their generation is a tribute to his generosity of spirit, and his kind and disarmingly modest manner. His students include Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, and Christopher Rouse. Crumb has also, not surprisingly, been a generous colleague. David Burge and the late Jan DeGaetani are two remarkable performers who worked closely with Crumb. Crumb offered a welcome alternative to the tense and testy relationships between performer and composer that came to dominate the new music scene, first after World War I (one thinks of Schoenberg) and after World War II (one thinks of Babbitt). Finally, Crumb as a person and in his demeanor is one of the few composers and indeed professors on our campuses (in any subject) entirely lacking in pretension and a sense of self-importance. There is a directness, grace, wit, and down-to-earth quality to George Crumb that is unforgettable. In Crumb, these attributes are not without their mischievous and subtle aspects. But meeting George Crumb for the first time, one might not guess that one was meeting one of the most original, profound, and important composers in all of 20th-century music, whose influence on the music of today has been historic. Crumb, working with the impetus provided by his encounter with the music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Dallapiccola (especially Webern’s approach to pitch, sonority, silence, and the economy of form) made something uniquely American out of a European tradition in an entirely novel way.

If I may be permitted a personal note, this concert is the realization of a dream I have harbored for a long time. I will never forget the impact Crumb’s Echoes of Time and the River made on me when I first heard it. It was 1967, and I was 19 years old and an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. We were lucky to have a terrific music department, with Easley Blackwood, Ralph Shapey, and Richard Wernick on the faculty, alongside a group of music historians (including Howard Mayer Brown, Leo Treitler, and H. Colin Slim), many of whom were active performers.

I was the assistant conductor and concertmaster of the University Orchestra and a student of Richard Wernick’s. Through him, I was invited to the rehearsals taking place in Mandel Hall in 1967 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a special series devoted to contemporary music. The piece in rehearsal was Crumb’s Echoes, and the performance was to be a premiere. The members of the orchestra refused to do the processionals, as I recall, and only reluctantly agreed to play the antique cymbals. I do remember Victor Aitay, the great concertmaster, gingerly putting down his violin to play an antique cymbal when called for in the piece. I still possess and cherish the score of Echoes I was given to study.

I got to sit behind Crumb as he followed along, with his friend Richard Wernick beside him. I met Crumb again a few years later when I was in graduate school while visiting the Wernicks, who had moved to Media, Pennsylvania, where the Crumbs also lived. Wernick had joined the Penn faculty. I recall playing the Schubert “Trout” Quintet with Crumb playing the double bass part on a second piano. For several years, Jan DeGaetani and her husband Phil West were artists in residence in New Hampshire at Franconia College while I served as president there in the early 1970s. I recall many memorable evenings with George Crumb who came several times for concerts and visits. Among the most unforgettable was a long evening séance at the Franconia Inn, during which a table—at which sat Jan deGaetani, George Crumb, Joel Thome, Phil West, and I—was said to have “levitated.”

When I moved to Bard College in 1975, George Crumb and Richard Wernick kindly came to do a mini-residency at the college. I was once again reminded of the grace, humor, reserve, and intelligence of George Crumb. It is so refreshing to encounter a genuinely great gift for writing music that means something, engages the audience and fellow professionals, and says something new but is neither imitative nor manipulative. That rare gift resides in Crumb, an individual without airs and affectation. It is indeed a miracle when an artist exists who does not relish appearing as one.

George Crumb has taken his place alongside the greatest of American composers. His unmistakable American voice and intuition for innovation, all in a manner immune from commerce and the politics of fame, has earned him international renown. The American Symphony Orchestra is truly proud to honor George Crumb by presenting three of his greatest works in its ongoing tribute to great American composers, which has recently included Henry Cowell, Walter Piston, and will continue next season with John Cage.

Trapped in the Web of History

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Hunchback of Notre Dame, performed on March 8, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

Today’s performance of Franz Schmidt’s opera Notre Dame, which he completed in 1906 and which was premiered in 1914, is perhaps the first effort to present this work on a major stage in North America. The opera had some notable success before World War II, but only in German-speaking Europe. After 1945, its presence in the repertory was restricted essentially to Vienna, where the work has been produced both on the stage of the Vienna Sate Opera and the Volksoper. Notre Dame has taken its place, alongside Max von Schillings Mona Lisa (1915) and most of the operas of Zemlinsky and Schreker, in the virtual storage bins of the repertory.

Opera is one of the most recalcitrant of art forms. Unlike some other musical genres, new operas are still being written and performed. But perhaps an adverse consequence of opera’s currency is that its rich history, especially during the 19th and 20th centuries in France and German-speaking Europe, is being buried by neglect, much to the detriment of the audience and the future of the art form. The situation is so dire that when one seeks to revive a work, one is bound to encounter the perennial ill-informed suspicion that if a work is not as popular as La bohème, La traviata or (however implausibly) Götterdammerung, it can’t be any good. The fact is that opera houses are risk averse, and they fear, without reason, that the public won’t attend anything from music history that is not already a hit. The richness of the historic repertoire from after 1815 and before 1970 is a potential bonanza; this conservatism is an unnecessary impediment to enlarging the audience for opera.

The meager attention still paid to Notre Dame, since it is restricted essentially to Vienna (although there was a 2010 revival in Dresden) might lead one to think that the work, and indeed all of Schmidt’s music, has something peculiarly Austrian or even Viennese about it. Could Schmidt’s music be a “local” phenomenon, which, unlike the music of Johann Strauss, is not susceptible to international export?

Nothing could be further from the truth. If there ever was a cosmopolitan and versatile musician who commanded the full range of compositional techniques transcending any local tradition, it was Franz Schmidt. If there indeed was anything “local” about him, it was the extent to which he mirrored the polyglot diversity of the Habsburg Empire and its culture, itself—as Franz Werfel never tired of asserting—the embodiment of the cosmopolitan: an anti-nationalist, multi-ethnic, political conglomerate. It is worth some nostalgia, particularly today as we witness the struggling provincialism among the Central European nations that emerged from the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 and the demise of the Soviet Empire in 1989.

Schmidt came to an anti-provincial culture naturally. He was born in 1874 (the same year as Schoenberg and 14 years after Mahler) in today’s Bratislava, now the capital of the Slovak Republic. It was formerly known as Poszony and was an important Hungarian city governed by Budapest after the Compromise of 1867. Before that it was Pressburg, a crossroads of the Habsburg Empire where German was spoken (alongside Slovakian and Hungarian and Yiddish). Schmidt was part Hungarian and part German and spoke both languages. Bela Bartók grew up in the same city, as did Ernő Dohnanyi—two of Hungary’s 20th-century cultural icons. Schmidt’s Hungarian heritage left its mark, as listeners will discover easily from the music in Notre Dame.

But Schmidt’s musical training took place in Vienna, where Dohnanyi had also gone to study, as opposed to Budapest, where Bartok had chosen to enter the conservatory. Schmidt was a fine pianist. He was also a very accomplished cellist who played solo parts in the Vienna Philharmonic, where he was a member for almost 20 years. In addition, he was a virtuoso organist, and of course a composer. He eventually became the head of the Vienna Conservatory and taught a fantastic array of distinguished musicians, just as Franz Schreker did in Berlin. Schmidt’s pupils included not only composers, however, but also pianists and cellists. In the midst of all this, Schmidt wrote four symphonies, a variety of concerti, operas, and one major choral work (performed twice by the ASO), the towering and magisterial The Book with the Seven Seals (1937).

Despite the admiration both of those who were in opposing camps in terms of music and culture such as Schoenberg, and of others including key protagonists of modernism in England and America such as Hans Keller, Schmidt today is performed, if at all, mostly by Austrians (e.g. Franz Wesler-Most) and a few who were trained in Vienna (e.g. Zubin Mehta). Why is a composer of such craftsmanship and versatility, who stuck stubbornly to the still-appealing rhetoric and style of late 19th century romanticism, consistently ignored? Why does Schmidt still suffer in the shadows, even more strikingly than do his Viennese contemporaries Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker?

Predictably, the answer is complex. First, Schmidt was not only poor at self-promotion (a necessary attribute for a composer), but he seems to have been his own worst enemy. He quarreled openly with Mahler and Mahler’s brother-in-law, Arnold Rose, the concertmaster of the Vienna Opera and Philharmonic. Schmidt always felt put upon by someone or something. He was prone to hypochondria. His self-image as victim was not quite as offensive as that cultivated by Hans Pfitzner, but Schmidt was nonetheless of that ilk, quick to believe that he had been overlooked or snubbed. Unlike Pfitzner, however, Schmidt was improbably and uncommonly generous to students and colleagues in need.

Second, there is some discomfort with how Schmidt, who was not Jewish, allowed his music to be appropriated. Despite vigorous dissents in the posthumous Schmidt literature (there is an active and fiercely loyal group of admirers still in existence) and testimonies by his loyal pupils and colleagues (many of them Jewish), Schmidt’s politics veered to the right and adhered to the local Viennese traditions of political anti-Semitism, which during the 1890s became embedded in a Christian-Social framework. In this sense, Schmidt followed in the footsteps of Bruckner before him in the cultural politics of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Although as a composer Schmidt reveals an affinity to Brahms, his politics were the opposite of Brahms’s. By the mid-1930s Schmidt allowed himself to be linked to Austro-Fascism, and after 1938 and the Anschluss, to the Nazis. He died in 1939 before completing a Nazi-inspired cantata he agreed to write with the unfortunate title The German Resurrection. During the war, Schmidt’s music was played frequently in Vienna in order to demonstrate great “Aryan” modern music blessed with spiritual meaning, a powerful corrective and alternative to the “degenerate” grandiosity of Mahler and the abstract cacophony of Schoenberg.

Third, Schmidt had the misfortune of writing music at the peak of music’s history as a cultural form. There were too many good composers around. Schmidt came of age while Brahms and Bruckner were still writing. As an aspiring composer he competed with Max Reger, Gustav Mahler, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky, Dohnanyi, and Franz Schreker, and one could add Edward Elgar as well. Each of these composers wrote music with a continuing allegiance to 19th-century post-Wagnerian practices. If that was not sufficiently daunting, Schmidt by 1918 faced an entirely new source of competition—the modernist and nationalist musical movements that emerged after World War I. Schmidt’s work as a composer appeared contemporaneously with music of Bartók, Szymanowski, Enescu, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Hindemith, Weill, Martinů, and Janáček, just to name a few. And then one needs to consider the impact of composers from North America and Russia on the concert and opera repertoire after 1918. There seemed to be little place in the international scene for an old-fashioned-sounding Schmidt.

All this would be enough to daunt anyone, no matter how talented. But Schmidt remained productive and disciplined, impervious to fashion. It is ironic that Notre Dame, like Schreker’s Der Ferne Klang (1910), anticipates Berg’s Lulu (1935), not only in the treatment of the central female character, but in Schmidt’s use of classical strategies associated with instrumental music—sonata and counterpoint—and the orchestra as protagonist to frame the musical structure within opera. Dramatic action and an independent musical structure and logic, without reference to illustration or allusion, are integrated in Notre Dame, as in Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu. Schmidt was not a bland conservative—he was a reactionary revolutionary who sought to resist the decline in musical culture that had started in the late 19th century with the indiscriminating popular rage for Wagner.

The theme of Notre Dame has less to do with Victor Hugo then it does with Frank Wedekind and Otto Weininger: the fin-de-siècle obsession with the feminine and its role in inspiring aesthetic creativity and defining (and corrupting) the masculine. If anything, Schmidt and his librettist invert Hugo’s narrative and turn his politics upside down, framing the audience against the mob. Schmidt’s Notre Dame is an early example of 20th-century conservative cultural skepticism regarding the prospects of progress and mass democracy. It tacitly laments the collapse of the cultural legacy of aristocracy and monarchy, hardly Hugo’s intent. Indeed, Schmidt was one of many who never recovered from the end of Habsburg rule and the splintering of the Empire into warring little nations, essentially destroying the multi-ethnic and national character of Europe, including his birthplace.

The final remarkable aspect of Schmidt is the extent to which his music, despite its superficial debts and affinities to others, including Wagner, Brahms and Strauss, is really original. Despite his personality, Schmidt has a Gershwin- and Richard Rodgers-like gift for tunes, melodies, and lightness that routinely eluded Schoenberg and Reger. The melodic instinct and ear for a popular style (more associated with the operetta) resulted in the fact that Schmidt’s music is never quite as bombastic as that of Strauss and Mahler. Schmidt also carries on Bruckner’s adept lyrical use of the chorus. Furthermore, Schmidt retains an uncanny sense of proportion in structure and the use of time, as two previous works performed by the ASO, the 1934 Piano Concerto (with Leon Fleisher) and the 1923 Beethoven Variations for Piano and Orchestra, also reveal.

Notre Dame was Schmidt’s greatest single career success. Yet he remained bitter. Its premiere was delayed. Schmidt blamed Mahler and openly accused him of jealousy (clearly a bad idea). The first performance took place in the first year of World War I. By the time the war was over, the work seemed out of date and out of touch with the times—if not the music, then certainly the plot and libretto. During the 1920s and the early 1930s, Schmidt felt unfairly and increasingly dismissed and overlooked, even in Vienna (when in the 1920s Strauss briefly co-directed the Vienna Opera with Franz Schalk).

At the same time, Notre Dame, although in the shadow of other works, garnered considerable respect, as it deserved. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was impressed enough by the music to write Strauss about it. The orchestral music and vocal writing were widely admired and the finest opera singers from 1914 on wanted to be cast in Notre Dame.

This opera, along with practically all of Schmidt’s music, deserves to be in the repertoire as more than a rare curiosity. The excellence, refinement, elegance, and inspiration of Schmidt’s work are qualities eagerly embraced by audiences. Now that the conflicts of history have receded, we could use a breather from more of the same: Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner. Franz Schmidt’s music can provide a welcome change, if only it were performed in contexts that emancipate it from its undeserved identification as provincially Austrian.

Orientalism in France

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Orientalism in France, performed on Feb 10, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

The term Orientalism does not refer to characteristics or ethnicities located in a massive geographical region that spread from northern Africa, through the Middle East all the way to Asia, termed indiscriminately in 19th-century Europe as the “Orient.” Rather, it refers to a European fascination and obsession with distant cultures based on an historic accumulation of preconceptions and stereotypes. These developed in the European imagination before the Crusades. They lasted for centuries, with residues still visible in contemporary European and American representations of Islam and Asia. Their currency was enhanced by the experience of colonial and imperial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Not all these stereotypes were condescending or hostile. Some seemed benign, such as the colorful stories in One Thousand and One Nights. Others were sublimated European fantasies that expressed criticisms and desires otherwise not easily articulated in European societies. And many were used to justify European superiority. All, however, were products and distortions of European imaginations that actual travels and encounters to the lands in question were not capable of dislodging. Consider the two great Orientalist painters of France: the East portrayed by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), who traveled throughout North Africa, was just as idealized and influenced by European preconceptions as those of Jean August Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) who never traveled further than Rome. When Gustav Mahler sought inspiration in Chinese poetry in Das Lied von der Erde, its German translation and musical adaptation rendered it powerfully European.

A particularly intense locus for Orientalism in the 19th century (but hardly the only one) was France. The French fascination with the non-Western world began in earnest with the triumph of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was he who brought the Rosetta Stone to Europe. Champollion used it to unravel the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Napoleon brought the glory of the East to France and made France the modern equivalent of ancient Rome, with all the grandeur, glory, and arrogance of that conceit.

Napoleon centralized and modernized France and strengthened Paris’s status as the cosmopolitan crossroads of Europe and the arbiter of international taste and style. The world was judged and characterized in the Parisian press. Fashions were set for the rest of Europe. Individual European nations were not exempt during the 19th century from the imposition of stereotypes any more than Eastern cultures (though the difference between Europeans was pale in comparison to the difference between the European and non-European). The French, for example, considered the English to be cold and calculating, too steeped in the Old Testament, and thoroughly unmusical. They thought the Germans turgid and given to abstruse abstractions. German philosophers, according to the French, were schoolmasters and either rigid idealists or materialists. The German people were considered aggressive and unrefined. But the French celebrated themselves for their quick intelligence, their wit, elegance, and graceful style.

But although France experienced industrialization and urbanization in the 19th century, the dominance of a pre-modern rural ideal was never shattered. It was the countryside and the provincial life that helped sustain a national self-identity tied to nature and landscape in a manner quite different from the English experience. In the 19th century, France uniquely experienced a population decline. There was, by the end of the 19th century, a fear that France was deteriorating and that its greatest days were in the past. This insecurity was inspired first by the Napoleonic defeat in 1815 and then reinforced in 1870 when the Prussians vanquished the French with astonishing speed. France found itself in an odd position, in which its increasing powerlessness both economically and politically was compensated by its conceit as home—in Paris—to a culture emblematic of the highest aristocratic and bourgeois refinement and sophisticated mores. At the same time, under Napoleon III and the Third Republic, France pursued its colonial and imperial ambitions, sustaining and fueling the symbiosis between Orientalism and the French conceits of aesthetic clarity, elegance, and taste.

Therefore, beneath the mask of French cultural smugness lay a profound insecurity. In terms of 19th-century musical culture, one response to that insecurity was to grab hold of the German classical and romantic musical traditions of Beethoven, Schumann, and most significantly Wagner, and make them instruments of a French national cultural revival. To this unexpected form of cultural appropriation we owe the achievements of Chausson, Chabrier, D’Indy, and ultimately Debussy. The role played by César Franck can be linked to the impetus provided by Wagnerism. The goal, after 1870, was to create a new and distinct French musical tradition.

A parallel response, evident already at mid-century, was to enhance French distinctiveness by instilling music with elements of the exotic and Orientalism. Bizet’s Djamileh can be seen as the musical equivalent of the paintings of Henri Regnault (1843–71), whose Salome and Summary Execution evoke the kind of Orientalist exoticism that became wildly popular at mid-century. The exoticism in French art and music derived from Moorish Spain (North Africa) and the entire Ottoman Empire, as well as Asia (note Debussy’s use of a Japanese print for the publication of La mer) and sub-Saharan Africa. Ultimately, it was the Indian subcontinent and the Middle and Far East that seemed to offer the most fertile ground for French Orientalism. This is because, unlike southern Africa or Polynesia, these areas contained civilizations that could be made as complex or reductive as the European artist required. And furthermore, they were seen as decayed and deteriorated, which meant they appeared not competitive with Europe. Although the “primitive” regions of the Pacific might satisfy a Gauguin who tried to escape occidental civilization, a French artist could easily to turn to the East if he or she wanted to say something important about France. At the core of much of the appropriation of the “oriental” in 19th-century music was the intent to critique and explore all things Western, notably familiar romantic mores regarding sexuality and sensuality.

In the case of music, the appropriation of Orientalist elements commented particularly on the French self-definition and self-image in terms of musical materials, sonorities, and forms. What passed for melody, harmony, and form in music were redefined by the inspirations that appropriated or imagined “oriental” practices provided. They were used to challenge the dominance of German classical rule-makers and form-givers, the patrons of sonata-form, fugues, and traditional four-part harmony in the style of J.S. Bach.

Not surprisingly, though all of the composers on tonight’s program appropriate “oriental” musical elements, only one of these composers actually spent a considerable amount of time outside of France. This was Saint-Saëns, who had a real explorer’s personality. He traveled extensively and adored North Africa. He composed a work entitled Africa, as well as an “Egyptian” Piano Concerto. Yet this Orientalist aspect was integrated into his outspoken allegiance to the task of transcending the perceived differences between the German and the French. His most successful opera, Samson and Delilah (1877), bears witness to how the use of Orientalism permitted him to do this. Orientalist gestures are integrated with perfectly-constructed counterpoint and fugal writing. For all his romance with the non-Western, Saint-Saëns remained an eclectic defender of the traditions of Mozart and Beethoven. Franck, who was arguably the decisive original voice in 19th-century French musical cultural (although a Belgian), also found his particular affinity in Les Djinns (a subject to which Gabriel Faure would later return) with the mysteries in the legends of the Middle East.

Djamileh suggests that Bizet, like Ravel, was captivated by what was perhaps the most influential fictional work of Orientalism in France, One Thousand and One Nights. This collection, still popular today, was originally collated and translated into French in 1717 by Antoine Galland. There is still debate about how much of it was translated from original sources and how much of it was made up by Galland. Ravel was one in a long line of musicians taken by that collection. Alfred de Musset’s story, Namouna, on which Djamileh is based, is in the tradition of Galland. The harem is located in Cairo. Bizet, arguably the most talented composer of the mid-19th century in France, whose death at the age of 37 was a shock to his contemporaries, wrote many of his most successful scores exploiting a self-conscious exoticism, not only derived from nearby Spain (as in Carmen), but elsewhere, as in his early neglected symphonic ode, Vasco da Gama.

The youngest of the composers on this program, Maurice Delage, a student of Ravel, represents a later stage of the French fascination with the non-Western. His near contemporary, the critic, novelist, and activist Romain Rolland, authored a biography of Gandhi and Tagore and was attracted to Vedanta philosophy. India became a key focus for that generation. It is in Delage’s music, however, that we see most clearly the impact on modernism of two centuries of the French and Western effort to define its cultures with and against a construct of the East and the “other.” Indeed, as the Ravel and Delage works suggest, the character of 20th-century music, particularly that portion of it that emerges from France and especially Paris, cannot be fully understood without considering the patterns and legacy of 19th-century orientalism.

Stravinsky Outside Russia

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Stravinsky Outside Russia, performed on Jan 20, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

It has become all too commonplace to negotiate the complex and tangled fabric of artistic life in history by constructing an artificial hierarchy—lists of the “best” or “most famous” personages—as if painting, writing, or composing were Olympic contests, adequately judged by a single objective criterion. In reality, at any given time there are many inspired and imposing figures who, despite their ambitions, jealousies, and rivalries, themselves never worried about any top ten or top fifty rankings. And the nature of art-making resists such blunt instruments of evaluation. Nevertheless, for most of the 20th century (if there were indeed to be a contender for the status of the “greatest” 20th-century composer) the honor, as a matter of public perception both in the general public and among professional musicians, would most likely have fallen on Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky, who, unlike Paul Dukas or Felix Mendelssohn, seems not to have suffered from modesty, self-doubt, or excessive generosity to others, would have been only too pleased. Perhaps the best way to think of Stravinsky’s standing during his lifetime and for several decades after his death in 1971 is to compare him to the place his contemporary, Pablo Picasso, came to occupy in the visual arts as emblematic of the 20th century.

The reasons for Stravinsky’s prominence and dominance are many. First and foremost are the range and quality of Stravinsky’s output, sustained over a very long and productive life. Second, Stravinsky was a shrewd and effective promoter of his own music and career. Third is the variety of styles and genres in which the composer worked, from the stage to small chamber music works. Fourth—and perhaps most intriguing—are the prominence and influence he managed to achieve in three very disparate and discrete public spheres and contexts. The first was his native pre-revolutionary Russia, into which he was born in 1882. The second was French-speaking Europe, in France and Switzerland, where the composer lived and worked for nearly three decades before World War II. Stravinsky started his career outside of Russia as a Russian working abroad, and then as an exile. But he ended up as an exponent of contemporary “French” music. Stravinsky spent his final three decades (from 1939 on) based in the United States, where he was regarded initially as partially Russian, but equally French as an exile. Ultimately, by the early 1960s, he came to represent American music, at home in the United States and abroad.

Stravinsky’s career began in Russia, where he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and where he formed a deep and lifelong artistic and spiritual attachment to Russian folk traditions, the Orthodox religion, the Russian language, and the Russian cultural heritage in music, the visual arts, and literature. The “Volga Boatmen” arrangement for Chaliapin gives evidence of this. In Paris, where he befriended Claude Debussy, Stravinsky exploited the rage for presumed exoticism of all things Russian, and rose to international fame through the success and notoriety of his ballet scores written for the Ballets Russes.

One single date has come to serve as an historic marker for the explosion of modernism onto the cultural scene—a moment in time that seemed to bring the 19th century to a close and usher in the 20th: the May 29, 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring (which the ASO will be performing next month in our Classics Declassified series). In his years in France, Stravinsky came to dominate the musical and cultural scene, taking his place alongside Valery, Gide, and Cocteau (forgetting Coco Chanel in this context) as a luminary. Through Nadia Boulanger, arguably the most important single teacher of a younger generation of composers, many of them Americans, Stravinsky influenced the course of American concert music. In his American years, Stravinsky’s fame and reputation continued to grow, not as an outsider (the way other émigrés, such as Schoenberg, saw themselves), but as an insider in the American scene. In part through his association with Robert Craft, who would become his chronicler and assistant, in his last years Stravinsky was astonishingly productive, writing in a new way, adapting modernist techniques developed by Schoenberg and Webern.

All in all, therefore, one can locate roughly three distinct stylistic periods in Stravinsky’s career. The first was an unmistakable “Russian” phase; Russian influences are obviously audible in the Firebird, for example. This gave way to a form of self-consciously international neo-classicism, not dissimilar from a parallel development in architecture, particularly the work of Le Corbusier. The high point of that period was reached during the late 1920s and early 1930s in Paris. In the years of transition from Russia, great works that mirror the trajectories forwards and backwards in time were written, such as Les Noces (1914/1917) and The Soldier’s Tale (1918). The legacy of neo-classicism formed the basis for the third period (the most audibly modernist period, that of the 1950s and 1960s) when the composer was in the United States, where he wrote among other things, together with W.H. Auden, his operatic masterpiece The Rake’s Progress (1951) and an opera for television, The Flood(1962).

At the same time, just as in the case of Picasso, the shifting stylistic surfaces in each period never masked a consistent distinctive character and quality to Stravinsky’s music. A set of proverbial fingerprints, revealing a unique musical imagination and personality, can be located in all of Stravinsky’s music. Central to Stravinsky’s aesthetic was the belief that in the end music was separate from language, and demanded a formal economy, a structure, and rigorous logic all its own. At the same time, Stravinsky understood his audience and the public. He had an uncanny sense of the theatrical in music and an elegant sense of humor and irony. There was a clarity, transparency, and lightness to his music reflecting a deeply felt aversion to Wagnerian grandiosity and Mahlerian metaphysical pomposity. A lucid rhythmic originality, vitality, and complexity inhabit many of his scores, but the asymmetries and surprises all seem seamless and natural. The discipline of writing for the dance taught the composer that the overarching architecture of a work, its musical flow and narrative, could not be obscure. Stravinsky used musical time with uncanny effectiveness, rarely if ever wearing out his welcome with his audience or his fellow musicians. His command of instrumental and vocal sonorities was equally impressive, as was his capacity to make his material memorable. Stravinsky’s extensive output was startling in its consistency in terms of rigor, invention and quality.

Yet, like Picasso, although Stravinsky’s name and reputation remain in tact, the interest of the public has shifted away from much of his work. The three great ballet scores, The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911/47) and The Rite of Spring, are cornerstones of the orchestral repertoire. Many later scores are still heard, but far fewer than one might think or wish. This is especially the case with Stravinsky’s later works. Indeed, many of his mid-career and later works survive on the public stage as a result of his friend Balanchine’s choreography, including pieces not intended for the dance, such as the Violin Concerto (1931).

If there is tendency to simplify how we approach the history of music by constructing lists of the “top ten,” there is a parallel allure to the idea that there is some “essential” identity to each composer in terms of his historical roots, so to speak. Bartók becomes quintessentially “Hungarian,” Copland “American,” Debussy and Ravel “French,” and Sibelius “Finnish.” As a result, we turn to Americans for the “best” performances of Copland, Hungarians for Bartók, the French for Debussy and Ravel, and the Finns for Sibelius. This makes marketing easy and lends some hint of authenticity to our experience as listeners, as if there might be some secret spiritual or national bond, framed by blood, language and soil, between a composer and his music, requiring decoding by someone who shares that bond.

Even when this might plausibly apply to a composer (e.g. Musorgsky as Russian or Smetana as Czech), it assumes some fixed generalized category—Russianness and Czechness that seem to transcend historical change. But what do we make of Stravinsky? Despite his evident identity as a Russian émigré after 1917, this reductive assessment violates not only his own views about the nature of music, but the facts of his career and the range and variety of his compositions. Recourse to the notion of exile, in the case of Stravinsky, only complicates the problem. Rachmaninov was also an exile after 1917. For him the experience of being separated from his homeland was traumatic. He sought to insulate himself in an environment marked by nostalgia. He tried to recreate the atmosphere of his native land when he was in America, England, and Switzerland. Prokofiev, who like Stravinsky found himself abroad when the October Revolution happened, and like Stravinsky sought to make a career in America and France, in part because he felt always in Stravinsky’s shadow, returned to Russia in the mid 1930s. But Prokofiev, unlike Stravinsky, had no spiritual ties to the Orthodox Church and was never a virulent anti-Communist.

Stravinsky fit in, in France and America, as a leading and successful participant at the center of musical and cultural life, and never at its margins.

Vladimir Nabokov reinvented himself and became one of the greatest writers in English and one of the most trenchant observers of post-War America. Stravinsky managed to reinvent himself too, not once, but twice: first in France and then in America. Like Nabokov, he used the position of exile to forge a synthesis with his new circumstances and reach in new ways various new publics. The link to the past was never hidden or disavowed (as Kurt Weill attempted). Unlike the Jewish and politically-active anti-Fascists, Stravinsky had not been rejected, betrayed, or expelled by Russia, but by the Communists. And Stravinsky, fortunately for him, unsuccessfully tried to keep his music in circulation in Germany after 1933. Displacement and the necessity to adjust may have been unwelcome but they could still be understood as acts of practicality, not fear or conscience. Exile provided Stravinsky with new remarkable sources of inspiration.

This concert seeks to highlight the consequences of Stravinsky’s life after 1910 and particularly after 1917, when the plausibility of a return to Russia disappeared. Some works foreground aspects of Stravinsky’s lifelong connection to Russia. In others, particularly the later choral works, the “Russian” element, if present, is quite remote. What this concert suggests is that in Stravinsky’s case, we have a composer’s composer, for whom music can function in the world in a manner that resists facile typecasting, and whose character reflects a dialogue with the composer’s immediate environment.

Furthermore, the music on this concert, with the exception of the Symphony of Psalms, appears rather infrequently. It is therefore a reminder of the range and variety of the music of one of the consummate masters of musical composition whose ambitions, craft, and influence were international and whose identity shifted, at different phases in his career, to transfigure distinct milieus and contexts.

Bauhaus Bach

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bauhaus Bach, performed on Oct 21, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

Modernism in the arts during the 20th century can be said to have had two distinct (albeit related) and contradictory impulses: first, rejection, resistance, and rebellion on the part of the younger generation, born after 1860, directed at a perceived arrogance and smugness regarding the state of culture and the arts in Europe during the late 19th century—a sense of triumphant superiority buttressed by the startling progress of industry, science, and technology, and the development of cities and a prosperous urban middle class; and second, at the same time, a pervasive pessimism about the standards of contemporary culture, the absence of normative principles, the detachment of ethics from aesthetics, and a sense of decline and subservience to commerce and fashion. This required a change in the foundations and forms of art and the restoration of perceived true and genuine standards of ethics and aesthetics characteristic of a classical past, ones that advanced the good and the beautiful.

Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg became identified as expressive of the first impulse. Matthew Arnold was among the first to articulate the second impulse, only to be followed by many lesser imitators who decried the philistinism of modern times.

In music, the rejectionist modernist challenge to the musical practices of the 19th century can be located in Debussy, Mahler, and the early Schoenberg, and in the Stravinsky of the 1913 The Rite of Spring. The heyday of the modernist rebellion was at the turn of the 19th century, before 1914. In the chaos and disillusionment that followed World War I, in the face of apparent political and moral bankruptcy, this rejectionist strain in aesthetic modernism, particularly in painting and literature, flourished. It is visible most clearly in the eccentric and radical character of Dada and Surrealism. Yet at the same time, already before 1914 there was a call to “return to Mozart.” This restorative impulse in modernism gained momentum after 1918 and had its strongest impact in an ascetic formalism that was particularly dominant in music and architecture.

Music and architecture have been long considered kindred art forms, particularly during the 19th century. Friedrich Schelling famously dubbed architecture “petrified” or “frozen” music. However, in no era would this be more evident, in practice as well as theory, than in the 20th century. No doubt, the connection between the visual and the musical was made more plausible by the post-Wagnerian enthusiasm for the integration of all of the arts, as well as the practical encounter between visual symbolism in design and sonority in music in the construction of halls for music—a burgeoning business between 1870 and 1914. Architecture’s link to music rested in part on the fascination with connections among sight, color, and sound—pioneered by composers Scriabin, Ciurlionis, and Schoenberg, and advocated by the painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), one of the founders of the Bauhaus. With respect to architecture, it was held that there was a perceived special common debt, shared by music, to formal structures that shape the subjective experience of space and time, including proportion and perspective. Both architecture and music, in their formal realizations, deal directly with indispensable structural elements, variation and repetition.

The connection between 20th-century modernist movements in the visual arts—particularly (but not exclusively) architecture and design—and music was most impressive in the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus—both a school and movement—flourished in Weimar, Germany from 1919 to 1933, when it was shut down by the new Nazi regime. Started first in Weimar and then transferred to Dessau (until 1932), the Bauhaus was led, for most of its life, by architects: first Walter Gropius (1883–1969; Alma Mahler’s second husband) and then Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). The artists associated with the Bauhaus included Paul Klee (1879–1940), an avid musician with a passion for Bach; Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943), who shared an interest in music and theatre; Kandinsky, once a close friend of Schoenberg’s who even tried his hand at composition and considered music a model for non-objective painting; and last but not least Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956).

As Barbara Haskell, the curator of this fall’s brilliant and long-overdue retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum (with which this concert is linked) has noted, Feininger was sent by his father to Germany from New York to study music. Feininger’s parents were both musicians. His father, a violinist and teacher, also composed music that came to the attention of Franz Liszt. The musical traditions of the Feininger family were continued even though Lyonel abandoned music as a career. Lyonel’s son Lawrence became one of the leading musicologists of the post-World War II era. Just as Schoenberg painted and took lessons (fatefully) from Richard Gerstl (1883–1908), the brilliant Austrian expressionist painter who took his life when his affair with Schoenberg’s wife ended, Feininger throughout his adult life continued to dabble in music. Schoenberg had one major period when he produced most of his paintings, the decade before 1914. Feininger had a comparable short span when he composed. It took place during his years at the Bauhaus.

For many visual artists and architects in the 1920s (including Klee), the composer who best exemplified the musical—music’s formal logic, its autonomy, its abstract nature, its pure aesthetic economy, its resistance to kitsch and sentimentality, its stature as representative of some normative criteria of beauty and the “classical”—was J.S. Bach. Bach’s command of counterpoint and polyphony—witnessed by his many astonishing forays in the fugue—rendered him not only the greatest composer of all time, but an historic aesthetic model for an “objective” modernism. The international style of architecture abjured the dishonesty of facades, decoration, and ornament. It called for a disciplined honesty about the materials of construction and a visible and transparent synthesis of form and function. Klee and Feininger emulated Bach in their paintings. Feininger’s obsession with Bach led him to try his hand at writing fugues.

Schoenberg’s development, during the early 1920s, of a new method of composition with twelve tones, specific to each piece but standard to all works, was designed to replace tonal relationships between individual pitches. This would therefore emancipate music from its dependence on learned inherited traditional links between music and expression and emotion. This was a radical effort to restore a classical purity to the art of music Schoenberg believed flourished in the age of Mozart and Haydn, the classical era.

This explicit anti-romantic strategy paralleled modern architecture’s effort to distance itself from 19th-century historicism in design. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Bauhaus. Bauhaus furniture designs emulated the sleek elegance and simplicity of the early 19th-century Biedermeier era just as Schoenberg, with new materials, sought to spark a renewal of the pre-Romantic 18th-century ideals of musical thinking and composition.

The widespread neo-classical restorative impulse of the 1920s fueled and sustained a resurgence of public interest in Bach. There was no more poignant an example of this 20^th-century Bach revival than Wolfgang Graeser’s remarkable edition of Bach’s last and uncompleted work, The Art of Fugue, which Graeser also orchestrated. His orchestration was performed in Bach’s own Thomaskirche at the 1928 Bach festival in Leipzig. That performance left an indelible impression on Alban Berg, who wrote enthusiastically to his wife about the event. Graeser, a brilliant and multi-talented Swiss artist and scholar in his early 20s, committed suicide shortly thereafter. His orchestration was largely forgotten, except for the loyalty shown it by the great conductor Hermann Scherchen.

For his edition, Graeser chose to add a Bach organ chorale prelude, following the example set by Bach’s son, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach. The chorale prelude was finished by the blind J. S. Bach shortly before his death, and was the last completed work by the composer. Graeser included it in his performing edition so that The Art of Fugue, left unfinished, would not trail off.

As Stephen Hinton points out, Bach revivals have not been rare. The most notable ones were exactly a century apart. The earlier one, in which Mendelssohn played a pivotal role, occurred in the 1820s in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The later one, the Bach revival that frames this program, took place in the aftermath of World War I. In point of fact, Bach was never really forgotten. Bach’s music may have disappeared for periods of time from public performance, but composers after Bach, from Bach’s sons and Mozart to Webern and Boulez, studied his works. Composers have consistently been in awe of Bach’s command of the materials of music, and the purity of form in his compositions.

Indeed, Bach’s profundity and emotional power—whether audible in original form or in modernized orchestrations—derive from the rigorous discipline and intensity of the musical logic he employed. Music, in Bach’s hands, became a sacred art, the highest expression of the divinity in human nature—the imaginative capacity to create a true aesthetic realm emancipated from the compromises of everyday existence. No wonder that in moments when human nature reveals its darkest side, its uncanny attraction to violence, cruelty, and death, all camouflaged by the use of rhetoric and language and the use of reason and argument to justify war and destruction, artists have turned to Bach for inspiration.

Passover in Exile

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Passover in Exile, performed on April 21, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

It is not unusual for us to view the making of art as somehow discretionary and perhaps even decorative, distant from what is truly important in life. Our construction of what is of value in life, what is truly important, has for complex historical and cultural reasons been influenced by definitions of what is useful, profitable, necessary, efficient, popular, and practical. And the arts are really none of these things, it seems, except as a venue of ambition for a few and an arena of entertainment for the many.

But this utilitarian definition of value trivializes the human imagination. The making of art, the aesthetic impulse, particularly in the case of music—an art form that exists within time and transforms our experience of time—reveals itself to be at the very core of the value of life and the sanctity of life. That revelation too often occurs, however, in times of suffering and hopelessness. Of all the arts, music, because of its essential character as non-representational, is rightly privileged in our Abrahamic traditions as a form of life that brings us closer to the divine. After the high priests in the Old Testament comes, in order of status, the tribe of musicians whose noise transcends the limits of human language. Music reaches beyond words and reflects a presence beyond the human sphere.

Whether feared as subversive (in some theologies and philosophies) or celebrated as the spark of the divine, music is necessary. It is not a discretionary form of life. And in no time in history was that felt more acutely than in the 1930s by the Jews of Europe. For German-speaking Jews, the triumph of political anti-Semitism in the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933 deprived them of their language and their sense of belonging. For generations German had been the language not only of their professional and public lives, but also of their intimate experiences. It framed their relationships with friends, family, and strangers, and their dialogue with themselves. After 1933, German language and culture was not only in the hands of enemies but entirely redefined to exclude all Jews, no matter how many generations of Jews had lived as part of a German speaking world. German Jewish writers lost their public and their purpose.

The passage of time—especially since 1945—has led us increasingly to focus on the Holocaust when we think of the fate of European Jewry. Too often, faced with the images of concentration camps, torture, and death, we understandably underestimate and overlook the pain and suffering of exclusion, segregation, disenfranchisement, and exile that took place between 1933 and 1941. But that experience was the norm for all German Jews between 1933 and 1939. The librettist of the work on today’s program, Max Brod (1884–1968) was in fact a Czech Jew, but a central figure in the German Jewish culture of Prague. Even though his direct encounter with Nazi rule came only in 1939 (he left Prague on the last train before the Nazis occupied the city), from 1933 on, he too essentially lost his language and vocation—his public voice and space. Brod, although an early convert to Zionism, was a German writer, writing for a German reading public. His world was the same as that of his friend Franz Kafka. It was shaped within a bilingual city that prided its literary German as being of a higher standard than that practiced in Germany. Prague’s German literary tradition had in large measure been sustained and cultivated by its Jews. Its luminaries included Brod; Fritz Mauthner, the philosopher of language; Franz Werfel; and Egon Erwin Kisch, the great journalist.

Brod was a polymath who wrote music, poetry, and fiction as well as music criticism. After emigrating to Palestine in 1939 he became a major figure in the history of Israel’s cultural life and a force in the great Hebrew theatre Habimah. Before his emigration, Brod famously put Leoš Janáček on the map, as it were, late in the composer’s life, following the Prague premiere of Jenůfa. He translated Janáček’s operas into German, thereby permitting them wide distribution throughout Europe. Brod also helped propel the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Schweik) to fame. Music was central to Brod throughout his entire life. In 1951, he wrote the first book on music in Israel, and wrote on many musical subjects, including Mahler. But if there ever had been a moment in his life when music mattered most as a medium of communication, it was after 1933. The Nazis and their evident popularity could effectively appropriate the German language, but hard as the Nazis tried, music seemed more resistant. If anything, the significance and power of the musical culture of Europe, with which post-emancipation Jewry had forged an intimate connection, only grew in importance among German Jews, both those trapped at home and those in exile.

The trajectory of Max Brod’s life followed a path that began with a high level of acculturation and assimilation into cosmopolitan life in Prague. As a young man, Brod was forced to confront the challenge of Czech nationalism, an encounter that led ultimately to Zionism and Brod’s emigration, not to America but to Palestine, before the outbreak of World War II. The life of Paul Dessau (1894–1979), Brod’s younger collaborator on the Haggadah setting, offers an example of a familiar alternative pattern quite common to Dessau and Brod’s generation. Dessau’s grandfather was a cantor. Through music, the talented young Dessau moved from the more insular world of Jewish life into the center of cosmopolitan culture. He rose to prominence as a conductor and composer for films in the 1920s. In 1933 he was forced into exile and moved to Paris where he continued to write music for the film medium and experimented with modernism in the direction of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone strategy.

Faced with the reality of fascism, Dessau turned not to Zionism but to Communism. The Spanish Civil War inspired him to write political music consistent with his radical sympathies, emulating the example of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler. Dessau ended up, along with a host of German émigrés, in Hollywood, where he began a famous and long-standing collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, writing music for Brecht’s plays, including a large oratorio-scale work, Deutsches Miserere. (The ASO performed Dessau’s 1957 In memoriam Bertolt Brecht two seasons ago). Hollywood seemed the right place to go. Dessau had written the music for a 1928 film directed by Walt Disney, Alice and the Fleas.

But Jewish themes did not vanish entirely from his output during Dessau’s American years. Dessau did not remain in America or end up in Israel. He followed Brecht to East Germany, where he remained until his death. There he continued to find a way to reconcile his radical egalitarian politics with musical modernism, teaching and composing two operas in his later years, one based on Büchner, Leonce und Lena (1978) and Einstein (1973). He was consistently the object of suspicion on the part of party officials and ideologues.

The collaboration between Brod and Dessau was exactly contemporaneous with another remarkable collaboration between a German Jewish composer and descendant of a cantor, Kurt Weill, and a Prague German Jewish writer, Franz Werfel, that resulted in The Eternal Road. This massive work (also performed by the ASO in its English-language version), similar in scale and intent to the Haggadah, was also originally conceived in German in the 1930s. It was translated into English and found its way to New York in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. In contrast, the Haggadah found no outlet for performance and was finally premiered in Jerusalem in 1962 in a Hebrew translation by Georg Mordechai Langer. Like The Eternal Road, also a work originally developed in German, the Haggadah was ultimately given its voice in Hebrew, in Israel. Both The Eternal Road and the Haggadah placed in the foreground the history of the Jewish nation as an oppressed people seeking freedom. One found its public voice in America, a hospitable and stable diaspora, and the other in the Jewish state, both nations where the pariah status of the Jews, their exclusion from citizenship in politics, was no longer the defining aspect of modern Jewish identity.

The Eternal Road has had some currency and been revived on occasion, largely as a result of the fame and popularity of Weill. But Dessau and Brod’s Haggadah has not been so fortunate, in part because Dessau’s reputation has diminished. The composer’s politics did him no favors during the Cold War. He had advocates neither in America, where he was derided as a Communist, or in Israel, where his distance from Zionism (rather than his left-wing politics) did not help his cause. And Europe before 1989, west and east of the Iron Curtain, was no place for this setting of the Passover text and story. The 1962 Jerusalem premiere was followed in 1994 by a concert performance in Hamburg, not in Hebrew but in German. The work has not been performed since then.

But the moment for this massive and eloquent oratorio may have finally arrived. The Cold War has become a dim memory and religion is in the midst of a world-wide renascence. Yet the power of this work resides not in its link to religion but in the intersection between tradition and modernity, in its faith in the power of music, and the undiminished universal resonance of the story of Passover, the liberation of slaves and their journey to freedom. Dessau and Brod’s Haggadah is at once heartbreaking and arresting. We need to imagine Brod and Dessau, two displaced artists, either threatened or stripped of their vocations, their homes, their communities, and their language, each struggling to make sense of a world that had come to an abrupt end. Exiled and isolated, both turned to their indelible identities as Jews—an identity that may once have been residual or secondary but had become dominant involuntarily through the events of history.

The authors’ personal identification with their mythic ancestors, the slaves in Egypt, their plight, their pride, and their hope, has an intensity that is hard for those of us privileged to live in freedom and comfort, in homes of our choosing, to imagine. The inspiration they put into this work does not stem from ambition for success and fame, for they had no prospect of performance, particularly at the historical apex of anti-Semitism, during the 1930s, an anti-Semitism spearheaded by the Nazis but openly and tacitly endorsed by the whole world. They gave voice to their own people, a nation abandoned and alone, and to its tradition of suffering and its hope of liberation, all at an historical moment of utter darkness. Working with a language they barely commanded (Hebrew) but that represented the continuity of Jewish identity, they celebrated the shared culture that was inspired by Hebrew. As in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s 1925 translation into German of the Old Testament, German was subordinated through the synthesis of music and language.

Brod and Dessau transposed the most intimate, constant, universal, and memorable marker of Jewish identity—the Passover Seder— and its rituals that take place each year in every Jewish home, into the public sphere, onto the stage in a unique European cultural form, the sacred oratorio. The Haggadah is a touching epitaph to the cultural contribution of European Jewry. It offers a synthesis between distinctly Jewish elements, the legacy of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Handel’s Messiah, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and the now-forgotten oratorios on biblical themes by Bruch, Anton Rubinstein, and Elgar. Written in a moment of hopelessness, fear, and oppression, Dessau and Brod’s Haggadah is a moving tribute to the resilience of human spirit and imagination and the power of art to sustain the will to live and the courage to fight against oppression on behalf of freedom and justice.

American Harmonies: The Music of Walter Piston

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert American Harmonies: The Music of Walter Piston, performed on March 29, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

The contrast between Walter Piston’s career and his posthumous reputation and place in the repertory exposes the ironies and shortcomings in the way the history of music often gets told. We are led to believe that there are great figures who are overlooked and misunderstood in their own times, but who are posthumously revered. But often, the opposite is the case. Many composers who were well-regarded and successful during and immediately after their lifetimes, are sometimes altogether forgotten today. Furthermore, we are led to believe that great composers, like painters and writers, suffered in their lives, and were more often than not poor, lonely, unhappy in love, and perhaps unstable. This too is a groundless post-Romantic assumption, as the examples of Bach, Mendelssohn, and dozens of others amply testify.

Walter Piston was not overlooked in his own time, and his reputation as a major American composer was well deserved. This bodes well for a revival of his music in the future. He seems to have been quite stable, happily married, and prosperous. By all accounts he was generous in spirit, a good citizen, and blessed with two rare gifts: humor and wit. Howard Pollack, in his fine 1992 volume on Piston’s students entitled Harvard Composers, tells the following story. When one of Piston’s students, Harold Shapero, went to study with Hindemith (whom Piston admired) he discovered that Hindemith was ruthless in criticism and regularly rewrote Shapero’s drafts of melodies. Frustrated, Shapero handed in the ‘cello theme from the Concertino being performed on tonight’s concert as his own. Hindemith was pleased and much less critical, describing the tune condescendingly as “Frenchy.” But then Hindemith proceeded to rewrite it. When Shapero later told the story to Piston, Piston mused, “Well, I could change one of his, too.”

Piston, in his lifetime, was best known and prominent as the dominant figure in music at Harvard who, among other things, brought Stravinsky for the lectures that turned into the 1947 Poetics of Music. For 34 years Piston taught music at Harvard. Yet he himself was largely self-taught as a musician before entering college. His first interests were engineering and painting. But he went on to teach himself to play the piano, the violin, and the saxophone. Piston’s hands-on familiarity playing a vast array of instruments explains the persuasive economy and practicality of his 1955 textbook Orchestration and his unerring skill in handling instruments, from the flute (Piston’s 1930 Sonata for Flute and Piano helped establish his reputation) to the harp (consider the late “Souvenir” for harp, viola and flute from 1967) and harpsichord (the 1945 Sonatina for Violin and Harpsichord). Piston’s ear was incisive and in symphonic music he orchestrated as he wrote.

Returning from Paris, where he studied not only with Boulanger (whom he brought later to Cambridge) but also with Paul Dukas, in 1926, Piston settled into a comfortable routine, producing steadily an impressive array of works. As a celebrated and revered teacher at Harvard, Piston enjoyed, for years, the patronage of the Boston Symphony and the loyalty of many generations of students from Leroy Anderson and Leonard Bernstein to Elliott Carter and John Harbison. However, Piston’s prominence as a teacher and the success of his textbooks, particularly the 1941 text entitled Harmony, would eventually become liabilities. There is perhaps no more damning phrase among critics and in self-consciously artistic circles than the word “academic.” It has recently become fashionable for composers, writers, and painters to do some teaching, but only on and off. To hold a regular responsible position in an institution smacks of a bureaucratic disposition and a yen for respectability that is incompatible with spontaneity, inspiration, originality, risk taking, and eccentricity—all hallmarks according to the popular imagination of true artistic temperament. In the argument for a strict separation of teaching and doing, however, the examples of Fauré and Rimsky-Korsakov are conveniently forgotten.

Apart from his consummate musical skills and judgment there was nothing visibly flamboyant about Piston in mid-career and he seems never to have harbored an ambition to write for the theatre or make a career as a conductor, despite his considerable skill on the podium. Piston was too much the ultimate insider, and a generous one at that. Nothing outside of his music and writings seemed memorable by the ever-more-dominant criteria of stardom the world of classical music adopted from Hollywood after World War II. Piston was not a “personality.” He courted no controversy, even in the McCarthy era. He was not a natural subject of publicity.

Furthermore, Piston’s music exhibited no obvious markers of radical innovation. Piston was a composer who excelled at strategies others had pioneered, an artist capable of synthesis. Piston’s music was influenced certainly by the example of Stravinsky, in manner reminiscent of but also distinguished from Copland. Piston, a lifelong Francophile, admired Debussy, but in the end he developed his own eclectic and distinct American voice. His models from the 19th century were Chopin and Brahms. His America was not Copland’s vision of the West and the “frontier,” but one closer to Ives (despite the differences in their music): New England.

Piston has a distinct voice, but it demands the capacity to appreciate the consummate command of musical materials. Piston’s music is beautifully crafted. That should not be held against it. There is nothing academic about Piston’s music. Its range and quality—in contrast to that of Roy Harris, for example—justify Elliott Carter’s view that Piston’s music reveals a rare combination of elegance, wit, sparkle, craftsmanship, and a fluid and persuasive flexibility in its emotional range and authenticity.

Walter Piston may not have been an original in the sense of Ives, Cowell, or Varése, or a composer intent on exploiting mere contrast and effect, but, as Carter put it, he excelled at the “most durable and most satisfying aspects of the art of music,” giving us hope that the “qualities of integrity and reason” in our culture are still with us.

American music in the 20th century had its share of brilliant new voices such as George Antheil and Leo Ornstein, where the promise of early success was never realized. There are other composers in history known in retrospect for just a few works (e.g. Carl Ruggles), or one period, or even a single work (e,g, Leoncavallo). Piston represents a different case: a career marked by consistency and growth over time. His music has the substance, sophistication, variety, and unpretentious candor of feeling sufficient to sustain interest over time.

In contrast to one of Piston’s contemporaries, Roger Sessions, whose music shares with Piston’s an extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship and integrity, Piston’s music was always intentionally accessible (or “realist” as Pollack argues) and transparent (if a bit “ironic,” as Pollack suggests) in intent, even in his more explicitly modernist works from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Let us continue to hope that musicians and audiences have the capacity to respond to and become attached to music that stands back from spectacle and flash and explores more deeply, as Piston’s does, the unique qualities of musical form as a means of expression in response to contemporary life. The refinement and the dialogue with tradition in Piston’s music permit it to transcend its historical context and engage new generations of performers and listeners.

The Context of Music: The Spanish Civil War

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Music of Spain: Composers of the Civil War, performed on Feb 25, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

The modern political history of Spain began formally with the declaration of the Second Republic of Spain (the so-called “first” republic was a short-lived affair in 1873–4) at the end of 1931 after the departure of King Alfonso XIII (who did not abdicate but was declared guilty of treason) and the adoption of a constitution. The 1931 constitution may have had hallmarks of a modern democracy, including the election of a president by parliament and an electoral college based on the popular vote, freedom of religion, and the civilian control of the military. But it also outlined a radical and perhaps even noble agenda that was divisive and suggested the possible influence of communists. The new republic sought in its fundamental laws to sharply reduce the role not only of the military (no professional soldier could become president), but also of the Catholic Church. The radical secular vision of the new political order was perhaps best expressed by nationalization of church property and the dissolution of the Jesuit order.

The extreme and historic social inequality that dominated in Spain justified legal provisions to expropriate private property, engage in land reform, and nationalize public utilities. Popular as these measures were, particularly in the midst of a terrifying and worldwide downward economic spiral, they were undoubtedly starkly progressive and profoundly influenced by socialism. They alarmed the vested interests of the past, the landed aristocracy, the army, and the clergy. The nation that would face this swift turn to republicanism was itself not cohesive enough as to make the shift from monarchy to an egalitarian republic smooth. And for all the ills of the church, it had its adherents throughout all social classes.

The new republic also faced a major issue central to all twentieth century (and twenty-first century) Spanish politics: the bedeviling tension between regional and national identity. Catalonia, the home of Pablo Casals, was by far the region most determined to achieve autonomy. It had its own language and culture and its own political elite. But Andalusia (where Picasso was born) and the Basque region were also places with distinct cultures and proud traditions. Regional pride may have survived in competition with more modern constructions of national identity in all major European nations (France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy), but regional identity remained far more competitive in Spain. Spain entered the twentieth century more as a fragile dynastic entity akin to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Spain was an amalgam of not always compatible peoples, despite a shared common language and a seemingly coherent geographical and historical profile. It was far less an incipient centralized modern state of the sort fashioned over centuries in France and rather more rapidly out of large sections of nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe.

If regionalism was not enough of a challenge to the republic, religion—in the form of the Catholic Church—had provided a powerful common ground in the Iberian Peninsula. The republic sought to weaken the Church’s influence. A deep religiosity pervaded Spain for centuries. It cut across class divisions. Ignatius Loyola was Spaniard and the Spanish monarchy helped define the Counter-Reformation. Spain carried the banner of the dream of universal Christendom, expelling Islam and its own Jews by the end of the fifteenth century and bringing Catholicism with an equally chilling brutality to South and Central America. Monarchy and Church were closely aligned and both were associated with the towering and impressive colonial expansion that had made Spain legendary before the 18th century throughout the world. The heritage bequeathed by these two powers, secular and sacred, sustained a national sensibility in the era after Spain’s fall from economic and political preeminence between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, regional and social divisions notwithstanding.

Spain’s relative economic backwardness and political impotence during the nineteenth century did not diminish its place in the European imagination. Weakness lent its culture a romantic allure, particularly among intellectuals and artists in France, England, and Germany. Spain, in part owing to the Moorish influence in its history, its proximity to North Africa, its distinctive regions, and the residues of its colonial reach, came to represent something exotic and unsullied by modern rational commerce and industry. The French in particular saw in Spain a thriving, magical, and genuine musical and visual culture. By 1900, Spain had taken its place in the romantic imagination in the more industrially advanced countries of Europe in a sympathetic albeit condescending manner; Spain was both sufficiently similar and distinctly “other” as to offer European artists powerful sources of inspiration that could fuel resistance to the worst spiritual and aesthetic consequences of modernization. From Bizet to Ravel, the Spanish element offered an inspiring antidote to the overwhelming dominance of German and Italian musical traditions.

Nevertheless, despite its historical drift into relative powerlessness and decline in the late nineteenth century, a renascence of Spanish culture in literature and the arts took place, culminating in a vibrant modern outpouring of music, painting, and literature in the twentieth century. But in no other part of Europe was culture so intertwined with and affected by politics. The Spanish Republic struggled to achieve stability. The contradictions between a noble effort to create a modern nation marked by freedom and equality by eliminating the last residues of influence on the part of the twin pillars of feudalism-church and crown and the reactionary will to restore monarchical and Church power became violent. As the Civil War took shape, Spain’s artists and intellectuals could not stand aside.

In 1936, a coalition—a popular front of left wing parties—defeated their conservative opponents at the ballot box, including supporters of the church and monarchists. A revolt ensued that turned into the civil war. It broke out first in July, initially in Spanish Morocco. As the legitimate elected government proceeded to further confiscate church property, the conservative rebellion gathered momentum and the fighting spread to the mainland. At the head of the insurgents was Francisco Franco.

For three years Spain was torn by a Civil War fueled not only by divisions in the country itself, but by the intervention and non-intervention of the rest of the world. Germany and Italy, both in Fascist hands, recognized and supported Franco generously with military and economic support. The republican side, known as the Loyalist cause, received support from Stalin that was limited, expensive, and highly compromised. The Loyalists were abandoned by those nations that should have been their natural allies—the democracies of France and England, as well as by the United States. The republic’s most steadfast ally was Mexico. Fear of communism and a lingering post-World War I romance with disarmament and pacifism resulted in a nearly deliberate international effort to prevent the Republic from defending itself. Many have speculated about how different the rest of the twentieth century might have turned out had the world stood up to Hitler and Mussolini in Spain and defended the Republic against Franco.

Ironically, it was Catalonia that put up the most heroic effort on behalf of the Spanish Republic. The Loyalist cause could not prevail against Franco’s military superiority. The fall of Barcelona in January 1939 marked the true collapse of the Republic. But before the end, the cause of the Loyalists managed to electrify an entire generation. Americans, as private individuals, mobilized into the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, aptly named to underscore the ideal of democracy, legitimacy, and unity. The list of volunteers who went to Spain to fight in what came to be known as the “last great cause,” in defiance of the failure of democracies to match the power and brutality of dictatorships, is a veritable who’s who of celebrities, ranging from George Orwell to Ernest Hemingway. All told, over 30,000 individuals volunteered to fight on the side of the Republic.

The collapse of republican Spain foreshadowed the tragedy of World War II and has become, as a subject of history itself, an ideological battleground of interpretation about propaganda, dictatorship, the role of communism and Stalin, the place of intellectuals, and the nature of justice and democracy.

The composers on this program all emerged from the flowering of Spanish culture before the onset of the Civil War. Each took a different path once it began. De Falla went into voluntary exile. Turina sided with Franco and benefited from his allegiance to the victors, and Gerhard, like his better known countryman Casals, fled in the wake of defeat and lived with a life-long sense of defiance towards Franco, the revolt, and the forces that brought the Republic down.

Each composer, through music, expresses a distinct construct of and debt to a modern Spanish identity. All three help explode the distinction between a “center” to Europe and a “periphery.” In this music one encounters an engagement with one’s heritage—the distinctly local, so to speak—in a manner that does not trivialize it or render it an object of fetishism or reductive simplification. The music is no longer “provincial” but an integral part of a pan-European dynamic that sought to engage the issue of the proper nature of art in modernity. These composers stand alongside Bartók and Janáček in utilizing the familiar and seemingly more-authentic roots of concert music in a formal manner possessed of a universal reach. In particular, Roberto Gerhard (whose magnificent Violin Concerto was performed by ASO in New York some years back) is one of the twentieth century’s finest and most distinctive composers. Although his career flourished in England, his music is today very underrepresented in the repertory.

The trauma and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War receded very slowly into history. It is ironic that Spain, despite its significant current economic difficulties and continued tensions between regions and the central government, has flourished since the death of Franco. Under Juan Carlos, Spain is a constitutional monarchy that has managed to negotiate the competing pressures within Spain without substituting dictatorship for democracy.

On Behalf of Albéric Magnard

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bérénice, performed on Jan 20, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler defended his tendency to play particular works from the past over and over again, stating that as a musician he was not “a curious wanderer” or driven by “a scholarly interest” but rather by a “love” of music; he performed repeatedly those “great works” he “loved” because they consistently awakened in him a sense of “enthusiasm, warmth, sweetness, beauty, and greatness.” The contrast between Furtwängler’s approach and that of the American Symphony Orchestra rests not in any disagreement over the need to love the music one performs or expect that its impact survive repeated performance and hearing. It lies rather in the our conviction that a wide ranging curiosity about the repertoire of the past and scholarly interest both can result in the restoration of music to the stage that is not already well known, music that we can fall in love with and listen to more than once.

Albéric Magnard guided his career as a composer in a manner that seems in retrospect to have intentionally restricted any chance that his works would gain adherents and enter as part of the active repertory. Born to relative wealth and social prominence in 1865, the son of the editor of Le Figaro, Magnard pursued a musical career after training in the law. Following a trip to Bayreuth in 1886, Magnard decided to devote himself exclusively to music. He was determined not to exploit his family’s standing and influence on his own behalf. Although he studied with Massenet and later with Vincent d’Indy, he did little to cultivate the support of fellow composers or the leading performers of the day.

He spent his time quite apart, composing, except for some teaching at d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum, the rival institution to the Paris Conservatoire. Periodically, Magnard would self-finance a concert of his own music. In this manner, Magnard maintained a principled distance from all of the rival factions and byzantine politics within the Parisian musical establishment. He published his own music with a small radical socialist publishing house and he had his last symphony, No. 4 (1913), performed not by a major institution but by a nearly all-women’s orchestra (unfortunately with disastrous results). Magnard’s politics were profoundly idealistic and he stood steadfast on the side of Dreyfus, writing a powerful “Hymn to Justice” in 1902 for the cause. That alone set him apart from d’Indy and many colleagues who sought to remain distant from the controversy that divided and obsessed French society for generations. For Magnard, writing music was at all times an ethical act. Beauty and justice, in his view, were aligned. Art needed to serve the cause of rectifying social injustice and promoting the truth.

Magnard struggled not only with a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis his contemporaries (largely because of his late start and the unfair accusation that he was little more than a dilettante, despite his exemplary record as a student of harmony and counterpoint) and the residual guilt of having been born to wealth and privilege, making him an object of envy. He also battled deafness. As a result, Magnard was aloof and became somewhat of a recluse whose manner was marked by an ascetic sense of moral superiority and disdain for public opinion. He is perhaps remembered most for his startling death in 1914. He defended his rural mansion against the advancing German troops, killing one soldier and causing his home to be burned to ground. Magnard perished in the fire, along with the manuscripts of his last compositions and much of his second opera, Guercoeur (1901).

Magnard, a perfectionist, completed fewer than 30 compositions. Among them are four symphonies, now widely regarded as among the finest examples of late nineteenth-century French symphonic writing. ASO has performed No. 3 (1902), the most famous of the symphonies, as well as the orchestral poem “Hymn to Venus” (1904). Since Magnard’s death, his music has periodically found defenders, including the conductor Ernest Ansermet. Several chamber works have entered the repertory, including the remarkable wind piano quintet from 1894 and the string quartet from 1903. The most recent biography and reconsideration of his life and work appeared in 2001, written by an avid Magnard enthusiast, the French cardiologist Simon-Pierre Perret, and the distinguished French music critic and scholar Harry Halbreich. Nonetheless, when I located the vocal score to Bérénice in the Harvard University Music library in 2003, I think I may have been the first person to check it out.

Bérénice, Magnard’s third and last opera, completed in 1909 and premiered in 1911, has long been regarded as his finest and most characteristic work. Its musical qualities complement the idealism of the libretto in which feminine love triumphs over male political ambition and power. It is Bérénice and not the Roman Emperor Titus who is Magnard’s protagonist and is vindicated in the opera. It is she who delivers Magnard’s message of truth. As the composer wrote in the preface to the score in 1909, Titus, who died young, cried at the end of his life, asking why he deserved such a cruel fate. After all, he had only one action in his life for which he needed to repent. That single act was, for Magnard, the decision, without an absolutely firm reason, to turn away from a sacred moment, from an “adorable” lover and from her genuine love for him. Magnard’s preference for the character of the feminine was explicit. In the preface to Bérénice, he confessed “I understand better with every passing day how much superior a woman is to any man.”

Although the occasion for choosing Bérénice as a subject can be linked to Jean Racine’s play, it was a familiar and well-established operatic and theatrical subject. The most famous treatments of the story were a play by Corneille (also from 1670, rivaling Racine) based on the love between Titus and Bérénice, and of course Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito. Magnard wrote his own libretto. By streamlining the story, he only accentuated what he certainly knew was the obvious political symbolism of the subject in 1909. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery officer, had been unjustly convicted of treason for passing military secrets to the Germans, and though in 1906 he had been exonerated, reinstated, and decorated by the government, much of the French public remained unconvinced. In the crucible of 12 years of conflict over the issue, a new racialist, anti-Semitic reactionary French nationalism came into being, led by the newspaper Action Française and key figures to whom Magnard was opposed, such as Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet, and Maurice Barrès. Magnard’s sympathetic foregrounding of a Jewish queen who is hounded away by the mob of Roman citizens—a circumstance in which the political leadership bends to ethnic prejudice and fails to do the right thing (to the detriment of justice and the state, as well as to personal happiness)— was not an accident. The opera is more than a reworking of Racine. The fate of the Jewish (but highly assimilated and acculturated, vis-à-vis Rome—as was Dreyfus to France) daughter of Herod Agrippa, the nominal queen, was turned into a morality play about the symmetry between the happiness of intimacy and love and the pursuit of truth and justice in the public sphere. Magnard’s Bérénice is Captain Dreyfus after 1906. Titus represents France, which is left at its peril by a failure to truly embrace the truth and accept the proven loyalty of Jewish officer (who was framed) as a model of patriotism and what it might mean to be a true Frenchman. In short, Magnard’s Bérénice is more than an intimate love story.

For most of the twentieth century, Magnard was remembered at best as a marginal, respected but conservative figure in French musical history during a pre-World War I period that included Massenet, Saint-Saens, Chausson, Debussy, Dukas (with whom Magnard shared a profound self-critical sensibility and a limited output), Fauré, and d’Indy. After 1918, the French musical scene became dominated by a new generation that included not only Frenchmen such as Ravel and Les Six, but émigrés including Stravinsky and Prokoviev. After 1945, the post-World War II avant-garde was no more interested in rediscovering Magnard that its predecessor after 1918 had been.

However, Magnard’s music ought to encounter a better fate today. It is not imitative of any other composer. It is eclectic, taking inspiration from Wagner, Debussy, and d’Indy, but entirely distinctive, elegant, economical, and accessible. It has an authenticity, directness, color, and intense purpose that are memorable. The eloquence and beauty of Bérénice make it a work, in Furtwängler’s sense, deserving of deep affection, a major achievement and more than the passing result of idle scholarly curiosity.

Music and the Bible

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music and the Bible, performed on Nov 2, 2010 at Carnegie Hall.

If there ever was a composer in the history of music whose posthumous reputation was entirely and shockingly at odds with the reputation he developed in his lifetime, it is Ludwig Spohr, or Louis Spohr as he came to be known. The ASO is honored to have the outstanding scholar and expert on Spohr, Clive Brown, as a contributor to tonight’s program notes. Professor Brown’s indefatigable efforts on behalf of Louis Spohr are responsible for helping to keep a small part of Spohr’s output alive in the modern imagination. When Spohr died in 1859 at the age of 75 (a venerable age in those days), Johannes Brahms was reported to have lamented that the last of the great masters had died. For Brahms, who painfully aware of the humbling legacy of music history, to place Spohr beside Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven was high praise indeed. Brahms’s mentor and friend Robert Schumann shared a similarly deep admiration for Spohr’s accomplishment and importance.

Spohr’s career as a musician began early despite family pressure against music as a career; he was born into a distinguished line of physicians and clergymen. However his precocity on the violin was not to be ignored. Already as a young virtuoso he began to compose. In 1812, he found himself concertmaster of the orchestra of the Theater-on-der-Wien, which brought him into direct contact with Beethoven. Spohr then moved to London and finally, at the age of 37, to Kassel, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Spohr’s achievements are daunting indeed. He was a fabulous violinist, the Paganini of the north, and founder of a school of violin-playing. His music for the instrument has never lost its following. Prominent in the violin repertory are the many series of duets and the violin concertos. Spohr is reputed to have been the first conductor to use a baton, which suggests the growing importance of public concerts in his time. But Spohr’s reputation as a composer during his lifetime rested in the first instance on operas, two of which had a considerable following: Faust 

(1823–52) and Jessonda (1824). He was also a symphonist; at least half of the ten he wrote deserve regular modern performances. There is an impressive body of chamber music, not only string quartets, but four double string quartets, and octet, and a nonet. Not surprisingly, Spohr also wrote many songs. But it was his contribution to the sacred and secular choral literature that ensured his reputation among contemporaries.

The nineteenth-century oratorio was the crossroads between public and private music-making. It demanded the participation of amateurs, which was provided through the large number of choral societies that sprang up in German-speaking Europe after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. These choral societies were the musical equivalent of the reading clubs that the sociologist Jürgen Habermas identified as evidence of the development of a public sphere, a realm in which public opinion could be expressed in a manner that would influence the course of politics. Europe between 1815 and 1848 was in the midst of a political reaction that sought to reverse the spread of democracy and civil liberties. Tight censorship and the control of public gatherings were the rule. But censorship was less stringent with respect to music. Music-making became an important part of the growth of domestic and public entertainments. In particular, singing became popular because the standard of training for amateur participation was inevitably lower than might be required for an amateur orchestra. Spohr’s first major secular cantata, entitled Germany Liberated, was written on a text by Caroline Pichler, a prominent Viennese personality whose memoirs are a major historical document, and who was herself an amateur choral singer.

Both of the works you hear tonight were written in a period of religious revival. With the onset of the terror of the 1790s and the transformation of the French Revolution under Napoleon, the secular, anti-clerical universalist dreams of the Enlightenment seemed increasingly irrelevant and implausible to intellectuals and artists throughout Europe. The trajectory of the French Revolution gave birth to nationalism, not only in France but in the rest of Europe all the way to Poland and Russia. The early nineteenth century was a period of anti-Enlightenment ferment in literature and philosophy. Both in Protestant and Catholic Europe there was a revival of spirituality and a renewed curiosity in periods before the eighteenth century, particularly the Middle Ages. A fascination developed with the mystical, unknowable, and ineffable, ranging from the Gothic fairy tale to medieval romance. An anti-rationalism flourished which was entirely compatible with the renewal of Christian idealism. The oratorios of Spohr and Fanny Mendelssohn mirror this turn away from rationalism towards an inner sensibility and religious subjectivity. The religious fervor of the age had two important consequences for music. First, the vocabulary of expression expanded to invite greater color and freedom of form, though at the same time, composers were motivated to look back in history to models from before the classical era, to Bach and Handel. Second, because of its abstract and indeterminate meaning, music became prized as an instrument of faith, a vehicle for each individual to express his or her connection to God. The popularity of choral singing was not only rooted in social and political circumstances. Enthusiasm for participating and listening to choral music was grounded in the belief that the language of music and the act of singing were means to forge a closer connection to the divine, and to the divine qualities of the human individual.

Singing in a large chorus with a professional orchestra in oratorios became a passionate pastime for thousands of middle-class citizens in German-speaking Europe and England. Of all of Spohr’s oratorios, The Last Judgment (as tonight’s oratorio came to be known in English) was his most popular and remains the most persuasive. If for some it lacks the dramatic effects of his contemporary competitors, it reveals what Clive Brown has eloquently identified as Spohr’s achievement. Spohr “accepted the substance of received classical forms but filled them with music that, employing a highly distinctive melodic and harmonic idiom, proved wonderfully apt to depict the fluctuating emotions of the human soul.” Spohr was in fact the musical equivalent of early romantic literature. There is a sensitivity, elegance, and intensity to Spohr’s music that remains compelling to our post-modern sensibilities.

If Spohr was born to a family of learning and respectability, Fanny Mendelssohn was born into a family of even greater intellectual distinction and substantial wealth. She was the beloved sister of the world-famous Felix, granddaughter of the great philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and she married a distinguished painter, Wilhelm Hensel. Only in the last quarter-century has scholarly attention turned to Fanny Mendelssohn as a musical figure in her own right, not merely the sister of one great man and the wife of a prominent husband. Fanny’s father was reputed to have said that he grew up the son of a famous man (Moses Mendelssohn), only to find himself the father of a famous son. Today he would have to modify that to being the father of a famous daughter as well. R. Larry Todd, author of the finest biography of Felix Mendelssohn, has recently published a companion biography of Fanny.

Fanny Mendelssohn was given the same education as Felix, her brother, but not the same encouragement. Despite the enormous prejudice at the time against women as professional artists (consider the case of George Sand), Fanny never gave up her commitment to music. She continued to write both for solo piano and small ensembles. As the work on tonight’s program suggests, she also wrote large-scale works in genres such as those in which her brother excelled. Many of these works were designed for semi-public concert venues. Fanny herself maintained a Sunday afternoon concert series which accommodated large groups: choruses and orchestras.

There is a fair amount of controversy surrounding Fanny’s relationship to her brother. There is no doubt that Felix was devoted to her and believed in her talent. Her death shattered her brother, who died in an identical manner less than a year later. Felix was also dubious about her publishing music in her own name. But he was as critical of himself as he was of his sister. His notoriety as a child prodigy made him increasingly gun-shy of publishing his music as he became older. Many of his greatest works from his maturity were performed to acclaim but never published. As he gained experience as a composer, Felix Mendelssohn became obsessed with revision and improvement, fearing the criticism that might come to him through the premature publication of his works. The interesting question, then, is to what should we ascribe Fanny’s failure to be published and therefore recognized as a composer in her own lifetime. Her obscurity as a public figure extended well beyond her death. It is only the modern re-evaluation of the prejudice against women that has caused the rediscovery of Fanny Mendelssohn in her own right.

It may very well be that the bias against Fanny may not have been limited to issues of gender. Felix’s hypersensitivity to publishing his own music may equally have been related to his status as a Jew, despite his conversion and genuine commitment to Protestant Christianity. Felix and Fanny were converted as children by their parents after their grandmother, the widow of Moses Mendelssohn, died. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, although Mendelssohn’s fame continued to grow, his visibility as a Jew in the climate of increasing political and racial anti-Semitism also flourished. Therefore Felix Mendelssohn was not sympathetic to modern nationalism.

The early nineteenth century, before modern nationalism, represented a heyday of great cultural salons, particularly in Berlin and Vienna, maintained by charismatic and dynamic Jewish women of great wealth. Fanny Mendelssohn maintained such a salon primarily devoted to music. Her brother’s anxieties and her own uncertainly about assuming a public role as a composer were driven not only by the prejudice against her gender but against her Jewish origins. Although through marriage she assumed a name that hid her origins and although she became like her brother a believing Christian, in the hearts and minds of those intent on prejudice she remained a Jew. In the most positive sense, she was a great figure among several of her day and age, like Fanny Arnstein, and Rachel Levin von Varnhagen, eminent Jewish women who played an extraordinary role in the urban high culture of the first half of the nineteenth century.

In the decades following her death, in the wake of modern political anti-Semitism pioneered in part by Richard Wagner, any hope that Fanny Mendelssohn would get her proper due as a composer was certainly slim. It is poignant and ironic that her reappearance as a composer of large-scale music should come in the form of choral music based on religious texts and located within the traditions of Protestant Christianity. This fact forces us to confront the ease with which we carry forward prejudice with respect to religious affiliation on the basis of race and not confessional membership or conviction.

James Joyce

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert James Joyce, performed on Oct 6, 2010 at Carnegie Hall.

Three giants of twentieth-century literary modernism in the English-speaking world revealed, in their own distinct manner, a close affinity to music: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Eliot inspired a few composers, notably Igor Stravinsky and Michael Tippett. Pound was far more invested in music. He considered himself somewhat more than an amateur in matters musical. He wrote two idiosyncratic operas. One of them—Le Testament, based on the poetry of Francois Villon—was composed in 1923 together with a composer on today’s program, George Antheil. Pound considered Antheil the most promising composer of his generation and actively promoted Antheil’s reputation. Pound wrote music criticism for a few years. He also wrote a book on music that dealt with the theory of music, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, in 1927. Pound’s primary interests were sonority and rhythm, an emphasis that listeners to Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (which turned out to be the composer’s most famous piece) will readily appreciate.

Pound believed in asymmetry in rhythm and the need to avoid the use of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. Freedom from regularity was one of his goals so that poetry would be “in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” Pound, with Antheil’s help, created patterns of speech of extreme complexity that defied conventional musical notation. Harmony, the prime tool of romanticism, was the enemy. He sought to “tear up the whole bloomin’ era of harmony and do the thing if necessary on two tins and a wash board,” he wrote. But the main objective was to unravel how we speak, the larger forms of literary convention, and the linguistic rhetoric of meaning, all in order to restore the power of the spoken word.

As Paul Griffiths has eloquently argued in his essay for tonight’s concert, Joyce was deeply invested in music. He was a musician’s writer in that, as Griffiths has argued elsewhere, “musical” was a term of high praise. As with Pound, sound and rhythm play a key role. Joyce toyed with collaborating with Antheil as well, also on an opera, this time based on Ulysses, Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops. Antheil set only one sentence, using different meters for every bar in order to match the prose. As Daniel Albright has noted, if Joyce and Antheil had completed the work, Pound’s theories of how to match language and music would have been realized.

At the same time, Joyce (and to a greater extent Eliot) was rather conservative in his musical tastes. Joyce loved Irish popular songs, liturgical music, and opera. Modernism in literature intersected less prominently with contemporaneous musical modernism in the early twentieth century than avant-garde developments in the visual arts did, where collaborations between composers and painters were frequent and produced memorable results.

The connections between James Joyce and music represented in this concert are of three different types. First, there is the personal link between Joyce and Antheil. Joyce shared Pound’s extravagant opinion of Antheil as a promising force in modernism. Second, there is a biographical connection, namely Joyce’s extraordinary response to a chance hearing of Schoeck’s song cycle. Third, in Seibert’s choral and orchestral work we encounter the magnitude of Joyce’s influence on subsequent generations in a powerful musical approach to Joyce’s best known and most influential book, Ulysses.

George Antheil (1900–1959) was one of the most elusive and articulate figures in twentieth-century music history. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Antheil studied piano and composition in Philadelphia and at age 19 became a pupil of Ernest Bloch in New York. He earned the patronage of Mary Louise Curtis Bok and went in the spring of 1922 to Europe, settling in Berlin. In 1923 he moved to Paris, where he met Joyce and Pound and all the luminaries of modernism from Picasso to Yeats. He formed a duo with the violinist Olga Rudge, for whom he wrote several sonatas (paid for by Pound). Antheil experienced considerable success in the mid 1920s, but by the early 1930s his reputation had begun to suffer. By the 1930s Antheil had begun to shift his focus back to America, first writing for theatre and dance in New York (working with Martha Graham, Ben Hecht, and George Balanchine), and then by 1936 for the film industry in Hollywood, notably with Cecil B. DeMille. Antheil turned out to be a superb writer, whose autobiography Bad Boy of Music is a gem, marked by wit and charm. In the last period of his career Antheil wrote in a more conventional late romantic style and focused on opera, writing the libretti for two of them himself. The most successful of these late works, however, was a version of Ben Jonson’s Volpone. He died more of a legend than a well-known composer, someone who was reputed to have given piano concerts with a gun on the piano, held a patent together with Hedy Lamarr (for a torpedo guidance system), and wrote Ann Landers-style columns.

In the end, however, most of Antheil’s music has descended into obscurity with the exception of the music from the 1920s, particularly the Ballet mécanique, a work that has become legendary, and A Jazz Symphony from 1925, an exuberant and spectacular piece. The 1920s was Antheil’s most original period, when he focused on spatial juxtapositions, using blocks of sound as if in an assemblage framed by an overarching concept of elapsed time. Antheil’s concept from the start was cinematic and visual. He described his work in terms of musical “pictures” and time as “a musical canvas.” He compared his use of time to Picasso’s use of blank spaces, in service of “the most abstract of the abstract.” Antheil, never guilty of excessive modesty, claimed to have preceded the innovations of a rival who became more famous: Erik Satie. In the late 1920s, Antheil’s eventual turn away from radicalism can be anticipated by his confession that he had written Ballet mécanique with “some madness within myself.” But Beethoven also mused about his own work in similar ways. Antheil’s versatility and eclecticism should not be held against him. More of his later music deserves revival for its consistent craftsmanship and ingenuity. Antheil the composer should be remembered for more than one moment. Unlike the one other American from the same period who also had a meteoric start to his career as a composer and pianist, Leo Ornstein, Antheil did not fall silent and disappear. He produced a substantial body of work to be contended with. In retrospect, Joyce and Pound’s advocacy may not have been misplaced.

Othmar Schoeck (1886–1957) presents altogether a different picture. His primary achievement as a composer rests in his massive output of songs, rivaling in extent Franz Schubert. There are in addition five fantastic song cycles; one glorious work with string quartet, Notturno (1933); and four with orchestra: Elegie (1915–1922), Nachhall (1955) [performed by the ASO several seasons back], Befreite Sehnsucht (1952), and the most famous, the one on today’s program written in 1926. He also wrote eight impressive operas and a fine violin concerto, performed more than a decade ago by the ASO. Schoeck was a dour personality with an original voice. But he, a pupil of Max Reger’s, consistently felt himself unappreciated and in the shadow on the one hand of Richard Strauss, the era’s most successful opera composer, and after 1925, Alban Berg, whose triumph with Wozzeck he believed damaged the critical reception of his finest opera, Penthesilea.

But Schoeck crafted his own distinct voice and modernist style, albeit one rooted in a neo-romantic logic that he developed under Reger’s tutelage. Schoeck’s reputation has suffered in part because of his political allegiances. He became an avid proponent of the Nazis, not an altogether uncommon characteristic for German Swiss intellectuals and politicians of the time. But his enthusiasm was so pronounced and his eagerness to curry favor with the Third Reich so blatant that in his last years he became somewhat of a pariah. Nonetheless, Schoeck was clearly Switzerland’s finest twentieth-century composer. Few composers have matched the intensity, integrity, and power of the combination of poetic text and musical expression that he produced.

In January 1935 James Joyce was in Zurich to consult his eye doctor and went to a concert conducted by Schoeck. On the program was Lebendig begraben. Joyce was so impressed that a few days later he paid an unannounced visit to Schoeck’s home in search of the composer. After hearing the concert, Joyce went out to get a copy of the piano vocal score. He wrote his daughter-in-law in a letter, “If I can judge by last night he [Schoeck] stands head and shoulders above Stravinsky and Antheil as a composer for orchestra and voice anyhow.” Joyce also sought out the Keller poems with the intent to translate them. Joyce observed that “Schoeck is a type rather like Beckett who gets up at 2:30 P.M. his wife says. But I hope to catch him before he falls asleep again. But he can write music all right.” As Schoeck’s biographer Chris Walton noted, Joyce indeed did, but not until after inviting the composer to dinner and giving him a copy of Ulysses in the French translation with the dedication “in homage from your admirer, James Joyce.”

Mátyás Seiber (1905–1960) is the least known of the impressive number of composers—from Dohnanyi and Bartok to Ligeti and Kurtag—who make up the great musical renaissance of twentieth-century Hungary. Seiber was born in Budapest and studied with Kodaly. When Seiber submitted a wind Serenade for six instruments in 1925 for a prize in a competition and did not win, one of the judges, Bela Bartok, resigned in protest. Seiber went on to teach in Frankfurt where he met Theodor Adorno and worked intensively on and with jazz. He in fact gave the first course on the theory and practice of jazz, certainly in Europe. He emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1935 to England. He was immensely productive and was recruited by Michael Tippett to teach at Morely College, an adult college in South London founded in the 1880s. Seiber was killed in a car crash on a visit to South Africa in 1960. Ligeti dedicated his 1961 Atmospheres to Seiber’s memory. Like his Hungarian mentors and models. Seiber maintained a life-long interest in folk materials. Like Antheil, he also tried his hand at film and radio music, writing a score in 1955 for Orwell’s Animal Farm in its animated film version, and for a radio version of Goethe’s Faust in the 1940s. He also has one successful popular song to his name, “By the Fountains of Rome.” Seiber’s best known work, however, remains his 1947 setting of Joyce, Ulysses, the piece which ends today’s program. Yet there is more music waiting to be revived, including piano works, string quartets, songs, chamber works for a variety of instruments (many using jazz and improvisation), shorter orchestral works, and various settings of folk song materials.

We at the American Symphony are once again proud, at the opening of this new season that marks the orchestra’s return to Carnegie Hall (where the orchestra was founded in 1962), to showcase stellar works by unfairly neglected composers in a concert framed by a common thread, in this case a daunting and imposing one, the life and work of James Joyce. It is both fitting and ironic that so well-known and towering a figure should provide posterity with the unexpected opportunity to mine treasures of music history buried by oversight and a habit of forgetting driven not by judgment but by carelessness and thoughtlessness.

Apollo and Dionysus

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Apollo and Dionysus, performed on May 9, 2010 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is difficult to imagine a history of Western art that does not begin with the legacy of the classical world. Indeed the entire notion of “Western,” the idea of a coherent cultural tradition which in fact is anything but coherent, is largely the result of a conceit first developed in earnest during the nineteenth century. The core of that idea was the notion that modern European culture is a direct descendent of ancient Greece and Rome. The Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt (1818–1897), whose epoch-making book The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) pioneered the idea of defining history as a succession of related periods, identified the “rediscovery” of classical antiquity as the impetus for the civic humanism that was the hallmark of the Renaissance. The Renaissance became the defining era of modern Western culture. (Of course, the irony is that Europe before the Reformation spent several centuries selectively refuting the learning of the ancient world and effectively obliterating the artifacts of a classical heritage. The “rediscovery” came about largely because of European forays into Egypt and Arabia, where much of the learning of ancient Greece had been preserved by the great Arab scholars.) The Renaissance desire for continuity with the classical world is most strikingly evident in Dante’s choice of Virgil as the guide of the Christian soul in the Inferno. Virgil, a symbol of humanity’s highest possible achievement before Christian revelation, holds for Dante the beginning of the thread of history. Dante presumed his readers would have an intimate acquaintance with the Aeneid, which itself dramatizes the continuity between ancient Troy and Virgil’s Rome.

Burckhardt was a bit like Virgil with his thesis that the Italian Renaissance was the result of a rediscovery of classical heritage. The idea was as constructive as a guide to self definition for the nineteenth century as Virgil’s epic was for Augustan Rome. Burckhardt’s Renaissance was considered to be the beginning of early modern culture. The notion rested on the presumption that before the Renaissance, a period existed which could conveniently be called the “Dark Ages” or the “Middle Ages,” that is, an amorphous period between the classical and the modern. This idea gave a fine pedigree to the current age, a sense that fit in very well with nineteenth-century European aspirations with respect to secular culture. Burckhardt was an enormous influence on his contemporaries. The most important contemporary was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a classicist as well as a philosopher. Nietzsche, also an amateur composer and pianist, famously cultivated the friendship of Richard Wagner. He eventually turned on Wagner’s art and personality in an equally memorable fashion with trenchant and perceptive sarcasm. Nietzsche and Burckhardt had considerable regard for one another and overlapped as resident academics in Basel.

For both of these thinkers, the transition from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance represented a decline in the dominance of ignorance, superstition, and the irrational, and the revival of reason. The identification of the Renaissance as the beginning of modernity was itself a revisionist idea that challenged the previous preeminence of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as the first modern age. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was an age of great progress that began with the English Restoration in 1660, and saw the accomplishments of Newton, Locke, Lessing, and Goethe. The period (not the century) ended in 1789 with the French Revolution. The Enlightenment was an age of rapid industrialization and scientific progress, the development of democratic social contract theory, and the flowering of letters. It represented the erosion of the power of the Church in political affairs, and the strengthening of the secular nation space. The founding fathers in the United States and the Jacobins in France cherished a vision of themselves as heirs to the great leaders and orators of classical Greece and Rome. Indeed one group of great poets and writers of Britain were often referred as the “Augustans” and the era in Britain and on the Continent has been called the Neoclassical Age. In German-speaking Europe there was no more articulate defender of the priority of the ancients than Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), who had a tremendous influence on writers and artists, and who developed the false impression of ancient Greek monuments and buildings as smooth, white, and pristine. This idealized image is still evident in the buildings of our own nation’s capital and our Greek temple-inspired banks and libraries.

As an age which put itself at the apex of historical progress, the nineteenth century—once it had established the Renaissance as the beginning of modernity and the Enlightenment as its adolescence, as it were—developed its own version of the meaning of its classical inheritance, of this look backwards on behalf of the present. The writing of history is inevitably as revealing about the era of the writer as it is of the writer’s subject matter. In the nineteenth century, Romantic writers developed their own fascination with the ancient world. But it was a fascination tinged with urgency, because the modern inhabitants of the ancient lands, the Greeks, Turks, and Arabs, were seen as an object of compassion and condescension. Byron died defending his beloved Greece from the Ottomans. Elgin transported the legendary Parthenon Marbles to the British Museum for safekeeping from the Greeks who did not value what they had. Schliemann did the same for the artifacts of Troy, which ended up in Berlin (albeit allegedly with some selective alterations to make them look more idealistically “Trojan”).

But by the mid nineteenth century the intent had become to challenge the smug assumption about reason and progress inherited from the Enlightenment. In contrast to the earlier century, the nineteenth century shifted the focus away from the Roman era of Cicero, Livy, Virgil, and Horace to the earlier classical iterations of the Greek worlds of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. If Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) was the most eloquent expression of the appropriation of the classical past for the eighteenth century, then Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) might be counted as the single most significant mirror of the later nineteenth century’s view of the classical past.

Consequently, this shift also brought about a shift in interest from politics to mythology, from a benign consideration of Roman religion as an aspect of civic life (comparable perhaps to the restrained Christianity of Thomas Jefferson’s deism), to a fascination with mythic archetypes in pre-Christian classical thought that might offer a glimpse into the innate nature of humanity. This notion was of course loaded with the disillusionment with and suspicion of modern progress and industrialization, which by the end of the nineteenth century, was fairly apparent in the face of unprecedented poverty and discontent caused by commerce and industry. Could the Greeks, the birthplace of civilization, tell us through their mythic archetypes something about the nature of the human before it became disfigured by modern progress?

Nietzsche thought so. He initially identified the power of Greek tragedy as an act connected to religious ritual. Within that ritual lay a vision of the world not defined by Christianity. Using Greek myth and dramatic ritual as his basis, Nietzsche concluded that there are two fundamental but contradictory characteristics in the human spirit, and therefore in the way art both comes into being and is received. The Greeks were well aware of this duality. They personified it into two gods in the Olympian pantheon. The first of these gods is Apollo, god of light, learning, and music. As a characterological impulse that informs art, the Apollonian is that which imposes discipline of form, finds beauty in symmetry and proportion, expresses refined sentiment, grace, and reason. It is the Apollonian that raised humanity above the beast and controls action through thought in order to create order and promote civilization. The second god is Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy. Dionysus represents the irrational, the erotic, the physical, the uninhibited, and the boundless. Dionysus is undirected energy, frenzied joy, and absolute freedom with all the consequent destructiveness. The Dionysian impulse is pure instinct, that which connects humanity to the natural and animal world. Nietzsche used these two warring archetypes, neither of which can exist without the other, to depict the human factors that inform art with both its beauty and its psychic power. It is not at all surprising that Nietzsche’s reflections on aesthetics and history of ancient culture emerged in a transformed manner in the writings of Freud, who found in the eternal struggle of the Dionysian, which in Freud’s language became the id, the seat of the mind’s violent and sexual impulses (and also its truth),and the Apollonian, or the rational, controlling ego, the basis for human civilization.

Among artists of Nietzsche’s generation and after, this powerful explanation of human nature proved irresistible. How fascinating to suggest that we all have a primal force lurking in our psyche, from which we are protected by conscious discipline and the learned art of civilization, whose true value cannot deny that force’s inevitable legitimacy. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that his masterful portrayal of what can happen when the balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian is upset, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was inspired by a dream, a message from his own subconscious. Music was an even more fertile arena for an exploration of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Apollo was the god of music, after all, and his lyre formed sound into disciplined patterns of beauty and symmetry. But Dionysus also had his sacred aulus or pipe which drove his followers, the Maenads, to frenzied orgies. For Nietzsche, both impulses constituted the essential elements of music: the beauty of its form, and its ability to touch primal emotion. When he admired Wagner, Nietzsche saw in Tristan und Isolde a reconciliation of the Apollonian and Dionysian, and in Wagner’s music in general a rebirth of the Greek spirit, which was in turn a rejection of moralistic Christianity. He later changed his mind about Wagner, but not Christianity. It should not surprise us that the generation of composers that was caught in this intellectual framework popularized by Nietzsche, and struggled with the overpowering legacy of Wagner, returned again and again to these archetypes as a source of inspiration and innovation.

In the end, however, it was Nietzsche’s use of the idea of the Apollonian and Dionysian, and its absorption into modern psychoanalytic theory that helped solidify the significance of this version of the classical heritage for the twentieth century. In the closing section of his classic essay on the relationship between Protestanism and capitalism, the great social scientist Max Weber (an avid music lover) described the predicament of the individual in modernity as an “iron cage.” There was no escape in life from the tyranny of rational action. The horrors of the First and Second World Wars vindicated this skeptical criticism of modern life. Music remained an art form potentially immune from such controlling rationality. It had the Apollonian virtues of form and beauty and at the same time could give expression to the joyous irrationalism symbolized by Dionysus. Tonight’s program provides a cross section of how twentieth century European composers integrated a Nietzschean-inspired sense of the crisis of modernity into their artistic vision, seeking in classical symbols a route around the bland and oppressive utilitarianism of a tradition of reason Nietzsche himself located not in Apollo or Dionysus but in a later legacy of classical antiquity, the influence of Socrates.

Robert Schumann (1810-56)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Robert Schumann: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1853), performed on April 9, 2010 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Robert Schumann was perhaps the first in a long line of great nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers whose ambitions were as much literary as they were musical. One might count in that group such diverse personalities as Wagner, Berlioz, and Prokofiev. Indeed Schumann’s ambition to become a writer, fueled in part by his father’s status as a bookseller, publisher, and translator of Sir Walter Scott, was influenced by the work of Jean-Paul Richter and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The influence of Jean-Paul lasted throughout Schumann’s life; Schumann was alleged to have said that he learned as much about musical composition from Jean-Paul as he had from any formal musical training.

The literary in Schumann’s musical imagination first took shape as an attachment to the miniature piano piece. Schumann’s early reputation was based on short, characteristic piano pieces that took literary figures and scenes as their inspiration. Schumann was able to translate not only the poetic impulse into music, but also the effect of prose. For the solitary pianist and the listener, the relation between the literary text and music became one of reminiscence, an act of nostalgia. Music stimulated the imagination just as reading did. This indirect connection between the literary and instrumental music led Schumann to experiment with the formal structure of music, the logic of musical narration. Consider “Träumerei” from the cycle Scenes of Childhood (1838). As famously analyzed by Alban Berg, this brief, beautiful piece has asymmetrical phrase lengths and harmonic surprises motivated by the sensibilities created by Romantic prose and poetry. Schumann’s innovation was to create a new expressive vocabulary for instrumental forms including extended musical fantasy that utilized a rhetoric that exceeded the conventions of sonata writing and other classical forms.

Schumann’s reputation as a pioneer was confined, however, to the varieties of domestic music making, including chamber music and the writing of Lieder that set texts, particularly those by Heine, brilliantly. Schumann solidified his position in the musical world before 1840 not only by such musical compositions but by the use of his literary talents to master the art of criticism. He set the terms of the long nineteenth-century critical debate that sought to separate the superficial from the profound and distinguish between true art and philistinism in music. He was an early advocate of Chopin and Berlioz. He took on the fashions of the day including the taste for athletic virtuosity and ear-catching sentimentality characteristic of French opera. For Schumann, Beethoven was the ideal and terrifying genius in whose shadow all future generation of composers seemed condemned to remain.

It was through the friendship and support of Felix Mendelssohn that Schumann developed the courage to challenge Beethoven in the arena of large-scale musical works. Although Schumann wrote four symphonies, it was not a form with which he was entirely comfortable. Instead Schumann followed the example of Mendelssohn and indeed the fashion of the times by turning his attention to the oratorio form. Once again Schumann’s literary gifts served him well. His first great success in the larger public arena was with his masterpiece Das Paradies und die Peri (1843). An immensely popular poem, Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), was at the core of the oratorio, and the composer’s skill in the setting of text and the evocation of ideas gave him the tools to construct a persuasive dramatic argument.

Schumann’s work habits were always hampered by his psychological fragility and his tendency to waver between manic and depressed moods. The early and mid-1840s were a good period for him. With his confidence bolstered by success in using secular literary texts for large-scale compositions, Schumann turned to an area in which Mendelssohn never succeeded: opera. Ultimately he would complete one opera that truly deserves a regular presence on the stage, Genoveva (1847). Ironically, although based on works by such notables as Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Hebbel, it is hampered by a relatively unpersuasive libretto by the composer and Robert Reinick.

But in 1844 Schumann’s ambition focused on tackling the most significant German literary text not only of his own time but in all of German history: Goethe’s drama, Faust. This monumental play was written in two parts, distant from each other both in years and in form. The first part was published in 1808 and already had attracted the attention of composers in the generation before Schumann. Beethoven toyed with the idea of setting Part I to music, but that project faltered. For all Beethoven’s admiration for Schiller, the figure of Goethe presented an even more daunting challenge, even though the two once came together in a much-anticipated meeting and supposedly had little to say to each other. Goethe was without question the most prominent cultural personage of his time, and would remain, through the age of Thomas Mann, the equivalent of Shakespeare in the German literary tradition. Ludwig Spohr was another who set Faust to music, one of many subsequent efforts to capture the poetry and dramatic spirit of Part I in music.

Goethe took a long time to complete Part II, which he finally finished in 1832, the year of his death. If Part I became an icon of early Romantic sensibility, Part II became its polar opposite. The first part of Goethe’s treatment follows, with interpolation, the traditional story of the man who signs a pact with the devil in order to learn the secrets of the universe, and destroys the first woman he learns to love in the process. It is an iconic Romantic conceit. But after 1809 Goethe became increasingly suspicious of literary Romanticism, and in Part II he invented a new kind of neoclassicism in diction and the use of the theater to explore the spiritual and mystical with a disciplined formal approach, using a somewhat elaborate adherence to classical models. Part II moves into deeply symbolic and philosophical territory in its allegorical depiction of Faust’s redemption as representing the fundamental struggle of the human soul. For all his evident betrayal of Romantic precepts, the older Goethe (not the Goethe of 1774’s The Sorrows of Young Werther) became an object of derision for younger Romantic writers including Schumann’s beloved Jean-Paul. But the literary controversies of the 1820s subsided after Goethe’s death as veneration for the great man rose above all partisanship. In comparison to Part I, Part II seems resistant to the conventions of the theater, and therefore an unlikely subject for opera. At the same time, however, the conclusion of Part II suggests that music is possibly the only language to express properly the profound truths encountered by the soul in its final encounter with mortality. The tempting challenge to composers of setting Part II to music, despite its lack of a conventional narrative, is understandable. But throughout the nineteenth century, composers would have only fragmentary success in rendering Part II in music. For most concert-goers the most memorable attempt is that of Gustav Mahler, who chose the same text that Schumann did as the basis of the second part of his Eighth Symphony.

Schumann’s courage and ambition in taking on this formidable challenge may have had personal resonance for him. In Part II Goethe, despite his apparent rejection of Romantic principles, actually expands on one of the most enduring conceits of Romanticism: the obsession with the feminine personality. In Part I, Gretchen is the innocent beauty responsive to and corrupted by sensuality. She dies as the ideal object of desire. In Part II she becomes the ethereal instrument of redemptive love. Part II ends with a celebration of what Goethe calls the Eternal Feminine, the highest expression of the human capacity for love and forgiveness. This idea also expresses Schumann’s own life-long personal, philosophical, and ultimately ambivalent relationship to women and love.

No doubt, Schumann’s initial ambition was to write a successful operatic treatment of both parts of Faust. Ultimately, he retreated, perhaps out of respect for Goethe’s text, towards the form of an oratorio. This accounts for the very selective structure of Schumann’s work. In fact it is not clear that this work was ever completed. Like so many after him, Schumann found Faust just too daunting, perhaps because of the implied music of Part II. Goethe’s poetry is its own music. Schumann was sensitive to this on account of his own literary instincts. These instincts that explain why in his setting of Byron’s Manfred, he left a good deal of the text unset, to be spoken, not sung. Byron’s poetry was simply too beautiful in its own right to require music. Music might seem superfluous. The results in Scenes from Goethe’s Faust is consequently a remarkable act of editing by Schumann, resulting in a mix of songwriting, dramatic scene painting, and choral grandeur. At every moment Schumann never gets in the way of the drama and lyricism of the text. As Paul Griffiths points out, Schumann selected from both Parts I and II in order to highlight in the complex drama the centrality of the lead female character, the object of love.

In the long history of musical settings of Goethe’s Faust, including the best known example, Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust and Liszt’s Faust Symphony (which also uses the end of Part II) Schumann’s effort is certainly among the most compelling. The nineteenth-century obsession with Faust never resulted in a work that combined popularity with profundity. The only one that became a staple of the repertoire was Gounod’s opera, which most German critics and opera lovers have held in contempt. Although Schumann succeeded, this work has undeservedly remained a rarity.

Ironically, the friend and supporter who encouraged Schumann to widen his musical ambitions, Mendelssohn, had a privilege that Schumann never did—the opportunity to spend time with the great poet himself. Goethe adored the young prodigy, a protégé of Goethe’s closest musician friend, Zelter. Richard Wagner (who was also obsessed with the idea of setting Faust) helped to popularize the view that it was Mendelssohn who ruined Schumann by encouraging him to abandon his experiments in combining the literary with the musical in shorter forms. But as was often the case with Wagner’s criticism, his motivations for making this claim were suspect. It was after all Mendelssohn’s influence that led Schumann to set as much of Faust as he did. Through Mendelssohn’s influence, Schumann succeeded where Wagner himself failed. Schumann gave much of Goethe’s masterpiece its most eloquent, intense, and profound musical incarnation.

After the Thaw

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert After the Thaw, performed on Feb 24, 2010 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

One overtly benign but distinguishing feature of the Soviet Union was its commitment to and investment in aspects of high culture, notably music. From the early 1920s, first under Lenin and then throughout the era of Stalin’s rule, state support for musical culture created opportunities and dilemmas for composers that may be difficult for artists and audiences today to fully comprehend. At first, the success of the 1918 Bolshevik revolution inspired optimism about the possibilities of art and its role in shaping a utopian future. That optimism was rooted in the idea that a new era had begun, one unencumbered by the traditions and failures of history. During the 1920s, a confident, experimental modernism took hold. The roots of that modernism were in part borrowings from paths charted by fin- de-siècle modernists in Russia and Western Europe. One of the touchstones of early modernism was its explicit rejection of history and a determination to redefine musical logic and thereby engender a decisive break with the past.

Since in the 1920s, Communism even in Russia was viewed as an international movement. The commonplace markers of national identity historically inscribed in Russian music in many various incarnations from Glinka to Stravinsky needed to assume at best a subordinate role. The modernism that flourished not only in music but in literature and the visual arts in the early 1920s laid claim to a universalist objective vision, one that was divorced from inherited links not only to nationalism but conventional expressive rhetoric that triggered associations between music and representation and emotion. The conceit of objectivity was allied and consistent with the nearly ascetic ideas crucial to the Communist revolution: faith in the logic of science and the inexorable destiny inscribed in history. Modern art needed to serve political movements that advanced these ideas.

The era of avant-garde modernist exploration was short-lived. Modernist experiments particularly in music, whether in Russia or in the West, for all their compelling conceptual justifications, were hard for audiences to love. The rejection of comprehensible forms and melodies, as well as the framework of tonality, led to music that seemed to go over the heads of the public, even of the much maligned bourgeois educated classes. The paradox was obvious. If Communism was a political movement by and for the masses, how could its modern and ideologically consistent art be justified if the masses neither liked nor understood it? By the end of the 1920s a competing aesthetic ideology gained in ascendancy. A new orthodoxy took over that derided elitism, art for art’s sake and celebrated a utilitarian populism grounded in melody and accessible simplicity. The state sided with this idealized proletarian vision of art and called for a shift from futurist modernism to an ideal of new art capable of engendering loyalty and enthusiasm among the masses for the new order of things. Music in particular was singled out as a medium that could help disseminate values key to a Communist society such as egalitarianism and solidarity with the proletariat.

During the first decade of Stalin’s regime, an additional but predictable twist was added. Stalin recognized that the masses of Russian people were attached to nationalism and to quite conventional markers of beauty and sentiment. He rejected the idea of internationalism. The proletarian and populist art of the 1930s and 1940s celebrated a reductive simplicity and forged anew a link to the musical rhetoric, structures and nationalist markers bequeathed by the great masters of Russian music of the nineteenth century.

This shift from experimentalism to a nationalist populism in the 1930s on the part of the regime was articulated in an ominous and stark manner. In contrast to the West, the Soviet state enforced a monopoly on cultural life, controlling all the practical aspects of artistic production such as education, employment, publishing, and performance. The artistic life of the Soviet Union was designed from the top down in an effort to control artists, public spaces and public experiences. The goal of the state was control over individuals with access to the public sphere and to create an effective alternative to what was presumed to be the decadent bourgeois cultural habits of the urban capitalist marketplaces of Western Europe and North America. By the early 1940s, a musical equivalent to Socialist Realism came to dominate Soviet music. For the concert and opera stage, there was a clear mandate. Composers were expected to write music that was easy to listen to, as well as select texts and librettos with proper ideological content. The conceit was that the audience could be inspired to embrace the collectivist spirit of state socialism. In order to win the approval of official state arbiters and censors, composers turned to tradition and recognizable forms. They employed repetition, a transparent logic and explored melody and the easily memorable. The Romantic construct of the composer as a free artist exercising his or her imagination in an effort to realize individuality and originality was challenged with striking severity by the authorities as anti-Soviet and anti-Communist; thus conformity with sanctioned and quite conservative conventions vis-à-vis modernism became the necessary starting point for any young aspiring artist.

All this was no laughing matter. As the most famous of all Soviet composers, Dmitri Shostakovich, recognized in 1936 when his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk received a scathing editorial in Pravda, crackdowns on deviations were backed by the power of the state apparatus, including the security forces and professional organizations such as the Union of Composers with its various oversight committees. Not even Sergei Prokofiev after his triumphant return in the 1930s was immune from censure and ostracism. Although he came back willingly to the Soviet Union in 1935 and embraced (like Shostakovich) much of the populist idealism put forward by Stalin’s regime as a challenge—how to write simple, popular but sophisticated modern music—he quickly discovered that being an official artist had consequences unimaginable to composers living in the West. There were benefits, of course, including financial security, privileged housing and goods, but these exacted significant sacrifices, spiritual and practical. Abject flattery was often not enough to mollify or distract the authorities.

The low point in Soviet history with respect to the arts occurred in 1948, when composers, including Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and one composer on tonight’s program, Alexander Lokshin, were condemned. Lokshin and Shostakovich suffered loss of employment and banishment from public life. In Shostakovich’s case the punishment was brief and relatively easy compared to Lokshin’s ten years as a virtual non-person. Until the death of Stalin, modernist developments in the West were dismissed in the Soviet Union as narcissistic elitism. They enjoyed at best an underground following. Indeed in the purges of 1948, the language of condemnation against composers out of favor centered around accusations of “formalism,” a euphemism for music that lacked a reductive communicative surface and proper ideological content. Formalist music was said to be based on the self-indulgence of self-referential aestheticism and mere egoism.

Stalin died in 1953. Although there was some relaxation in the climate of fear, 1956 was the watershed year. It was defined by Khrushchev’s famous condemnation of Stalin’s rule. Between 1956 and Khrushchev’s fall in 1964, a brief moment of loosening of state control existed, known historically as “the Thaw.” This optimistic period saw the beginnings of a rapprochement with the West and a softening of the state’s prescriptions for the arts. But just as the wave of experimentalism before Stalin took power had been short-lived and brutally disrupted, this moment of opportunity after Stalin’s death proved to be transient as well. Khrushchev himself was no stranger to the Stalinist habit of delivering aesthetic judgments that determined the fate of artists. Yet Lokshin’s work on this program comes directly out of context of the Thaw.

After Khrushchev, Brezhnev ushered in a drab, dispiriting and oppressive era of neo-Stalinism. Tischenko’s symphony dates from that era. Only with Gorbachev came Perestroika, and ultimately the collapse of the Soviet system. Tchaikovsky’s 1987 work on this program was written in that context. Russian artists were cut loose into the chaotic and uncertain 1990s.

It is within this framework that one needs to consider the music on this program. The historical context has receded into memory, so much so that one can sense a misguided nostalgia among certain elites for the Soviet past evident in the revival of the autocratic habits of state control and intimidation that mark today’s Russia. But outside of Russia, the Soviet era has vanished from consciousness. Only two composers from this more than seventy-year history of Russia are widely performed today: Shostakovich and Prokofiev. This is in spite of the fact that the investment by the state in music nurtured several generations of highly talented composers, each of whom was forced, like Shostakovich and Prokofiev, to come to terms with the regime as their master.

Of all the arts music is the least susceptible to censorship (perhaps because it is less descriptive and capable of transmitting ordinary meaning, as opposed to literature or painting). Composers, if they desired, found clever ways to elude becoming mere hacks. They developed strong and powerful individual voices and ways to circumvent control by encoding complex and contradictory meanings in music where surface and interior were intentionally inconsistent with one another. Shostakovich is understood by many to have mastered this strategy, using irony and sarcasm in music to powerful effect.

The politics of the Cold War, the passage of time and the erasure of memory have determined that most of the music written by Soviet composers born after the Revolution remains largely unknown to the West. The only exceptions are a few figures from the late 1970s and 1980s, émigrés such as Alfred Schnittke and Arvo Pärt.

But there is a good deal of irony here. Those composers who remained in Soviet Russia and managed to balance official favor with independence and originality and created work of artistic merit may have succeeded at home, but they skillfully skirted domestic danger only to be derided in the West. And those who were censured at home were effectively silenced and are now forgotten. When Rostropovich brought Boris Tchaikovsky’s cello concert to New York in 1964 it was dismissed as banal official music. Lokshin’s case is more extreme: he was totally out of sight for ten years, but then struggled to gain recognition in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the Thaw. Even though his music was influenced by the work of Schoenberg and Berg, he never attracted attention in the West. Boris Tishchenko (who admired Lokshin greatly), the one composer on this program still alive today, has the understandable need to explain his career to younger contemporaries for whom the Soviet Union is not a living memory.

But today, absent the Cold War, surely these works need no longer suffer from the political notoriety of their Soviet composers. Ironically for these composers, the advantages of state support and the association with that support have resulted in an even more recalcitrant posthumous dismissal than is routinely encountered by composers elsewhere with the passage of generations.

But how should we approach music written during the Soviet era, now that the political landscape has been so radically altered? Is it ultimately merely propaganda without value? Is the legacy of official support and success during the Soviet era sufficient justification for rejection? For all the Soviet Union’s immense evils, represented brutally by Stalin’s murder of millions, there is a fundamental difference between the Soviet Union and the other powerful dictatorship for which art was useful: Nazi Germany. Although in the 1950s these two regimes were compared under the rubric of totalitarianism, there was in the Soviet system a tension between the ideal and the real that had no parallel in Nazism. Communism may be a failed system, but one cannot deny that its utopian vision of an egalitarian world without class distinctions, politics or the state is attractive, albeit implausible. Soviet composers believed in the ideal of Communism, even though they had to contend with a reality that did not embody that ideal. To survive as a composer and even a performing artist required some dimension of collaboration.

In the Soviet case, that accommodation or collaboration does not merit blanket ethical and moral condemnation. What occurred under Hitler—the paths taken by men like Martin Heidegger and Carl Orff—should not define how we judge artists in the Soviet era . The favored artist under Hitler had choices. There was less ambiguity between right and wrong. At the same time many artists and composers saved their careers by simply continuing to work while trying to keep their noses clean of political conviction, something that was not as possible in the Soviet Union. Some indeed advanced their careers by becoming active Nazis; others sought to help victims in secret, and some went into voluntary seclusion such as K.A. Hartmann. In the Soviet Union, where one could be sent to the mines of Kolyma upon the slightest suspicion of anti-Soviet behavior, one did one’s best to conform. One had the possibility of hope, however delusive. One could believe that someday the Soviet system could become just and admirable.

The Soviet Union inspired numerous unattractive characters–sycophants who advanced their careers (e.g. Kabalevsky and Khrennikov) shamelessly and at the expense of others– but is their behavior really any more reprehensible that other artists in earlier times who were forced to flatter tsars, kings, and popes, or who, as in the case of Wagner, advocated despicable notions of racial superiority? Even Arnold Schoenberg, whose career suffered on account of Nazism, was not immune from the fascination with autocracy and intolerance that thrived in the 1930s. He developed, harbored and expressed the most unattractive chauvinist and dictatorial sentiments.

None of the composers on today’s program therefore deserve to be dismissed solely because they worked within the system of the Soviet Union. Now that the mid-twentieth-century romance with modernism is over (itself a Cold War phenomenon supported ironically in the West as underscoring the contrast between Soviet Russia and the free West), we are able to take a new look at the enormous output of new music that took place particularly after the death of Stalin. Since our political context as listeners is so different, we can discover finely crafted music that has the welcome benefit of accessibility. We can do so without bias. Boris Tchaikovsky, dismissed by critics in New York in 1964, was held in the highest regard by Mstislav Rostropovich to the end of the latter’s career. It was he who brought the cello concerto on today’s program to my attention just a few months before his death. Shostakovich’s exceptional and enormous regard for Tishchenko (and for that matter Lokshin) is itself a powerful recommendation that suggests an evaluation of his music is long overdue. Finally, Lokshin deserves what amounts to a first look. He pursued a kind of middle road between rebellious deviation and conformity. Yet, of all these three composers he suffered the most, first from the state and later from an accusation of collaboration with the state. Lokshin, the most obscure figure on tonight’s program, has a remarkable body of work ripe for rediscovery.

As time passes, we will be able to assess the place of the Soviet era, particularly its second half, in Russian history. Music since the early nineteenth century has been a central feature of Russian culture. In few nations have the traditions of concert and classical music remained so vital for so long. To restrict our appreciation of the achievements of Russian composers who lived and worked in the Soviet Union to Prokofiev, Shostakovich, and to a few signature works by Khachaturian and Kabalevsky, is to allow an inadequate construct of political history to obscure our recognition of great and memorable achievements. Without doubt a lot of propagandistic and ephemeral work was produced. But that is also the case in non-authoritarian societies where freedom and the marketplace thrive. One suspects that there may have been more music written in the Soviet Union of lasting value for performers and audiences today than was produced during the same period elsewhere. To appropriate, with some irony, a word associated with the ideological debates within Communism, enough time has passed to legitimate some active “revisionism” in our own time.

An American Biography: The Music of Henry Cowell

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert An American Biography: The Music of Henry Cowell, performed on Jan 29, 2010 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This evening’s concert goes to the very heart of the original mission of the American Symphony Orchestra. American Symphony’s founder Leopold Stokowski was a controversial figure, looked down upon by those who considered his style and approach to music to be vulgar, and his self-invented personality too flashy and artificial. But oddly enough, that early icon of conductorial hair style actually had substance and principle—something that happens too rarely, particularly in the world of classical music. For all his commercial success and reputation as a Hollywood figure, Stokowski was from the outset a persistent innovator and explorer. He may always not be remembered for particular interpretations of masterworks, but he certainly will be remembered as one of the creators of the modern standard of orchestral sonority, the nearly technicolor lushness of the blended sound of the modern orchestra, still cherished today. Stokowski’s truly distinctive contribution, however, was his broadening of access to new audiences and his advocacy of new and unknown music. While at the Philadelphia Orchestra, and later during his tenure at the American Symphony Orchestra, he fearlessly presented new repertoire.

Stokowski’s presence in American musical life coincided with a cultural movement in music that mirrored the brashness of an America that had just taken its place as a major player in the world. When one reads the fine essay by Richard Teitelbaum that follows, one should remember that Henry Cowell was twenty years old when the United States entered the First World War. His career coincided with a time in history in which the America of his day was the China of today. The United States was growing rapidly and was at the cutting edge of industrial competitiveness. It had outstripped Europe and was on its way to becoming the largest economy in the world. During Cowell’s lifetime it would take its place as the most powerful nation on earth. For Europeans, Americans represented industriousness, competition, innovation; America was the future. While earlier generations of European intellectuals found ways to see the United States as backward and provincial, by the time World War I ended, America was no longer a plausible object of derision. Rather it became an object of fascination and emulation, and for that very reason, also a focus of anxiety. In the interwar period, the distinguished German critic and theorist Siegfried Krackauer pointed to the Radio City Rockettes to exemplify the dangers of spiritual mechanization of the human that powered America’s economic and political domination. Through music and film, America became a leading exporter of culture. Given the devastation that took place in Europe, European artists flocked to the United States for patronage and audiences.

It is therefore not surprising that while all this was going on, an optimistic spirit of innovation flourished in the arts in the United States. Cowell’s career coincides with the advent of American modernism in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Insofar as music in American life before 1917 seemed to be derivative in its indebtedness to European models, the challenge facing young American artists in the 1920s was the creation of something distinctly and uniquely American. Now that America, though still young, seemed fully realized as a nation, it demanded that its own distinctive voice be heard. The character of that voice would have to match the industrial spirit of America. It had to be marked by a self-conscious modernity and a faith in innovation.

In this regard, there was no more distinctly American composer in the first half of the twentieth century than Henry Cowell. He was an experimentalist and a pluralist. True to America’s identity as an immigrant nation, he embraced influences from numerous sources. He broke the boundaries that had been erected between types and genres of music. He invented new sounds. He introduced the work of composers from all over the world to American audiences. No individual was more responsible than Cowell for bringing America’s first truly original master of composition, Charles Ives, to the public’s attention. Ives reciprocated with support for Cowell and his activities. Cowell’s interest encompassed not only experimental and avant-garde modernism, but that which we today awkwardly call “world music”. As Richard Teitelbaum suggests, this may have been the result of his being born on the West Coast, which retained more of a link to Asia, while the East Coast seemed to preserve its residual debt to Europe. Cowell’s energy and productivity are themselves a source of amazement. So too is the list of those indebted to Cowell for his role as mentor and advocate.

This impressive record of achievement thus begs the question: why is it that more than three quarters of the devoted audience for classical and concert music today might not recognize even the name of Henry Cowell, much less his music? A search of programs by American orchestras and ensembles will reveal that very little if any of Cowell’s music is played. (On the list of orchestras that have played Cowell’s music, the American Symphony would be toward the top, owing largely to Stokowski’s advocacy and to recent performances of several of Cowell’s works.) Is the answer to the question that Cowell was simply a great organizer, teacher, and thinker whose music isn’t worth performing? That would be the most commonplace answer.

Its apparent plausibility rests in the mistaken but recalcitrant idea that first, the standard repertory today reflects the collective and legitimate aesthetic judgment of history and therefore a quasi-Darwinian process of objective selection, and second, that music is an art that demands competitive comparison, that only works befitting the attribute “masterpiece” deserve the time and effort to be heard and played in concert. By this standard, not a single work by Henry Cowell has survived. Indeed, from the perspective of self-styled connoisseurs and aficionados, most of the music performed at American Symphony Orchestra concerts (especially works never recorded) deserve before the performance to be met with skepticism, and after dismissed with the comment that these works do not compare with the major works of Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Bartók, or Stravinsky.

he judgment of history does not constitute an objective test. Consider the fate of Henry Cowell. The scandal surrounding his imprisonment for homosexuality, and the easy association in many circles between aesthetic radicalism and left-wing politics damaged his reputation and career during his lifetime and posthumously. For all of America’s celebration of its own love of invention and innovation, there has been a dark side to American cultural life: an enormous pressure to conform, the rule of a marketplace that is intolerant of genuine individuality and dissent, and a risk-averse anti-intellectualism derived from mistrust, isolationism, and commercial interest. Henry Cowell’s career and music have consistently tripped the wires of all of these negative attitudes. As a result, for the last fifty years, his music was deprived of the hearing it deserved except in a small community of devoted advocates. More exposure is necessary to permit a reasonable assessment of the worth of his many compositions. Only after repeated performances can we as performers and listeners decide which works we prefer and which seem more persuasive than others. Even within the output of the most famous composers there are hierarchies of taste. In Cowell’s case, exposure denied by the musical establishment at large for extraneous and specious reasons has prevented most listeners from exercising any sort of judgment. That is what makes Cowell the perfect subject for the mission of the American Symphony.

For some odd reason, changing inherited impressions has become much harder in music than it has in either painting or literature. In music, the unremitting standard of the “masterpiece” is more of an excluding factor than it is in any other art. Why does listening to a piece of concert music require a judgment to determine it is not something else—perhaps by Stravinsky, Mozart, Mahler, or Copland? We do not read books this way, and we do not view paintings this way. We do not furnish our homes with paintings and prints and objects that way. No one can argue that the idea that a painting of Botticelli or a play by Shakespeare are daunting and overwhelming examples of the triumph of human imagination. But the greatest Botticelli or Shakespeare need not diminish our appreciation of other paintings and plays. We do not reject plays and paintings old or new in our theaters and museums because they are not Botticelli and Shakespeare. We do not demand that the only things performed or displayed are by Botticelli and Shakespeare. We profess a wider and more eclectic range of appreciation for unquestionably excellent examples of human expression in painting and writing. Yet in music, a dominant snobbery apparent in writers, performers, and listeners would shut down the exercise of curiosity. Young performers and conductors learn and offer almost exactly the same historical repertoire that their counterparts did thirty and fifty years ago. Concert promoters encourage this. But as Cowell understood, music is an experience of life in the world. There is a wide range of music that inspires, ennobles and delights audiences who have the insight to listen to a work in relation to their personal preferences or opinions, not in relation to what they have learned are the narrow group of the “best” composers and compositions.

Our reasons for performing unfamiliar repertoire are not about searching for lost treasures. We are not on some sort of Antiques Roadshow, trying to assess rare work by some pre-existing standard of comparative values. We are not in the business of being musical truffle hounds. Rather, we perform Henry Cowell’s music, as well as the music on past and future programs of the American Symphony, to show not rarity but the unexpected vastness, quality, and depth of musical expression that is available to be heard within the history of music. Our only standard is that it is music that deserves to be enjoyed and experienced. The music must have the inspiration and craftsmanship to capture the attention of those who love to play and listen. Not every work will take its place alongside an acknowledged masterpiece, but it doesn’t have to. As in other arts, all kinds of music contribute to an unimaginably large and varied experience, in which anyone will eventually find something they like. For those who restricted their capacity for the joy of music to a few famous works (an unreasonable fragment of cultural history), they may find that repetition of those works will ultimately eviscerate their power to move the listener by eroding the essential reactions of surprise and engagement those works inspire.

In the course of history, generations reverse themselves. The great work of the past can fade and be replaced by a reversal of judgment. In the end what appeals to the audience is determined by criteria the audience brings to their experience, shaped by the historical circumstances around them. That is what lies beneath the legendary observation of Leonard Bernstein regarding Gustav Mahler’s assertion that “my time will come”: it did. Mahler’s music did not change, but the way it was perceived and interpreted underwent a radical reevaluation.

Henry Cowell may be due for such a reevaluation. Despite the skepticism of those who consider themselves “in the know,” the response of American Symphony’s loyal audiences since the founding of the orchestra by Stokowski to new repertoire has been one of delight. They, like the musicians in the orchestra, respond to excitement, character, substance, and surprise in music. We hope this continued attitude will give a reprieve to music unfairly neglected and forgotten by the self-styled arbiters of taste who pronounce summary judgment based on criteria worthy of a beauty contest or quiz show.

The Remains of Romanticism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Remains of Romanticism, performed on Nov 15, 2009 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Musical romanticism is, like most descriptive categories, elusive. Its existence is shaped by an implied chronological contrast. At the beginning of its historical spectrum, it is juxtaposed in opposition to eighteenth-century classicism which it succeeded. At the other end of its history, romanticism is understood as coming to an end with the advent of modernism, which is itself defined by its rejection, in the twentieth century, of the external markers of romanticism. In this way it has become standard to characterize the nineteenth century as the era of romanticism. But when we try to identify the features of the romantic in music beyond neat chronological boundaries, we find that though romantic elements make their appearance most famously in middle-period Beethoven, they may also be found in Mozart. Romanticism also did not lose its hold after its “era” had supposedly ended; well into the twentieth century, “conservative” composers continued to write in the romantic tradition, and the familiar conventions of late nineteenth-century romanticism inspire film music well into our own time. Since the mid-1970s, a more conscious revival of romanticism in musical composition has flourished.

Having said that, a set of interconnecting characteristics stand out in the music on today’s program, all of which was composed in the twilight years of the romantic tradition. Carl Czerny alleged that his teacher Beethoven claimed he always had some kind of story or plot in mind when composing instrumental music. Once the composition was finished, needed to be forgotten. It at best should be regarded by the listener as the external, temporary scaffolding necessary for the composer to construct the enduring edifice. In this sense Beethoven retained an old classical bias that musical discourse operated self-referentially and made its case to the listener through the interplay of musical events: themes, counterpoint, development, rhythmic contrast, and harmonic pathways. These became structural devices that delivered to the listener a sense of architecture and organization. The image of scaffolding around this structure is apt, because the scaffolding was made up of what we might call “extra-musical” elements: stories and vistas. For example, consider Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (1808). It is a sublime experience of listening and a magical example of how musical elements seem to operate autonomously without the help of words and pictures. But that achievement was accomplished through Beethoven’s use of music to narrate the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It is precisely the connection between music and language, between musical time and narrative time, and by extension music and the initially non-musical experience of life, that romanticism took its inspiration. For the generation of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin, who are deemed masters of “early” romanticism, the Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, the “Pastoral” (1808), was the quintessential proto-romantic work. In this symphony Beethoven famously described how he used music to express the impact of external events and experiences, the “storm” and the “bubbling brook,” rather than the events themselves. In that work, he conceded an inspirational relationship that would be essential to all romantic composers. Form and structure were no longer defended exclusively by expectations set up by purely musical logic. Nature defines the inspirational elements. In Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture (1830/2), it is the visual experience of nature that informs the classical logic of the instrumental composition. In Robert Schumann’s early piano pieces, literary models and characters create novel musical forms.

Romanticism took patterns of musical expression and uses of time developed during the classical era and transformed them so that something implicit was made explicit: the connection between music and the visual and linguistic or literary. It is in romanticism that the associative conventions to which we are accustomed between emotion and certain musical patterns became standardized. One can hear them in many a film and television score. The first generation of nineteenth-century romantic composers used music to express and describe the subjective experience of life. Unashamedly, they borrowed and adapted the seemingly self-contained logic of classicism to narrate and expand the player’s and listener’s poetic sense of the inexhaustible expanse of the human imagination. There is no more evocative title to depict the agenda of romanticism in the first part of the nineteenth century than Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words (1834).

Not entirely coincidentally, along with these romantic developments came a dramatic expansion of the musical audience. Literacy in music, now an art form to which it was easier to relate given the elaboration of its connections to the subjectivity of life, grew with great rapidity during the nineteenth century and created a massive concert audience. Listeners consumed music as a means to escape from the quotidian and increasing utilitarian if not drab dimension of contemporary economic and social life. The attraction of music, particularly instrumental music with its seemingly unique abstract character, was how it refreshed the imagination with the infinite possibilities and sanctity of human life at a time when the harsh realities of modernity seemed to threaten both nature and humanity. For this reason, romanticism in music took on the characteristic of idealistic nostalgia. New instrumental music, pioneered especially by Liszt, was inspired by stories taken from the pre-modern past, from mythology and antiquity. The past, both imagined and real, far removed from the listener’s actual circumstances, became the object of fascination for the romantic musical imagination. Ultimately, romantic music became a thrilling dramatic and emotional experience, but its musical logic became increasingly subordinate to an imaginary desire in human experience, dependent on words and pictures. The scaffold described by Beethoven itself became the musical substance and structure. It goes without saying that the master of this inversion was Richard Wagner.

This concert explores the music of composers whose names (with one exception) may not be immediately recognizable. Yet all were prominent during their lifetimes in the nineteenth century. They were chosen for today’s program because they demonstrate the many different ways originality and a distinctive voice can emerge from a conflicted relationship with tradition and conventional expectations. These composers lived at least part of their lives aware that they must be at the end of an enormous tradition. Some of them lived to cross the threshold of the romantic transition. If the generation of 1809-10 struggled with the legacy of Beethoven, the burden of history felt by Robert Fuchs and Hermann Goetz, the two earliest composers on today’s program, was even more intense. Younger than Wagner and Brahms, the formative composers for them were Schumann and Mendelssohn. Next in line chronologically are Ludwig Thuille and Richard Strauss, close friends born three years apart in the early 1860s. Following closely after them is Siegmund von Hausegger who was only eight years Strauss’s junior. By the time this second group came of age as composers, they had not only the looming figures of Beethoven, Schumann, and Mendelssohn to contend with, but Brahms and Wagner.

Strauss’s Second Symphony (1884) was written a year after Wagner died. Brahms admired this work. Along with Bruckner, Brahms was one of the last living masters of a tradition of composition dating back to Mozart. Brahms certainly felt the burden of being the last exponent of a great tradition. Strauss was only twenty when he wrote this symphony, struggling even then to find a new voice for his generation. But Strauss’s symphony is not, in fact, an example of an inexperienced composer early in his career, engaged with imitation. Rather it is a brilliant example of how history is referenced and how allusion and stylistic suggestion can become the means by which conventions are overturned. After this symphony, Strauss set the form aside for many years, only returning to it later with his own unmistakable stamp in Symphonia domestica (1903) and the Alpine Symphony (1915). Like Mahler, here he used the external convention of the symphonic form to rethink the premise of romanticism. In the work on today’s program, Strauss resisted the Lisztian idea and Wagnerian path of organizing music along a literary narrative. At the same time he holds on to the notion that a piece of music is more than itself and that it must trigger some aspect of human self-reflection. In this case the human reflection is about history, the tradition of music making itself. The habit of allusion, stylistic incongruity, and quotation that are audible in this work became the hallmark of Strauss’s later work, with its increasing dose of irony and philosophical distance.

Similarly, Hermann Goetz’s Violin Concerto has its own nostalgic quality, embodied in the way it reflects the composer’s turn away from writing for the stage and the voice in an attempt to recapture the innocence of the early nineteenth century. Robert Fuchs adapts a form associated with Haydn and Mozart in an attempt to achieve something original. He picks up a thread that Brahms abandoned early in his career, a multi-movement work that has no pretension to symphonic coherence. This Serenade is his most famous work, and like his wonderful set of violin duets, it instills an intensity of feeling with a self-conscious effort to evoke a neo-classical clarity of musical form and technique. Siegmund von Hausegger’s work seeks to extend Liszt’s idea of narration through music by using a subject discarded by Wagner. Composed after Strauss’s daunting set of tone poems, it resists the ironic distance which Strauss mastered and seeks to rekindle, late in the career of romanticism, the heroic and the monumental by setting a pre-modern tale in the garb of post-Wagnerian, late romantic rhetoric. There is only one work on the program that has the term “romantic” in its title, Thuille’s Romantic Overture. Like Fuchs, Thuille was a gifted teacher whose textbook continued to be used well into the twentieth century. Although inspired by Wagner, this overture seeks to redeem a conceit lost on Wagner, but one which all the composers on today’s program shared. That conceit held that even when tied to words and pictures, music alone could communicate something that words and pictures never could, and that music opened up an expanse of feeling and experience that seems boundless and resistant to any fixed image or meaning. For Thuille, Hausegger, Fuchs, Goetz, and Strauss, all late romantic music was an effort to open the infinite in the experience of the listener, for whom life in the modern world might seem increasingly limited by the harsh realities of time and space.

Fervaal

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Vincent d’Indy Fervaal, performed on Oct 14, 2009 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert performance of Vincent D’Indy’s Fervaal is probably the work’s first North American performance. Yet Fervaal is an opera that occupies a significant place in the history of French music. Indeed, this presentation continues the American Symphony Orchestra’s ongoing project to bring back into the repertory the great examples of nineteenth-and twentieth-century French opera. We hope to follow in future years with neglected works by Chabrier, Massenet, Saint Saens, and Magnard.

The career and the posthumous reputation of D’Indy (1851–1931) are both fascinating and contradictory. Few composers have done themselves so much damage through their own writings. In 1930, late in his career, D’Indy published a notorious anti-Semitic tract on Wagner’s influence on French music that explicitly pursued the line of thought pioneered by Wagner in his mid-nineteenth-century essay “Judaism in Music.” D’Indy followed a familiar turn-of-the-century ideological strain by identifying a specific Jewish style and attitude in music and the arts, signaling not only the deleterious influence of Jews but a Jewish approach toward the making of art, not necessarily pursued only by those racially identified with Judaism, that was fundamentally inartistic. With this late book D’Indy erased many associations and alliances he had cultivated earlier in his life. For most of his career, particularly before the completion of Fervaal, he enthusiastically praised the work of Giacomo Meyerbeer. There are in fact distinctly Meyerbeer-like moments in Fervaal. But D’Indy’s anti-Semitism and ties to the political right in France isolated him. Ironically, among the most ardent admirers of Fervaal was none other than Paul Dukas, a Jew. By assuming a stance of determined advocacy for the anti-Dreyfus camp, D’Indy damaged his relationship with Alberic Magnard and other musicians who sympathized with D’Indy’s music and aesthetic ideals but supported the cause of Dreyfus.

The writings of his later years solidified the reputation of D’Indy as a crotchety, unattractive conservative. Posterity has had little reason to doubt this description, despite the pioneering work of recent scholars, including Andrew Thomson and Jann Pasler. If D’Indy is remembered at all, it is for a very few works, including the 1886 Symphony on a French Mountain Air and the symphonic variations Istar. D’Indy’s place in the history of French music has been secured as much by his founding a conservatory to rival the Paris Conservatory, the Schola Cantorum, as it has by his music. D’Indy’s course in composition taught at the Schola was published in several editions. It was historically organized and integrated philosophy, history, and music. Following Ruskin, D’Indy stressed structure and form. Harmonic change could be understood as a path toward light and dark. The history of music revealed a progressive evolution that privileged modernity’s capacity to evoke “radiant beauty…unity in variety, expressing grandeur and order.”

The reputation of the Schola was that it was at one and the same time highly influenced by Wagnerian aesthetics and yet devoted to premodern traditions of composition privileging counterpoint over harmony and structure over taste for sentimental melody and lavish sonority. No doubt the key influences on D’Indy were Wagner and Cesar Franck (on whom D’Indy wrote a book marked by admiration and devotion). Those French composers against whom he has been said to place himself included Massenet and later Debussy. D’Indy had little use for Massenet but his music shares more in common with Debussy than standard textbooks might lead one to believe. When D’Indy turned pages for Debussy at one of the first private readings of Pelleas, he was neither shocked nor critical. In fact the contrast between the Conservatoire and the Schola, in curriculum and aesthetics, was in retrospect more rhetorical than substantive.

This was also partly the case in politics as well. What set D’Indy apart was his sense of himself as an aristocrat. He was a monarchist. If one lines up his allegiances with his presumed aesthetic prejudices and anti-Semitism, he seems to have placed all of his bets on the wrong side of history. It comes as no surprise that leading figures in French musical life in the later twentieth century have shown little interest or regard for D’Indy or his life, including Messiaen (Dukas’s pupil) and Pierre Boulez. But early in his career, up to the writing and premiere of Fervaal, D’Indy shared colleagues and friends who were staunch republicans, and he himself took on roles explicitly supportive of the Third Republic.

On closer inspection, D’Indy was more central to and important in French musical and cultural life and his music more characteristic and compelling than has been acknowledged. This suggests that performers and listeners need to take a new look at D’Indy’s career as a composer and force in the history of French music. There is no better place to start than his operatic masterpiece Fervaal.

The opera was the fruit of a long compositional process. It is often said to be Wagnerian, but this is a misleading description. The score is built on a series of formal structural episodes that constitute an organic arch, both musical and dramatic. Although the music contains a great deal of chromaticism, the modulation is what carried a spiritual meaning for D’Indy. Modulation, in turn, called for maintaining reminders of a stable tonality. His own analysis of Wagnerian harmony was geared to stressing its allegiance to a fundamentally diatonic system of tonality. Like others of his generation, D’Indy placed Wagner in a historical context that allied him with Palestrina, rendering him more of a classical than a revolutionary composer. Furthermore, D’Indy’s orchestration is distinctly different from Wagner’s. Because D’Indy was obsessed with the idea that one should hear every word, he pared down the orchestration so that clarity could be achieved. In this sense, his attitude toward orchestration is more reminiscent of Richard Strauss than Wagner. Both Strauss and D’Indy used massive forces to achieve intimacy and to underscore clarity. Not surprisingly, both composers carefully studied Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration.

The Wagnerian in Fervaal rests in the conception of the operatic experience. Here was music drama as a spiritual and political undertaking. It was informed by the beliefs that music was a function of inspiration and the transcendence of the everyday and that the public should be transported, not merely amused or astonished. D’Indy’s Wagner, particularly the Wagner of Parsifal, was a kind of neo-Catholic, a convert to Catholicism along the lines of John Cardinal Henry Newman. This view of Wagner, particularly as understood through the prism provided by Parsifal, was not uncommon in the 1890s. We no longer share D’Indy’s confidence that Parsifal was, in the end, a Christian work. For D’Indy, Parsifal was the greatest work Wagner ever produced, and D’Indy’s attendance at its 1882 premiere left a lasting impression, not only on the composer but also on Fervaal.

There are, however, very crucial differences between Parsifal and Fervaal. One needs to remember that for all the Wagnerian influence in France, which was considerable, (particularly after the composer’s death—despite the fact that there were few, if any, stage productions of his works in France), French Wagnerians such as D’Indy and Chabrier were (in often quite different ways) fierce patriots. Wagner’s influence outside Germany lay in inspiring other groups and nations to match through music, art, and architecture what he had contributed to a definition of Germany and the German. D’Indy deeply admired Chabrier (whose Le roi malgré lui was performed by the American Symphony Orchestra in New York City a few years ago). Chabrier was a true Wagnerian; Gwendoline was his most Wagnerian work, clearly imitative of Tristan und Isolde. But beyond that surface imitation, the scale and musical character of Gwendoline are distinctive, not imitative. Chausson’s Le roi arthus, which was certainly influenced by Wagner, is something quite different in sonority and in the character of the melody and harmony.

Of all of the French Wagnerians, D’Indy was the most patriotic in a conservative sense. He invented the story of Fervaal as an antidote to any lingering sense of defeat and lowered expectations in the France of the Third Republic. For all his elitism and love of Wagner, D’Indy was a fervent French chauvinist. Also unlike Wagner, he had gifts as a visual artist. His drawings and sketches show talent exhibited by only a few composers, Mendelssohn and Schoenberg among them. The visual element gave D’Indy’s music a distinctive character, but even more important was his appropriation of a French version of the Oriental. Germany was a relative newcomer to imperialism, but France was an old hand, rivaling England. All French operas near the end of the nineteenth century seem to flirt with the Oriental, and D’Indy’s opera is no exception. The enemies, the people of the heroine, are from the Islamic world. The task of conjuring up a visual image of this Oriental world D’Indy accomplishes primarily through sonority and color. The tale is shamelessly assertive of the superiority of the French race. D’Indy bought into the pseudo-scientific theory, popular at the time, that the French descended from the Celtic race, supplying the French people a superior provenance. The presumed historical location of the story of Fervaal is a complete fiction. Its factual basis rests only in the symbolism of a new nation arising from an old, great nation. That nation, led by Fervaal, will be marked by the attributes of Christian love and charity inspired by the figure of Christ. However, the new nation that Fervaal initiates out of the tragedy of the loss of his beloved requires no sacrifice of the old virtues of Celtic culture. In this sense, Fervaal is a mythic equivalent to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, where the glories of a nation are extolled, in this case in the future. The story has other clear debts to Wagner, but D’Indy used many other models, particularly in the large choral scenes of the Second Act.

Ultimately, the music of Fervaal is hard to characterize. It is a particular synthesis and variation on many parallel themes in the history of music regarding structure, harmony, narrative, orchestration, and form. D’Indy believed that inspiration was indispensable and could not be supplanted by mere craftsmanship. Whatever one may think about the opera’s dramatic theatrical possibilities, its music is elegant and beautifully crafted. It is not the music but rather the libretto and story that have helped keep Fervaal out of the public eye and ear. The story is complicated, although complexity has not been known to prevent operas from success and popularity. Love and death are treated a bit too piously, albeit beautifully, for contemporary taste. There is something wooden about both the storyline and the psychological characterization. Finally, the circumstances of the opera seem to us today both fictional and marginal, if not wildly politically incorrect on many obvious grounds. Nevertheless, Fervaal contains an exquisite and refined score that deserves to be heard.

Composing A Nation

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Composing A Nation: Israel’s Musical Patriarchs, performed on May 31, 2009 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The creation of the state of Israel and the history of Zionism as a modern nationalist movement are among the most widely debated subjects in recent history. Zionism was a direct response both to the European anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth century, and to new national movements among groups and nationalities within larger dynastic entities—primarily in Eastern Europe where the large majority of European Jews resided. Zionism, especially after the momentous publication of Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State (1896) in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair, took its cues not only from contemporary French and German nationalism, but also from emerging efforts to forge political and cultural independence in Poland (which had been divided into three parts), the Czech lands, the Balkans, in Romania, and in Hungary. The Jews of Europe, owing to extreme discrimination and legal and social restrictions, were political pariahs. Their exclusion in Europe caused them to see themselves not simply as bearers of a distinct religion but as a dispersed nation, as valid and legitimate as both the oppressed and oppressor nations around them: German, English, French, Polish, Czech, and Russian. The vibrant nationalisms in Europe inflamed a desire for Jewish political autonomy.

The dream of the Jews as equal citizens with a different religious persuasion within several European nations was completely exploded by the events of European history after the Dreyfus trial. But this new Jewish nationalism imitative of its European parallels required a new national language. This is why Hebrew, the modernized transformation of the traditional religious language, became the language of the Zionist movement and Israel, displacing the use of Yiddish, the lingua franca of Ashkenazi Jews and one of the great and rich languages of modern history. Just like the Czechs and Hungarians, Jewish nationalists sought to generate communal pride in a distinctive culture through literature and music.

The most striking aspect of the modern Jewish national project was that it could not be realized within Europe itself. Where was this long sought-after Jewish homeland to be, a place where Jews would no longer be pariahs? The solution favored in the end by all proved both logical and convenient for the European colonial powers. At the turn of the century, the vexing issue of what Europe was to do with its Jewish population was elegantly answered by Zionism: relocate them to some other part of the world, outside of Europe. The imperial arrogance of the victors of World War I made this notion seem plausible. Some of the non-European locations proposed for the Jewish state, such as Uganda, seem incredible now. But the most compelling location was of course the place that by tradition and religion was associated with the ancient Jewish nation, Palestine—which, conveniently enough, was under the control of the English and French after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Encouraging Jewish settlement in Palestine was doubly attractive to the European powers. Not only did Zionism promise to get all the Jews out of Europe, but as grateful colonial settlers, the Jews would provide ongoing leverage in the region for perpetual conflict with the Arabs, which was of course greatly in Europe’s imperial interests: divide and conquer. As long as everyone was constantly fighting each other there, there was no chance that any viable Arab government could form that would challenge European interests. During the interwar period the presence of a thriving Jewish settlement in Palestine would help ensure that the lucrative flow of arms and transitory alliances between Europe and corrupt sheiks and princes could continue indefinitely.

Events, however, took a starkly different turn. By the mid-1920s a large segment of European Jewry did emigrate, but primarily to the United States. Comparatively few managed to get to Palestine before World War II. At the Evian Conference in 1939, the non-European nations did not take up Hitler’s offer to expel the Jews of Europe, with the exception of the Dominican Republic which offered to take 100,000. The United States closed its doors behind the façade of the quota system, and the British continued cynical double-game by encouraging Jewish emigration to Palestine (for a fee) knowing it would fuel Arab resentment. After the Holocaust and with the end of the British mandate in view after 1945, however, everything changed. By 1948 there was a community large enough and sufficient international momentum to partition Palestine and create the state of Israel.

The establishment of the state of Israel, however, did not follow the conventional pattern of independence and national emergence. The intensity of the circumstances that brought about partition and the war of independence formed the outlines of the political situation that the world continues to struggle with today. During the Cold War and after, despite the veneer of a post-colonial world, it suited the leading powers to have the Middle East conflict remain unresolved. Unlike many new nations in the twentieth century, the major part of the population of Israel did not represent a people that resided on the same land in a continuous manner for generations. They lived in a land that had to be reconstructed and reinvented. The new Israeli population had to make sense of discontinuity, and to generate quickly a relationship between land, culture, and language that would bind them into a sustainable country. The new Israelis had the Bible and the story of the ancient kingdom of Israel, but when they arrived from their European towns and villages to the Middle Eastern landscape and encountered indigenous populations both Jewish and Arab with whom they were entirely unfamiliar, these newly minted citizens realized they had to construct a new unifying national sensibility.

For Americans, this challenge is perhaps more easily understandable than to Europeans. To North America, as well, Europeans came as settlers to a foreign landscape populated by dramatically different cultures. There is a fundamental difference, however, in the way in which the American European settlers forged their country and the way the Israelis forged theirs. In America, the settlers wiped out the indigenous population through war and disease. The narrative of conquest was substituted by the narrative of discovery of an empty and fertile new world. But the settlers in America came from often fanatical and not entirely homogenous elements from Europe, separated from one another by national origin and religion. In order to create a shared American identity, which still took a century after independence from Britain, the focus had to be not on blood and soil but on the concept of shared citizenship in a democracy where the privilege of citizenship could be acquired even by the foreign born, and where there was strict separation of church and state. In the case of Israel the settlers before independence, as pawns in the game of Ottoman and European imperialism, never enjoyed full civil rights. And the indigenous population of Arabs had no intention of making way for the newcomers. The new Israel fashioned a commonality on the basis of a shared Zionist dream and the experience of past oppression. The founding of Israel, unlike the United States, was therefore characterized by a sense of religious and cultural coherence. Nonetheless a sense of a new nationality, a conscious architecture of identity, needed to be created rapidly. Hence in the first years the socialist Kibbutz movement flourished. It took shape out of an idealism inherent in some sectors of the Zionist movement that a better state should be created than the ones left behind in Europe. Faced with the rare historical opportunity to begin a country from scratch, the early generations of Israelis dreamed of what the perfect democratic nation would be, a nation by design, freed from all the baggage of history and convention.

Amazingly, a tremendous portion of this effort at national self-invention was assigned to the arts. Herzl’s dream of the new state as one of high culture was embraced by the Zionist pioneers. The creation of orchestras, dance and theater companies was considered an essential act of national self-assertion. Three of the composers on today’s program came to Palestine as refugees fleeing the Nazis. Ödön Partos, Paul Ben-Haim and Josef Tal brought with them a deep familiarity and attachment to the modern European vocabulary of musical expression. Faced with the desert landscape, the rich and diverse culture of the Middle East, the explicit and implicit demand on one’s muse made by changing one’s name and language, how as musicians and composers could they express their own personal reinvention, much less that of an entire nation?

Tal’s answer was to sustain the modernist project in music as a universalist template that could be adapted to the experience of modern Israel. But when I interviewed him at the public celebration of his ninetieth birthday in Berlin, I was reminded of how difficult the task must have been for Tal to reconcile his allegiance to the great tradition of German music with his tireless patriotism and efforts on behalf of Israel’s musical culture and identity. He fit all the affectionate albeit cutting stereotypes applied to German Jews as self-styled taste-makers and cultural arbiters.

Paul Ben-Haim was a composer whose music was particularly liked by Leonard Bernstein. He took a more conservative expressive turn than Tal. He was more explicit in following a path charted by composers from Dvořák to Copland who tried to incorporate folk elements. He used the late Romantic idiom in a manner that permitted the appropriation of distinct markers of national identity and place. Of the generation of Israeli composers on today’s programs, Paul Ben-Haim’s music is perhaps the most symbolic of Israel’s independence and the most frequently performed. His Fanfare for Israel (1950) is often used to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. Despite his success, the difficulty of Ben-Haim’s exile and emigration should not be underestimated. His massive oratorio Joram (1933), written as he waited to emigrate, deserves a new first-class contemporary performance. It is a monument to how music can express suffering, isolation and hope.

Ödön Partos came from the rich and vibrant early twentieth-century context of Hungarian art and culture. Bartók and Kodály are the most persuasive examples of how twentieth century composers created a musical vocabulary that permits both personal expression and the articulation of national consciousness. What marks Partos’s work on this program is its connection to the Kibbutz movement and the notion that universal compositional techniques could be reconciled with the need to express something particular and local. Resisting the idea of the artificial invention of a new Mediterranean style, Partos found a way to meld modernism with distinctive elements that would make his music expressive of a landscape and experience that was not European but in a novel way Israeli, representative of the idealism of the Kibbutz movement. There is an intensity and emotional angularity that reflects Partos’s roots in Hungarian modernism.

Mordecai Seter, who was the first in this group of composers to come to Palestine (in 1926), was born in Russia on the Black Sea. Seter was a representative of the single largest Ashkenazi contingent to emigrate to Palestine, that of Russian Jewry (defined by pre-1918 borders), the contingent that also provided most of the political leadership in the Zionist movement and in the first years of Israel’s independence. Seter began his musical education in Palestine and unlike the others he returned to Europe to study, a sojourn that included working with Paul Dukas and Nadia Boulanger. Seter chose to base most of his mature musical work on sources from the Sephardic tradition. By so doing he anticipated the enormous influence Sephardic Jewry would have on the character of Israel. After 1948 the emigration from Yemen and Morocco brought to Israel an entirely different Jewish experience. The basis of Seter’s magnificent piece are the liturgical and musical traditions of Mizrahi and Yemenite song.

Many years have passed since the music on this program was written. The most important factor (apart from the 1967 and 1973 wars) affecting Israel’s culture has been the Russian immigration that began with the Refusniks in the 1970s and blossomed after the fall of Communism. Israel today hosts an almost unbelievable array of composers, each of whom struggles with the problem of how to transform the particular experience of Israel into musical creations that can resonate as more than mere emblems of identity. The works on today’s program achieve these goals. They are not reductive markers of some version of what it means to be an Israeli.

The Israel of today has developed in both popular and concert music a distinctive and complex Israeli identity, quite different from Diaspora Jewish sensibilities. This varied and complex synthesis includes elements from the German European tradition, the Eastern European tradition, the Russian tradition, the varieties of Sephardic culture, and the powerful Palestinian Arab influence. Each is encountered on a daily basis in the context of everyday life. In today’s concert we hear the first stirrings of how music functioned as an important vehicle not only of individual expression but of a need to craft a new natural sensibility out of the embers of the destruction of European Jewry. The pride and optimism inherent in the works of these composers is matched by the talent they had and the courage they showed in restarting careers cut short by the events of the 1930s and 1940s. These composers represent poignantly the extent to which Herzl’s dream of the new Jewish state as a state defined the highest pinnacles of human achievement—art, scholarship and learning—was deeply cherished at the moment of the founding of the state of Israel. This idealism was sustained through the 1950s and 1960s when there was still an optimism that a new kind of society could be fashioned. But the grim realities of international politics and war and strife have made life more difficult than any of these composers might have anticipated.

Revisiting William Grant Still

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Revisiting William Grant Still, performed on March 22, 2009 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When this concert, focused on the career of William Grant Still, was scheduled a year and a half ago, those who were betting on who might be the next president of the United States gave Barack Obama very low odds. But nothing could be more appropriate than the first major retrospective on a distinguished African American composer taking place in the first months of the administration of America’s first black president. The appropriateness of the timing of the concert, however accidental, should not be ascribed merely to the obvious. Eminent African American composers of classical and concert music have been rare, just as the advent of an African American president is unique, at least for now. What connects the career of Barack Obama with that of William Grant Still is that they both defy the easy stereotypes we associate with race.

One lesson, among many, that should be learned from the recent election it is that race per se is not a scientific concept but a cultural one. Masquerading as science, conceptions of race have been used for abusive purposes for centuries, and particularly since the nineteenth century. In this country, it has historically been applied as a descriptive and analytic term especially by the white community for political and social purposes, not only among those on the right who still harbor dreams of segregation and white supremacy, but also among those on the left whose application of the term has led to the prescriptive phenomenon we call political correctness. W.E.B. Du Bois, perhaps the greatest African American intellectual in American history, was correct that the color line has defined the shape of American history and culture. But that straightforward and defining observation has been misunderstood so as to distort any understanding of how truly simplistic and reductive the placement of undue weight on skin color has been in any attempt by whites and blacks to understand each other, much less themselves. Modern science in the form of study of the human genome has revealed revolutionary truths. Among them are the facts that skin color is just another complex genetic trait, that so-called races are more alike than they are different, that it is Africa that possesses the greatest genetic diversity, and that it is from Africa that all of the rest of the world’s population seems to have migrated— including the population of Europe, where the most elaborate theories of race were developed. The President of the United States may be black, but who he is and where he comes from fits no deterministic stereotype whatsoever. It is not surprise then that his views on issues have confounded liberals and conservatives alike.

The reductive image in the mind of most white citizens of what constitutes a black musician rarely, if ever, includes “serious” or “classical” music. That fact is a social reality reflecting decades and generations of discrimination and exclusion, rather than some inherent affinity on the part of members of one so-called race to a certain kind of expressive vocabulary. Still’s misfortune was that he did not fit the expectations placed upon him as an African American by both the white community and his fellow African Americans. Although, as this concert demonstrates, Still worked to use his identity as an African American as a source for his compositional career, his strategy was no more exceptional than Bartok’s use of Hungarian folk traditions or Stravinsky’s appropriation of Russian folk materials.

If the universal, whether in literature or music, is to be expressed through the creation of an artwork, it usually derives from the very particular. Composers and writers are best served when they deal with what they know and understand intimately and with that to which they have a compelling emotional connection. But Still did not behave in a way that those who discriminated against him wished him to act; neither did he conform to the wishes of those who looked to him to join in a common cause. His most famous work, the African American Symphony (1930), which is not on today’s program by intention, gained currency because it was the perfect act of tokenism on behalf of concert promoters and audiences. It was the first symphony by an African American to be performed by a major orchestra.

Still’s other moment of notoriety was his collaboration with Langston Hughes on Troubled Island, the first African American opera slated to be produced by the New York City Opera. It opened in 1949 in the midst of the first wave of post-war anti-communism. Still refused to be stereotyped merely as a novel phenomenon or as an exception. He approached the craft of composition not as a representative of a race but as a composer who dealt with the same twentieth-century challenges of modernism and accessibility that Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, and Howard Hanson faced. Still was an American composer who was inspired, after studying with Varese (just as with Copland was after studying with Boulanger) not to follow a European trajectory toward a more experimental and avant-garde modernism. Composers of Still’s generation from America sought to create something distinctly American in the twentieth century that would draw a wide audience and not turn out to be pale imitation of European conceits.

But perhaps Still’s worst sin, from the perspective of white and black America, was his outspoken anti-communism during the postwar era, which made him something of a pariah, particularly in liberal white circles. His politics were the polar opposite of Paul Robeson, the famous and still revered singer who was the victim of virulent anti-communism and racism, a proud progressive for whom the Soviet Union was not an evil empire, but perhaps the very opposite. In the 1950s, during the nascent years of the civil rights movement, the effective alliance was between liberal and progressive white America that had severe doubts about the saber rattling and arms race of the Cold War, and the leadership of the black community. Still, in what was considered to be an appalling betrayal of black American progressivism at the time, sided with the enemy by embracing the traditions of a rigid, suspicious, and somewhat intolerant anti-communism that dated back to 1919.

Still’s career and reputation suffered therefore as the result of two factors. First, he was black and sought to make a career in a world that separated white and black and relegated blacks to the arts that were viewed as authentically black and exotic to whites. Successful African American artists triumphed in an arena that was conceded to the black community: jazz. The visible symbolic figures black figures of American music were Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday. Classical music was restricted; it was not viewed as a proper venue for blacks (despite the presence of black classical musicians going back to Beethoven’s colleague George Hightower). Whites who reveled in jazz were, despite themselves, engaging in a form of condescension. It was incredibly difficult for an African American in the United States to make a career in classical music. The first person to recognize this barrier was Antonin Dvorak, who when he came in the 1890s to the short-lived National Conservatory in New York, embraced openly the African American tradition. He believed that it was from the African American and Native American traditions that an authentic American music would emerge. His vision of the future was not of a popular art form or something like jazz, but of a classical tradition in America transformed by two distinctive features that emerged from American history: the legacy of slavery and the memory of the indigenous peoples of the continent. Still’s music is probably the most eloquent realization of Dvorak’s hopes. His output was extensive, including music for film and television, and his inspiration and craftsmanship were superb. The second factor that damaged Still’s career was, having offended the mainstream white community, his politics also offended the black and white progressive community. It is worth noting, however, that one established figure who was a firm supporter of Still was Leopold Stokowski (who performed the African American Symphony in 1937 with the Philadelphia Orchestra) and who corresponded with Still regarding music for his brand new orchestra in 1962, the American Symphony Orchestra (see the letter reprinted in this publication).

Despite all the efforts of political correctness, there is a baffling question. Why after persistent efforts to reclaim the history of African Americans as part of the way in which American history is told, is the name William Grant Still so obscure? It deserves to be as well known as the names of the jazz greats of his time. There are many reasons, not least of which is how little importance classical music in retrospect seems to hold in our self-image as a nation. But probably more significant in this context is that Still was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He defied expectations and set his own path.

If the election of Barack Obama signals a new age, it gives us the opportunity to reconsider how we think about race, and not only in politics. The first step may be to acknowledge that the color of one’s skin determines real issues of opportunity and exclusion. But in fact the color of skin does not determine the outcome. And there is no uniformity in response to the world that the color of one’s skin renders inevitable. William Grant Still was an individual who crafted an individual voice. He crafted his own vision of the African American heritage. In the end the promise of individuality and a respect for it commends democracy and freedom to us all.

Persecution and Hope

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Persecution and Hope: Masterworks of Conscience, performed on Feb 20, 2009 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is not an exaggeration to assert that Luigi Dallapiccola was the greatest Italian composer of the twentieth century. He was an almost exact contemporary of Aaron Copland, but the divergence in their careers, particularly in their relationship to their respective native countries, provides instructive contrast. Copland’s meteoric rise was initially in part due to an embrace of European modernism, but in the 1930s he turned to a more populist and conservative idiom. He linked his music intentionally to the progressive democratic politics of the New Deal. As a result, he introduced a music that bridged the concert stage and the movie theater, producing a sound that would seem emblematically American, patriotic, and national.

Dallapiccola followed almost the same curve in the opposite direction, although he was like Copland born into a family atypical of the country of his origin. The Dallapiccola family was from a region that was marginal to Italian culture. Indeed before 1918 it was once an integral part of the Austrian Empire. When he was a teenager, Dallapiccola’s family was interned in Graz because of suspicions regarding their nationalist politics. During those years the composer was exposed to the established Austro-German tradition. As a young man he traveled to Bologna and then to Florence. In his early twenties, he encountered the music of Mahler, Debussy and Schoenberg—the same music Copland discovered, but Dallapiccola pursued from that starting point a different path.

Inspired by incipient European modernism, Dallapiccola’s formative years as a composer overlapped the early years of Italian fascism and the career of its leader, Benito Mussolini. It is awkward for many to remember that “Il duce” was in the late 1920s and early 1930s a figure more admired than reviled. It was not only Italians that Mussolini seduced into supporting him. The American poet Ezra Pound infamously supported the Italian dictator, and European intellectuals such as Stefan Zweig found in Mussolini a welcome balance between freedom and order, a positive antidote to the economic and social chaos of postwar Europe. If the America of the 1930s fostered social justice as well as new opportunities for tolerance and freedom, Italy fostered a very different nationalist philosophy. The Abyssinian campaign and Italian role in the Spanish Civil War were startling reminders that Mussolini’s humanistic pronouncements were decorative façades for a brutal system.

For Dallapiccola, optimism vanished during the 1930s. As an artist, his response to the darkening political environment and the increasing restrictions on freedom and liberty led to a more dramatic adoption of modernist strategies in composition, and a forceful rejection of the conservative expressive devices bequeathed by late romanticism favored by his Italian contemporaries eager to placate the regime. His was not the Coplandesque celebration of the national collective, but the anxious alarm against oppression and conformity. During the 1930s, the most influential figure in Dallapiccola’s creative exploration was Alban Berg, whom he met in 1934. It is therefore all the more inexplicable that tonight’s two operas, as well as Dallapiccola’s Ulisse and Job, have not yet achieved permanent places in the repertory.

As the subject of his first opera, Dallapiccola chose the 1931 novel that made Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (now best known for The Little Prince) famous. What attracted Dallapiccola to Saint-Exupéry, a rather shadowy adventurer with profound literary gifts, was perhaps the real and fictional obsession in the author-aviator’s works with the will of the lone individual. If Volo di notte is about anything, it is about an almost futurist, even neo-Nietzschean commitment to present action, a kind of will to power and self-assertion in the face of death and uncertainty. The death of Fabian and Rivière’s refusal to abandon night-flying can be read as metaphors of resistance by the individual. An assertion of individualist freedom is worth the risk of encountering the unknown and possible self-destruction. Begun in 1937 and premiered in 1940 despite the aesthetic prejudices of the regime, the music is structured around recognizable cells of rhythm, harmony, and melody that are developed over the course of the opera. A basic twelve-tone system is employed, but alongside modal and chromatic usages. The work is structured along Bergian lines and is framed at the outset and the close by tonality.

The existential predicament of the characters in Volo di notte and the resulting suffering and tragedy may have provided the initial impetus for Dallapiccola in 1937, but by the time he contemplated writing a second opera in 1942 the political circumstances had worsened considerably, and the general questions of Volo di notte had assumed a specific urgency. Europe was at war and the true consequences of fascism were no longer ambiguous. As Dallapiccola (whose wife was Jewish) recalled, “Between 1942 and 1943…it became increasingly clear to me that I must write an opera which…would portray the tragedy of our times and the tragedy of persecution felt and suffered by millions of individuals.”

The German occupation of Italy after the fall of Mussolini placed Dallapiccola in a tremendously dangerous circumstance, not alleviated by the subject of his current opera. Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve of 1943 he finished the libretto of Il prigioniero. Dallapiccola and his wife were in the town of Borgunto, Italy, after deciding not to flee to Switzerland for fear of losing contact with Dallapiccola’s mother. Luckily, the couple survived after successfully hiding in Florence until the end of the war. He finally finished Il prigioniero in 1948 and the opera received its premiere in 1950. Il prigioniero can be most fruitfully compared to Berg’s personal and expressive adaptation of the avant-garde devices pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg. Dallapiccola fashions his own approach to the use of twelve tones. The work, despite its modernist vocabulary, has an intensity and lyricism that permits it to express what Max Weber famously called the “Iron Cage,” which the modern individual is forced to confront, the inexorable trap in which the possibilities of freedom are circumscribed. The last words of Il prigioniero occur when the main character, as Dallapiccola describes it, “unconsciously mutters ‘Freedom?’” Alessandro Bonsanti, the writer and critic who later became mayor of Florence and Dallapiccola’s friend observed: how can that question be answered beyond the response of silence? Is freedom in modernity an illusion or painful deception? There are those who see Dallapiccola’s opera as being extremely pessimistic, but the suffering it expresses is of such power that it is reminiscent of the renewal of the human will and its capacity for resistance. The prisoner may not find the answer, but he has at least remembered to ask the right question.

Unlike Aaron Copland, Dallapiccola remained committed to fashioning a musical vocabulary that was deeply expressive of the circumstances of a contemporary existence marked by mass movements, unprecedented weapons of destruction, a dehumanizing world of commerce and industry, and the seemingly endless daily struggle for dignity, matched only by unlimited opportunities for surrender into conformity.

It took almost half a century for the wider public to embrace Alban Berg. More than a quarter century after the death of Luigi Dallapiccola, especially in light of events of our own generation, a wider appreciation of the intensity and humanism of Dallapiccola’s modernism is timely. These two operas reveal the power of music to tell the truth. Modernism, surprisingly, has its human side that requires no concession to popularity or aestheticized familiarity. If Aaron Copland deserves to be honored as the most eloquent voice of the optimistic possibilities offered by freedom, Dallapiccola is the twentieth century’s most powerful voice on behalf of the struggle for freedom through an art of originality, provocation, resistance and the candid revelation of anguish and fear.

The traditions of western concert music are most succinctly idealized in the motto of one of the most venerable continuing civic organizations formed on behalf of musical culture, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig: “true joy is a serious thing.” By comparison with what appears the more tuneful and accessible surface of post-modernist operatic writing currently so in vogue, Dallapiccola’s music does not make for “easy listening.” But it is the intention of the composer to reach the public. The imagination, drama, and the searing gaze on the human struggle for freedom and individual autonomy of these operas offer audiences true joy through a genuinely moving and serious experience.