Murderer, Hope of Women, Op. 12 (1919)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Sounds of Fantasy: Music and Expressionism, performed on May 10, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Hindemith’s Mörder, Hoffnung Der Frauen, composed in 1919 and the first of his triptych of one-act operas, belongs to the category known in German as Literaturoper. A substantial work of literature–Oskar Kokoschka’s expressionist play of 1907–is used as a ready-made libretto. (Kurt Weill’s Der Protagonist, like Berg’s Wozzeck and Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, is another such Literaturoper.) But an Expressionist play does not guarantee an Expressionist opera, even though Kokoschka’s sententious baffle of the sexes seems literally to cry out for musical stylization.

The snarling semitone with which the onstage brass are instructed to “drown out” the orchestra at the opening obviously symbolizes the irreconcilably dissonant relations between the archetypal “Man” and “Woman.” Yet the work’s musical language in general does not emancipate its dissonances in the way that, say, Schoenberg’s prewar expressionist pieces do. The rich, eclectic idiom is contained within a more or less tonal framework. Nor, unlike Schoenberg’s atonal vocal works, does Hindemith respond in persistent detail to the immediate expressive or representational demands of the text. More symphonic than operatic, Mörder‘s form is similarly quite conventional, divided as it is into four readily distinguishable parts: a thematic exposition with lyrical second group, a development section, a slow movement, and a recapitulation-cum-finale. Such a fusion of a one-movement sonata design with the contrasting characters of the four-movement sonata cycle (called “double-function form” by the musicologist William S. Newman) was a common approach to the large-scale organization of nineteenth-century instrumental writing, especially in the work of Liszt.

Stylistically, Hindemith’s writing betrays a number of other influences, too: Straussian instrumental exuberance, Schrekerian opulence, and Wagnerian lyricism. In fact, the lyrical second thematic group, to the words “Our Woman,” is an obvious allusion to Tristan und Isolde (ironically, perhaps, to the so-called “Motif of Love’s Rest”). If Expressionism in music seismographically extrudes inner emotional turmoil (as in Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung), then Hindemith prefers to stay nearer to the surface, juxtaposing diverse idioms to convey the broader dynamics of the ritualistic tableau.

Such a mixing of styles suggests an almost parodic distance from the expressive tradition on which Hindemith relies. He speaks various musical languages with almost disarming fluency, but none of them is really his own. We may say this only with hindsight, of course, knowing Hindemith the prolific creator of the later well-crafted instrumental music, written in his own distinctive voice.

The premiere, given by Fritz Busch in Stuttgart in 1921, achieved something of a succès de scandale. While a number of critics rightly sensed a composer of enormous talent and promise, negative reactions sufficed to establish Hindemith’s early reputation as a young upstart. It was a bold–if ultimately uncharacteristic–beginning to a remarkable career.

Sounds of Fantasy: Music and Expressionism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Sounds of Fantasy: Music and Expressionism, performed on May 10, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is easy to forget the shock of World War I. The massive slaughter on the Western front and the unprecedented brutality of modern warfare paralleled the purposelessness of the conflict. The chauvinist euphoria with which the war opened was based on the belief that the war would be brief and relatively painless. But as the fighting dragged on, the intransigence of the combatants seemed to grow in direct proportion to the absence of any effective rationalization. The First World War brought the nineteenth century in Europe to an end, and with it died a facile belief in progress and the inevitable triumph of rationality and civility.

The consequences of the war in terms of art helped to inspire a generation to cast off the habits of the past. Tradition lost its prestige precisely because it became associated with the value system which led millions to their deaths in the trenches. If the war was a catastrophe, so was the influenza epidemic of 1918. By the time the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919, the last glimmer of a better future had been extinguished. The great hope for a reconciliation, Woodrow Wilson, came to Europe with the famous “Fourteen Points.” But the terms of the settlement allowed pre-war enmities to fester. Not only was the Austro-Hungarian Empire broken up into smaller nation-states, but the principle of self-determination was only partially upheld. A rabid nationalism took the place of dynastic hegemony. Germany was humiliated beyond reason and held solely responsible for the war.

The German defeat came as a shock to its own citizens. The years 1918 to 1920 were ones of extreme political instability. The new Republic, dominated by the Social democrats, betrayed the extreme Left and projected an implausible compromise between the old Wilhelmine habits and the promise of a socialist order. The established elites of the army and the judiciary remained intact, and what later became known as the Weimar Republic gained a few genuinely loyal adherents. From the Republic’s commencement, a powerful right-wing sentiment flourished, sustained by the legend of the “stab in the back” Traitors inside Germany were responsible for its defeat, not the superior power of the Allies, fueled by the American entrance into the war in 1917.

These historical events provide the background for the music on today’s program. The right-wing reactionary movements of post-war Germany quickly took aim against the avant-garde culture of rebellion encouraged by the immediate post-war years. The First World War contributed to the success of the dada movement in Europe. Artists, writers, and musicians challenged the conceits of continuity, coherence, and meaning as understood by the bourgeois audience of pre-war Europe. Culture, taste, and refinement in an ordinary sense seemed to have little to do with a sense of justice and ethics. One might have liked to believe that progress in the nineteenth century mean not only the spread of education but the raising of standards in aesthetic judgment. One would have liked to think that conventions of morality and ethical judgement were also on some historical road to improvement, along with aesthetic taste. But skepticism and cynicism were appropriate responses to the war, and so to was a distorted Nietzscheanism, a celebration of the ecstatic present moment. Above all, any assertion of privilege on behalf of realism or its equivalent-to some criterion of objective beauty-came under siege. Expressionism was, after all, a vindication of the subjective as the only valid standard. And if art were to have any legitimacy, it had to assist in the radical transvaluation of beliefs, including aesthetic expectations.

Franz Schreker was from the older generation. When the war broke out, he was not a young man. After the war, he moved from Vienna to Berlin, where he had the good fortune of not living to see the full ascendancy of Nazi power. Of Jewish descent, Schreker lost his position as head of the leading conservatory of Berlin shortly before his death. It was during the years before 1933, however, that he built up the conservatory, recruiting everyone from Artur Schnabel to Arnold Schoenberg as teachers. Like Schoenberg, Schreker sided with the new generation of rebels, and was one of its teachers and mentors. The Chamber Symphony was written at a time when it was already clear that the war was senseless and lost. The successor to Franz Joseph, the Emperor Karl, tried unsuccessfully to bring the war to a close. The Habsburg Empire was doomed. It had sealed its fate by deferring to imperial Germany in its foreign polity. As Christopher Hailey, author of a masterful biography of Schreker, points out, there is something retrospective inSchreker’s music. But at the same time, the intimacy and sensuality of the work point as much forward as backward.

Since the late nineteenth century, a rivalry had existed between Berlin and Vienna in terms of art and culture. Many figures, such as Max Reinhardt and Schoenberg played significant roles in both cities. It therefore comes as no surprise that a composer without any links to Vienna, Paul Hindemith, should have taken as the libretto for his opera a text written by that enfant terrible, Oskar Kokoschka. Kokoschka is best known among music aficionados as the lover of Alma Mahler. When their torrid relationship came to an end, he built a life-size effigy of her, brought it to the opera, and burned it publicly. After Egon Schiele’s death in the influenza epidemic, Oskar Kokoschka became the undisputed leader of the Austrian expressionist movement. His play Murderer, Hope of Women was designed to shock middle-class culture buffs, and so it did. Kokoschka himself was a devoted music-lover, whose instinct for the musical was apparent to Hindemith. The fascination with male and female as polemical categories was a commonplace for the Vienna of 1907; Kokoschka’s views were unexceptional In this regard. Otto Weininger had already published his scathing Sex and Character (and later committed suicide in the house in which Beethoven died). Karl Kraus, whose The Torch served as a bible to Kokoschka and his friends, was obsessed with the character of the feminine. Additionally, Arnold Schoenberg, during this pre-war period, worked on Ewartung and Die glückliche Hand, both of which can be understood as expressionist experiments. The connection between Schoenberg and Kokoschka is particularly interesting, in part because of Schoenberg’s own foray into Expressionist painting during the period in which in which Kokoschka wrote the play upon which Hindemith based his opera.

By the time Kurt Weill finished The Protagonist in 1925, the worst of the immediate post-war era seemed to be over. The visceral instinct to experimentation that dominated the years 1918 to 1921 had given way to a more coherent movement. What is significant about this early work of Weill’s is that it brings together music, text, and theatre in a manner unique to the era before the sound motion picture, as Bryan Gilliam points out. It is an unknown and unfairly undervalued work by a composer whose career is difficult to characterize. In Germany, Weill is known primarily as the composer of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Three Penny Opera–an important voice of the Weimar Republic whose works bridged the world of popular music and art music and who represented the essence of pre-Nazi liberal culture. Weill is at the core of the American cliché of Weimar cabaret. Mark Blitzstein’s version of The Three Penny Opera helped to secure Kurt Weill’s appeal to the American Left. However, in the United States, Weill, the son of a cantor, abandoned his association with Brecht and Weimar culture and became a successful composer for Broadway, reinventing himself in the American musical scene, to the dismay of many of his fellow immigrants. The earlier instrumental music of Kurt Weill has now returned to the concert hall: the two symphonies, the cello sonata, the concerto for violin. And slowly, the American Weill is becoming known in Germany. Oddly enough, however, amidst the current Kurt Weill renaissance, The Protagonist has remained in the shadows.

Of the art and culture of the inter-war period, it is the visual that has made the most lasting impression on the general public. German expressionism has acquired canonical status largely in the arenas of film, architecture, and painting. It is hoped that this concert can bring into equal relief the musical achievements of that era. The painters, architects, and filmmakers of the day would themselves be astonished to think that the work of their musical colleagues had been allowed to languish. One can only truly understand post-World War I visual expressionism and architectural modernism (particularly its emphasis on the economy of materials and the absence of ornament)-Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Walter Gropius (and his Bauhaus colleagues), Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang–if one also has the music of Schreker, the young Hindemith, and Kurt Weill in one’s ears.

Faith: Meditation and Mysticism in Turn-of-the-Century France

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Faith: Meditation and Mysticism, performed on April 28, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Anyone living in the late 1990s in America might be tempted to think that he or she is trapped in an age peculiarly weighed down by doubt, aimlessness, and pessimism. If one is to believe the daily press and many cultural and political pundits, ours is a time when fundamental moral values have deteriorated, civility is in decline, and standards of art and culture have been cast adrift. Above all, the old verities of decency, reason, and objectivity have been undermined. As a result, we are told, many in our midst are turning once again to religion and mystical and metaphysical traditions in order to find firm bearings in a troubled age.

This cliché-laden depiction of cultural ennui and hopelessness today can be compared to the state of affairs at the turn of the century in Europe, particularly France. Perhaps the ends of centuries bring out admixtures of psychic and sociological insecurities. Numerological symmetries seem to take their toll on the way we think about history. The fact remains, however, that the late nineteenth century was a time in which artists, writers, and intellectuals were deeply concerned about the direction of society and culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, modernity seemed to have gone awry. The shift from a rural to an urban culture brought with it poverty, decadence, and an impersonality that appeared to exist in stark contrast to an idealized, pre-industrial world. despite enormous progress in science and technology, advances in rationality struck many observers as having been achieved at the cost of basic spiritual values and sensibilities. The attraction to Wagner’s Parsifal as a symbol of the renewed spirituality owes much to this state of affairs.

Max Nordau was perhaps the most famous turn-of-the-century cultural critic to charge modern art with reveling in decadence and degenerate depravity. In his view, the progress of modern civilization had been turned on its head by the generation of musicians, painters, and poets who had come of age during the second half of the century. By 1900, the most infamous of the culprits were probably Friedrich Nietzsche and his one-time hero, Richard Wagner, Parsifal‘s overt claim to purity notwithstanding. In differing ways they were both held responsible for subverting common sense and the moral yardsticks of Christianity.

The result was that painting, dance, and music were accused of celebrating the erotic, gaudy, the decadent, and the self-indulgent. There was indeed a fascination with what psychologists now might term the unconscious and instinctive, the seemingly basic currents of human emotion that lay below the controlled exteriors of Victorian-era bourgeois existence. The popularity of Oscar Wilde coincided with a widespread belief in Darwinism and a confidence in evolutionary progress. Progressive theories of history existed side-by-side with a fascination with the “primitive” and with sexuality and violence.

The so-called progress of modern life that was visible in the spread of literacy and the development of art and music–the creation of a public space with civilized inhabitants in the urban centers of Europe and America–filled some of Europe’s most prominent figures with horror. The most famous voice in the wilderness was that of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist. After the publication of Anna Karenina in 1876, Tolstoy became increasingly committed to spreading his own version of the teachings of the Gospels. His amalgam of utopian socialism and primitive Christianity led him to a scathing critique of modern culture, art, and civilization. His last novel, written twenty years after Anna Karenina, entitled Resurrection, was his valedictory effort to reconcile art and morality. In it, Tolstoy confronts the issues of sexuality and morality that obsessed him. Prince Nekhludov struggles to shed himself of the habits and instincts of elegant cultivation to reclaim an ascetic, transcendent spirituality characteristic of simple, anti-modern rural life.

Of Tolstoy’s three large-scale novels, Resurrection is now the least favored and known. But when it was published in English, it was tremendously popular. It was initially banned in England, but the ban was revoked through public pressure. Eventually a stage version was created for the English public. European intellectuals at the turn of the century heard in the later Tolstoy a prophetic voice. Even if his solution seemed irreconcilable with modernity (and this was the view of the great German sociologist Max Weber), its purity, authenticity, and appeal remained undiminished. Appropriately, Tolstoy dedicated all the receipts from this novel to a utopian pacifist community in Russia. The young Albert Roussel was therefore not alone in his attraction to Tolstoy and to this tale of a spiritual journey that confronts two of life’s leading temptations: the allure of external culture and one’s inner instinctual forces, both of which threaten each individual’s capacity for goodness.

If Tolstoy was the late nineteenth century’s conscience in search of a return to simple Christian virtue, the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio embraced all of the fin de siecle’s contradictions. He was notorious for every form of degenerate behavior. He was so obsessed with luxuries, that it was said even his horses slept on Persian rugs. His works were put on the Vatican’s Index, and he was reviled as the emblem of contemporary moral depravity. But matters are never that simple. d’Annunzio was no doubt part posturing charlatan. But he was also a successful poet and a figure of charismatic public flamboyance. He later distinguished himself on the field of battle and became one of the icons of Italian fascism.

On the surface, d’Annunzio was the polar opposite of Tolstoy. What links them together, however, is their shared dissatisfaction with the conceits and conventions of modern life. Beneath d’Annuzio’s radical disregard for bourgeois standards was a genuine desire to fashion for his contemporaries a world view that transcended mere materialism and surface rationalism. He turned not to the traditions of ascetic Christianity but to Paganism. Despite the disingenuous eroticism of the text, d’Annunzio and Debussy were in search of a new source of religious spirituality for their times.

Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien was therefore not merely an extravagant theatrical enterprise. As Debussy himself admitted, even though he was in no sense conventionally religious, a spiritual quest not unlike Tolstoy’s is distinctly audible in the music he wrote for d’Annunzio. Scholars have tried to downplay Debussy’s contribution by suggesting that he composed the work reluctantly and just for the money. Perhaps he was in search of a theatrical triumph comparable to that of Pelléas et Mélisande. But the fact remains that he completed the project and did not disavow it. A composer’s estimate of his own work may not be the best guide, and neither is posthumous criticism. The music to Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien achieves a spiritual clarity and a translucent beauty. Debussy’s music infuses Tolstoy’s dimension of simple truthfulness into d’Annunzio’s overheated, multimedia extravaganza.

A word should be said about this performance of Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien. The value of reviving this work has frequently been brought into question. Marcel Proust thought the music trivial, and more recently, Pierre Boulez has rejected claims that the music is of more than passing interest. Yet this work, despite practical obstacles, has been repeatedly brought back to life. The version being performed tonight restores all of the narration (including the prologue) used by D.E.. Inghelbrecht, the French conductor and friend of Debussy who selected the text with the composer’s approval. Previous performances have generally cut the narration or dispensed with it entirely. We have chosen to restore the full narration in the form in which Debussy’s score was revived after the first World War because the effectiveness of his music depends on its interruption by either the spoken word or dramatic action. Debussy wrote this work as incidental music to a drama. Therefore, to perform Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien as one continuous musical composition with sequential movements is to distort it. Debussy’s music functions as a call and response to words and action. In part, it accompanies words and action. But the medium of music played a distinctive role in a theatrical production that was originally part mime, part theater, and part dance. The restoring of the extended narration honors the cumulative power and impact of the music as part of a larger whole. If Debussy had been asked to write a tone poem, symphony, or opera, his musical materials and decisions might have been different.

In today’s concert, the audience can experience some inkling of the way Debussy conceived of music functioning within the realm of the mystical, magical, theatrical event. If Tolstoy in his novel sought to use his gifts as a writer to serve the moral betterment of mankind, in Saint-Sébastien Debussy sought to make his unmatched command of musical timbre and color serve as the medium of spiritual transformation.

America’s Musical Pioneer: Homage to Leopold Stokowski

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert America’s Musical Pioneer, performed on March 3, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Fame and success in one’s lifetime do not necessarily ensure respect. Neither do they secure the prospect of a positive posthumous revisionism. The career of Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) is a case in point. In his own day, Stokowski was idolized by audiences–particularly in Philadelphia, where he built a legendary ensemble as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He elicited a distinctly silken string sound. He innovated on the style of performance and mesmerized his listeners with the expressive painterly gestures of his hands (he used no baton), his dashing profile, his shock of flowing hair, and his elegant presence.

Stokowski was a showman and a born entertainer. He was a man addicted to the theatrical. He collaborated with Walt Disney and shook hands with Mickey Mouse on the silver screen. He became a world-famous media figure. For all this he was branded by critics and many rivals as a charlatan and a mere popularizer. He was rarely taken seriously as an interpreter. Toscanini, Furtwängler, Klemperer, and Walter all were held in higher regard. For connoisseurs of a particular bent, Reiner and Mitropolous were considered, in contrast to Stokowski, musicians’ musicians with a profound command of musical texts.

In our day, record collectors and listeners take an interest in the performance traditions of the past. All the conductors listed above have had their discography re-released in modern formats. Their work has been poured over by critics and emulated by young conductors. The posthumous reputation of Stokowski, however, has lagged behind. Whether it was his penchant for the life of a socialite (including a marriage to a Vanderbilt) or his wide popularity, his work is still denigrated. It remains less known than it should be. Self-conscious sophisticates and those with pretensions to profound insight still continue to dismiss his work, much as Stokowski’s contemporaries once did.

Among the performers of the past who have gained a nearly fanatical posthumous following and authority, few can rival the respect and awe now associated with the work and career of Glenn Gould. Gould was a genuine iconoclast. He was consummately a musician of ideas, whose writings deserve study and rereading, and we still mourn his untimely death. To his credit, Gould was not afraid to differ from his contemporaries. He admired and understood Stokowski. He recorded Beethoven with Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra. At a minimum, Gould’s judgment should lead us to question received wisdom concerning the artistry and achievement of Stokowski.

Leopold Stokowski was a great conductor, an inspired musician, and a tireless advocate of new music. The list of works introduced to the United States and premiered by Stokowski in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York is staggering. It includes Berg’s Wozzeck, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. No other major conductor, not even Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, was as adventuresome, as fiercely eclectic, and as tirelessly innovative. Stokowski rivaled Toscanini in the popular imagination and exceeded Koussevitzky and Mitropolous in his advocacy of new and experimental music.

Stokowski loved life. His vitality was inexhaustible. He lived well into his nineties, conducting concerts in England and making recordings. He founded a new orchestra in New York in 1962–the American Symphony Orchestra–and kept it alive with his own funds. He sought to fill the vacuum created when the New York Philharmonic left Carnegie Hall. He also wanted to show that an orchestra made up of young Americans trained here could match European orchestras and American ensembles dominated by Europeans. He encouraged young American conductors and composers during the 1960s. He premiered Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony with the ASO. At the ASO he developed a program of concerts with low ticket prices in an effort to broaden the audience for concert music.

Stokowski the conductor not only cultivated a lush and rounded sound, but also took risks in creating excitement, showing how music functioned dramatically and utilizing often unexpected (but not capricious) shifts in tempo, color and mood. His ASO performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is a case in point. He tinkered with scores, but he always elicited a distinct and alluring line and sound, and his performances were never boring. Above all, he made many transcriptions, including an innovative version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which the ASO took on tour to Japan in 1994. Perhaps because he had started his career as an organist, he conceived of the orchestra as a single organic instrument, as capable of flights of unique, soloistic timbres as it was of producing huge, integrated sonorities.

This concert pays homage to Stokowski’s legacy and contribution by presenting four works associated with him and reflective of his range of interest. Today’s ASO seeks to honor his example of innovation and his embracing of new audiences. All the works on this program were first performed by him in the United States. Two of them, both by Americans, were given their world premieres by Stokowski. The opening work on the program, the Bach-Stokowski D minor Toccata and Fugue, is perhaps the most famous of his many transcriptions. It was his signature piece.

Stokowski’s example and contributions to twentieth-century musical life in America ought to be an inspiration to future generations of performers and listeners.

Jews and the European Musical Tradition

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Jews and the European Musical Tradition, performed on Jan 26, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Tonight’s concert reverses the sequence of history. It opens with Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre, written in 1938 on the eve of the destruction of European Jewry by Nazism. It closes with a throwback to the pre-modern European world before 1848, to an age before virulent nationalism and racial hatred, when notions of the inevitability of tolerance and rationality in the history of humankind still held sway. The concert’s closing work, Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang Symphony, celebrates that faith in the triumph of reason and enlightenment over superstition and prejudice. It communicates the expectation that all sectarian religions ultimately will converge over time into one credo under the banner of a demystified and rational modern Protestantism. For Mendelssohn, the divine is not ineffable but capable of expression in human experience and language as light and reason. At the core of the Lobgesang is a vision of a world at peace, marked by neighborly love and the absence of violence.

Schoenberg was a German-speaking composer, born a Jew in Vienna who converted as a young man and then reconverted in 1933. His return to Judaism was motivated by the radical extremes of hate that soon were to be followed by an unimaginable torrent of physical and psychic violence and cruelty. Schoenberg refashioned a Jewish identity along his own philosophical lines and in his later years espoused an intense Zionism. In the 1920s, in part through a break with the painter Kandinsky, Schoenberg confronted the fact that anti-Semitism in Europe could not be eluded by a religious conversion. Being a Jew meant more than maintaining allegiance to a doctrine and a way of life. He not only returned to membership in the Jewish community, but in his unfinished masterpiece, Moses und Aron, he expressed his conviction that the notions held dear by Felix Mendelssohn were wrong. The divine could not be expressed adequately. Human language was unequal to the task. Humanity, like the Biblical nation that turned to the Golden Calf while waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, was condemned to doubt–to be seduced by surrogates and to debase reason and truth with inadequate speech and corrupt action.

It is ironic, then, that this concert closes with an expression of unimaginable harmony among humans and a vision of a faith expressed in music and language that seeks to bind humans one to another and not divide them. Mendelssohn did not convert from Judaism as an adult. Yet he grew up as a devout man of faith, although (unlike his grandfather) as a Protestant. He married a pastor’s daughter and produced the most significant church music in Germany of the nineteenth century. Yet, in contrast to his father, Felix never dropped the obvious and emblematic Jewish name Mendelssohn. He never forgot his origins as a Jew or lost his sense of solidarity with the people and religion of his forebears. Like Schoenberg, he knew that being a Jew transcended faith. In fact, Felix Mendelssohn believed that his embrace of Protestantism vindicated Judaism, the ideas of his grandfather, and the logic of history.

Felix Mendelssohn was, after all, the grandson of the eminent philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, contemporary of Immanuel Kant, and the greatest Jewish figure of the German Enlightenment. Born into a family of both material and spiritual wealth, Felix, despite enormous privileges and fame, experienced anti-Semitism, particularly around the so-called Hep Hep riots of 1819. Notwithstanding his forebodings about the rising tide of nationalist sentiment, particularly in the years immediately preceding his death in 1847, Felix still held fast to the hopes eloquently articulated by his grandfather. Moses Mendelssohn had called on his fellow Jews to modernize their religion and seize the opening up of the ghetto in the 1780s and the opportunities created by edicts of toleration to enter into a Christian world as equals. Moses’s son Abraham took the logic of emancipation to its logical extreme. He converted and assumed a new non-Jewish name, Bartholdy. Upon the death of Moses Mendelssohn’s widow, he had his children baptized. Another of Moses’ children, Felix’s aunt Dorothea, married the philosopher Schlegel and embraced Catholicism.

In the third work on the program, placed between Schoenberg and Mendelssohn, we encounter the nearly forgotten music of another German Jew, Berthold Goldschmidt. Unlike the works that surround it, it is a work of “absolute” music, devoid of overt ideology and reflective of the intense identification by German Jews with the traditions of European culture–their contributions to these traditions and their aspirations for them. Goldschmidt was born into the last generation of German Jews who would come of age primarily as Germans and not as Jews. In this concert we hear the voice of the generation of victims, of a distinguished representative of a cadre of artists and intellectuals born at the fin de siècle who descended from German Jewish families who prospered between 1848 and 1933. despite increasing political anti-Semitism, German Jews flourished as assimilated Jews in German society. Goldschmidt was lucky, in a comparative sense. He survived the war in England. But his career as a composer was destroyed, and he was forced to struggle as an outsider, displaced from a world to which he once believed he belonged, prejudice notwithstanding. Unlike some émigrés, he did not lose faith in his values. during the war he fought the mixture of appropriation and disfigurement of culture by the Nazis by broadcasting European concert music on the BBC directed to Europe as a propaganda measure against Nazism.

Today it is ironic that the history of Jews in Germany has become an object of genuine and intense interest on the part of a younger generation of Germans in Western Germany. Books, movies, and plays about the Jews are plentiful. Visual artifacts are carefully preserved. A non-Jewish readership eagerly reads Martin Buber and contemplates the wisdom of the vanished world of Eastern European Jewry, including Hasidism, as mediated not only by contemporary scholars but by the romanticized accounts of Austrian and German Jewish writers of the 1920s–Joseph Roth, Arnold Zweig, and Alfred Doblin. The philo-Semitism of young Germans today is akin to the romance with the Native American in our own country. A society obliterates the living protagonists of a contrasting tradition only to see subsequent generations use the memory of that destroyed tradition as an object of exotic wonderment and a vehicle of social and cultural critique.

A German-speaking culture without Jews! Perhaps only the most virulent of nineteenth-century anti-Semites–possibly Richard Wagner–could have imagined such a possibility. Indeed, the sustained interaction between Jews and Christians in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany led to the fact that German Jewry–despite the context of unremitting anti-Semitism–made remarkable and crucial cultural, intellectual, social, and economic contributions to Germany. Assimilation and acculturation were profound and successful realities. It was as if the paranoia and irrationality of anti-Semitism in Germany only increased as the objects of hate ceased to be openly and visibly Jewish in some preconceived and preferably exotic manner.

Mendelssohn died before it had become clear that neither assimilation nor acculturation could be sustained for the very long term, before the brutal fact emerged that in German-speaking Europe the Jewish Diaspora, despite centuries of cohabitation, ultimately would not find itself secure and at home. The grand sweep of history as retold in textbooks and schools tends to mask the encouraging realities of individual experience and daily life framed by one or two generations of experience. In the end, although, with hindsight, we might think the catastrophe appeared inevitable, the Jews of Germany were shocked by the events of 1933 and 1934. When Hitler turned out not to be a brief nightmare, but was accepted, appeased, and even emulated in the rest of Europe, even after the violence of 1938, few were prepared for the subsequent slaughter. The image of Germany that the Jews of German origin held on to was the Germany of Moses and Felix Mendelssohn; a Germany of Kultur (culture) and Bildung (self-cultivation), of refinement and reason, the “good” Germany of classical Weimar and Goethe.

This concert is dedicated to the memory of the German-speaking Jewish community. Too often when we think of the European Jewry destroyed by Hitler and his allies our mental picture turns exclusively to the poor, pious, shtetl Yiddish-speaking Jew, untouched by Western modernity. But in Germany, and in all of Central and Eastern Europe as well, particularly in Budapest, Vienna, Warsaw, Lodz and Prague, modern European Jews–the Jewish Weitburgers–millions of cosmopolitan Jews–were also obliterated. Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and Goldschmidt were descended from that line of European Jewry. So were a disproportionately high percentage of the European audience for music and culture before 1933.

We would do well to more than just marvel at the extent, variety and magnitude of the achievement of assimilated and acculturated European Jews. In the face of the power of the music on tonight’s program, we ought to recall and to rekindle a modern Jewish vision of a world of tolerance, freedom, reason, learning, and culture that, despite the Holocaust, survives as a complex set of aspirations for our own day, worthy of respect and emulation.

Behind the Curtain: Submission and Resistance under the Soviet Regime

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Behind the Curtain: Submission and Resisteance under the Soviet Regime,, performed on October 1, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The first concert of this season focuses on the dilemmas faced by artists in conditions of extreme “unfreedom” and censorship. The historical situation that we have chosen is the Soviet Union before Perestroika and after the rise of Stalin. This period was the worst era of sustained dictatorship in Soviet history. Two generations of composers are considered today: Nikolai Myaskovsky came of age before the October Revolution, Dmitri Shostakovich and Tikhon Khrennikov were still children–eleven and four years of age–when the Communists took over. Myaskovsky’s evolution and career as a mature composer, therefore, had to take into account the shifting direction of post-revolutionary politics. Audience members who are familiar with the flowering of progressive visual art, theater, film, poetry, and architecture after the revolution may be familiar with the immediate post-revolutionary history in the arts, which encouraged experimentation and modernism. But the flirtation with modernism in the Soviet Union was brief. By the mid-1930s an entirely new and terrifying official aesthetic had evolved. In the full flower of Stalinism, the choices facing artists were not easy. The list of those who died or were tortured because of their independence is tragic. It includes the poets Babel and Mandelstahm. The lives and careers of countless others were destroyed.

Of all the arts, music presented the most complicated case. Unlike painting, theater, film, or literature, music certainly could be regarded as more elusive with respect to the issue of political meaning. But that did not deter the Soviet state apparatus from imposing accepted standards. Nevertheless, the room accorded musicians for the creation of independent meanings, ironies, and ambiguities was far greater than that facing architects, painters, and writers. In the end, instrumental music in particular, which is featured on this program, could be argued to be exclusively about itself. That such a formalist view of music will not hold up under severe scrutiny and was not in favor with the regime does not diminish the inherent capacity of music to better elude strict political control.

When we think of everyday life under the two most brutal dictators of the century, Stalin and Hitler, the tendency has been to think about heroes and heroines–individuals who, in some Hollywood-like fashion, stood up to terror and risked martyrdom and, more often than not, achieved it. Those are the stories we like to tell, even though few of us possess either the character or the courage to act in the same way. Heroes and heroines are and always will be the exceptions. For most of us, the will to survive necessitates a large spectrum of adjustments to realities over which we perceive very little or no control. Most people want to be left alone to pursue their private lives. Others with ambition to achieve something in the public arena quickly encounter the need to compromise–to “play ball,” so to speak–in order to give their own hopes and dreams a chance to become real. Those of us who have lived with the privilege of freedom are often too quick to condemn those who have compromised and have eluded an open conflict with authority–those for whom the thought of terror, death, and the inability to work were far too frightening. But no one can doubt that the consequences of resistance and defiance under Stalin were severe and swift.

In today’s concert we turn to individuals who were not martyrs, dissidents, or resisters. They were artists of stature and achievement. In our simplified view from the outside it is easy to turn any society into a picture with only good and evil participants. To live in the world and to function in any capacity, including that of being an artist, requires varying degrees of grayness and ambiguity.

The two figures on this program who are the most intriguing are Myaskovsky and Shostakovich. Shostakovich is far better known. The Fifteenth Symphony, his last, was written in a time that was perhaps the most awkward for the composer since the debacle surrounding Stalin’s reaction to his Lady Macbeth in the late 1930s. With the explosion of open dissidence in a neo-Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, Shostakovich, a senior and revered figure, allowed his name to be used on the side of the state against individuals such as Andrei Sakharov whose names now have become legendary symbols of the struggle for freedom. But the Shostakovich case is profoundly complicated. He was one of the great examples of how a genius with a nearly unparalleled musical imagination and a profound spirituality struggled to function under totalitarianism. He continued to work, to write, and to exist as a musician. He was at one and the same time part of a “system” and a thorn in its side. The music mirrors the anguish and complexity of his circumstance and speaks on many levels, particularly to posterity. Shostakovich reveals without question the necessity of music as a form of personal expression and as an arena that ultimately can resist and elude political appropriation and domination.

The case of Myaskovsky is less well known but comparable in that a profoundly talented composer struggled to adapt to changing circumstances and survived as a professional. Unlike the other arts, an orchestral composition needs to be heard and put on stage. It cannot exist–as a book or a painting can–without being performed publicly. And the public performance is ultimately controlled by those who command political and economic power. Compromise and collaboration become unavoidable if one wants one’s work to be heard and wants a public in one’s own time.

The case of Tikhon Khrennikov may strike many listeners as the most puzzling and unfamiliar. He did more than cooperate and find a way to survive. He became a leading official of the state. By assuming power, he was responsible for the hated system. In retrospect, there are those who would defend him by saying that under his leadership things were actually better than otherwise might have been the case. From the perspective of this concert, the question in the end is–what kind of music did he write and how does it now fare with audiences when the evil with which he was associated has become historical and is no longer contemporary? If one is unable to approach the music dispassionately, it is interesting to hear what officially sanctioned music sounds like. How does it adapt to our ears? does it evoke its political context or origin?

An obvious example of how official music can end up successfully shedding the skin, so to speak, of its origins is Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. At the end of the day, how does the music of Tikhon Khrennikov strike us, even though he, like many other composers of greater and lesser distinction, can hardly be viewed as having been a saint or an admirable political personality? Music does not always live in harmony, side by side with virtue.

This concert, therefore, is designed to be provocative, in the first instance, as a precis of a very important and grim era in the Soviet Union in which musical life, particularly in a moment of extreme unfreedom, was vital to many, many people. The concert hall was one of the few public gathering spaces marginally independent of rigid control, where personal expression, however camouflaged, was still possible. Second, this concert forces us to think about the relationship among politics, personal ethics, and art. The music should force each of us to look with a differentiated sensibility on the predicament of those who sought to live and function in some plausible way and to continue their vocations as artists in a context that made unreasonable demands and inevitably distorted any natural impulse to distance oneself from radical evil.

Between War and Peace: The End of the Second World War

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Between War and Peace, performed on April 30, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This final concert of our 1994-95 season honors the momentous events of fifty years ago. In the spring of 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. At the San Francisco Conference, the hope of humankind, the United Nations was created.

In the brief period between the end of Hitler’s War (and with it the full recognition of the unparalleled brutality and horror of Nazism) and the dawn of the Atomic Age on August 6, it was perhaps still possible to believe that the worst humanity had to offer had been overcome. The sense of triumph was not merely one of military victory and national pride. Amidst the despair visited on all that resulted from the destruction of Europe there was a glimmer of hope that the world had just experienced the war to end all wars; that the radical evil of the hate, terror, and atrocities exemplified by Nazi Germany would never be repeated. The United Nations held out the possibility that the old ways of power politics would be changed.

The arts were not left unaffected by the War. Each nation, on both sides of the conflict, marshaled its leading musicians into the battle for the heart and minds of its people. Marc Blitzstein was commissioned by the Air Force to write The Airborne Symphony. Although later on he distanced himself somewhat from the Nazis, at the start of the regime Richard Strauss accepted an official position as head of the music section of the Cultural Ministry. Arthur Honegger’s sympathies for the French Resistance were clear from the start.

In modern history, World War II shattered the illusion that music can remain neutral and value free, an aesthetic arena concerned with beauty that stands independent of politics. Good music is just good music, one might like to say. Even though this is not quite the case, since music is different from art and language, it offers a unique forum and vehicle for communicating. The often repeated claim that music is a universal language is somewhat true in that the variety of meanings to which it is subjected can never be exhausted and never remains stable. The motto of victory for the allies was the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Yet the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven was performed repeatedly under the Nazi flag in the context of the celebration of the Third Reich. And Beethoven is performed today without any shred of evident political meaning and without any residue of its use and abuse during the Second World War. Music resists evil by simply being elusive. It is susceptible at any hearing to any individual’s way of listening and ascribing meaning.

At the same time, music has been able to give voice to a sense of existential hope and despair in ways that remain recognizable and that transcend the historical moment. It is therefore not surprising that war has inspired the writing of great and lasting music. One thinks, for example, of the Napoleonic Wars and the work of Haydn and Beethoven.

This program chooses three examples of music inspired by the closing years of the war, when victory was within grasp, the recognition of suffering unavoidable, and the yearning for a better world matched only by a fear of the total destruction of civilization. In the case of Strauss’s Metamorphosen, the composer’s pessimism and despair led him to write a work whose musical language broke the barrier of his own narrow and amoral attitudes. A profound expression of sorrow and humanity could emerge from Strauss only in music, never in words. Here a sense of loss and defeat is expressed in terms that remind us all of our common fate and limitations as human beings; it overcomes our rage and resentment of those who were once our enemies. Dark as the work is, it is at the same time an expression of hope in that it shows the best of that of which any of us might be capable: the ever-present possibilities of redemption from evil.

Despite the rousing patriotism of The Airborne Symphony, Blitzstein was careful to end the work with a plea to reject the false sense of moral superiority that victors inevitably display. The lesson of America’s bravery in the air, the sacrifice of its fighting men, and the promise of modern technology was a world beyond nations–the open sky of a universe marked by international cooperation and tolerance.

This concert contains one work by the vanquished and one by the victor. The other work is by Arthur Honegger, who was Swiss. While he was actively anti-Nazi, he was formally a citizen of a neutral nation. In symbolic terms his presence in this concert represents the voice of the engaged bystander–the many individuals who were left to resist, withdraw, watch, and try to understand helplessly the killing and suffering. This great work–like Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Symphony No. 1–reminds us of the horror of war and oppression. But unlike Hartmann’s work, Honegger’s looks ahead as well as back. Within its overtly religious framework it offers, in music, an expression of faith in humanity’s divine spark–our capacity to begin from the rubble again, perhaps in a more just and noble fashion.

Many readers of this program will reflect on how little progress seems to have been made in the last half-century. The events in Bosnia and all over the world–not to mention the hate and violence with which we live every day in our own country–can lead us to hopelessness. Our collective failure to restrain evil and violence and our callous adaptation to an environment marked all too regularly by suffering and death are perhaps signs of our inability to redeem the possibilities that faced the world in 1945. At the same time, this music, written fifty years ago, should remind us that it is never too late to start, to renew the idea of international cooperation, to secure human rights for all, to educate and extend ourselves to others, to display tolerance, to resist radical evil, and to prevent war. The music on today’s concert reasserts the unpredictable and staggering power and richness of the human imagination. The greatness that is possible in music by individuals should be equally possible in the conduct of everyday life.

Unjust Obscurity? (1995)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? (II), performed on March 10, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert explores one aspect of the American Symphony Orchestra’s mission. We would like to offer a challenge to the habits by which orchestras set their repertoire. Why are some works repeated over and over again and others only occasionally performed? Why is it that some works are rarely ever heard? Implicit in the ASO’s mission is a healthy skepticism about the way we understand music history. The commonplace wisdom is that “history” is itself an objective judge. That means that if a piece of music doesn’t survive in the repertory over many generations it must not be a masterpiece or even worth hearing. The idea behind this is that somehow all works receive an equal and fair chance to be heard and to be judged as worthy of rehearing by generations of listeners. The truth of the matter is that for every work that survives in this manner there are works that have to be resurrected laboriously without the verdict of “history.” Perhaps the most famous example is the Beethoven Violin Concerto. After the first two performances, it was declared a failure and a bore. Nearly four decades after its composition, Joseph Joachim revived it by performing it persistently despite the objections of concert organizers. Future generations are grateful that he took the time and trouble.

We at the ASO also hope to puncture the exaggerated emphasis that many lovers of music place in the ideal of the “masterpiece,” we would like to encourage listeners to enjoy a piece of music, appreciate its magical and memorable moments, and even recognize weaknesses without feeling compelled to dismiss any work to oblivion simply because it is not an equal of a familiar and flawless masterpiece. Why shouldn’t we love and appreciated fine music the way we look at fine paintings and read fine books? Over the past few seasons, the ASO has revived works that past generations of listeners have been moved by and have appreciated; works of mastery and inspiration that have been belittled in some quarters because they still don’t seem as good as, for example, a Brahms concerto or a Mahler symphony. But if listening to the music of the past is to be a living experience, must we restrict ourselves to a diet of a very limited number of works form the enormous wealth of excellent music writing during the last two hundred years? The works the ASO is presenting today are not in any sense “second rate.” They are not “minor” works by “minor” figures in the history of music. The only way one can consider them minor is if we redefine our sense of proportion. Such a redefinition would render most of the artists whose pictures we cherish minor and most of the books we read and respect as minor. Why are some of us so impatient and judgmental when it comes to music?

Periodically the ASO devotes an entire program to works that we believe need to be performed more often. Obscurity is, of course, a relative term, and some in the audience may be troubled by the idea that any of the pieces on today’s program are considered obscure. Connoisseurs, for example, have a different definition of obscurity. But from the point of view of most music lovers and concert goers, none of these works are everyday fare. To hear them live or even on a recording is a comparatively rare experience. Perhaps the most important thing to point out is that our experience has been that the staff and above all the musicians of the ASO have come to believe in and respect the so-called “obscure” works we present. It is our hope that we successfully communicate this affection and admiration to the concert public.

In 1996, we will celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of one of the great American composers of the twentieth century, Roger Sessions. By today’s standards, his music may sound modern in an old-fashioned way. But in every style in history there are great and lesser practitioners. Even if a musical vocabulary of expression should experience an eclipse for a period of time, the genius of those few who used that vocabulary as an authentic vehicle should not be forgotten. Among twentieth-century modernists, Roger Sessions was a giant. His works will continue to electrify, fascinate, and move listeners despite changes in fashion. This Piano Concerto is a fine example of Sessions’s compositional mastery.

The Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck is less known than he ought to be. Those who know his music admire it for its subtlety and lyricism. His works deserve a wider audience. This Concerto is truly an undiscovered jewel. Since it is a lush and expressive violin concerto, it should appeal to virtuosos and audiences alike. There has always been a demand for Romantic violin concertos, and we hope that this performance will lead to other performances. The work is elegant and intimate. It was written for Stefi Geyer, a fabulous violinist form Hungary who was, among other things, Bela Bartók’s first love. She was a student of Hubay and a classmate of Bartók’s in Budapest. Bartók wrote his first Violin Concerto and the Two Portraits for her. Before World War I, she moved from Budapest to Switzerland, where she met Schoeck.

Psalm 114 of Mendelssohn is a less familiar example of the still-to-be-revived choral repertoire of the mid-nineteenth century. Although Mendelssohn’s music for chorus and orchestra was enormously popular a century ago, most of it has disappeared from concert programs. This is particularly the case for the shorter sacred works.

The closing work is by Karol Szymanowski. Szymanowski was one of the great composers of this century. Although his two violin concertos are reasonably well know (but not played as often as they should be), most of Szymanowski’s music, particularly the great opera King Roger, still awaits systematic advocacy by conductors, vocalists, and instrumentalists. Several years ago, we performed a very early, neo-Straussian work, the First Symphony. We now present one of Szymanowski’s masterpieces, the Stabat Mater. It reveals Szymanowski’s distinct music language. As the program notes indicate, this work was written for performance in either Polish or Latin. We have chosen to perform the work in Latin for two reasons. Too often Szymanowski is praised in a somewhat condescending manner as a great “Polish” composer. The implicit prejudice is that form some national cultures of Europe–for example, those of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary–different criteria should be applied. Some well-known names are considered as great nationalist composers, but are less regarded if viewed from a so-called universalist, international context. One, for example, rarely speaks of Beethoven or Bach as “German” composers (unless one is a die-hard German nationalist). Yet we persist in speaking of Szymanowski in relationship to his identity as a Polish citizen. No doubt Szymanowski was s fierce Polish patriot, but Brahms was as much a German patriot and we don’t speak of Brahms as a German c composer in quite the way we refer to Szymanowski as Polish. Therefore, we will perform the Stabat Mater not in Polish but in Latin in order to underscore the fact that this work can stand comparison to other great settings of this Latin text. It is a profound work of religious faith designed for listeners all over the world. Furthermore, in the score there are some slight musical variants depending upon which language in which the work is sung. Ironically, in most cases the Latin, I believe, strengthens the musical line. In an era when the work of Gorecki has become wildly popular, it is both appropriate, enlightening, and sobering to listen to the great spiritual and music achievement of Karol Szymanowski.

Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major [Schalk edition] (1894)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner and 20^th –Century Politics performed on Jan 13, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Amidst all the discussion of politics, a few words should be said about the music in the major work on this program, the Bruckner Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat.

The work, which is in four movements, was written in 1875 and 1876. Bruckner revised it again in 1878 but never heard the work performed by an orchestra. It was published in 1896 with the help of Franz Schalk, who conducted the first performance. For the published version, large sections were reorchestrated, the last movement was cut extensively, and a brass choir was added at the end to strengthen the closing bars. At the first performance the added brass were offstage, but the score explicitly calls for the new brass choir to be “behind the orchestra on a raised platform.” Either the offstage placement did not work or there was no room. Some Bruckner devotees may wince at this version, but I believe it makes a fantastic case for the work. In this version, the work should be heard more often and recorded.

The first movement is nominally in B-flat major. This can be said because the first movement may be one of the most interesting and powerful experiments in the relationship of harmony to the conventions of symphonic first-movement sonata form. The work has a slow introduction (the only one of its kind in Bruckner), which resists a firm tonality and drifts through G-flat into A until the Allegro. But even in the Allegro, tonality always seems to shift, together with wonderful new thematic and rhythmic materials and periodic breaks in the surface continuity. C major, F minor, E major, G minor, B-flat minor, E-flat major-among others-all are explored as this grand, nearly improvisatory harmonic journey makes its way to its massive end, which asserts the B-flat major. This movement is one of the most innovative in the nineteenth-century literature and bears the marks of Bruckner’s genius in using harmonic color and unexpected relationships to frame the emotionally powerful but intricate and subtle musical structure, in which the matter of a defining tonality is challenged.

The second movement is in D minor and is marked by a lyrical clarity achieved, In part, by simple cross rhythms. The second subject is in C major. Bruckner’s melodic genius is evident throughout. The closing bars are particularly notable with the D pedal in the timpani and the quiet close in D major. The third movement Scherzo is in D minor and is typical Bruckner. There is a slower second theme, reminiscent of the Austrian Ländler dance. The transition to the trio, which is not In 3/4 time, is an example of Bruckner’s harmonic usage. The F sharp of a D-major triad becomes used as a G-flat. The audience hears the same sustained note from one context immediately become the basis of another unrelated context without warning. in this movement, particularly the Trio, Bruckner’s humor and his relationship to Schubert and the eighteenth century are audible.

The last movement, after the introduction, is built around the writing of fugues. There is also a stunning chorale. Throughout this massive, multi-subject contrapuntal movement-even in this shorter form- Bruckner’s dramatic sense and sonic imagination are breathtaking. For the listener there will always be two outstanding aspects: the constant influence of the sound of the pipe organ on Bruckner’s use of the orchestra and the utterly original attitude to the creation of musical continuities. A majestic structure is built around blocks of sound, closely interrelated musical ideas, and carefully organized counterpoint–all placed in discrete and harmonically unexpected sequences. Bruckner creates his own sense of time and therefore the inner journey for the listener, it is likely that the essence of that journey, for Bruckner, was the celebration of faith and a sense of awe; and the expression of the variety and majesty of God’s creation through sound.

Bruckner and 20th –Century Politics

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner and 20^th –Century Politics performed on Jan 13, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert is designed to invite the audience to think about how we come to appreciate and hear the music of the past. It would be nice simply to be able to answer that it is all a matter of the “music itself.” It would seem logical that music that was written down can be considered a constant, much the way we might regard a fixed distance or a monument. We might argue that Mozart wrote such and such a piece, published it, and there it is. When we read about how past generations loved that piece, we hum the very same bars of music to ourselves that they must have. Likewise, the Statue of Liberty, although it may have been cleaned and refurbished periodically, remains much the same thing. It is unchanging, relatively speaking. Generations of school children who have been taken to see it would recognize it, identify it, and never think there was much to contemplate in terms of difference.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes pose a more daunting problem. They recently have been “cleaned,’ apparently to restore them to the condition they were in when they were done. We now can see them, scholars claim, as Michelangelo “intended” them to look, and as they did when he was finished. However, the reputation of these paintings, as well as most of the powerful interpretations of them and the posthumous fame of the artist, was based on the darker and entirely different appearance that these “same” works acquired since they were completed. The whole nineteenth-century cult of Michelangelo, all the millions of treasured reproductions, and our understanding of Renaissance art history were based on quite different-looking images.

The same holds true, perhaps on a more extreme scale, for our view of Greek classical architecture. For more than a century we have prized the white, austere surfaces of classicism that are now tourist attractions and have been reproduced in our finest neo-classical public buildings. It turns out, however, that the Parthenon might have looked quite colorful, decorated in bright pastel and other brash pigments. Over time, the gaudy color disappeared, leaving the white surface, which the Greeks who built the Parthenon might have thought naked and ugly. The sober dignity of classical architecture–an ideal to which we have been committed for so long- may now vanish as something “authentic.” In its place we have the unsettling notion that what the ancients built and treasured was, in terms of its colors and combined effect, more akin to the aesthetics of our brightly colored suburban malls and the worst of post-modern architecture than to the Lincoln Memorial.

In music, this kind of unsettling change has been accomplished most dramatically for Baroque and Classical. Efforts to utilize the instruments and performance styles in use at the time the composers were alive have altered the surface of what was once seemingly unchanging and familiar music. The Mozart we accept today just is not quite the same as the Mozart Bruno Walter was accustomed to thinking about and performing. We rarely, if ever, will hear Bach, Handel, Mozart, or Haydn performed in a manner resembling the approach Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, or Bartók took in performing the works of these composers.

The balance between what remains the same and what is different can be exaggerated, of course. There is possibly more sameness than difference, but the differences are constant and play a decisive role. Perhaps the fetish of so-called “authentic” performances has run its course. The obsession with “historical authenticity” has a tendency to obscure the competing and equally valid questions regarding the range of possible meanings and interpretations that can be associated with any text, irrespective of what the composer may have “intended” (if one could ever really establish what that was in terms of a musical performance).

The case of Bruckner, as Paul Hawkshaw has so elegantly argued in the essay that accompanies this program, is even more daunting. The texts themselves have been, from the beginning, in disarray. The kind of certainty about what the Fifth Symphony of Bruckner “is”–by comparison with the Beethoven Fifth, the Mahler Fifth, or the Shostakovich Fifth–simply eludes us. There are, no doubt, passionate and close-minded advocates of this or that version, but an inflexible claim to certainty and expertise in Bruckner must always remain suspect. Richard Osborne wrote in Gramophone in August 1991 that in the case of the Bruckner 5th, the matter is “simple”; and that “once we have scotched the validity of Franz Schalk’s 1893 version. it is relatively plain sailing”.

Unfortunately, the Schalk version, which dates from 1896, not 1893 (the first orchestral premiere was in 1894) has, as the work of Ben Korstvedt and other scholars suggests, more claims to authenticity, respectability, and to reflecting Bruckner’s wishes than heretofore suspected. Bruckner actually may have approved of the version of the symphony whose printing took place in 1896, the year of his death. Not only was the Fifth known for the first third of this century in the version being performed today, but that version may have reflected the composer’s own revisions, even though some of the suggestions may have come from a loyal disciple.

Bruckner was not the only composer to reconsider aspects of a work after the first performance and at the urging of trusted colleagues and students. Korstvedt has shown that the revisions of Symphony Nos. 2 and 4 and of the Quintet did reflect Bruckner’s wishes. We do not know what version he heard in the first four-hand piano performance of the Fifth. Schalk maintained that Bruckner explicitly approved of the additional brass at the end of the work. The 1896 edition may be a perfectly valid representation of the Fifth.

We are so accustomed to respecting “true” painstaking scholarship that we fail to retain a healthy skepticism. Every music student has had the experience of looking for the “Urtext” edition-the uncorrupted “real” unedited and distorted text. In Bruckner’s case the motivation and the procedures behind the creation of the “Urtext”–the meticulous scholarship begun in the 1930s, particularly on the Fifth Symphony–was National Socialist ideology, masquerading as “neutral” scholarship. “Facts” simply did not speak for themselves. Even anti-fascists and Jews of that era were unwittingly influenced by a view of Bruckner encouraged by the Nazis. After all, the tainted “critical edition” of the Fifth was published in 1935, deceptively, as a “neutral” scholarly achievement.

For the listener, however, there is a larger question at stake. We have fallen into the habit, in the United States, of thinking about Bruckner too much in terms of the Nazi appropriation of him and his music. No doubt, in his lifetime and afterwards Bruckner was the darling of those who championed the worst form of reactionary and intolerant politics, particularly anti-Semitism. But the popularity of Bruckner during the Nazi era was not an obvious legacy for the composer or the music.

Most important, the Nazi embrace took its toll on the way the music was played. The spirit, tempos, and timbres of practically all Bruckner performances–especially those praised by critics and Bruckner enthusiasts–are based on models that date from before 1945. Contemporary conductors thoughtlessly turn to Karajan or Furtwängler or examples set by other German and Austrian contemporaries between 1930 and 1945 to find the true approach to Bruckner. But Karajan and Furtwängler–and too many of their colleagues–were more a part of the world of Nazism and its ambitions to present Bruckner as essential and true Aryan culture than should make us comfortable.

The easy disclaimers (interpretation is just a matter of looking at the “same” music, and doing what somehow is “objectively” in it) won’t work. Given the importance of Bruckner to the Nazis, why do we assume that the “German” performance tradition of the mid-twentieth century is the place to begin? After all, Bruckner’s music has never quite achieved the popularity it deserves. In the United States, the Fifth–perhaps because it was Hitler’s favorite Bruckner symphony–is one of the lesser known symphonies. Perhaps a fresh approach to the texts and a distancing from received performance traditions will help.

This concert therefore tries to present Bruckner anew. We start with his early and strikingly patriotic Germanenzug. Bruckner’s sympathies were perhaps more congruent with his unattractive reactionary pan-German patrons in Vienna than many scholars are willing to admit. But the distance between mid-nineteenth century patriotism and Nazism should not be passed over lightly. We move to some lighter material, the Abendzauber, written for the same male chorus for which Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube was written a decade earlier in 1867; an organization that, as Hawkshaw correctly points out, was feared in the 1840s by Metternich because its leaders were in the forefront of liberalism and the movement to democratize the Habsburg Monarchy. Among those who lost their lives in the 1848 Vienna revolution were organizers of the Vienna Men’s Choral Society.

We then turn, in Psalm 146, to the most powerful aspect of Bruckner’s personality: his devout Catholicism. Bruckner was an unassuming, provincial Austrian genius with few pretensions. He was loved by his students. His use of dialect, his simple mode of dress, and his manners were the source of much humor and may have offended some of his more cosmopolitan colleagues. But above all he was truly a man of God. Today’s performance of this youthful work is a world premiere.

This brings us to the Fifth. It may not be the stirring, warlike work that was performed in 1937 to illustrate Aryan masculinity, spirituality, power, and grandeur. The cruelest fate has been the extent to which Bruckner, the devout and brilliant organist, counterpoint teacher, and composer was tarnished posthumously by the Nazis. Unlike Wagner, Bruckner was not a rabble-rousing anti-Semitic polemicist. What in his works can be interpreted plausibly as politically nefarious, as might be done in the case of Wagner? The Fifth may be about theology and faith as music, as are other works.

The question posed by this concert, therefore, is: Can we listen to and appreciate Bruckner in a way that puts the Nazi era behind us? To do so not only requires that we play repertoire and use editions that are less laden with the Nazi legacy. It also demands that we perform Bruckner differently: independently of the suspect traditions that have come down to us.

Berlin 1894: A Concert Recreated

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Berlin 1894: A Concert Recreated performed on Dec 11, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert was designed by Richard Strauss, who, at thirty years of age, was already world famous as a composer and the leading exponent of the New German compositional tradition of Liszt and Wagner.

The purpose of recreating a concert from exactly one hundred years ago is to offer contemporary audiences a better sense of the musical culture of the past. In terms of its relationship to music and the live concert, the audience of a century ago was quite different from the one gathered today. Many of the concert-goers in the past played a musical instrument and sang as amateurs. The music of the home, whether popular or so-called serious music, was more closely related to the music of the concert stage. Consequently, there was a far less strained relationship between the past and the present. Audiences expected to hear the new as well as the old. A sense of continuity with the past was sustained despite an evident and even exciting tension between the ambitions of a new generation of composers at the fin de siècle and the aesthetic tastes of an audience that considered itself musically literate and steeped in good taste formed through an intimate engagement with music history.

By 1894 the beginnings of a rift between the tastes of the audience and the claims of modernism were audible. The audience was increasingly wedded to expectations based on past repertoire. The 1980s became the decade of secessionist movements in both the visual arts and music; of closely knit groups of artists and composers bound together by the explicit aspiration to chart new paths. Strauss was clearly a leader in this regard, and the Berlin audience knew that. Following the well-known pattern validated by Richard Wagner, resistance to the new by a supposedly smug middle-class urban audience was itself a badge of honor. At the same time, composers expected that after a reasonable period of time the new would become accepted. In 1894 the key to that process remained the dissemination of new music through the printing of music and its repetition in the home on the piano and within amateur circles. The concert functioned as the indispensable and periodic public showcase. As with the theater and the exhibition of paintings and sculpture, public display would lead to private consumption and the progressive transformation of taste.

On the eve of World War I this pattern broke down in the world of music. Unlike painting and literature, modernism in music after the fin de siècle failed to claim the affection of the audience to the extent new music had during the nineteenth century. Part of the explanation rests in the most striking change in the access to music-through novel technology of sound reproduction-that developed during the twentieth century but was barely predictable in the 1890s.

The most serious difference between today’s audience and that of a century ago is the presence of high quality recorded sound. Most of today’s concert-goers know music through radio, records, and CDs. One can become entirely familiar with the standard repertoire in music without ever attending a concert. Indeed, often concerts are successful because they come on the heels of recordings. Or, as in the case of the three tenors, concerts exist as a prelude to the mass marketing of videos and records.

Consequently, the concert, particularly the orchestral concert, is less striking. The sound heard at any concert has become comparatively banal. We can hear more volume and the same apparent richness of sound at home and in the movie theater daily. In 1894 the orchestral concert presented a welcome, rare, and stirring contrast to the aural environment of daily life. That fact, combined with the different relationship to making music within the audience, made the concert simply more memorable. For that reason, the integration of non-orchestral items was not unusual. It gave the artists a unique chance to perform for an audience. There were no records or CDs one could buy of the same artists performing other repertoire.

What makes today’s event remarkable, therefore, is that most of the repertoire on it has remained relatively unknown. It is either not recorded or, if it is, it’s available on obscure labels. Therefore, the sounds will be as novel today as they were one hundred years ago. One will have to listen, not in comparison to a familiar recording of a well known work, but in response to how the music strikes one for the first time. The two exceptions are the works by Mozart and Wagner.

These exceptions, in part, justify the selection of this particular Berlin Philharmonic concert from the past. The conductor became, after all, one of the great figures in music history and one of the last composers to gain world-wide popularity. Richard Strauss’s musical evolution can be understood, to a great extent, in terms of the creative interplay between the rival aesthetics of Wagner and Mozart that marked Strauss’s development. The young Strauss was nurtured by his father in a love for the classical tradition understood as starting with Mozart and ending with Brahms. At the time of this concert Strauss had gone through a major crisis and shift in his life and work. He had been profoundly influenced by a second father-like mentor, one of Wagner’s disciples, Alexander Ritter. This Wagnerian phase would last until the second decade of the twentieth century. From 1910 on, particularly during his collaborations with Hugo von Hofmannsthal after Elektra, Strauss turned increasingly back to Mozart and to classical ideas. In 1930 he even made his own version of Idomeneo. Even in the last decade of his work, during the 1940s, Mozart and Wagner remained at the center of Strauss’s concerns. His affection for their work and his search for modes of reconciliation, elaboration, and combination never diminished. If critics point correctly to the Mozartian aspects of Strauss’s last works, one need only to listen to Strauss’s last opera, Die Liebe Der Danae from 1940, to sense the continuing lure of Wagner. The Mozart concert aria Strauss chose was written in 1786, around the time Mozart was working on The Marriage of Figaro. The work was written for Anna Selina Storace, who premiered the role of Susanna. She was, according to Alfred Einstein, “beautiful, attractive, an artist and a finished singer” of whom Constanze might very well have been jealous. The piece was written for Storace and Mozart himself, hence the role assigned to the piano. It is appropriate to note that Strauss himself married an accomplished singer and wrote music for her. The use of music as a language of personal communication evident in the Mozart was a lifelong habit of Strauss.

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which premiered in 1868, was not only among Wagner’s most popular and accessible works; it was Wagner’s only attempt at comedy. Strauss’s attraction to the music and character of this Wagnerian drama–including its explicit inclusion of musical aesthetic controversy as a central theme and subject of the drama itself–would be reflected in much of his later work for the theater. during his career as an opera conductor in Berlin, Strauss conducted Die Meistersinger seventy-three times, more than any other Wagner work and more than any work by another composer. This 1894 Berlin concert, therefore, takes on a special significance as a revealing biographical and aesthetic metaphor for the development of Richard Strauss’s career.

Schubert Orchestrated

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Schubert Orchestrated performed on Nov 18, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Posterity has always felt somewhat cheated with respect to the symphonic music of Franz Schubert. There simply is not enough of it. Unlike Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the greatest of Schubert’s symphonies were not performed in the composer’s lifetime. The B-minor, so-called “Unfinished” Symphony, was first performed by the elegant and dashing choral conductor Johann Herbeck in Vienna more than thirty years after the composer’s death. It quickly became a sort of signature work representing all of the popular myths about Schubert’s life and character as well, offering a fine case for Schubert’s genius with melody and form. The so called “Great” C-Major Symphony was premiered by Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig in 1839, more than a decade after Schubert’s death.

Despite his untimely death at 31 in 1828, contrary to the many versions of the romanticized biography of the composer, Franz Schubert was, in his lifetime, neither obscure nor destitute. But his fame and reputation, in published form and within the immediate environs of Vienna was as a composer of songs, piano music, and chamber music. The composer’s own ambitions were concentrated on the theatre.

It is, however, nevertheless true that Schubert’s posthumous reputation far outstripped that which he gained in his lifetime, a fact which distinguishes him from either Mozart or Beethoven who were internationally respected during their lifetimes as truly great historical figures, or Mendelssohn whose posthumous reputation, unfairly, has suffered in comparison to the stature he attained during his career.

Subsequent generations have embraced Schubert and have taken as their starting point the repertoire written for amateur and domestic use. However, as the public concert (particularly the orchestra concert) assumed a larger place in the musical life of the nineteenth century, especially after 1848, and as listening took on more of a role in musical culture than playing, the demand for the “orchestral” Schubert grew. The early symphonies did not entirely suffice. One wanted to hear the mature and really distinctive Schubert.

Therefore, although the works on this program are not ordered chronologically, this concert program does offer, inadvertently, a capsule history of nineteenth-century musical tastes and habits. Chronologically speaking, the first of the orchestrations and arrangements on this program, the Liszt version of the Wanderer Fantasy mirrors the era of virtuosity – of Liszt, Thalberg and Paganini – of the 1830s and 1840s. It stems from the heyday of early Romanticism – the generation of Schumann and Mendelssohn, for whom Schubert was not the last classical master, but the first protagonist of a new era. Liszt clearly saw in Schubert a new and different aesthetic.

The Joachim version of the Grand Duo and the Brahms orchestrations of three songs, (particularly when placed alongside the Mottl transcription of the F minor Fantasy) mirror a mid-nineteenth century struggle over the soul of Schubert. By the mid- 1850s a kind of cultural political war within European music had erupted. On one side stood the so called New German School of Liszt and Richard Wagner, and on the other Joachim, Brahms and others who saw themselves as the legitimate descendants of a classical tradition which included early romanticism, particularly Mendelssohn and Schumann. Beethoven was claimed by both sides. So was Schubert.

Luckily, and perhaps significantly, Wagner was relatively silent on the matter of Schubert, leaving Schubert to the Brahms-Joachim axis. Brahms and Joachim viewed Schubert in the way Schumann had, as the soul of a wholly original and intimate expressive extension of classical traditions. Brahms edited the Schubert Symphonies for the first critical edition. The Joachim Quartet helped establish the chamber music of Schubert as an essential part of the quartet concert repertoire. Joachim, Brahms’ closest friend, believed that the Grand Duo was in fact a version of a “lost’ Schubert symphony. This idea had already been put forward by Schumann. Perhaps the sound of piano music for four hands, particularly when played on more modern instruments than the ones Schubert knew, is inherently orchestral sounding.

By the time Joachim completed his orchestration, however, there was a secondary consideration. The popularity of four hand music was in decline. Unlike the solo piano or the quartet, the genre of two people sharing one bench and playing together seemed resistant to any concert stage adaptation. Both in sound and as a theatrical event, piano for four hands has never become much of a spectator event. As in the case of the Mottl transcription, the orchestration of piano music for four hands by the mid-nineteenth century was tantamount to protecting great music from possible neglect. Joachim’s version was a great success and was frequently performed. Even Toscanini had it in his repertoire.

Brahms’ love of Schubert was matched only by that of his own antipode in Vienna, Anton Bruckner. From the 1860s on, a veritable local Schubert cult developed in Vienna, spurred on by members of the many male choral societies in the city. By the centennial of Schubert’s birth, 1897, the composer had become a political symbol, appropriated by warring factions. On the one side were the liberals, including Brahms and his supporters who saw in Schubert a classical master whose cosmopolitan humanism extended to the most simple and unpretentious citizen; on the other side were the radical Christian Socialists, led by Karl Lueger and their allies, who included right wing German nationalists and anti-Semites, many of whom were avid supporters of Bruckner. To them Schubert – the only native born Viennese composer in the international classical canon – was an example of true, unadulterated Austro-German spirituality; a symbol of echt local anti-modern values, uncorrupted by Jews and foreigners.

In the midst of this controversy, Felix Mottl, the Wagnerian conductor and protégé of Hans Richter, the long time conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic (who also had a brief career in the United States), orchestrated the F-Minor Fantasy. It was, so to speak, a neo-Wagnerian tribute to Schubert for the centennial by Mottl, himself a native born Viennese. It was admired and performed by none other than Richard Strauss.

So much for politics. This concert should, above all, remind the listener how much music adapts to different formats. We have become so puritanical about which instruments to use and which historical evidence to marshal to defend performance practices that we have forgotten that a century ago, in the name of the love of music, our predecessors appropriated the past and rendered it modern. By so doing they extended the reach of Schubert’s music and made it speak in new ways to new audiences. Listening to the works on this program we are not only reminded of Schubert’s greatness, but of the aural imaginations and insights of two great and two distinguished nineteenth century musicians.

Paris in the 1860s The Origins of Impressionism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Paris in the 1860s performed on Sep 25, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Understanding art and culture as functions of seemingly unique, easily described national character traits has become a convenient and deceptive habit. There is irony, consequently, in the realization that the most significant event in the modern history of French music was the Paris premiere of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser (in a revised version) on March 13, 1861. The work caused a near riot, prompting Wagner to withdraw it after the third performance. From the publication that spring of Charles Baudelaire’s two-part essay “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” to the death of Claude Debussy in 1918, the debate over whether one ought to succumb to or resist Wagner’s ideas defined the character of French music and aesthetics.

The curious interplay between the French and the German might well be regarded as a fascinating underlying theme to this concert. No doubt our accepted notion of the history of modern painting affirms that, from Impressionism on, European modernism in the visual arts took its primary inspiration from the French. Insofar as the painters, poets, and musicians of Paris in the 1860s and after worked side by side, it can be said that not only French music but French poetry (e.g. symbolism) and French painting owed much to Wagner.

On the other side, Friedrich Nietzsche, once Wagner’s ardent champion who later crafted a compelling and penetrating critique, embraced Georges Bizet’s masterpiece Carmen as the quintessential anti-Wagnerian model of operatic greatness. Indeed, of all French nineteenth-century music, it was Bizet’s oeuvre that captivated turn-of-the century German-speaking composers and audiences. This generation was in search of some route out of the maze of imitative neo-Wagnerism. With Bizet, particularly in his one-act opera Djamileh, one could detect the disarming lightness of Offenbach and the lyric elegance and economy of Mozart–all without any loss of the seriousness and emotional power in which Wagner specialized. Bizet commanded the twin musical languages of humor and passion with equal skill and invention.

Djamileh has been unfairly neglected for most of its existence. The libretto was written during the Second Empire, in the later 1860s, and mirrors that decade’s spirit. But the collapse of the Empire, the defeat at the hands of the Prussians, and the experience of the Paris Commune intervened before the music was composed. Bizet’s decision to set a text that could easily have seemed anachronistic by 1872 reflects his attraction to an opportunity within the story that those recent historical events only enhanced: the chance to interweave the comic and the tragic. It was precisely the subtle shifts from the frivolous to the intensely romantic in Djamileh that attracted the attention and admiration of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.

If Djamileh is at all familiar to today’s music lovers, it is probably because Mahler’s biographers have mentioned in passing that in 1898, during his tenure at the Vienna Opera, he revived Djamileh and conducted all of its nineteen performances between 1898 and 1903. Mahler evidently loved this obscure masterpiece. The same can be said for his friend and rival Richard Strauss. In 1945, in a letter to Karl Boehm, Strauss penned what he dubbed his “artistic testament.” He wanted to outline what should be done to revive culture after the “catastrophe” of the war. Strauss recommended that Vienna establish a permanent “opera comique” in the Theater an der Wien where the greatest of all comic operas, The Magic Flute, had been premiered. In his brief list of essential works for its repertoire, Strauss included Djamileh, which can be viewed as a source of inspiration for Ariadne auf Naxos, in which Strauss brings about a Bizet-like synthesis of Mozartian lyricism and Wagnerian drama.

Paris was a remarkable crucible of creativity in the 1860s. The aesthetic debates of that decade were central not only to the formal direction modern painting, literature, and music would take; the manner in which art and culture either influenced or mirrored national identity became a near obsession. The world from which Impressionism came also gave birth to a modern politics marked by sharp nationalist pride, conflict, and hatred. Sewn into the fabric of French controversies surrounding Wagner and the direction of modern art from the 1860s and 1870s were strands of chauvinism, racialist thinking, and anti-Semitism. The Jewish librettist of La Vie Parisienne and many other Offenbach works, Ludovic Halévy, was for years among the closest of Edgar Degas’s friends. That friendship would end in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair: Degas was a staunch believer in Dreyfus’s guilt.

In more ways than one, Offenbach, also a Jew, deserves the last word on the Paris of the 1860s and its significance. Like many “outsiders” before and since, Offenbach was able to define, distill, and parody the main currents of Parisian culture and its values and communicate them back to the majority of Parisians. This outsider created the very definition of the “cultural center” in relation to which, ironically, he remained marginal. Offenbach’s achievement went still further. In the midst of the craze for Wagner (who was among the most significant of modern anti-Semites), this German Jew, like Heinrich Heine (who also had immigrated to Paris), used wit and insight to expose and blunt aesthetic pretentiousness, smugness, hypocrisy, conceit, and the terrifying self-importance of modern wealth and political power. High on the explicit and implicit list of Offenbach’s targets for ridicule were Wagner and his Parisian followers.

That his music has been held in such high esteem by many original minds of the twentieth century is testimony to Offenbach’s understanding that comedy provides an opportunity to communicate a unique ethical critique. Amidst the laughter and irreverence, his stage works demonstrate how music and language can become instruments to combat the inflated rhetoric, fanaticism, and self-importance of everyday life that lead humans into conflict and enmity. As one laughs at oneself, one gains a precious moment of recognition that can inspire modesty, compromise, and compassion. Offenbach was the master of this cleansing kind of theater. To achieve such a result, the music had to be non-trivial (as it indeed is in La Vie Parisienne and Offenbach’s many other master-works) and every bit as compelling, memorable, and alluring as one would expect in great serious opera. Every age, especially ours, needs an Offenbach of its own.

The American 1980’s

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The American 1980’s performed on May 22, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When Leopold Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra over thirty years ago, one of his ambitions was to create a showcase for American musicians – including American composers. It may be hard to believe, but in 1962 the prejudice that Americans were somehow inferior to their European colleagues possessed considerable currency. Impresarios, critics, and public alike seemed to feel more confident with individuals with Slavic names, a German heritage, or French provenance. The notion was that they exemplified aesthetic “traditions” that were magically passed on from generation to generation. Within the realm of concert music, an American insecurity vis-à-vis Europe dates from the nineteenth century. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, a startling percentage of the members of major orchestras in the United States were from Europe. To this day we undervalue the American music written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There still seems to be some sense of surprise, for example, when a work by John Knowles Paine or George Chadwick is played and turns out to be very good.

In the post-World War II era, matters began to change, helped no doubt by the European fascination with American jazz. Leonard Bernstein and Van Cliburn are perhaps the best-known American classical musicians from the mid-century to have successfully overcome the prejudice. American composers, however, have had a somewhat tougher task than American performers, since the blossoming of American compositional talent in the mid-century coincided with an accelerating decline of interest on the part of the public in contemporary music in general. Too much of a remarkable repository of fine twentieth-century American music remains unplayed. Leopold Stokowski, like his counterpart Serge Koussevitzky, worked to bring American composers out of their second-place status. Both of them commissioned and performed a staggering array of new American works. In his later years, Stokowski turned his attention to assisting American players and conductors. The American Symphony Orchestra is the legacy of that effort.

In 1992 the American Symphony Orchestra invited Richard Wilson to become its first Composer-in-Residence. In this capacity he has planned a concert devoted to American composers that fits within the larger artistic mission of the ASO. Earlier this year we played a concert of two works by composers from the former Soviet Union. We believed that, beyond their compelling musical properties, these works could be understood in the context of the momentous decade of the 1980s, which witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In some ways, the present concert can be considered something of a parallel. The 1980s, the era of Reagan and Bush, had a coherence made up of such diverse phenomena as neoconservatism, the explosion of interest in minimalism, and junk bonds. Behind these obviously journalistic phrases, however, was considerable activity and exploration by American composers. This concert highlights music from that decade by focusing on the work of four composers at mid-career, all of whom remain active and are currently at work on new projects. It is a particular pleasure for us to break the habit that is commonplace in most orchestras: the nearly exclusive focus on first performances and world premieres.

There is a terrifying incongruity between the effort and energy required to write a piece of music and the reality that, if the work is heard at all, chances are it will be heard only once. Months and years mirror themselves in a few brief moments on stage. Works of visual art don’t disappear, and books can be forever. But pieces of music need to be performed more than once for them to have even a fighting chance to gain the attention and affection of listeners. We hope that we have the opportunity once again in the future to give works from the recent past their much-needed second, third, fourth, or fifth hearing and to continue the tradition, started by Stokowski, of supporting and encouraging living American composers.

Harlem Rhapsody, Op. 62 (1963)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Common Ground performed on April 15, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is astonishing that the music of such a good and historically significant American composer as Louis Gruenberg (1884-1964) has drifted into obscurity. Credit must be given to Gunther Schuller and Gruenberg’s daughter Joan Cominos who have worked to revive interest in Gruenberg’s work. They were both enormously helpful to the American Symphony Orchestra in the process of realizing the project to complete the orchestral of Harlem Rhapsody.

The facts of Gruenberg’s life and career include a brilliant early phase as a pianist, including a tour accompanying Enrico Caruso and performances under Arnold Schoenberg’s direction. Gruenberg was a protégé of Ferrucio Busoni, with whom Gruenberg studied and collaborated on a variety of projects. Gruenberg’s opera The Emperor Jones starred Lawrence Tibbett and ran successfully at the Metropolitan Opera for more than one season. It can be considered one of the landmarks of American twentieth-century opera repertoire. It even made the cover of Time Magazine. Gruenberg wrote a number of acclaimed film scores (several of which received Academy Award nominations) and a violin concerto for Jascha Heifetz. As David Noble has written recently, perhaps “a generation now making its own quest for musical romanticism” will rediscover Gruenberg’s music.

Gruenberg was born in Russia. His father became a musician in the Yiddish Theatre in New York. Gruenberg’s family was beset by poverty. Gruenberg supported his family by playing in hotel orchestras before he went to Europe to study with Busoni. Apart from Busoni, as Noble has correctly pointed out, it was the example of Dvorák that most influenced Gruenberg. The main tenet of Dvorák ’s approach to music in American was the advocacy of the use of African-American and Native American musical materials. This was the authentic route to a truly American music; one that would be more than a pale imitation of European models.

Most of Gruenberg’s most acclaimed compositions utilized African-American materials. His setting of James Welles Johnson’s sermon God’s Trombones, and his Creation, Jazz Suite, and The Emperor Jones from the 1920s and 1930s all testify to this fact. Harlem Rhapsody was written in 1953, relatively late in Gruenberg’s career. He realized that his work had already fallen out of favor with critics. He refused to bow to fashion and returned to his aesthetic and political commitments from earlier decades. In 1924 Gruenberg, in an almost exact echo of sentiments written by Dvorák thirty years earlier, wrote, “It becomes my firm conviction that the American composer can only achieve individual expression by developing his own resources…these resources are vital and manifold, for we have at least three veins indigenous to America alone: jazz, Negro spirituals, and Indian themes.”

Thirty years later, with Harlem Rhapsody, brilliantly orchestrated by the distinguished American musician Jonathan Tunick, Gruenberg made this point once again. The score was complete in a piano reduction with specific but incomprehensible indications of the intended instrumentation.

The central dimension of Gruenberg’s politics with respect to art and culture was faith and the idea of America as a nation which could create a shared identity out of the many streams of cultures which made up its history. The domination, either subtle or overt, of one stream was not at issue. Crucial to Gruenberg was a fierce commitment to social justice and a respect for the African-American tradition without condescension or exploitative instinct. At the end of his life Gruenberg wrote, “Since the blood lines of all nations have created this nation, I still visualize the day that this stream will eventually crystallize in an American expression of all the arts…”

Gruenberg shed the Yiddish and Jewish cultural heritage not out of any sense of shame but rather on account of an enthusiasm for the possibilities of creating something new and particularly American. Faith in the future as opposed to an allegiance to a romanticized past governed Gruenberg’s aesthetic quest. He grew up within a poverty-stricken Jewish ghetto. From the perspective of his politics, African Americans were allies whose experience most nearly resembled the European context from which his parents had fled.

As Harlem Rhapsody makes plain, Gruenberg’s affinity, respect, and creative embrace (within the context of European and American concert music strategies of the twentieth century) of the music of the African-American community of his day were singular expressions of solidarity and homage.

Common Ground: African-American & Jewish-American Composers, 1930-1955

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Common Ground performed on April 15, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In our day and age it is rare that any single “classical music” concert event can find itself caught in the web of a contemporary cultural and political crisis. We have come to regard concert life and the music of the concert hall as essentially matters of entertainment and aesthetic taste, entirely divorced from the nasty world of politics and social conflict. Even though there are some who welcome this sort of distance in terms of history, this has not always been the case. Musical life has been a significant part of political life. Chopin, Verdi, and Wagner are perhaps the most obvious examples of composers who regarded their work as vital to a community defined precisely in terms of its politics.

This concert was planned in the knowledge that over the past quarter-century a painful strain in the relations between Jewish Americans and African Americans has developed. However, the extent of the hate and deception exhibited in recent months was not anticipated.

It is hoped that this concert can contribute to the current political debate by presenting a moment of history when matters were different. Not nostalgia, but rather the exploration of different models from which to draw inspiration for the present and future is at issue here.

The composers on this program born into Jewish families who integrated African-American materials in their work–Gershwin, Gruenberg and Gould–did so in ways which earned the respect and admiration of their African-American contemporaries and colleagues. The composers of African-American descent–Price, Ellington and Kay–who integrated European traditions with African-American traditions, did so in ways which earned the respect and admiration of their non-African-American contemporaries and colleagues. There is perhaps no better indication of these reciprocal relationships than the use made by Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and others, of Gershwin’s theme, “I Got Rhythm.”

At mid-century, Jewish Americans tended to regard their African-American contemporaries as allies. Both communities experienced in recent and distant history oppression, discrimination, prejudice and the brutality of violence. The African-American community did not regard the Jew as the quintessential example of the American white oppressor. The facts of slavery and the disappointments stemming from the era of reconstruction were more recent than they are today. The idea that the poor and disenfranchised immigrant Jewish population that fled to America at the turn of the century and their descendants were at the root of white racism in America, was decidedly implausible.

The fact that European Jews were white enabled them to assimilate–to escape poverty and the ghetto and experience a security and prosperity without parallel in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. This has made the adoption within segments of the African-American community of the distorted rhetoric and lies of European anti-Semitism, seem reasonable today. Old fashioned anti-Semitism might serve as an easy way to explain to new generations the inexplicable and inexcusable: the failure of American society in the second half of this century to bring social and economic equality and justice to the African-American community.

The credo shared by all the composers on this program included: 1) faith in the social and economic potential of democracy and 2) the hope that neither a distinct white nor black identity would emerge, but instead a unique amalgam. More to the point, the Jewish-American composers represented here rejected the idea that they were prisoners of a heritage of something that was truly “Jewish.” In fact, they turned to the music of the African-American experience because it seemed to be at the heart of what they dreamed they would be part of: an America in which they could feel comfortable and celebrate. They had less interest in the New England cultural tradition with which Charles Ives was obsessed.

Furthermore, the notion that ethnic identity can be essentialized –defined as this or that in some seemingly authentic manner – and its ownership restricted to a single group, was foreign. A universalism, perhaps naive from our point of view (but blissfully so), prevailed. Jews did not resent the fact that Max Bruch’s Kol Nidre, played on the eve of Yom Kippur in many Reform synagogues, was written by a German-Christian. George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was not regarded as somehow invalid – as an example of humiliating exploitation. Florence Price’s overt adoption of the example of Dvorák’s New World Symphony was not seen as a betrayal of her identity as an African-American. Neither was Ellington’s music for the screen and concert stage seen as a concession to a dominant “white” culture. In this sense it is a poignant matter of irony that Ulysses Kay’s piece on this program won the Gershwin prize.

The works by Gruenberg, Gershwin and Gould reflect their conviction that the African-American experience was at the root of American cultural identity. There was no separate “white” alternative; no shred of white supremacist ideology can be found. Florence Price believed that the European symphonic tradition needed, for its own sake, the materials of the African-American experience. What is now sometimes belittled as a “male dominated” purely “European” expressive art was seen as a vehicle for the powerful expression of the ideas and sentiments of an African-American woman composer. Duke Ellington, one of the greatest composers of this century, sought to reach the concert hall public with his music without thinking that the concert hall was “Eurocentric” and thus subject to avoidance because it was not multi-cultural.

We need to be reminded that in our current way of thinking about these issues we have stripped both the past and the present of individuality and diversity. Just as there is no single definition of the “Jewish” neither is there of the “African-American.” There never has been. We have obliterated the true details of the past and turned the past into a self-serving caricature by which we measure the present falsely in the name of history.

It is hoped that in the encounter with the wonderful and partly unfamiliar music on this program we can be reminded of how things might be different. The idea of cultural diversity based on discrete units which are somehow ethnically “authentic” and unsullied by “the other” is a fraud. We are each predictable and unpredictable amalgams of many diverse influences. The seemingly scholarly claims on behalf of preserving one or another tradition are invalid because the traditions to which they refer are our own constructions.

If the art of music can play, as it has, a salutatory role in politics then let us acknowledge that it constitutes a creative common ground which mirrors the essential equality of each individual creator, player and listener; an arena where affection and respect (as evident in each piece of music on this program) can be achieved so that it can be broadened beyond the reach of notes played and heard.

Affection, honesty, curiosity and respect –reflected in the composer’s conceit that everything is at the disposal of the creator, and that nothing is off limits –are shown amply by two living composers who are deans of our concert hall tradition: Morton Gould and Ulysses Kay; two less well known composers from the past: Florence Price and Louis Gruenberg; and two of the greatest figures of our art: Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. May their music drown out the hate and violence with which we live and inspire us to create a new common American ground of our own making.

On behalf of all the musicians, staff and supporters of the ASO, may I express the hope that this will be more than “just” a concert; but an inspiration to all of how we might better deal and communicate with one another to make this city and our nation as truly human as the music heard tonight makes us realize is possible.

Brahms, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Raff, & Reger

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert An Italian Journey through German Romanticism performed on March 11, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Brahms, Nänie

One of Johannes Brahms’s friends was the painter Anselm Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s biographer and closest friend, Julius Allgeyer, introduced Brahms to Feuerbach in 1871. Not a particularly adept politician, Feuerbach finally secured a position in Vienna but ran afoul of the local Viennese politics of painting. He was seen as an unwelcome rival to the lionized Hans Makart. Feuerbach’s troubles in Vienna were a source of concern for Brahms. Anselm Feuerbach died in 1880. Brahms was inspired to write this work in his memory. The work is dedicated to Feuerbach’s mother, who devoted her life to sustaining the reputations and memory of her son. What attracted Brahms to Feuerbach was the unerring elegance and beauty of Feuerbach’s self-consciously neoclassic painting. If Hans Makart’s grandiose and historicist tendencies made him the painterly equivalent of Richard Wagner, Feuerbach’s self-conscious restraint, spirituality, luminosity, and refinement might be compared to Brahms’s nearly neoclassic compositional strategies. Indeed, Makart, Feuerbach’s rival, was deeply admired by Richard and Cosima Wagner. It is not surprising that when Brahms decided to write something in Feuerbach’s memory, he chose a text by Schiller. The poem is explicitly neoclassical in its references. Within the eloquent Greek mythological framework, Schiller speaks of death and beauty in a way that Brahms found a fitting tribute to Feuerbach’s painting. This work is among Brahms’s most intimate and intense in spirit. The composer brought to bear his extensive experience as a choral conductor and a writer of choral music. few pieces have achieved as adequate a linkage between text and music, and in this case the shared aesthetics of music, poetry, and painting. The work was first performed in 1881 by Brahms in Zurich.

Beethoven, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

Mendelssohn, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

These works have been chosen and placed together because they were both inspired by a well-known Goethe poem. The Beethoven is among the least known of the composer’s works. There is an enormous amount of mythology surrounding the relationship between the two best-known figures of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century German-speaking culture, Beethoven and Goethe. They met once, and according to various accounts, the encounter was not entirely successful. Beethoven long had harbored hopes of writing music to Goethe’s Faust. Goethe, whose musical tastes were not always reliable, seems not to have understood Beethoven’s greatness and was put off by the composer’s less than refined self-presentation. Beethoven’s setting was written in 1822 and is dedicated to the poet. In contrast, the work of the same name by Felix Mendelssohn was written by a composer who was a decided favorite of Goethe. Felix Mendelssohn’s teacher was Karl Friedrich Zelter, who was close to Goethe. Zelter was also Goethe’s musical adviser. Their three-volume correspondence is among the most interesting and revealing documents of musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Zelter was so impressed by the young Felix Mendelssohn that he introduced the boy to the great poet. Despite his not inconsiderable prejudice against Jews, Goethe was enchanted by Mendelssohn’s talent and intellectual brilliance. Few encounters were as important to the young composer as his friendship with the great Goethe. Mendelssohn visited Goethe’s house frequently and played for the poet and corresponded with him. Therefore it comes as no surprise that among Mendelssohn’s finest works is a setting of Goethe, the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht. This overture, like the better know Fingal’s Cave, was designed as a free-standing work. The name “overture” therefore is somewhat of a misnomer. It was written in 1828, when Mendelssohn was nineteen years old. Unlike Beethoven, Mendelssohn displays the new agenda of Romanticism in music. He chose to express the poem exclusively through instrumental sounds. He did not set Goethe’s text; rather he provided a mixture of evocation and illustration. This overture is a magnificent example of a synthesis of neoclassical and Romantic sensibilities. The musical strategies of thematic development and variation are placed in the service of a rather novel sense of the relationship between music and narration and representation with respect to nature and emotion.

Raff, Italian Suite

Joachim Raff is the composer on this program whose life and work are least known. He was born near Zurich in 1822 and dies in 1882. His early work attracted the attention of Mendelssohn. Later on in his career he became more allied with the so-called New German School of Liszt and Wagner. In his own day he was extraordinarily famous and well respected. Among his pupils was the American composer Edward MacDowell. In more recent times Raff is remembered mostly through his association with Franz Liszt. Among his compositional work are eleven symphonies, seven of which bear subtitles relating to nature and landscape. In addition, Raff wrote a series of shorter works inspired by places and nature. The “Italian” Suite later served as a model for Strauss. It ends as does Aus Italien with Neapolitan material. The work is in six movements. The “Italian” Suite is one of four works bearing the name “suite”; the second is subtitled “In the Hungarian Manner,” and the fourth is a musical essay “From Thuringia.”

Reger, Four Tone Poems after A. Böcklin

Most concertgoers today will associate the name Max Reger with that of Rudolf Serkin. The great pianist and the family of Adolf Busch, into which Serkin married, were ardent advocates of Reger’s music. Reger was born in 1873 and died in 1916. His work is marked by an intense and virtuosic command of counterpoint and a harmonic ingenuity reminiscent of Spohr, but in a modern form. Reger was an organist and a tireless composer. Hew saw himself as continuing a tradition exemplified by Schumann and Brahms. He was also the conductor of the court orchestra in Meiningen, a post made famous by the tenure of Hans von Bülow. These tone poems are among Reger’s most lasting works. They were written in 1913. The work of Arnold Böcklin inspired many composers. In his time, Böcklin was the most sought-after and famous painter in German-speaking Europe. Perhaps the best-known piece of music inspired by Böcklin is Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. The painting by that name is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Another admirer of Böcklin’s was Johannes Brahms. In this work, Reger, using the vast resources of the orchestra, attempts, like Mendelssohn, an orchestral instrumental equivalent to the canvases of Böcklin. Reger’s strategy is not narrowly illustrative.

Each of the four movements is tied explicitly to a single canvas: “Der Einsliedler” (called by Reger “The Hermit Playing the Violin”); “In the Play of the Wave”: “The Isle of the Dead” and “Bacchanale.” These four paintings show only part of the iconographical range of Böcklin’s work. These are based on mythology. They were chosen by Reger in part because as a sequence of four they suggested a formal pattern which struck him as a variation of the traditional four-movement symphony–a welcome compromise between the symphonic form and the Lisztean and Straussian tone poem.

An Italian Journey through German Romanticism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert An Italian Journey through German Romanticism performed on March 11, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The fascination for Italy among German writers, artists, and musicians can be traced back at least to the mid-eighteenth century. In the renaissance of German letters during that time there was a distinct and eloquent neoclassical strain. J. J. Winckelmann (1717-1768) wrote his famous tract in 1755, “Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks.” The German rediscovery of classical antiquity extended to the field of architecture. Among the most influential aesthetic forces in German nineteenth- century culture was the achievement of the Berlin architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose neoclassic buildings were regarded as an embodiment of the rebirth of true beauty through the style of antiquity.

The glorification of a Greco-Roman ideal found an analogue in the German romance with the Italian landscape. The lure of Italy was not merely historical. Italy represented the world of light and warmth, an oasis of nature infused in a curious manner with the remnants of a great historical past. All this stood in contrast to the cold, dark, forbidding landscape of the North. If one thinks of the stage set of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz and the early nineteenth-century German romantic canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, one can think of few more evident counterpoints than the sunlight of Florence, Rome, or Naples. The German fascination for Italy as well was shared by the Swiss and the Austrians, who were in a position to forge an ideal synthesis between the best virtues of the German and the Italian. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can be conjured up as evidence of this conceit. The Italian influence from as early as the time of J. S. Bach was never far from the minds of the leading composers of German-speaking Europe.

The most important literary reflection of the German obsession with Italy was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italian Journey. Goethe’s sojourn in Italy from 1786 to 1788 offered a model that was followed by generations of young aspiring, musicians and writers from the North. Mendelssohn spent considerable time in Rome during the 1830s. Brahms was an inveterate traveler whose favorite place was Italy. Among his most treasured books was Jacob Burckhardt’s Cicerone, a descriptive guide to the art treasures of Italy. However, the most well-known Germans with an Italian obsession were the painters of the nineteenth century who lived for long stretches of time in Italy. Unfortunately, the names of these painters are not well-known among Americans. German nineteenth-century painting in general has never won much of an audience in the English-speaking world. Those Americans familiar with the Hudson River School and with the great monumental landscape painting of the American nineteenth century will appreciate readily the magnificent creations of the German nineteenth- century tradition of painting. There was a group of painters loosely called “The German Romans.” Among the best-known are Arnold Böcklin and Anselm Feuerbach. Both these painters are indirectly represented in this concert by the works of Brahms and Reger. Music lovers and concert-goers, however, will recognize immediately one of the last incarnations of the nineteenth-century German fascination with Italy in Richard Strauss’s tone poem Aus Italien. The suite by Joachim Raff from 1871 on this program, although less well-known, is a wonderful earlier example of that tradition of music inspired by the Italian landscape. It is therefore more than an accident that that quintessential figure of nineteenth-century German culture, Richard Wagner, died in Venice, where he had chosen to live.

What began in the eighteenth century as a celebration of the universal ideals of beauty, which recognized no national differences, ended in the late nineteenth century as a distortion of universal national self-aggrandizement. The self-proclaimed superiority of modern nineteenth-century German culture seemed to be vindicated by the idea that it had successfully integrated the surviving remnants of the classical past into itself through the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. The absorption of the Italian strengthened and deepened the German self-definition of its own culture. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the music and the art represented by the Reinhart collection at the Metropolitan Museum and the works on this ASO program bear testimony to the authentic inspiration generated by the strange and complex symbiosis between North and South evident in the German relationship to Italy during the nineteenth century.

The Breakup of the Soviet Union: A Musical Mirror

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Breakup of the Soviet Union: A Musical Mirror performed on Feb 18, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The relationship between music and politics has been both ambiguous and enigmatic. Strictly speaking, music neither describes nor illustrates in the way that pictures and language seem to do. Therefore, a facile identification of political ideas with music appears problematic. However, within a particular historical context, the sound and function of music in society can assume a highly charged political meaning.

This is particularly the case in moments of history when political censorship has been severe. The Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer, whose work was subjected persistently to censorship, once commented wryly that he envied composers. With music, the censors were at a loss. If there was political meaning, it might be found, at best, in any words that were being set–as in the case of opera and vocal and choral music–but not in the music itself.

The oppressive world of the 1830s under Metternich ought not be compared to the political repression and dictatorship experienced in Europe during the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union music became politicized by the state to an astonishing degree from the mid 1920s to the late 1980s. Joseph Stalin created a world in which artists and writers were murdered, tortured, imprisoned, and humiliated. Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich both struggled to find ways to survive in the basic sense of the word and yet remain true to the notion of art as the free expression of the individual. Although musicians had an easier time under Stalinism than contemporaries who were writers (one thinks of Mandelstam and Akhmatova) the life of a composer in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century was not easy. The category of official music existed and with it a powerful central official hierarchy. Certain styles of music were suppressed.

Some quite talented composers paid direct and regular homage to the often arbitrary tastes of the ruling elite. Others sought to speak in a double voice, to escape direct censorship and reprisal and yet communicate anger, despair, and hope covertly within the textures of the music they wrote. By the 1980s, in a post-Stalinist Soviet Union, particularly under Perestroika, matters had improved. But the 1970s under Brezhnev were not so open and lenient. To the end, the fundamental structure developed under Stalin for the control of the arts by the state remained in place.

Today’s concert offers the American listener two glimpses into how two of the most important composers from the former Soviet Union (both born in the 1930s) struggled with the political context of their art. The American writer Mary McCarthy once noted with some degree of irony that it was only in conditions of “unfreedom” that art, particularly music, really mattered. Only in the darkest days of the Brezhnev era could a poet (e.g. Ratushinskaya) be imprisoned for writing about love. An underground of writing and concert life in Moscow and Leningrad mirrored an intensity of interest in artistic expression wholly foreign to ourselves. In the context of repression and censorship, music and poetry remained arenas in which free expression could more readily be realized.

Given the restricted choice of how to spend one’s time, the limitations of personal movement, and an absence of consumer economy, reading and listening were vital experiences. When a composer or writer put his or her pen to the page, the significance of what he or she was doing went well beyond issues of career, income, and fame. As Ms. McCarthy noted, in our free and open society the making of art seems too often to make no difference at all.

Alfred Schnittke’s and Sofia Gubaidulina’s music conveys, with a nearly unmatched intensity, the sense of urgency and importance that the making of and listening to music possessed for them and their publics during the 1980s. Schnittke and Gubaidulina are perhaps the most significant composers of their generation. Both occupied the tense and amorphous space in the Soviet world that can be termed “unofficial.” Both sought refuge abroad before the collapse of communism.

This concert presents contrasting works which frame the decade of the 1980s. The earlier work, the Schnittke cantata, mirrors, through the use of the Faust legend, with considerable irony, even sarcasm, the problems of the individual conscience when it is faced with the temptations of power. The cantata can be heard as a parable which warns against accepting the offer of the devil, who in Schnittke’s setting unmistakably can be associated with the blandishments and seductions offered by officialdom. It is not surprising that this work never pleased the Soviet establishment. It has the brilliance and angularity weassociate with much of Dimitri Shostakovich’s music.

If Schnittke’s work evokes the struggle between the idea that art depends on principled inner integrity (particularly when one is faced with overwhelming power) on the one hand and the corrupt traditions of the Stalinist legacy on the other, Sofia Gubaidulina’s work demonstrates the explosive energy and passion that the promise of freedom made possible at the end of the decade. Gubaidulina has long sustained artistic autonomy through her embrace of spirituality and religious faith. However, the Allelujia is not merely the culmination of a series of works by the composer with religious and spiritual content. It reflects the energy that political freedom can give to religious expression. What was once personal and private can be embraced, without restraint, in the public sphere. One can think of no more a moving and decidedly Russian expression of the possibilities presented by the long-awaited arrival of political freedom. Hope, joy, harmony, as well as the return of innocence and opportunity are communicated along with affection and a fundamental belief in the sanctity of life-sentiments wholly uncharacteristic of Stalinism and its successors.

For those concert-goers familiar with Russian history, one might suggest that in this concert we are presented with a continuation of two strains in Russian culture. The Gubaidulina work reminds one of the uniquely Russian spiritual and mystical tradition of Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) and even the religious strain in the late work of Leo Tolstoy. The Schnittke is perhaps an extension into the twentieth century of qualities we associate with Gogol and Dostoevsky. The character and power of the two works on this concert, and indeed much of Russian music, literature, and painting from the early nineteenth century to the present, may indeed derive (albeit indirectly) from the bitter struggle between the imperatives of art and the almost unbroken history of political repression in Russia from Czarism to Communism.

As we listen to these two works, we might well reflect on what is happening today in 1994. As a result of recent political and economic events, Gubaidulina’s optimism about the post communist world might end up appearing premature and even naive. We all must work to avoid such an outcome. Even though we cherish the great works of art that were produced under political repression, we cannot glorify the past merely because we lament a certain philistinism and irrelevancy that art and music have attained in the so-called free post-Communist world. Let us hope that in the former Soviet Union and also in the West, the traditions so magnificently sustained by Schnittke and Gubaidulina remain vital without the terrifying presence of necessity in the form of oppression, censorship, and the absence of freedom.

Der Rosenkavalier: The Silent Film

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Der Rosenkavalier: The Silent Film performed on Dec 19, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This performance of the reconstructed film Der Rosenkavalier is a tribute to the tenacity and enthusiasm of many individuals, both here and in Germany. Credit goes to Berndt Heller for doing the painstaking work of putting together the most complete version of the film possible. I am grateful for the efforts of Mark Loftin of the Bard Music Festival two years ago, when an unsuccessful attempt was made to bring the film to the United States. Most of all, I thank my colleagues at the American Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Carr and Lorna Dolci, who stopped at nothing to make this complicated project a reality.

The silent film Der Rosenkavalier presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the continuities and discontinuities between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century cultural traditions. The film also offers us an opportunity to see how two great artists, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, reinvented their own work when confronted with a new theatrical medium. Their decision to make a silent film of Der Rosenkavalier almost fifteen years after the premiere of the opera in 1911 was, no doubt, a tribute to the opera’s unbelievable commercial and critical popularity.

In terms of Strauss’s music, the opera Der Rosenkavalier occupies a special place. After the powerful and seemingly modernist Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier appeared to be a retreat to a more conventional, if not neo-Romantic and historicist, style. Strauss’s virtual disappearance after Der Rosenkavalier from the official story of twentieth-century music –a story that charts the progress of music from the rich, tonal, romantic vocabulary of the late nineteenth century (e.g. Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler) to the astringent modernism of the 1960′s (e.g. Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt)–is a consequence of Strauss’s music in Der Rosenkavalier. At the same time, Der Rosenkavalier marked the beginning of a rich period of collaboration with the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Too often, modern audiences think of opera as being exclusively the work of a composer. For example, the name Lorenzo DaPonte is remembered only because of Mozart. However unfair this is in all cases, it is entirely wrong in the case of the Strauss/Hofmannsthal collaboration. After Der Rosenkavalier they completed four great operas and worked together on several smaller projects. Critics have belittled Strauss’s music from the 1920s and 1930s, but in recent years, owing in part to our so-called “post-modernist” sensibilities, we now listen to the mature Strauss–the work from the period in which this film was made-with new appreciation.

The re-making of Der Rosenkavalier, therefore, was an act of exploitation of a smash hit, much the way a best-selling novel today is turned into a movie. The particular “hit” in question, the 1911 opera, was a symbol of the special problems facing art and music in the twentieth century. Der Rosenkavalier became a battleground for competing critical viewpoints. Supporters hailed Strauss’s so-called conservatism. Others, using the modernist claims of Schoenberg and his followers, trashed it. At stake was the question of how to reach an audience and which audience to reach with the musical and theatrical conventions of the past. By 1925 this debate included the question of whether the film medium would become an instrument of the elevation of mass taste or a new means of expression that would spark an aesthetic conflict with traditional nineteenth-century practices.

Given this context, what we see and hear in this film from the 1920s is astonishing. First of all, Hofmannsthal rethought the opera. In the film version he allied himself even more powerfully with Mozart than he had in 1911. That allegiance was implied by the opera version. In the heat of the debate about modernism in the 1920s, Hofmannsthal took further refuge in the world of the eighteenth century. If modernism in the twentieth century can be understood as a reaction to the romanticism of the late nineteenth century, then one plausible route to take was neo-classicism, a retreat beyond the nineteenth century back to the seemingly pure, graceful, and light, but at the same time profound, achievement of the late eighteenth century. Mozart was regarded as having achieved the most powerful synthesis of words and music. The power of opera was realized in a way sufficiently intimate and transparent so that the listener could follow language and music together. The sheer scale of the Wagnerian music drama and the particular character of Wagner’s language seemed to demand for Hofmannsthal a radical reconsideration, which took the form of a return to the eighteenth century.

Many listeners may be familiar with the Strauss/Hofmannsthal collaboration Ariadne auf Naxos in which the commedia dell arte and the example of Moliere are present. The entire end of Der Rosenkavalier was changed by Hofmannsthal for this film. The indoor ending of the opera is transformed here into a direct evocation of the last scene of The Marriage of Figaro, tempered by the last scene of Don Giovanni. The technique of a play within a play is utilized in the use of theatrical reenactment of the presentation of the rose.

But at the same time, Hofmannsthal was fascinated by the unique properties of the cinema. In the absence of words delivered by the voice, Hofmannsthal utilized flashbacks and cinematic means of silently communicating the emotional essence that sung words had communicated so powerfully in the opera. This silent film project inspired Hofmannsthal to approach in a new way an issue that had plagued his entire life and career. In his adolescence he had become lionized and world-famous as a lyric poet. Then he experienced a severe crisis about writing. For the remainder of his career Hofmannsthal struggled with the question of how language might function in the modern world. His enthusiastic collaboration with Strauss was in part an admission of the insufficiency of language alone. In the Rosenkavalier film, language retreats even further as a medium of modernity, leaving musical sound, pantomime, and image alone to work together.

Richard Strauss’s view of this film version has long been a matter of debate. Conventional wisdom has it that he undertook this film merely to mollify Hofmannsthal and to earn some money. But the mid-1920s was not an easy time for Strauss. From 1919 to 1924 he had served as co-Director of the Vienna Opera. He also was engaged in a variety of projects that turned his attention, like Hofmannsthal, to the eighteenth century. He arranged Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens. Later, in the 1920s, he began to re-write Mozart’s Idomeneo. In both his composing and his art collecting, he demonstrated a deepening respect for the French eighteenth century. Strauss was worried about his own creative energies. In the midst of the ferment of the 1920s, he already had taken on the aura of a figure from the past. His most-well-known works dated from between the mid-1880′s and 1911. It was said all too frequently that Strauss was beyond his prime. Furthermore, new developments in both high art and popular culture seemed to make him irrelevant.

The opportunity to achieve success in the most modern medium-film-therefore, was not lost on Strauss. Like Hofmannsthal, he was not content merely to make a film version of the opera. He included new music and followed Hofmannsthal’s lead in recasting the story. Strauss was possessed of a sense of humor, and both he and Hofmannsthal used the film version to respond to quirky elements of the well-known opera plot. They knew that many film-goers would know the opera and smile at how the Marshallin knew that Octavian had fallen in love with Sophie. Could better sense be made of Annina and Valzacchi? The famous handkerchief at the end of the opera becomes Octavian’s cuff in the first of the film.

Like Hofmannsthal, Strauss used the opportunity of writing for the film version to explore questions central to his work. First, as the scores of Ariadne and particularly Intermezzo and later Capriccio reveal, Strauss was in search of an economy and lightness and transparency uncharacteristic of, for example, Death and Transfiguration and Elektra. Here in the film medium, the utility of the eighteenth century as an aesthetic model for the twentieth again could be tested. Second, the relationship between words and music, or the competition between theater and opera, was never far from the composer’s mind. In the film the question becomes not only about the relationship between words and music (as in opera) but also between the visual and the musical. We too often forget that among Strauss’s passions was narrative and landscape painting. The cinematic virtues of this film version provoked Strauss as both composer and conductor to think about the visual and the musical together and how music functions without words with a visual dimension. Could music and pictures achieve the impact of opera?

The visual dimension of opera was a significant issue for Strauss. The cinematic version of Der Rosenkavalier gave him an opportunity to explore the relationship between music and modern techniques of visualization, particularly those that trade in the illusions of visual realism. The cinema offered new opportunities to experiment with time and memory as mediated through pictures and sound.

Strauss conducted two performances of the work, one in Dresden and one in London. One ought not exaggerate the claims of his disappointment. The director of the film was among the most famous Directors of his time. The actors included the leading film stars and one of the great figures of the Viennese Burgtheater and therefore the classical stage, as well as personalities from the operatic world. The film offers us a nearly comic amalgam of different acting styles.

When one watches the film, one thinks about the transition the great figures of the nineteenth century had to make when faced with modern technology. The great Austrian Director Max Reinhardt, a friend and colleague of both Strauss and Hofmannsthal (whose production of the play Elektra inspired Strauss to write the opera and who worked with Strauss in the production of Der Rosenkavalier and later Ariadne), also made a transition to film. Reinhardt produced many Hofmannsthal plays and, together with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, founded the Salzburg Festival. Reinhardt made a film version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 1930s. In both that Reinhardt effort and this Rosenkavalier film, the desire to make the artistic legacy of the past vital and render it effectively to modern audiences through a distinctly contemporary medium and therefore create an audience of otherwise inconceivable breadth should be viewed as having triumphed.