Tales of Edgar Allen Poe

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Tales of Edgar Allen Poe, performed on Oct 15, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Edgar Allan Poe died 150 years and eight days ago. It is one of the great ironies in literary history that he has had far more influence in Europe than he has had America, his native land. This is not to say that Poe has not become a household word. American school children for generations have been exposed to “The Raven” and the Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Poe has also done very well in Hollywood, in large measure as a result of the advocacy of director Roger Corman and actor Vincent Price. Though Poe wrote in a variety of genres, it is the author of horror and suspense, the creator of “Lenore,” that still has a grip on the popular imagination. But precisely his flirtation with the bizarre have prevented Poe from being widely accepted as a serious force in American letters. In the shaping of an American literary tradition, the Puritan legacy, the naïve optimism of a frontier mentality, the rhetorical majesty of Emerson and the epic power of Melville, have seemed far more pervasive and influential. Poe, whose writings have little to do with forging a national American identity, has traditionally been dismissed as derivatively European (though we might wonder how many pages of Poe a young American today is likely to have read, compared to pages of Emerson.)

It took Europe to recognize and convince America of Poe’s originality and significance. His neurotic characters and vague settings indeed did not seem “American,” but that doesn’t mean that Poe was Europhilic either. Rather, what interested Poe, and what in his writings spoke to many writers and artists especially in France and Russia, was the human mind in general, the psychological realm shortly to be explored by Freud, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists. Taking a step beyond E.T.A. Hoffmann, Poe used heavily symbolic narratives to explore our nightmares, and electrified such writers as Charles Baudelaire. It has not been until recently, however, that we have come to realize that in using condensed, overlaid narratives to dramatize the troubled mind, Poe proved himself American after all by transforming a genre that eventually became a seminal form in American literature–the short story.

In music, a similarly circuitous reaction occurred. European composers have long been inspired by Poe just as their literary contemporaries were, but American composers (with the exception of Edward Burlingame Hill) took little notice of Poe as a source for musical dramatization. From the mid-nineteenth century on, Poe’s peculiar mix of the supernatural and symbolic fascinated French and Russian composers who experimented with literary narrative and poetic texts as the basis for musical structure. Their sense of affinity between Poe’s writings and music perhaps rests in the amorphous, abstract, yet psychologically powerful qualities of Poe’s dramatic illustrations, which seem to resemble the qualities of music itself.

Appropriately, Poe provided the basis for one of the great mysteries of French music. Debussy worked for many years on a second opera, The Fall of the House of Usher, of which only an incomplete fragment remains, despite repeated efforts by noted musicians and scholars to construct a performable version. As the works of Schmitt and Debussy’s close friend Caplet indicate, Debussy’s fascination with Poe was not unique. When Russian intellectuals and artists, among them Turgenev, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev turned to Paris during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for inspiration and refuge from political oppression and cultural isolation, they asserted a singular resistance to Germanic culture (partly in response to the historical tensions between Germanic and Slavic politics and traditions). Through France, then, Poe’s ghost migrated to Russia. The connection in music history between French and Russian schools of composition is well-known. Hence the young Rachmaninoff encountered Poe (via Balmont) just a few years after Schmitt composed his Le palais hanté and Debussy was contemplating The Fall of the House of Usher.

The modern composer therefore has a substantial and even formidable tradition to draw upon when it comes to illustrating Poe in music. The Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara implicitly confronts the French/Russian attraction to Poe by offering his own composition, based on “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Despite the striking development of a national school of composition in twentieth-century Finland, that country was for centuries caught between the twin dominations of Russia to the east and Sweden to the west. The music and culture of the countries of that geographical region–Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and northwestern Russia–display many common features, despite considerable difference in language and religion. Rautavaara’s text is based on the final two entries of Pym’s diary, which are also the final two paragraphs of Poe’s story (save the annotation). As Robert Layton points out, Rautavaara was attracted to the proposition of illustrating in music the inscrutable mystery represented by Pym’s fate.

This exploration of Poe through the prism of European music reminds us that, though we often think of American culture as derived from that of our European forbearers, the New World was also quite influential on the cultural self-image of the Old World. A sense of European dominance has especially defined the field of classical music, where American culture seemed wholly the prisoner of European practices, attitudes, and training. But Poe’s presence in literature and music demonstrates that some of the most innovative artistic developments arise from a cross-fertilization of cultural ideas. America has emancipated itself from a self-imposed cultural subordination to the English, French, and German models only in this century, but America’s contribution and threat has loomed large among Europeans since the seventeenth century. Thus, as the example of Poe makes plain, nineteenth-century European culture is unthinkable without the existence and influence of the Americans.

Fin de Siècle

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Fin de Siècle, performed on May 12, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

As we confront the fin de siécle of the twentieth century with the hope and apprehension that often marks our self-consciousness about changing units of time, it is perfectly reasonable that we would want to reflect on the beginning of the current century, to learn what we can from our predecessors’ similar experience, to seek connection with them and so define our own place in history. Only after World War II did the beginning of the twentieth century become sufficiently removed to be made into an object of increasing historical and cultural fascination which, when selectively retold, can help to explain our own times. In Mahler’s music, for example, those elements have been emphasized which seem to suggest the seeds of modernity and a critical commentary on the claims of nineteenth-century romanticism. Mahler has come to embody the tortured loss of innocence about progress and reason with which we associate this century. Few in the early 1900s might have predicted that Mahler would emerge even as one of the most popular composers in the late twentieth century, let alone as a voice of modern angst. Mahler’s iconographic appeal has been triumphant among both general audiences and a very ambitious (if somewhat pretentious) school of intellectuals. At one time we thought that there was too much focus on Beethoven. We may now be approaching a similar phase with Mahler.

But in the years after the post-1960s Mahler craze, our fin-de-siécle penchant for historical reflection has initiated a reawakening of interest in his contemporaries–particularly Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, both of whom are represented in this program. Chronologically, these composers are more colleagues of Arnold Schoenberg than of Mahler. Furthermore, unlike Mahler, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky managed to excel in the field of opera. Both composers were crucial to the evolution of opera in the years between Parsifal (1882) and Wozzeck (1925). Schreker died in 1934 and Zemlinsky less than a decade later (1942, in relative obscurity in Larchmont, New York). Their posthumous careers, however, were not helped by either of the two opposing phenomena of the early twentieth century which so influenced the course of modern musical art: Nazi aesthetics and anti-Semitism on the one hand, and the mid-century dominance of Schoenberg and Stravinsky as pillars of “authentic” modern music, on the other.

Indeed, the aesthetic world which shaped these three composers was not the radical novelty and chaos and turbulence of post-1918 Europe. In this sense, despite their closer temporal proximity to Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Schreker aesthetically belong alongside Mahler. But it is also space as well at time which binds these three great figures together. All three were profoundly influenced by the city of Vienna, in which they all studied. Zemlinsky was among the most successful students of composition to come out of the Vienna Conservatory. Early in his career, he won extravagant praise and quickly became the elder statesman of the post-Brahms generation of Vienna. He taught Alma Mahler (with whom he had an affair), and Arnold Schoenberg (whose brother-in-law he would later become). After World War I, Zemlinsky was extremely active as a conductor in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin. But in the 1920s, his music seemed out of step and therefore fell out of fashion. Franz Schreker, who among other things, premiered Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, became an important teacher in Berlin in the 1920s. His music too experienced some decline in popularity in the 1920s. In Schreker’s case, the early operas of Hindemith, the success of Kurt Weill, and of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck also lent Schreker’s music the aura of being reflective of a pre-World War I aesthetic. But whatever stylistic characterization one wishes to make, these two were great and prolific composers. Through the efforts of Christopher Hailey, Schreker’s modern biographer, and Antony Beaumont–and in the arena of performance, James Conlon–the music of these composers is finally getting a wider distribution.

Mahler, Zemlinsky, Schreker help us to understand the world of fin-de-siécle Vienna in a new and more complicated way. Vienna has long stood in the popular imagination as a center of elegant, insulated culture–the epitome of fanciful visions of European refinement lost after two world wars. Among scholars, fin-de-siécle Vienna has been generally characterized as a city whose people sensed impending doom, a culture “in decline” caught between conservative thinkers who fiercely resisted the coming firestorm of modernism and seminal innovators including Freud and Wittgenstein. But more recent revisions of Viennese history have suggested that, contrary to popular myth-making, modernism was embraced by many: Mahler was lionized in Vienna and extremely successful there. The important break with the tastes of the Viennese audience really occurred with Opp. 9 and 10 of Schoenberg (1907-8). But even in the case of Schoenberg, as the 1913 premiere of Gurrelieder points out, he too enjoyed success in that city. And if we long for the myth of the lost, bittersweet elegance of Viennese society, we might want also to acknowledge how deeply tainted it was by the ubiquitous anti-Semitism which all of these composers experienced.

The historical Vienna was actually defined not by refined frivolity, but by a pervasive cosmopolitanism with all its attendant richness and conflict. It was the center of medicine, science, philosophy, painting, architecture, and theater. Its huge immigrant community and polyglot quarters and neighborhoods lent its artists a remarkably diverse resource of traditions and cultures. True, the image of “old Vienna” in the years between 1780 and 1848 (Joseph II to Franz Joseph) was heavily sentimentalized, but this nostalgia filled the gap between two important historical legacies. One of these was the fact Vienna was a relatively new city, everything before 1683 having been destroyed by the Ottomans; it was therefore an urban landscape of Baroque splendor. The second factor was that as a city Vienna was constantly updating itself, as is best symbolized by the construction of the Ringstrasse. One of the clearest indications of Vienna’s aggressive cosmopolitanism was its pervasive interest in and borrowing from cultures beyond Europe. For example, Mahler’s use of Chinese elements in Das Lied von der Erde is well know. And the collection that Zemlinsky turned to for his Symphonic Songs, Afrika singt, was an extremely popular anthology of poems of the Harlem Renaissance translated –very loosely–into German.

Vienna consisted therefore of much more than the preconceptions we might cull from Freud, Klimt, and Mahler. It was an irresistible magnet to young people of talent. This was particularly true in music and theater; it is no accident that Zemlinsky and Schreker were opera composers and Mahler a great opera conductor. As young artists they were drawn to the city in which musical theater had dominated since the eighteenth century. But having made Vienna their base, where did these three budding legends of modernism go within that city to perfect their craft? What institution on the very forefront of the changing cycle helped each of them break his distinct path into the twentieth century? It was the Vienna Conservatory–an unlikely candidate indeed.

After 1875, Viennese musical life experienced a distinct divide in aesthetic taste between those who associated themselves with Wagner and those who allied with Brahms (though the opposition was not so strongly felt among the composers themselves). The Vienna Conservatory was largely dominated by friends of Brahms. The distinct sense from the mid-1870s on that, despite Bruckner’s presence on the faculty, the Conservatory was anti-Wagnerian and rather conservative was increased by the 1880s, when Brahms, who sat on the Conservatory board of directors, became a powerful force in the musical politics of the city.

One member of the faculty whom Brahms particularly admired was Robert Fuchs. It was through Fuchs’s classes at the Conservatory that all the younger composers on tonight’s program passed. Fuchs taught at the Conservatory from 1875 to 1912. His curriculum was profoundly traditional, reflecting his respect for historical forms and practices. In addition to the composers on tonight’s program, Fuchs taught Hugo Wolf, Franz Schmidt (between 1889-91), Jean Sibelius and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Franz Schreker studied with Fuchs beginning in 1892, and again later studied composition with him. Fuchs considered Schreker “particularly talented” and “remarkably productive.” Fuchs made no secret of his skepticism about Schreker’s great masterpiece Die ferne Klang (from which tonight’s work is drawn), but Schreker retained throughout his life an enormous amount of affection for Fuchs. Their friendship extended through the period in which Fuchs composed his Third Symphony. Fuchs ultimately was very tolerant and relatively neutral with respect to the ambitions of his pupils, though his own compositions never embraced modernism. And many of Fuchs’s students were grateful for his insistence that they command a great variety of forms, particularly classical forms such as the serenade, in which, as Fuchs’s own successful Serenade demonstrates, the teacher himself excelled.

As a composer, Fuchs’s output of nearly 120 works is dominated by chamber music. The first Serenade from 1874 in D major was his first very well known work. There are also one published opera and many songs as well as choral works. The Third Symphony was written nearly a decade after Brahms’s death, and reflects a powerful command of the formal procedures of symphonic writing. But it is not nearly as conservative as one might imagine. The year of composition, 1907, was personally significant to Fuchs because it marked his sixtieth birthday and his award of an honorary pension from the Emperor himself. Fuchs’s remarkable knowledge of form and harmonic procedures are evident in this work; one has a glimpse of the highest standard of compositional practice and of accepted wisdom which a new generation confronted. These are the conventions of composition to which one can consider Schoenberg’s Treatise on Harmony from 1911 as a response.

That it is Robert Fuchs, emblem of Brahmsian conservatism, who should provide the common thread between three utterly disparate modernist composers, elucidates the lesson to be learned from the last fin de siécle. The connection of generations, teacher and pupil, and musical practices allow us to appreciate the evolutionary dimension of the shift from the late nineteenth century to expressionism and finally to modernism in the twentieth. The end of the cycle is therefore never a true rupture, no matter how great the differences in eras or stylistic surfaces seem to be. Rather, like Yeats’s “widening gyre” the new always carries at least some of history in itself.

Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariane and Bluebeard) (1907)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bluebeard!, performed on April 25, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

One of the only truly genuine twentieth-century prodigy composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, took pride in his originality, particularly during his years as a composer for the movies. Many of his successful colleagues in that genre stole shamelessly from the masters of great music. In a moment of rare candor, however, Korngold is reputed to have confided to a friend that many of the ideas in his best music were borrowed from Paul Dukas’s only opera, Ariane et Barbe-bleue. Korngold’s admiration for Dukas’s opera was by no means unique. Richard Strauss, generally not an admirer of the French tradition of composition, singled out Dukas for particular praise. The opera was also held in high regard by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky, and more recently found one of its most ardent defenders in Dukas’s pupil, Olivier Messiaen.

Why, then, is this opera so rarely performed either in concert version or on the stage? It enjoyed a fabulous start, including an American premiere performance by Arturo Toscanini with Geraldine Ferrar at the Metropolitan Opera. We always want to believe that the standard repertory reflects the enduring best of music. If something is not standard and popular, we often assume that there must be a good reason. But that is frequently not the case. The truth is that in the performing arts, particularly music, what remains in the standard repertoire is the result of habits and tastes that have as much to do with convenience and prejudice as with anything we might call quality. If we listen to Ariane, we might have difficulty in finding enough fault with either the music or the libretto of this masterpiece to warrant its disappearance from the stage. The libretto was written intentionally for music and it is not only by a major literary figure (the author of Pelléas et Mélisande) but it also presents a view of the Bluebeard story that ought to make it particularly pertinent to late twentieth-century audiences. In this version, the woman triumphs and much of the opera presents a powerful portrait of an attempt at convincing other women to liberate themselves. In the end Ariane fails, and that in itself gives the opera a level of psychological subtlety that should propel it onto the contemporary stage.

The word masterpiece in relationship to Ariane et Barbe-bleue is used deliberately, in part because Paul Dukas rivaled Johannes Brahms in his puritanical self-criticism. Far fewer works by this composer survive than were written. He felt about his music as Gogol did about the sequel to Dead Souls, and many of Dukas’s compositions suffered the same fate. As a result, however, what remains of Dukas’s work are pieces that are nearly flawless in their construction and refinement. Yet if one asks the average listener what Dukas wrote, one will invariably hear one title: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897), and this most likely because it was appropriated into the same genre in which Korngold excelled–it became part of the film score for Disney’s Fantasia.

If contemporary audiences had more opportunity to hear Dukas’s C-Major Symphony (1896), or his early works for chorus and orchestra (which remain unpublished), or La Peri (1912), the ballet which may have been Dukas’s most successful work for the stage, they might be aware of Dukas as more than the musical support for a rather emotive mouse. Dukas’s posthumous reputation has also not been helped by the politics of French and European music. For instance, Dukas was born from a partly Jewish ancestry, and was not helped by the fact that one of the most powerful forces in late nineteenth-century French music was Vincent d’Indy, who, despite a nominal friendship with Dukas, was known to be as widely a propagator of virulent anti-Semitism as Richard Wagner. Furthermore, Dukas was exceptional in his complete lack of interest in his self-promotion. He was a taciturn and extremely private individual who married late in life (at age fifty-one) and fell largely silent as a composer in his later years. Unlike Strauss, Dukas felt no urge to be polemical by writing music in a manner that was provocatively out of step with the contemporary.

Despite the subtlety and profundity of its musical symbolism and the psychological depth of its rendition of the traditional story, Ariane et Barbe-bleue may have been relegated to obscurity because of unintentional competition from two other nearly contemporary works, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). This conjecture is all the more disturbing when one considers it in context with the other fantastic riches in the operatic repertoire that await revival from the late nineteenth century, particularly in French music. Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus (1895), Fauré’s Penelope (1913), and the operas of Magnard and d’Indy also remain in the shadows. But when one hears the beauties of this score, the powerful representation of its characters’ tangled lives, and the masterful orchestration, the comparison should not be with other works that have fallen out of the repertory but with those that remain. The American Symphony Orchestra is proud to be able to present a twentieth-century masterpiece by a composer whose command of the craft of musical composition was consummate and whose unexpected modesty and artistic self-scrutiny merit not only our admiration, but possibly even a degree of awe.

The Composter’s Advocate: Serge Koussevitzky

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Composter’s Advocate: Serge Koussevitzky, performed on March 17, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Tonight’s concert pays tribute to a legendary and charismatic figure. Among Serge Koussevitzky’s formidable talents was his capacity to use his distinctive personality and dashing style as a source of inspiration for others. He left an indelible impression on Leonard Bernstein and several generations of students and protegés at Tanglewood. No conductor in the history of the Boston Symphony has ever been so beloved by his audience. Few would dispute that under Koussevitzky’s watch the Boston Symphony developed it own unique sound with a Russian-French patina, an elegance, fluidity and transparency decidedly different from the Germanic power of the Chicago Symphony tradition or the luscious sensuality and brilliance of Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra. Koussevitzky by all accounts gave great performances of many works in the standard repertory. However, he is best remembered as a patron of new music, both during his lifetime and through the tradition sustained posthumously by the Koussevitzky Foundation. Although Leopold Stokowski was undeniably adventuresome in his programming, no one could rival Koussevitzky in his support of new music through the act of commissioning new works. Stravinsky, Martin, Bartók, Dutilleux, and Copland, just to name a few, saw many of their finest works come into being as a result of Koussevitzky’s request for new works.

Despite all of this, there is a strange undercurrent in the posthumous legacy of Koussevitzky. One can detect it even in the program notes to this concert. Gary Karr alludes to the rumor that Koussevitzky did not write his own concerto. Bernard Jacobson quotes Stravinsky’s sardonic observation that Koussevitzky seemed unaware of massive errors in the parts and score he was using. The result was a catastrophic set of performances of the Ode on today’s program. There is in addition the testimony of Nicholas Slonimsky, who loved to tell of how he had to teach Koussevitzky The Rite of Spring, and even rebar it for him. And then there are the stories of how the members of the Boston Symphony knew when to come in at the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: they watched Richard Burgin, the concertmaster, who in turn observed when Koussevitzky’s hand went below a certain button on his jacket. The implication was that Koussevitzky was somehow deficient in conducting technique and basic musical skills. This seems quite implausible. For reasons that are not entirely self-evident, Koussevitzky is not remembered with the reverence accorded to other past masters, the way Toscanini, Szell, Furtwängler, Reiner, or now Karajan and Bernstein are. Stokowski was accused periodically of having been a charlatan, and Koussevitzky came in for his own share of critical snobbery, but in the massive output of CD reissues, Stokowski has still done better than Koussevitzky. Yet Koussevitzky was an international star with a prodigious role in twentieth-century music history and a devoted following among the greatest musicians of his day.

Born in Russia in 1874, Koussevitzky made his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1908, after gaining a substantial reputation throughout Europe as a double-bass soloist. He quickly acquired stature as a conductor notably through numerous guest engagements with the London Symphony. In 1924 he became music director of the Boston Symphony, a post he held for 25 years. With the BSO, he commissioned such works as Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and Hindemith’s Konzertmusik, among numerous other works. But it was with the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, which he established in 1942, that the conductor ushered into music history some of the finest works of the twentieth century, including Britten’s Peter Grimes, Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard, Copland’s Symphony No. 3, Milhaud’s Symphony No. 2, Villa-Lobos’s Madona, Blitzstein’s Regina, Malipiero’s Sinfonia No. 4, Piston’s Symphony No. 3, Harris’s Symphony No. 7, Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, Honegger’s Symphony No. 5, Fine’s String Quartet, Thomson’s Lord Byron, Dallapiccola’s Tartiniana, and Bernstein’s Serenade. After his death in 1951, the Foundation carried on with works by almost every major composer of the century, including Bloch, Chavez, Riegger, Carter, Schuman, Sessions, Toch, Foss, Tippet, Blackwood, Ginastera, Walton, Cowell, Poulenc, Berio, Henze, Krenek, Babbitt, Crumb, Cage, Del Tredici, Penderecki, and Birtwistle.

Perhaps it was Koussevitzky’s charm, success as an organizer, and his personal access to wealth that made him the source of envy. But the fact remains that he was a great conductor, an inspiring presence on the podium, a virtuoso of note, a competent composer, and a suave but canny observer of contemporary music. He managed to make the Boston Symphony an utterly crucial part of the cultural and civic life of that city and all of New England. He founded a school and festival which has remained a model for the entire world, through which practically every major composer, conductor, and musician has passed at some point in his or her career. After settling in Boston, Koussevitzky did not do much guest conducting and traveled reluctantly. His discography is only now slowly being made available in digital format. Tonight’s concert should inspire us to reflect on what a difference a magnetic, full-time, non-jet-setting music director of an orchestra can achieve in a city; how an orchestra can function in the culture as more than the instrument of subscription concerts; how it can generate new music and not simply be a museum intent on conservation. Koussevitzky showed how a great orchestra can play an educational role in the community, and how magnetism, elegance, generosity of spirit, and a vision can legitimately be considered an integral part of being a music director and conductor. The overwhelming fact is that no conductor in the twentieth century, not Toscanini and not Furtwängler, left such a decisive imprint on the character and direction of twentieth-century music as did Serge Koussevitzky. Through the commissions he gave and the institutions he created, Koussevitzky changed the course of history and brought into being icons of twentieth-century culture such as Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.

For Koussevitzky, conducting was not the act of making a highly personalized case about an existing canon. Conducting was not merely an act of interpretation. For Koussevitzky, conducting was an act of advocacy not of dead composers but of contemporaries who needed to be prodded and supported in order to write the next new work for orchestra, so that the canon of twentieth-century music would eventually rival that of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. From the Edition Russes de Musique (a publishing house he founded in 1909) to the last commission, 48 years after his death and at the end of the twentieth century, we can observe with confidence that the legacy of twentieth-century orchestral music does indeed rival the historical body of work upon which Furtwängler and Toscanini expended most of their efforts. That this is the case is in no small measure due to Koussevitzky. The American Symphony Orchestra is particularly pleased to remind us all that the Koussevitzky tradition of support for new music continues as the Koussevitzky Foundation proceeds to commission works for the concert stage.

Music of the 1960s

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music of the 1960s, performed on January 17, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Since the eighteenth century, it has been customary for scholars and critics to try to understand history in terms of discrete periods about which large generalizations may be made– the Age of Enlightenment, the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, etc. Such periodization is a dangerous enterprise. The telling details of the past are often subsumed, and the complexities and cross-currents of life are obscured by the reductive effort to render the chaotic coherent. Too often, we characterize the past in general terms which are germane to our attempt to explain our own times. As the German writer Friedrich Schlegel aptly observed, historians are often prophets in retrospect.

When we look back at the 1960s from our present perspective at the end of the century, we tend to explain that turbulent decade using evidence which we believe was decisive to the historical participants of the time. We instantly envision, as David Schiff rightly points out, a limited number of scenes from what time has judged to be the most memorable phenomena: student protest, the Viet Nam war, the civil rights movement, generation gaps, sexual liberation, the Beatles, the counter-culture. The 1960s, especially for those who actually lived through them, seems to have been an utterly unprecedented historical era–a watershed comprised of pivotal moments of social change and revolution. But how do we judge this watershed? Among the most important assessments at the time was a tract called The Greening of America (1970) by Charles Reich, a utopian mishmash of predictions, none of which have turned out to be accurate and which are now buried as mere memory as is the book itself. This is not to say that the decade’s euphoria and enthusiasms did not leave their permanent residue on manners, mores, and beliefs. But a confident belief in the positive revolutionary consequences of 1960s’ culture is no more convincing than the tiresome neo-conservative argument of a perfect world in the 1950’s, ruined by the subsequent decade. The modern agenda of cultural conservatism is very much driven by the tacit acceptance of the view that the 1960s were indeed a transformative decade whose influence must be reversed in order to restore American culture to health.

As the distinctiveness (or lack thereof) and legacy (if there is one) of the 1960s continues to be debated as myth and as history, there is little doubt that whatever revision takes place, the visual and musical symbols of that decade are fixed in our memories. But as the meaning of these symbols are contested by accounts that now search for continuities from the 1950s to the 1960s, and as we currently struggle over values, religion, and politics, we may do well to ask what the concert music of that period can tell us . If indeed there is a consistency that lies below the surface of all this apparent revolution, what does the orchestral music of that era reveal that the dominant popular culture, or journalism, or emblematic clichés and video clips can not?

Our first instinct might be to say that the music on this program represents how marginal concert music became at that time, when it was eclipsed by popular music and culture. The 1960s, however, was a remarkably vibrant time for concert music. It saw the triumph of American artists such as Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern, who were in their prime, while at the same time, the older pre-war generation of European masters were still active. The long-playing record and new stereophonic technology captured a larger mass-audience than ever before. No doubt there were rumblings about the obsolescence of the orchestra and acoustic concerts as old-fashioned, but the debate about the future of music was a debate about something vital and ongoing–not a nostalgic or conservative quarrel about a dying art form in need of resuscitation.

The composers on today’s program believed that writing concert music in the high art tradition was an important task with clear political and cultural overtones. All of these composers lived through the debates over modernism in music of the mid-twentieth century, when lines were sharply drawn. For them, disciplined modernism was an unequivocal resistance to fascism and tyranny. Today, some revisionists would like us to see hidden affinities between Schoenberg (and his advocates) and autocracy, rigidity, and inhuman abstraction. But during the 1960s, the complex and revolutionary sounding modernism evident in much of today’s music, was highly regarded and respected. Even Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky found themselves drawn to a more aggressive modernism during this decade. For them, modernist music embodied a progressive, triumphant reply to the charges of degeneracy and disfigurement of beauty articulated at length by followers of Hitler and Stalin. The 1960s, after all, were close in time (indeed, closer than we are to the 1960s) to the 1948 Zhdanov decrees (Stalin’s condemnation of modernism) and the cultural politics of Nazi Germany. The historical memories of this afternoon’s composers encompassed an earlier, very different time from the decade in which they produced their greatest works. This is especially true of Luigi Dallapiccola, who witnessed the close collaboration of conservative Italian composers with Mussolini.

In Europe, the political and aesthetic radicalism of post-1945 clearly expressed a desire to cleanse Europe of its past evils, the mass destruction of World War II. In America, this link between politics and art was not as clear and convincing. One reason that modernism–even as represented by Elliott Carter–seems stronger in Europe than in the United States is because American audiences did not necessarily hear in twentieth-century modernism the same echoes of liberation and spiritual freedom. They did not as urgently perceive the necessity for a break from the tempting and dangerous connotations of post-Wagnerian Romanticism. Modernism to American ears seemed arbitrary, obscure, and alienating in its highbrow complexity and incomprehensibility. American audiences’ response to 1960s concert music revealed that the historically powerful connection between progressive art and progressive politics was in the American consciousness tenuous at best. In contrast, for Witold Lutoslawski, modernism was a sign of the victory of Polish national identity over Stalinist domination. Modernism in Polish music flourished after the successful confrontation between Gomulka and the Soviets in 1956. Poland became the scene of the most progressive art-making in the visual and performing arts within the Soviet block and a powerful link between east and west. His music may have struck some American hearers as cerebral and abstract, but for him detachment was hardly the point.

The turning of the tide which marks the end of modernism’s moment in the center stage of the twentieth century is audible in Luciano Berio’s self-conscious Sinfonia, even though it is entirely contemporaneous with Elliott Carter’s magisterial revelation of the power of modernism in his Concerto. All these works are not just about music, but explicitly about politics and history. Far from being abstract or cerebral, they have an intense commitment, and it is precisely the emotional intensity, economy, and elegance of the music that can be appreciated without anxiety thirty years later. A conventional bit of wisdom inherited from Samuel Johnson–that artistic greatness is a test of the ages–is perhaps most true for music which in its own time was acknowledged, respected, but not entirely loved. What the music on this program tells us about the 1960s, which rock music, television shows, political events, and the familiar icons do not, is the enormous and ironic debt the 1960s had to the very past it was trying to wipe out, to the power of historical continuities as opposed to ephemeral surface changes. All the innovations we are prone to recall about the 1960s were dependent on and played out within a context of powerful and convincing modernist enthusiasm, not only in music but in painting, literature, poetry, and architecture. History is not about victors but about the restoration of memory.

Future generations may, when they write about the 1960s, begin to recognize the traditions audible in today’s concert as characteristic of a decade whose revolution was founded on the knowledge that the inventive imagination can offer a critical response to the past that does not descend into nostalgia. The 1960s were about the confidence to change, destroy, build anew–to clean house so to speak. Whether that actually happened or not is irrelevant. But the confidence is diametrically opposed to the nostalgia and insecurity that marks our current adulation of idealized moments in the past, rife with sentiments which suggest that the past is better than the present and that the future will be worse, and that the best we can do particularly in music is be pale imitators of glorious days gone by. The composers of this program fought the politics of the past through the notion that the art associated with it needed to be set aside and a more just present needed to be created which possessed its own unique aesthetic signature. They believed that the musicians of their own day were in a position to improve on past traditions. Our current sensibilities seem strikingly different and quite the reverse. At the end of the century, culture seems more than comfortable with evocative sentimentality. The modernist composers on today’s program struggled to replace sentimental reflection with action, and offer their listeners the sense of elation that accompanies a transcendence of familiar expectations and complacency.

Miske (“In the Forest”) (1901)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music and Visual Imagination, performed on Nov 11, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

M.K. Ciurlionis (1875-1911) is with little doubt the leading artistic personality of turn-of-the-century Lithuania. In modern history Lithuania has witnessed the subordination of its national culture (particularly linguistically) to those of Poland and Russia. Therefore, the need for a profoundly patriotic figure of international stature in painting and music has allowed Ciurlionis to emerge as a significant presence in Lithuanian art and has added immeasurably to his posthumous reputation. It is not simply coincidence that the first President of independent Lithuania after the fall of Communism, Vytautas Landsbergis, is a leading scholar of the work of Ciurlionis. Even in Soviet times, Ciurlionis was celebrated as manifesting in music and painting a distinctly Lithuanian voice.

Ciurlionis died young—just a few months before his thirty-sixth birthday. Nevertheless, during his short lifetime his work already attracted the attention of leading figures in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, where he had studied. He began his career as a musician, studying at the Warsaw Institute of Music, from which he graduated in 1899. In his twenties he also tried his hand at literary writing, although he would ultimately be best known as a painter. In 1901, the symphonic poem Mi_ke (In the Forest) was composed for and won a competition in Warsaw. In the Forest is particularly interesting because its composition coincided with Ciurlionis’s first efforts at painting. Only after completing his musical studies in Leipzig (under Jadassohn and Reinecke) did Ciurlionis begin formal training as a painter. Between 1902 and 1905 he studied painting intensively while supporting himself as a teacher of music. Although in retrospect Ciurlionis’s reputation is most firmly established as a painter, he continued to work as a conductor, teacher, and composer until the end of his life.

One of the most striking aspects of Ciurlionis’s work is the remarkable integration of the visual and the musical. Especially in his later work, Ciurlionis created paintings that were organized on a musical basis and were designed to embody musical concepts, such as the “sonata” paintings entitled The Pyramids (1909) and The Sea (1908). Indeed, there are seven visual sonatas with separate images corresponding to musical movements, entitled Allegro, Andante, Scherzo, and Finale. Among his earliest work is the cycle of seven paintings entitled Funereal Symphony. There are also a number of visual preludes and fugues. In addition to the specific paintings, Ciurlionis often created corresponding musical compositions as well, as in the case of The Sea.

The subject of tonight’s piece is a landscape, a theme which resonates throughout his painting. Ciurlionis painted a number of works entitled Mi_ke; the first dates from 1904. The painting reproduced here (1907) is among the best known of his many landscapes. The symphonic poem In the Forest was perhaps Ciurlionis’s first major musical success. It begins in C major and although a fantasy, has a clear process of thematic development. There are hints of Lithuanian folk-sources. The piece is significant because it gives the listener an insight into Ciurlionis’s sense of organic unity and his concern for instrumental color. Although the later tone poem The Sea has often been presented as a superior work, In the Forest engages precisely because of its unabashed expression of the composer’s intense attachment to his native environment and culture. It is free from the self-consciousness and lack of economy that characterizes The Sea, written after Ciurlionis went to Leipzig to study.

Despite the fact that his posthumous reputation is most heavily weighted toward his painting, we must remember that Ciurlionis above all remains a musician. What one hears tonight are not the efforts of a young painter dabbling in music, but of a young musician with a complex understanding of the relation of music to other arts. In this sense, Ciurlionis’s synthesis of music and painting associates him with Russian Symbolism, a powerful artistic movement during his lifetime. Music takes primacy in the relationship between the visual and the musical because, the Symbolists believed, it was the proper objective of painting to turn from discrete representation and narration toward a status more like music, a sensory experience independent of the familiar physical objects around us that we mistake for “reality.”

But while the intellectual influence of the Symbolists, and the musical legacy of Wagner and Chopin (in the piano music) may be discerned, there is also something different here. The originality of the music reflects two central ambitions of the young Ciurlionis: first, to find a voice that is distinctly Lithuanian without being provincial through music, that assists in evoking the essential experience of being in the Lithuanian landscape; and second, to use art and music in a free, mystical fashion, employing color and light. It is precisely the atmospheric and coloristic instincts of Ciurlionis the musician that led him to experiment with color, fantasy, and symbol in the painterly work, which has ensured his lasting fame as an artist.

Music and Visual Imagination

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music and Visual Imagination, performed on Nov 11, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The Russian poet Aleksandr Blok made the observation that there are only two kinds of time and therefore two kinds of space. The first is historical and is reflected in the calendar. The other dimension of time and space is musical. Blok speaks of the musical time and space as being tied essentially to nature as an experience that comes to us when we set civilized consciousness aside and surrenDer to “the global orchestra.” For the Russian Symbolists of the turn of the century, the search of the artist was to penetrate the artificial screen of realism and the illusions created by narrative coherency, and to find the cosmic in the specific. Andrei Bely, perhaps the most original voice of Russian Symbolism, placed music as the highest of the arts precisely because it proceeded through time and was not static. Rhythm rather than melody was the essence of music, since emotional expression required time to be felt. For Bely, passion and emotion, even when experienced visually, utilized the temporal dimension offered by music. Music dominated the other arts because it was beyond civilization and reason—at once utterly natural and earthbound, and at the same time pure and abstract. The laws of all art could be organized musically, so to speak, just as the laws of physics could be organized mathematically. The essence of the real was abstracted. Music was the guiding principle toward which art in the use of space, dimension and color should turn. With respect to meaning, visual art should thus be like music: indirect in its allusions and therefore ultimately symbolic.

However, despite the philosophical prejudice expressed on behalf of music during the era during which the music on this program was written, in terms of social history, precisely the opposite was occurring. In European culture, the nineteenth century can easily be regarded as the century of music. By 1900, however, the high-water mark of concert music’s significance as a social factor had been reached. The twentieth century would become the age of the visual, beginning with the explosion of innovation in painting and sculpture in the earliest decades, continuing through the rise of photography and the silent film, the sound film, and ultimately with television and video.

All of the composers on tonight’s program initially focused on music but eventually developed a deep interest in painting and visual imagery. One of them, Mikolajus Ciurlionis, eventually became better known as a painter than as a musician. The generation of Ciurlionis, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alexander Scriabin—all of whom were born in the same decade—was profoundly impressed by the aesthetic philosophies prevalent at the turn of the century. They sought to eliminate not only the boundaries between reason and emotion (and therefore between the rational and the seemingly irrational) but the demarcations between fields of knowledge: science, ethics, and epistemology. Central to their various mystical and pseudo-mystical speculations was an effort to seek meaning beyond language and to bridge the physical and metaphysical worlds. In the arts, much of this effort to find a unified theory through aesthetic experience had been propelled by Wagner, but this later generation went well beyond that starting point by actively seeking out the philosophical implications contained in the connections between sight and hearing. Schoenberg, for example, became friendly with the painter Wassily Kandinsky and contributed to the journal Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky for his part produced his own opera entitled Yellow Sound. Kandinsky would become the pioneer of non-objective art, just as Schoenberg would help return twentieth-century music to traditions of pure formalism.

At the turn of the century, visual art was both Schoenberg and Scriabin at the center of a new religion of art. The search for an underlying organic logic which could perhaps only be intuited through different aesthetic media working in concert together led Scriabin to resort to that panacea of nineteenth-century rationalism, mechanical technology. The remains of his efforts to design a sound-and-color machine still exist in a dilapidated state in the museum that was once his home. Ciurlionis, who like Scriabin died young (and within four years of the Russian composer), began to paint and write music almost interchangeably, in order to generate a fusion of both aesthetic experiences.

In tonight’s exploration of the early twentieth century’s engagement with the crossroads between the musical and the visual, Schoenberg’s Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (1930) represents a transition from the mystical symbolism of Ciurlionis and Scriabin to the reassertion of a less integrated parallelism between music and the visual evident in the Hindemith. Schoenberg wrote this piece many years after he had stopped working systematically as a painter. Nevertheless, the work owes much to Schoenberg’s remarkable gifts as a visual artist and his practical engagement with the making of art. The Mathis Der Maler Symphony, perhaps Hindemith’s most successful piece for orchestra, is in Bely’s terms, ultimately a work in which time is understood both historically and musically. Hindemith attempts to evoke the substance of the work of art, the experience of the viewer in front of the altarpiece, and the struggle of the artist in making it. Music assumes all the roles we might assign in a film or opera (from which the music is Derived). Although Hindemith’s strategy is more akin to that undertaken by Max Reger in his 1913 Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin, (performed by the ASO in 1994), Hindemith’s music can be understood as having been influenced by the rising importance of the film medium. We should not underestimate how radically our sense of time and musical space has been influenced by the motion picture.

In the case of George Gershwin, many of the strands of speculation engaged in by his European contemporaries find American equivalents. Like Ciurlionis and Schoenberg, Gershwin turned to painting, and became obsessed by both making art and collecting it. More than Schoenberg and Hindemith, the film was a crucial part of the culture in which he worked, for it was America that pioneered the business of moving pictures. Like Scriabin, Gershwin was fascinated by technology and modern instruments of reproduction and the transmission of sound, (as is evidenced by the “city sounds” in the Second Rhapsody). In this sense too he was truly American. But what sets Gershwin apart from the others was not only his greatness as a composer of popular music. Precisely because his audience cut across social classes in a way unimaginable to the others on tonight’s program, he had an instinct for the listening habits of his age. Furthermore he knew that in the 1920s, many American artists including Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keefe, and Joseph Stella, were inspired in their painting by music. The synthesis of the visual and the musical was therefore not located so much in the work of art itself (as had been advocated by the Symbolists), as in the act of listening visually, and by being inspired through the auditory experience to see differently.

Gershwin’s visual ambitions were neither musical nor abstract, nor even symbolist. They reflect a much more common-sense realization that hearing and seeing both take place in time and space, making the cultivation of the eye a potentially powerful experience for the musician, just as the training of the ear might help the artist. As we celebrate the centennial of Gershwin’s birth, we should revisit his painting and engagement with visual art as a way of understanding his musical ambitions during the last decade of his life. Tonight’s concert-goers may encounter unfamiliar dimensions of the mature Gershwin’s ambition, including those of making a name for himself in the field of symphonic music as a “serious” classical composer, and of becoming a fine painter. Perhaps nothing represents these dimensions better than Gershwin’s portrait of Arnold Schoenberg. We present it here with other art works connected to tonight’s program, so that audience members may experience for themselves each composer’s intended connections between hearing and seeing.

The Eternal Road, Acts III and IV

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Kings and Prophecies: A Road of Promise, performed on Oct 4, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Whether in excerpts or in its entirety, The Eternal Road has eluded revival for over sixty years. One might think that such a grand spectacle created through the collaboration of three seminal figures of twentieth-century European culture-composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) , author Franz Werfel (1890-1945), and Director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943)-would have seen the light of many days. The difficult history of this vanished epic stems, however, not only from the legal morass which led to the collapse of the New York production or even the deteriorated state of the surviving performance materials (recently edited brilliantly by the scholars of the Kurt Weill Foundation, making today’s performance possible). A primary reason for the disappearance of The Eternal Road was that it was written by three German-speaking Jews-one from Dessau and Berlin, one from Prague, one from Vienna-at the dawning of the catastrophe of the Nazis’ seizure of power and Hitler’s surprising legitimization by foreign leaDers and nations. The Eternal Road opened before Kristallnacht and vanished before World War II, the Holocaust, and the birth of the state of Israel. In other words, the intellectual, social, and cultural world which engenDered this masterpiece birth was completely overtaken by subsequent events. As a result, those who bothered to take a look at The Eternal Road since the 1950s have been struck by how out of step it appears with respect to the events that immediately followed it and with the realities of the second half of the twentieth century.

One concrete example will suffice. Recently the distinguished Weill scholar David Drew prepared an excerpt of the final act (Act IV) of The Eternal Road for concert performance in 1998 for the Proms in London and in later in Vienna. The excerpt, entitled “Propheten,” replaces the original ending with an ending from the preceding Act III, “Kings.” Drew made the change in part for musical effect. The change solves a difficult ideological dilemma. In the original form (which you will see today), the Jews retain their “exceptional” status as a people without a homeland or political entity of their own. Assimilation into the hostile host nation is not discredited and armed resistance to oppression is represented as improbable and implausible. The Jews seem fated to wanDer forever among other nations and be faced perpetually with minority status and a legitimate pressure to acculturate and assimilate. If one compares the ending of The Eternal Road to Felix Mendelssohn’s setting of Goethe’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht, one is struck by a vital difference. Mendelssohn, although bearing the most celebrated name in early nineteenth-century German-Jewish history, had been converted and become a devout Protestant. Nevertheless through his music he celebrated with empathy and pride the courageous resistance of the Druids to the siege on their traditions and beliefs laid by violent Christian attackers. In contrast, The Eternal Road ends much more ambiguously with a vague hope for a return to Zion among a defeated and divided community, bowing to a fate of perpetual exclusion, persecution, and powerlessness.

Of the three authors of The Eternal Road, Kurt Weill was the least distant from Judaism. He was also the youngest. Despite his premature death in 1950, he has emerged as the most well-known of the three. Unlike Franz Werfel, Weill embraced America and turned his back both musically and politically on his German past. He is followed in reputation by Max Reinhardt, whose impact on Hollywood and whose founding of the Salzburg Festival as well as his remarkable career as a Director has kept his name alive. Reinhardt was undoubtedly the most original Director in German-speaking Europe; his production of Elektra inspired Strauss to write his opera. He had some success in America and in 1935 directed a legendary film of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Mickey Rooney and James Cagney, which used Mendelssohn’s music adapted by Reinhardt’s fellow Viennese é;immigratesé;, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Franz Werfel has for English-speaking audiences vanished into obscurity. He was a gifted poet as a young man and was one of the people who first recognized the talent of Franz Kafka. He remains a hero to the Armenian people for his novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), which brought the tragic massacre of the Armenians to international attention. Although now largely forgotten as a novelist (his historical novel Verdi [1924]merits attention), he also authored several brilliant short novels including one of the most perceptive novels of adolescent school life ever written, translated as Class Reunion (1927). Werfel also went on to Hollywood and enjoyed his greatest success with his screen adaptation of his best-selling novel celebrating Catholicism, The Song of Bernadette (1941). Accompanied to America by his notorious wife Alma Mahler (an anti-Semite, as was her stepfather, the painter Carl Moll) Werfel published in 1937 a heartbreaking essay “Upon the Meaning of Imperial Austria.” In this essay he romanticizes the Habsburg Empire as a political entity holding the promise of transcending the evils of nationalism, in which the Jews could function as ideal citizens, as cosmopolitan people of ideas and culture without irrational allegiances to blood and soil. All three creators of The Eternal Road were in fact exemplars of the exceptional status of the assimilated Jew as protagonist of modernist aesthetics, anti-nationalism, and the virtues of art and culture. They were genuine Europeans: Jews who had realized for themselves the promise of emancipation from the ghetto by helping to create an international community of science and culture seemingly beyond politics.

The success of Nazism and of anti-Semitism in Europe during the late 1920s and early 1930s (including the anti-Semitism of Austro-fascism) challenged the funDamental premises of the majority of German-speaking Jews who had enjoyed until 1933 the most promising experience of integration into a non-Jewish European environment. The degree of assimilation in Eastern Europe and even in France was not nearly as great as what had occurred in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the persistence of official and unofficial anti-Semitism. In 1933, however, all German Jews who qualified under Nazi law as being non-Aryan were forced to come to terms with their identity as Jews, despite intermarriage, conversion and upbringing with very little understanding of Jewish history and tradition.

The Eternal Road closes with the prospect of another Babylonian exile, which the authors knew was a period in Jewish history of great intellectual achievement. The Babylon of modern times was to be America, albeit a reluctant America, whose immigration policies were restrictive and prevented millions of Jews from surviving. By the time of their collaboration, Weill, Reinhardt, and Werfel knew very well that tens of thousands of German Jews were seeking to emigrate, but that no nation including America would have them. They knew that Palestine was essentially closed to mass immigration. They also realized that many German Jews wanted to stay in Germany, hoping that the Nazi regime would be temporary, and were enduring indignity and hardship in the expectation that bad times would pass once again. It is in the eerie historical interlude marked by fading hope and betrayal by trusted friends and neighbors that The Eternal Road came into being. None of the authors, actors, audience members in 1937 had an accurate idea of what history would actually bring to the Jews of Europe. But despite the efforts of these three individuals to generate a politically powerful integration of the Bible and modern history, they never conceived of either the extent of the disaster that was already looming or the possibility that the Zionist dream would be realized.

What happened of course is that over six million Jews perished and a Jewish state was created in 1948. From the perspective of the present day The Eternal Road, particularly its conclusion, seems at best naïve if not erroneous. Zionism’s success and the history of the state of Israel during the past fifty years have proven, often painfully, a point that was perhaps incomprehensible to the authors of The Eternal Road. That point is that the Jews are not doomed to be exceptional. Given the chance to have their own political life and act as a nation, possess power include military power, and engage in politics as a majority, Jews naturally display all the virtues, vices, shifts and conflicts of any nation and culture. The exceptional Jews of European history-artists, scientists, and intellectuals-could not have foreseen the successful normalization of the Jewish people after 1948 in Israel, but operated only on the premise of a continuation of the European diaspora experience. Even in America, since Jews were white and not the dominant minority in an environment where race was the decisive criterion of discrimination, the Jews, in contrast to all European experience, found their way into the majority and have become normalized in the sixty years since the opening night of The Eternal Road, particularly after 1945.

The obscuring of the conclusion of The Eternal Road may therefore be convenient, but in my view it does no justice to the integrity of the original conception. The Eternal Road is a powerful work of storytelling, music, and theater, and the ending is in fact more affecting because it reminds us of the psychic and material devastation experienced by German Jewry in the mid 1930s. Death camps have rightly dominated our image of what the Nazis did, but we should not dismiss the traumas created by the segregation, dispossession, and violence that led up to that ultimate horror. The Eternal Road tells the story of a vital and patriotic community of Jews dismembered, expropriated, and persecuted by their neighbors who tragically embraced the leaDership of the Nazis.

Dwelling on what was best about the Jews in their European historical career, the three authors cling to the idea that what is ultimately human is not essentially political. It is not wealth or power that make life worth living, but rather the life of the mind and imagination-traditions of belief, philosophy, literature, learning, art, music, theater. Exile is not permanently devastating because the spiritual possibilities of the future always survive political disenfranchisement. The proper context in which to consiDer The Eternal Road, therefore, is not in the ideology of the Zionists who realized that the Jewish people could only be secure if they had a politics of their own and consequently reversed the conceit of an apolitical or supranational Utopia. Nor is it in the romanticization of minority status in which a people compensate for a restricted form of life by making culture and learning a primary tenet of identity. Today’s audience might think of The Eternal Road in the context of Sigmund Freud’s exile to England and the perspective on past and future evident in his three late essays The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism.

Our decision to revive The Eternal Road coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the state of Israel and the centennial celebration of the city of New York. It is ironic that both these events pay homage to the two most successful historical responses to the fate of the Jews so eloquently portrayed in The Eternal Road. There is no need to apologize for the ideology of this spectacle. The revival is in fact timely because it reminds us of the need to restore the memory of the German Jewish experience and the plight of European Jews before the outbreak of World War II. Precisely because of the triumphs we are celebrating, we can afford to be empathetic to points of view regarding Jewish history and European history that flourished before 1939 that do not point inexorably either to the Holocaust or the creation of the State of Israel.

Finally, as Guy Stern and Edward Harsh point out, The Eternal Road was a self-conscious effort on the part of its three authors to break the apparently impenetrable barrier between high art and popular culture. This opera/theatrical drama was designed to appeal in all its elegance and profundity to a mass audience without descending into cynical theatricality. In this sense, it contributed to a pivotal and defining debate in twentieth-century music. What kind of music constitutes the voice of modernity, and for whom should contemporary concert music be written? It is fitting to open our season-long look at the twentieth century with The Eternal Road, which set a very high standard for what we might today deem a “crossover” genre, from which future generations can easily learn. Art, entertainment, and moral edification are brought together in this work in an unforgettable and brilliant manner.

Nadia Boulager: Teacher of the Century

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Nadia Boulager: Teacher of the Century, performed on May 13, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

If one imagines a history of twentieth-century music written around 1970, one would assume that such a history would describe twentieth-century musical modernism as a phenomenon shaped by two dominant and somewhat opposing figures: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Both men might be legitimately charged with an egocentrism that made them consciously present themselves as the founders of modernist traditions. Throughout his career, Schoenberg maintained a powerful role as a teacher, but for all his irrepressible tendency toward authoritarianism, he was generous in giving his time to younger colleagues (such as Alban Berg or John Cage), particularly those eager to follow in the master’s footsteps. In marked contrast, Stravinsky never taught in the formal sense. Nevertheless his work and aesthetic outlook became the impetus for a school of composition which seemed explicitly to compete with the tradition that Schoenberg sought to create. Writing at the end of his life from Los Angeles in 1949, Schoenberg noted that American music was in the first instance characterized by apathy and a “commercial racket.” But he then commented that “there is a great activity on the part of American composers, la Boulanger’s pupils, the imitators of Stravinsky…they have taken over American musical life, lock, stock, and barrel…”

The individual whom Schoenberg mentioned so derisively was Nadia Boulanger. It would be hard to imagine a more charismatic and forceful personality in the history of twentieth-century music than Boulanger. She began her career as a composer studying under Fauré, but eventually turned to performance in keyboard (she also studied with Charles Marie Widor) and conducting. She was central to the rebirth of public performances of pre-classical music during the first part of this century, particularly music from the Renaissance and Baroque. Boulanger’s first performance in the United States was as the organist in the premiere of the Symphony for Organ by her most famous pupil, Aaron Copland. Boulanger was the first woman to conduct the major symphony orchestras in the United States. One of her last appearances was here in New York with the New York Philharmonic in 1962, when she conducted works by her sister and the Fauré Requiem. With characteristic elegance and generosity, she dedicated the Sunday afternoon performance to the memory of Bruno Walter, who had died the night before.

Boulanger first gained a reputation as a teacher at the Ecole Normale. From 1920 on, she was on the faculty of the American Conservatory at Fontainbleu. During World War II, she taught in the United States. Boulanger’s teaching was firmly rooted in her allegiance to Stravinsky (whose Dumbarton Oaks Concerto she premiered). Before World War II, she had already become the teacher of choice for aspiring composers. In addition to those on tonight’s program, her pupils included Jean Francaix and the Americans Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Elliot Carter, David Diamond, Walter Piston, Louise Talma, Elie Siegmeister, and Marc Blitzstein.

The history of modernism in America across all the disciplines is rooted in the confrontation between nativism and Europe’s pervasive influence. The iconoclasm of Charles Ives and the experimentalism of Henry Cowell were self-assertive reactions to the continued dependence of Americans on European models. In the 1920s, Paris became a veritable Mecca for painters and writers as well as musicians. In the United States, the role played during the 1930s and 1940s by such towering émigré figures as Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Bloch produced an American following for German and Austrian innovations.

Apart from the specific history of European influences transmitted through teachers in this century, when we consider the influence of teachers in general terms, we try to understand the degree to which the student assimilates the ideas and perspectives that have been taught, as well as the process through which an independent identity is forged. Haydn’s reputation as a teacher of Beethoven is well known, but what precisely did Beethoven learn from that experience? Certainly Thomas Attwood actually studied with Mozart, but in the end to what effect? Schoenberg’s influence on Berg and Webern is unmistakable, but how do we assess shared influence in the context of the striking differentiation of style and ambition? In the case of American musical modernism, however, we also confront the larger question of nationalist cultural ambition. Why did so many quintessentially American-sounding composers emerge from the classroom of Nadia Boulanger?

Perhaps the answer lies partially in Boulanger’s pedagogical approach, which may contains some ironic clues on the matter of influence. Can one speak of a uniform impact on Boulanger’s students, particularly the American ones? The disciplined modernist Neoclassicism with which Boulanger was associated did result, one might argue, in an American school of which Aaron Copland was the most elegant exponent. However the orchestral version of the Piano Variations on tonight’s program comes from a period of Copland’s music which predates the era of Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and the Third Symphony, works which have in whole or part become emblematic of Copland’s musical rhetoric. Boulanger’s teaching in the case of many of her American pupils inspired compositional strategies which tolerated a more conservative, accessible style and ones which lent themselves to narrative and dramatic uses related to the stage and film. But when one considers the work of Elliott Carter, for instance, one would be hard-pressed to find an overriding common thread in the music of Boulanger’s American pupils.

We might therefore conclude that what made Boulanger a great and magnetic teacher not only for a cadre of famous composers but for many other distinguished musicians who studied with her was less the imposition of an aesthetic than the transmission of discipline and the encouragement of individuality. Indeed, the sheer range of her pupils’ styles and development is astonishing. Perhaps it was her decision to abandon her own compositional aspirations that allowed her avoid competition or impose her will on her pupils or, as in the case of Schoenberg, to experience jealousy and resentment regarding the creative success of her students. The one common element she shared with Schoenberg, however, was an abiding and imaginative interest in the history of music. Schoenberg’s attention as a teacher was focused on Mozart and Brahms; Boulanger introduced her students to the wonders of Monteverdi and Gesualdo.

Nadia was not entirely immune to competition, at least as far as Lili Boulanger, her younger sister, was concerned. But perhaps no where else are the personal qualities that made her a great teacher more in evidence than in that relationship, for her career demonstrates any sibling rivalry Nadia may have felt was eclipsed by her recognition and nurturing of Lili’s prodigious talent. That the music of Lili Boulanger remains in the repertoire is very much a result of the advocacy of her elder sister, who was Lili’s first and perhaps most influential teacher. The person closest to Boulanger after her sister on tonight’s program was no doubt Copland, whose career she helped to launch. Easley Blackwood, whose sixty-fifth birthday is celebrated this year, may be a figure less familiar to audiences in New York, but inhabitants of the second city, Chicago, are far more familiar with his music. In addition his compositional achievements, Blackwood is a formidable pianist; his performances of Ives’s Concord Sonata and Boulez’s Second Sonata are legendary. In addition to his First Symphony, another early work, the Chamber Symphony, Op. 2 (bearing the influence of his other famous teacher, Paul Hindemith) is a remarkable achievement, all the more so given the youth of the composer. In recent years, Blackwood has turned his attention to music written on the basis of a microtonal system of tuning.

Perhaps one of the most enigmatic figures on tonight’s program is Igor Markevitch, best known among music lovers as an extraordinary conductor and teacher of conducting. As the Icare on tonight’s program hints, among Markevitch’s most celebrated achievements as a conductor were his performances of Stravinsky. His output as a composer was limited; like Gustav Mahler, his primary identity during his lifetime was as a conductor, especially in Stockholm, Montreal, Havana, and Paris. He shared with Boulanger a background in the French-Russian traditions of twentieth-century music. Not surprisingly, Markevitch was an enthusiastic exponent of twentieth-century music and was responsible for the first recordings of the music of Lili Boulanger.

Though there may not be much commonality in the compositional achievements of Boulanger’s students as represented on tonight’s program, there is one important characteristic that they do share, wherein perhaps lies Boulanger’s finest legacy. Blackwood, Copland and Markevitch showed early on a profound commitment themselves to teaching others. Too often in this century, individuals of enormous talent who have taken the vocation as a “creative artist,” whether in the visual or the performing arts, have developed a contempt for the role of the teacher. It is an idiotic adage that “those who can do; those who can’t teach.” By this logic, the truly successful artist should not have to teach, engendering a sense of superiority and suspicion about those who do. In the history of music especially, this attitude cannot claim an honorable historical tradition. The list of great composers who taught with enthusiasm is probably longer than the list of composers who shunned teaching as beneath their dignity. Nadia Boulanger evidently demonstrated to her pupils not only that a first-class, demanding and genuinely supportive teacher is indispensable to artistic development, but that being such a person for others can also be rewarding. In 1958, the year following his three years of study with Boulanger, Blackwood accepted a position at the University of Chicago where he has been a powerful force for the past forty-one years. Copland served as chair of the faculty at the Berkshire Music Center for twenty-five years. The inestimable contribution of Tanglewood to American music has much to do with Copland’s influence. Markevitch’s achievements in the instruction of conducting nearly matched his renown as a conductor, and exceeded his success as a composer. It is only recently that his compositions have begun to attract their deserved attention. Perhaps Lili Boulanger would have demonstrated a similar commitment had she not died at so tragically young an age. Therefore this concert might well be viewed not only as a recognition of the most successful and influential music teacher of the century, but also an acknowledgement of her triumph in communicating the significance of teaching in itself to her own pupils. We celebrate not only the continuing tradition of twentieth-century music-making but also of music-teaching: a crucial synthesis of the continuance of traditions with the will to innovation.

The Musical Romance of Childhood

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Musical Romance of Childhood, performed on April 5, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In today’s concert, several historical threads work in conjunction with one another. All three works mark the apogee of the nineteenth-century tradition of so-called program music. Until recently it been an accepted premise of music history that during the nineteenth century a great divide took place within European music. On the one side stood composers such as Brahms who supposedly believed in the autonomy of musical expression and meaning, and who chose to stress the continuities in instrumental music between the work of Haydn and Mozart and that of the first Romantic generation of Schumann and Mendelssohn. On the other side of the divide were Liszt, Wagner and their followers, who saw in not only the early Romantics but in Beethoven as well an essential dramatic and narrative logic in music. For them contemporaneity and modernity meant the fulfillment of a logical compatibility between music and poetry and music and drama. Instead of believing a storyline, an emotion, or a visual description as being extraneous to or at odds with “pure” musical expression, this group of nineteenth-century composers and aestheticians believed that modernity required an integration of disparate art forms, using music as the fundamental unifying factor. Their belief in music’s supreme ability to represent and divulge human experience stemmed from the striking philosophical prestige accorded to it as the highest of the arts by Hegel and Schopenhauer earlier in the century.

As we proceed to revise our understanding of the nineteenth century, what seemed to have been irreconcilable differences on a philosophical plane turn out in hindsight to have been more narrowly political and personal. We have now come to appreciate the narrative dimension in what were once regarded as models of pure musical expression in Mozart and Haydn. Formalism no longer seems so absolute, and conversely, narrative music no longer seems quite so structurally dependant on extra-musical logics, as the successful misapplication of Strauss to diverse modern contexts, such as film, have made apparent. Brahms and Wagner seem to possess affinities which would have never been considered by previous generations.

But when the works on today’s program were composed, the rift between program music and absolute instrumental music had not yet been called into question. The employment of large-scale orchestral forms in the service of telling a story, describing a scene, or illustrating an emotion was controversial. For many of the most sophisticated advocates of musical culture, this kind of post-Lisztian orchestral music was a telling sign of the vulgarity of the age and the decline in standards of taste. The symphonies of Tchaikovsky, for example, even though they lacked precise literary programs, were derided as hysterical and bombastic outpourings of human sentiment, unrefined by the formal discipline which was considered indispensable to beauty in music.

The collapsing of the opposition between Brahms’s symphonies on the one hand and the tone poems of Richard Strauss on the other derives from a line of inquiry that was rarely pursued in the nineteenth century but which has become important in the late twentieth century. If we consider the musical culture of the past not from the point of view of the composer but of the listener, and approach music’s reception as a historical process, we realize that in the nineteenth century–an age without the phonograph or the moving picture–audiences (aestheticians not withstanding) listened visually and narratively. A composer may have offered up something called a symphony identifiable only by its formal structure. But that did not mean that audiences flocked to symphony concerts merely to respond to formal achievement. The intensity with which the nineteenth-century audience listened reveals the extent to which music pervaded and inspired the full range of daily experience and feeling. Audiences saw pictures, heard stories, and experienced deep emotional responses, conjuring deep personal associations from instrumental music, no matter the composer, without apology. What the advocates of program music sought to do was to harness this ongoing process more effectively.

When the young Richard Strauss left the Brahmsian model behind him and began writing orchestral tone poems he became an enfant terrible for conservative critics and audiences, but his craftsmanship was so astonishing that even his worst detractors had to admire his command of musical form. All of the tone poems reveal a debt to symphonic writing and classical procedures in their explicitly literary programs (Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Also Spoke Zarathustra). But even Strauss pushed the tolerance of his critics, first with Ein Heldenleben, and then with Symphonia Domestica in 1903. In this work, which has been vilified and ridiculed, Strauss pushes the possibility of description and narration through instrumental music to the extreme. But rather than see this as an extravagant and self-indulgent display of narcissism as some would have it, the Symphonia Domestica may be one of the most ambitious though admittedly perverse challenges to smug assertions of good taste. This work is radical in a way that we generally reserve as a description for modernist experimentalists. Strauss uses irony to extend something self-evident in the work of Robert Schumann: the use of music as the expression of subjective and highly personalized emotion. What is really the difference between Schumann’s private fantasies and illusions which dominate his early piano music and the first person narrative which Strauss offers us? The mundane and precise nature of the program in fact forces us to do more than look for illustration, but to transcend evident illustration and respond to a musical experience–precisely the objective of the opponents to program music. Strauss joins the company of some of his literary contemporaries, such as Henry James (whose masterpiece The Ambassadors was also published in 1903) and later James Joyce, who struggled to represent human psychology through using an astonishing wealth of seemingly trivial and mundane detail. In the cases both of Strauss and his contemporary writers, the quandary was the same: how can one convey interior human responses to life through an aesthetic medium. Rather than escape into abstraction Strauss went the other way.

Indeed, by the time of Joyce’s generation, Strauss’s outrageous experiment had become more commonplace. Charles Loeffler might have been the object of some proper Bostonian’s ire and contempt because of an absence of austerity and rectitude in his music, but no one could accuse Sir Edward Elgar of bad taste. It is also easy to forget that even earlier, in the 1890s, Antonin Dvorák , upon his return from America, wrote a series of tone poems including one called A Hero’s Life. At the end of his career, the great protégé of Brahms recognized the potential in the new forms put forward by the young radical Richard Strauss. The conductor of the first performance of Dvorák ’s tone poem (performed by the ASO five years ago) was none other than Gustav Mahler. The distance between Mahler’s Fifth symphony and Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica is perhaps narrower than we might like to admit.

If program music became as obsessed as literature at the turn of the last century with the representation of internal realities through an extension of illustration, one would expect that the subject matter would move away from the historical and mythological to the personal and autobiographical. That is exactly what happened. This turn inwards was firmly grounded in alarming observations of the changing exterior world. By the end of the century, the transformation of the European and American landscape was unprecedented. The prominence of urban centers with their subsequent social problems and the effects of industrial growth were the external factors that gave rise to an obsessive reflection on the meaning of history and the direction of these radical changes. Whether literate Europeans and Americans turned to Marx or Darwin, the question “Where are we headed?” in response to the runaway pace of societal development was matched by an equally logical question: “What have we left behind?” It is not surprising that childhood as a part of a self-conscious examination of the human psyche became a compelling subject for many artists and thinkers at that time, and that just then Lewis Carroll came along to encrypt children’s desire and terror in complex rhymes and imagery, and Freud sought to reveal a startling picture of the beginnings of mental life.

Children, no longer perceived as merely unfinished adults, were idealized by some as being in a state of nature and innocence, much as the countryside was idealized as a pastoral landscape undefiled by the city. The process of their corruption in the course of maturity constituted the record of the adult’s current psychological state. An examination of memory and perhaps a return to or preservation of childhood therefore became, and remains today, an important part of the interior psychic struggle among adults to live in the world. The three works on today’s program use three different approaches to the question of how one preserves or discards memory and how one assesses the cost of growing up. What differentiates, however, the musical treatment of childhood and childhood memory in the early twentieth century from, for example, the evocation of childhood in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister is that the sense of distance and loss is more profound and the desire to preserve the child in oneself more apparent. Maturity has been found unfulfilling and as a result childhood idealized. As listeners left the daily routine of their lives behind and chose voluntarily to flock into concert halls to be transported by sound alone away from the routines and burdens of their daily life, they welcomed music’s capacity to evoke the nostalgic charm, the intensity, confusion, and tumult as well as the poignancy of youth.

Music of Conscience

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music of Conscience, performed on Feb 25, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Rarely in history have music and politics confronted one another with as much intensity as in our own century. This confrontation reached its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, the era of Hitler and Stalin. It had its roots, however, in the years before the First World War. Musical modernism, particularly in the form which evolved form the work of Arnold Schoenberg but also from that of Igor Stravinsky and his allies, was viewed both by its proponents and antagonists as motivated in part by politics. One can hear an explicit critique of the past in musical modernism–in its use of dissonance, its extreme extension and even rejection of tonality, and its incorporation of vernacular musical elements including folk music and jazz. That critique was directed at a perceived status quo of complacent, middle-class patrons and audiences whose presumed liberal beliefs masked a misplaced enthusiasm for capitalism, autocracy, and chauvinism. Musical modernists sought to rescue art from what they saw as stifling conditions, including the tyranny of late nineteenth-century aestheticism (a self-indulgent claim that art was only about beauty and itself), a commercially manipulated mass culture, and an elitist mésalliance, also inherited from the nineteenth century, between the tenets of “high” musical culture and a social political system which seemed to thrive on inequality and injustice for the European masses.

In their critique of culture and society, the musical revolutionaries of the early twentieth century sought to craft a new musical language and style consistent with the apparent contradictions of modern life. That meant using modernity against itself and not resorting to a stagnant or predicable continuation of the musical language of late nineteenth-century Romanticism. After World War I, a heated and deeply personalized war of words and music erupted. In one camp were the musical conservatives such as Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss. On the side of the progressives were, in addition to Schoenberg, Ferrucio Busoni, Franz Schreker, and a host of pioneering critics and writers. In Germany, these aesthetic wars were fought against the backdrop of the shaky Weimar republic which emerged out of the defeat of the German military forces in 1918. In the new Soviet Union, a comparable struggle was taking place, not so much between Romanticism and modernism but between modernism and socialist realism. These aesthetic conflicts in Germany and the Soviet Union also extended beyond the realm of music into art, architecture, and literature.

In the tumultuous and unstable environment of post-World War I Europe, the cross-currents of debate over what constituted an appropriate musical aesthetic for the twentieth century coincided with the beginnings of fascism in Italy and Germany and the eventual triumph of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. It is in this crucible that the composers on tonight’s program worked and fashioned their outlook as artists and citizens. The 1930s only deepened the conflicts. Hitler came to power in 1933 and by 1938 the pervasiveness and gravity of Nazism were fully apparent. In the Soviet Union, the show trials of the 1930s and a non-aggression pact with Hitler bore witness to the totalitarian nature of Stalin’s regime. The Allied victory in 1945 put an end to the war, but it did not invalidate the premises at the heart of the cultural and political debates. As Jewish Chronicle demonstrates, progressive Germans, dismayed at the weakness of post-World War II efforts at denazification, feared a resurgence of fascism in the form of neo-Nazism.

The search by twentieth-century composers for musical meaning that was both relevant to the contemporary context and politically progressive was lent further impetus by the events of the Cold War. Hanns Eisler, who had fled to the United States form Germany, was called before the House Un-American Activities committee. The proceedings against him in 1948 occasioned a concert by his friends and supporters which took place in New York fifty years ago this Saturday. Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Roy Harris, and Roger Sessions among other participated, but despite the efforts of these artists and such other notables such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, Eisler was expelled from the United States.

Although Jewish Chronicle was a collaboration of East and West German composers, it was not altogether successful as an effort of reconciliation between the two alternative approaches to constructing an anti-fascist post-war German. Hartmann, for example, an unequivocal anti-Nazi, withheld permission to perform the work for years, in part because of his ambivalence about the German Democratic Republic, with which Eisler and Paul Dessau were closely associated.

It is tempting at first to accept a reductive opposition that equates musical modernism with progressive attitudes to politics and an adherence to neo-Romanticism with a sympathy for fascism. But like his contemporary Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler was troubled by the fact that modernist music could not reach, however didactically, even middle-class audiences, let alone the masses. For Eisler, the goal was to find a way to compose new music that was at once free of commercialism and sentimentality and yet accessible and liberating to more than a sophisticated and somewhat pretentious elite. But because of the close association between conservative musicians and Nazi cultural policy, this “third way” proved to be an elusive and difficult option, and resulted in some ironic ventures for those like Eisler and Weill who sought to write a new kind of music that bridged the concert hall, the cabaret, and the street. Before the war Eisler had found an ideal medium for this goal in German film, but later found himself in the ultra-commercialist Hollywood film industry. He never ceased, however, to capitalize on the advantages of film to make a compelling artistic and political statement: his best-known score is for Alai Resnais’s searing portrait of the concentration camps, Night and Fog (1956).

From our present perspective at the end of this century, these controversies may appear dated, especially since we are surrounded by a wide and seemingly apolitical eclecticism in which late Romantic gestures subsist side by side with new compositions that sustain the legacy of Schoenberg. Tonight’s concert, however, is not an effort at remembrance. The works we perform tonight were motivated by past politics and a discrete historical moment, but they continue to communicate nearly a half century later the intensity and beauty of great musical art as well as the power and profound significance of the historical issues which lay behind their composition. The concentration camp remains more than an image of memory.

The predicaments facing composers at mid-century, precisely because of the politics involved, were also personal and involuntary. Each of the composers on tonight’s program was personally caught in the maelstrom of terror, intimidation, and propaganda. Hanns Eisler was born in Leipzig in 1898. His father was a well-known philosopher and his brother was a very successful journalist. He studied with Schoenberg and in 1926 joined the German Communist Party. He eventually broke with Schoenberg, for whom he never lost profound respect, and in the 1930s began to work with Bertolt Brecht. Since he was both of Jewish descent and a Communist, Eisler was force to flee in 1933. His music was banned by the Nazis. He spend much of the 1930s in America, where he taught at the New School before joining Ernst Toch, Thomas Mann, Franz and Alma Mahler Werfel in Los Angeles. The last period of Eisler’s life, the years after 1949, was spent in East Germany, where Eisler worked vigorously on behalf of a new education system and that country’s musical life. For Eisler, music and politics remained inextricable. He believed the task of the musician was not to detach himself from the mundane, but rather to fulfill an obligation to speak out through art on behalf of a just political system and against tyranny. Prolific until the end of his life, he died in 1962. His Deutsche Sinfonie represents a synthesis of his music and politics. It can with little doubt be considered his magnum opus and most lasting large-scale work.

The first work on this program, Jewish Chronicle, serves as an echo of the political issues that inspired the Deutsche Sinfonie. These specific events which brought this work into being–the outbreak of anti-Semitism of 1959 in Cologne–took place at a time when Eisler was in the twilight of his career. Boris Blacher, Eisler’s somewhat younger contemporary, who was instrumental in organizing this unique collaboration of five composers and one poet, has a markedly different history than Eisler. Blacher was born in 1903 in China into a well-to-do German family of Baltic descent. He moved to Germany in 1922. Unlike Eisler, Blacher was not forced to flee when the nazis came to power, but managed to keep working in Germany until 1938. He was not entirely “Aryan” but he had the support of powerful individuals, among then the conductor Karl Böhm, who used his influence in the Nazi regime to protect the composer. Blacher continued to explore his own modernist aesthetic credo (which included a special affection for jazz), but at the same time, he struggle to exist under the Nazis. Some of his music continued to be performed until 1940. That year, the facts about Blacher’s maternal grandmother, the daughter of baptized Jews, were confirmed and Blacher’s tenuously peaceful co-existence collapsed. He lived out the war in Germany in fear. His music disappeared from German programs. Blacher survived and played a significant role in the life of post-war West Germany until his death in 1975.

Rudolf Wagner-Regény, who wrote the second movement of Jewish Chronicle, was born like Blacher outside of Germany. Wagner-Regény was raised in a German community in what was then Hungary and is now Romania. He was closely associated with the designer Caspar Neher, who found fame through his association with Kurt Weill. In the twenties, Wagner-Regény became a German citizen and married a woman who was half-Jewish. He functioned reasonably well as a composer during the Third Reich. His works were performed by Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan. In 1941 an opera of his was premiered in Vienna, where Wagner-Regény’s friend, the local Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, was well-known for his penchant for high culture. The premiere of this opera inspired the ire of Goebbels. As punishment, Wagner-Regény was drafted into the military in 1943. He was fortunate enough to land a desk job in the army and survive. As a composer, Wagner-Regény struggled to find a musical language distinct from the extremes of modernism but without any association with fascist aesthetics. He eventually found the most sympathetic environment after the war to be East Berlin, where he died in 1969.

Paul Dessau, who wrote the last movement of the Jewish Chronicle and worked with Hans Werner Henze on the fourth movement, was born in 1894. Like Eisler he was of Jewish origin, but unlike Eisler, his Jewishness was a central part of his identity. He was the grandson of a Cantor. In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine and came to New York in 1939. In the early 1940s he met Bertolt Brecht with whom he worked extensively. When Brecht cam to the DDR and settled in east Berlin, Dessau followed him. Like Eisler’s, Dessau’s music ranges across the genres from popular song to opera and music for the radio. But Dessau’s open allegiance to Judaism led him down different paths; for instance, he wrote liturgical music. In 1936 Dessau wrote an oratorio on a Judaic text written by Max Brod, the writer and friend of Franz Kafka. After the war, Dessau was one of the few individuals who were free to travel between West and East Berlin, where he died in 1979. As in the case of Eisler, music and politics in Dessau achieved a symmetry and clarity that make his artistic accomplishment engaging and relevant to this day.

Hans Werner Henze, who recently celebrated his seventieth birthday, is the youngest composer represented on tonight’s program. He was born in 1926; his formative youth was deeply marked by the era of Nazism. In his autobiography, published in 1996, Henze recalls growing up in a context dominated by the Hitler Youth. Henze especially remembers how everyone remained silent about Kristallnacht. His father was wounded early in the war, and he himself was drafted in 1944. The impact of the Third Reich on Henze was to make the issue of politics a central aspect of his life and work, particularly in term so his construction of modernism. Like many of his generation, the experience of Nazism made the vocabulary of musical modernism a necessity as an act of defiance against the past, but Henze is particularly distinguished by the originality and range of his accomplishment. His artistic experimentation was defined by a consistent engagement with contemporary politics, ranging form the Cuban revolution to events in Chile in the 1970s. Henze revered Paul Dessau’s successful reconciliation of the task of the composer and the obligations of the artist as citizen. Like other contemporaries in the worlds of post-war German literature and painting, Henze rejected the convenient escape form political engagement offered by the simplistic dichotomies of Cold War politics. He actively pursued his role as a voice of conscience for post-war Germans.

The contribution of Karl Amadeus Hartmann to Jewish Chronicle may perhaps be the finest artistic moment in this extraordinary piece, and in many respects, of all the composers on tonight’s program Hartmann was the most extraordinary individual. Unlike Blacher or Wagner-Regény, he refused all participation in Nazi Germany, yet he did not emigrate. His inner resistance to Nazism was unparalleled. Much of Hartmann’s music was written in secret during the 1930s and early 1940s and then re-emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, often in revised forms. The integrity of his politics and personal behavior is matched only by the unique power and clarity of his music. Without a doubt, Hartmann is one of the finest composers of this century, whose moment of proper recognition is yet to come. Hartmann’s example as an artist of conscience is all the more remarkable because he was entirely “Aryan” with no reason to resist collaboration except for an unimpeachable ethical sensibility.

We are accustomed now to judge music in a manner that divorces a work entirely from the context in which it was written and from the occasion for which it was written. We carelessly place labels of approbation or criticism on works as if they were sealed off, as it were, from other dimensions of life. Defending works that are not in the standard repertory by citing their “good intentions” in non-musical terms if often done apologetically. In the same vein most critical discussions render the extra-musical meanings connected to those works we now deem masterpieces irrelevant. Greatness in music is often defined as an ability of a work of music to transcend origins and historical contexts.

Tonight’s concert suggests several alternatives. The music heard tonight is music that deserves more than the occasional performance. It does so not because it transcends its context, but precisely because it inspires future generations to make contact with history in a way that only music can accomplish. To deny the extra-musical circumstances of this music would be to insult its power. But to define that musical power as being comparable to the impact of a memorable journalistic or documentary photograph is to belittle the aesthetic achievement of the composers. Perhaps the best parallel to the music on tonight’s program is Picasso’s Guernica, which we revere as a work of art created as an act of outrage and of conscience. The ethical force of Guernica is inextricable from and synonymous with Picasso’s formalist achievements in that work. Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie is one of this century’s greatest choral and symphonic works: long after audiences can recognize the tunes for what they once meant, this work will move and inspire listeners. Jewish Chronicle, which is an exception to the rule that a work of music written by many composers–even great ones–rarely succeeds (compare, for example, the F-A-E Sonata by Dietrich, Schumann, and Brahms), reminds us that powerful music must and can be written in response to political challenges. The music of the composers on tonight’s program reminds us that artists, precisely because of their special gifts and talents, must speak out through their art.

Richard Strauss’s Die agyptische Helena

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Richard Strauss’s Die agyptische Helena, performed on Jan 18, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

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

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

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

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

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

Yet here is where Strauss’s own story gets intricate. Despite his fascination with Wagner, Strauss was to his dying day not in accord with the fashions of the fin de siécle. For one thing, his true lifelong musical god was not Wagner at all, but Mozart. For another, in apparent contradiction with his Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan, and Salome, Strauss like Brahms was thoroughly comfortable with the very middle-class lifestyle that was so under siege among his fellow artists, writers, and thinkers. His greatest passion was card-playing, and his personality seemed so commonplace that Gustav Mahler, after hearing Salome, is reputed to have remarked how inconceivable it was that someone so ordinary and bourgeois, so interested in simple material comforts, could write such astonishing fresh and brilliant music. Strauss was no Bohemian; he fashioned his life not only on the model of Brahms but of Haydn: he considered himself the ultimate, highly disciplined craftsman.

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

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

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

Since Strauss’s death, critical reassessment of his work has progressed much too slowly. There are some among us who have argued (without great acceptance) that Strauss’s work from the 1920s to the 1930s, particularly Die ägyptische Helena, are high points in his artistic career. His choice of musical language enhances not only the subject matter but Hofmannsthal’s verbal language. The filigree-like delicacy and complexity of Strauss’s orchestration and voice-writing always reveal the Mozart in him. No one at this afternoon’s concert should have any doubt about the premised shared by the artists on stage today that Die ägyptische Helena is not simply a curiosity or an interesting if flawed work by a great composer, but rather that it is the kind of masterpiece that needed a future generation to discover it and assign it to its proper place in the mutable canon of artistic acceptance.

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

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

The Other Voice of Johannes Brahms

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Other Voice of Johannes Brahms, performed on Nov 30, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

As the centennial year marking the death of Johannes Brahms comes to a close, it is to be hoped that our appreciation for the remarkable range of Brahms’s character and music has deepened, as well as our understanding of his complex and changing role in the history of Western music. During his own lifetime, Brahms was maneuvered into a position as the antipode of Wagner, when in fact Brahms was among Wagner’s most earnest admirers. He was profoundly impressed by Wagner’s genius and craft. Indeed, Richard Heuberger, composer, critic, and disciple of Brahms, reported that Brahms held two works of dramatic music in particular regard: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Brahms’s objection to Wagner was more directed at the cult, the personality, and the man, than at the composer. Two works on this afternoon’s program, Rinaldo and Triumphlied, hint at Brahms’s awareness of Wagner’s musical influence. However, Brahms’s admiration for Wagner’s dramatic music did not stop him from being cast as the arch-conservative and the proponent of so-called “absolute” music.

Before World War II, Arnold Schoenberg wrote a seminal essay entitled “Brahms the Progressive,” which inspired a new direction of interest in Brahms. He was heralded as the prophet of modernism and given credit for extending the techniques of classical style–particularly in the transformation and elaboration of thematic material–in ways which served as models for the innovative strategies of the Second Viennese School. The Wagnerian path, in which music was subordinated to a narrative framework and where repetition thinly camouflaged by the magic of extended harmonies led to a musical aesthetic of lavish neo-Romanticism, was unfavorably contrasted to the economy, density, and essential integrity of Brahms’s music.

More recently, a third image of Brahms has come into being. Modern scholars see Brahms as mirroring the deepest paradoxes of the nineteenth century. In many ways, Brahms was terrifyingly conscious of the weight of history. In him we may see an artist who responded with intense self-doubt to the facile claims of progress that marked nineteenth-century politics and historical theory. If Reinhold Brinkmann, writing in the 1990s, has linked Brahms to the idea of melancholy, the German critic and pedagogue Louis Ehlert made precisely the same point in 1880. It is one of Brahms’s singular achievements that his music can seem to satisfy those content with sentimentality as well as those in search of a Mahler-like recognition of the bittersweet and ironic. Our contemporary image of Brahms is of the philosophical musician, in whose works we hear, as the composer Mauricio Kagel once noted, the spirit of the Tragic Overture and the Academic Festival Overture simultaneously. Affirmation and doubt stand side by side in a way that is singularly compelling to a modern sensibility in which faith and sincerity seem extinct.

All of these images of Brahms contain some, but not all, of the truth; they demonstrated how resistant he has been historically to definitive assessments. Today’s program therefore seeks to complicate his legacy further by considering yet another aspect of Brahms’s life and achievement. Of all nineteenth-century European composers, Brahms was perhaps the most intensely curious and well-read. For all of Wagner’s penchant for writing prose works and delivering himself of opinions in writing, a cursory glance at the library of Brahms inspires awe and wonder. He once boasted as a young man that he spend all his money on books. The worlds of literature, philosophy, and art history were dear to him. In Brahms the composer, therefore, one always encounters Brahms the reader, and while few of his works carry an overt program, it is rewarding to consider what Brahms was thinking about in matters literary and philosophical when he wrote music. If indeed the two towering figures in late nineteenth-century music were Brahms and Wagner, perhaps the greatest contrast lies in Brahms’s personal integrity, his resistance to anti-Semitism, his determined association with progressive voices in his own time, particularly in Vienna, as opposed to the dishonest, spiteful, and racist fulmination of Wagner the poseur, that object of Nietzsche’s vitriolic reassessment.

Of Brahms’s often performed music, the most familiar is his chamber music, where intimacy, subtlety, and spiritual complexity are perhaps most appropriately expressed. The symphonies and concertos which are part of the standard repertory have been properly judged as works of chamber music writ large. Their scale emerges as the outgrowth of smaller constituent elements and gestures. There is very little in Brahms that is overtly theatrical, grandiose, or pretentious. Even the allure of Ein deutsches Requiem, for example, rests in Brahms’s ability to transform the evident monumentality of the sound into an intimate experiences for each listener. The works on this afternoon’s program are no different in this sense, but they have not shared the same popularity or favor as the composer’s other works.

But the rarity of these works in no way reflects upon their artistic value. Brahms’s acute self-criticism led him to destroy a great deal of unpublished music about six years before his death. Unlike other major figures in the history of music, there is probably no second-rate Brahms; in fact one suspects that Brahms was perhaps too rash. It is therefore not entirely accurate to identify these works as “lesser” Brahms, despite their relative obscurity in his canon. All three works date from the late 1860s, after Brahms permanently moved to Vienna. Although he lived in the city for over thirty years, he never identified himself with Vienna the way its native-born citizens did. He remained an outsider, a north German and a Protestant who was viewed with suspicion by many Viennese intellectuals, politicians, and musicians. He enjoyed the popular music of the city and he developed a close friendship with Johann Strauss the younger, whose music Brahms loved and admired. (There is a famous anecdote about Brahms’s writing out on a fan the opening notes to the “Blue Danube” Waltz with the phrase, “Alas, not by Brahms”.) Brahms’s alienation was further defined by political events. The Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the creation of a German empire, for example, was not an entirely welcome event in the Habsburg Empire, since Austria had been defeated in 1866 by the Prussians. Yet Brahms was delighted, as Frank Wedekind (a devoted admirer and author of Lulu) later immortalized in a 1909 play. Furthermore, in an age of burgeoning nationalism, sections of the German-speaking population of the multi-national Habsburg Empire began to dream of breaking away and becoming part of an All-German empire under Prussian leadership. From 1870 on, the political climate in which Brahms lived and worked in Vienna became increasingly divisive and strident.

The Song of Triumph is less known not because of its failings as a work of music, but because of its synthesis of political and religious sentiments. In the wake of two world wars, it is understandable that an unabashed celebration of a militarily powerful and unified Germany as a act associated with a Protestant theology would fall on unsympathetic ears in the English-speaking world. Likewise, Rinaldo is a text twice removed from the consciousness of audiences in America and England. Tasso’s and Ariosto’s epic romances have not been widely read in America or England since the eighteenth century and Goethe’s reworking has had no place in his English-language canon, insofar as there is one beyond Faust. Furthermore, the sound of Rinaldo–the reliance on male choir and solo tenor–has associations with the male choral societies of nineteenth-century Europe and America, a forgotten tradition closely related to German musical culture. At the beginning of this century the German-speaking men’s choral association in Buffalo proudly held the same toot as the prestigious Vienna men’s choral society: “Free and loyal in song and deed.” The Liebeslieder Walzer are of course among the most well-known of Brahms’s works, but are rarely performed in this arrangement by the composer. The orchestration of the waltzes is a fine example of how Brahms can easily retain the integrity of the scale of the waltzes while making elegant use of the wide range of sound available in a full orchestra.

The reception of works of music should not remain frozen in history; it takes time to vindicate works of music, to allow neglected masterpieces to emerge from the weight of historically contingent prejudices. The failure of Triumphlied and Rinaldo to become as well known and popular as they deserve can be largely attributed to matters of politics. The fin de siécle generation already in Brahms’s lifetime–not to speak of the generation that came of age at the turn of the century–found what they regarded to be the ideology of these works to be either foreign or unattractive. Additionally, a work like Rinaldo, Brahms’s closest effort at operation and dramatic music, complicates the neat polarity between Brahmsian absolute music and Wagnerian programmatic music. The anomaly of Rinaldo as well as the politics of the Triumphlied made these works increasingly obscure as the twentieth century wore on. But as the century finally draws to a close and we enter a second hundred years of engagement with the music of Brahms, these two neglected major works ought to take their rightful place. We may now take the opportunity to discover the power and beauty of these works, if only to enhance further our picture of this great musician and thinker to whom so many concerts have been dedicated in 1997.

Uptown/Downtown: American Music 1880-1930

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Uptown/Downtown: American Music 1880-1930, performed on Oct 22, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The American Symphony Orchestra, founded by Leopold Stokowski as a way of supporting American instrumentalists and composers, is pleased to begin its thirty-fifth season by presenting a program devoted to American music. The program we have chosen offers a wide spectrum of American music from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all works closely associated with New York City. These compositions demonstrate the trials and triumphs experienced by American musicians who were committed to the enterprise of fashioning an American musical culture which could hold its own without apology against the daunting legacy of Europe–particularly German-speaking Europe, where all of the composers in tonight’s program pursued their musical education.

It is a truism to assert that by comparison to its European counterparts, America is a young nation. This country’s relative youthfulness, combined with the fact that it evolved substantially as a nation of immigrants, helped frame an issue that plagued American artists through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century: how might the distinctly American be defined and expressed? Was there and could there be a unique American counterpart to European cultural achievement in literature, painting, and music? If the voluntary and involuntary immigrants who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought with them defined cultural heritages, discrete languages and societal traditions, what then would emerge, culturally speaking, from their interactions and their future in the new world? In literature, most American writers suffered from a peculiarly American form of what Harold Bloom has terms the “anxiety of influence”: the world of English letters was never far from the consciousness of American writers. Some, like Poe, James, and Wharton, mastered the greatest traditions of European fiction. But a distinctly American voice could also be discerned as the nation matured through the nineteenth into the twentieth century, particularly in the works of Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Cather, and Faulkner. That, however, did not dampen the sensibility that Europe remained the source an showcase of the highest literary achievement and refinement. One only needs to think of the many American writers who lived as expatriates in Europe during the twentieth century to remind ourselves of the persistent insecurity and ambivalence felt by many about American culture. The anglophilia of T.S. Eliot, for example, was an extreme incarnation of such cultural snobbery.

If the English language shared by Americans made identity a difficult issue for American writers, the American landscape did not make matters easier for American painters. Despite the achievements of the Hudson River school, American painters, perhaps until Abstract Expressionism in the mid-twentieth century, felt themselves in the shadow of both European traditions and European contemporaries. When we consider the canvases of Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, or Childe Hassam, our minds tend to drift immediately to the more famous contemporary French exponents of Impressionism. Even the work of the Ashcan school seems less interesting to us than historically parallel European movements. Twentieth-century modernism began as a European phenomenon. Decades later, when we look at the work of Burgoyne Diller from the 1930s, we easily detect the European influence, in this case of Piet Mondrian. Only in the 1940s did American art begin to seem distinctive to both American and European eyes.

In the area of music the circumstances tell a somewhat different story. In music, the influence of immigration would make its first and deepest mark on forms that would emerge as definitely American. That creative transformation is most evident in such phenomena as ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz. In large measure as a result of the influence of African Americans, by the end of the nineteenth century America had already developed original forms of popular music. But genteel music, both in the salon and in the concert hall, suffered profoundly–even more than music’s literary and cultural counterparts–from comparisons with Europe. In the arenas in which Europeans excelled–concert music–a uniquely American contribution developed more gradually and haltingly. Americans still remain suspicious of the capacity of a European art form based on aristocratic patronage to adapt to populist American circumstances. Concert music, more than painting and literature, still seems associated with the pretentious aspects of the ambition to become “cultured” in some vaguely undemocratic way.

When Antonin Dvorák came to take over the National Conservatory in New York in 1892, he urged American musicians to turn to African American and Native American roots to find a distinct voice (he was spurred on by the New York critic Henry Krehbiel). Dvorák ’s sense that American composers were too wedded to European models was well-founded. Two of the composers on this program, Edward MacDowell and George Chadwick, were typical. Their works reflect the indispensable European training that American composers of that era felt they needed. After studying in Europe, both of these men returned to America to teach: MacDowell at Columbia, and Chadwick at the New England Conservatory in Boston. The prestige of their work was enhanced by the fact that Chadwick had been a student of Jadassohn in Leipzig and Rheinberger in Munich, and MacDowell had studied with Joachim Raff in Frankfurt and Louis Ehlert in Wiesbaden. MacDowell’s career as a teacher and performer in Europe and his appearance before Franz Liszt lent him a special aura among Americans. Nevertheless, these composers tried to assert in the formats of the European symphony and concerto, an American sensibility, particularly in the use of construction of themes. Chadwick’s first works, particularly the concert overture Rip Van Winkle, despite its overtly American program, were embraced with enthusiasm in Europe as American realizations of European models. Given Dvorák ’s plea, it is ironic that the symphony by Chadwick on this program was chosen by Dvorák himself to receive the coveted prize of the National Conservatory in 1894.

MacDowell’s and Chadwick’s audible debt to their German mentors is pervasive, but when one turns to what is conceivably the other end of the scale in that era–the music of Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern, one realized that the gulf between so-called popular and serious music was no so great as it is today, and that the character of the melodies, the orchestral sound, and more ephemerally, the mood of all the music on tonight’s program can be perceived as emerging from a single source. That source is precisely the crossroads between the effort to be American and yet competitive with European standards. Victor Herbert was born in Ireland and educated in Germany, and came to America as a result of his wife Therese Foerster’s engagement at the Metropolitan Opera. Herbert played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and began to conduct and write his own music. Like many immigrants, he became enamored of the peculiarities of American life and landscape and wrote all sorts of music ranging from marches to film scores (including The Fall of a Nation).

Herbert’s greatest achievements, however, were in the arena of popular musical theater. He wrote more than forty operettas, most of which had their premieres on Broadway. The most famous of these is Babes in Toyland (1903), based indirectly on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Immigration itself was the focus of some of Herbert’s popular work; Naughty Marietta is about the relationship between an immigrant Italian girl and a man from Kentucky. Eileen, originally entitled The Heart of Erin (1917), is typically American in its self-conscious assertion of American-Irish solidarity with Ireland. Mademoiselle Modiste takes on another favorite subject also treated by Henry James (who played it out in a different social class and very different context): the relationship between a rich American man and a young Parisian woman. Herbert, a founding member of ASCAP, was an indefatigable popularizer of music and a staunch advocate of American composers and musicians. Using the same artistic heritage as MacDowell and Chadwick, he ventured to adapt another European model, the operetta, and create a bridge between American popular music of the nineteenth century and a different European tradition, equally indebted to concert music. His music clearly shows the skills of a composer well-trained in nineteenth-century European compositional strategies.

When one thinks of the influence of the Jewish immigration of the late nineteenth century to New York City on American popular musical culture, one thinks first of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. The patterns and sensibilities of the Eastern European Yiddish song seemed to be eminently adaptable to the world of early twentieth-century New York. But in American musical theater specifically, it was the earlier German-Jewish immigration to New York that played a decisive role. Oscar Hammerstein II’s grandfather, who founded the Manhattan Opera House, was born in what today is Poland, but which at the time of his birth was part of Germany. His formative years were spend in Hamburg, and he came to New York sometime around 1860. His grandson would collaborate with another musician of German Jewish descent who was born in New York, Jerome Kern. Kern also felt compelled to go to Europe for further training and chose to receive his advanced musical education in Heidelberg. Ironically, a larger number of his songs became popular as added numbers in American productions of European operettas.

It is a paradox in the evolution of an American music that what we now consider quintessentially American in spirit was developed by those who had every reason to consider themselves outsiders. Immigrants and t heir children articulated the sounds and styles on the stage that we now associate with Mississippi, Oklahoma, and the West. Two descendant of German Jewish immigrants wrote “Ol’ Man River” and other icons of vernacular American music. Jerome Kern’s greatest achievement was Showboat from 1927, a work which deals explicitly with America’s identity as a nation of contentious cultural intersections. Partly influenced by the very same compositional ambitions that compelled MacDowell and Chadwick, Kern pioneered the development of the American musical as an integrated form, with a coherent musical trajectory from beginning to end. He rejected the model of musical theater as a medley of disparate, popular songs. Despite the immense success which both Herbert and Kern achieved in popular mediums, however, they never lost the desire to make their mark in the hallowed European tradition of concert music, the world from which MacDowell and Chadwick never departed. Like George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, despite their successes, Herbert and Kern suspected they would only be vindicated in the eyes of history if they succeeded as “serious” composers. To that end, Kern agreed in 1914 to the creation of an orchestral suite from Showboat entitled “Scenario.”

All of the music on tonight’s program has a direct association with the cultural life of New York City. MacDowell, a pivotal force in the music department of Columbia University, was lionized by New York society. Chadwick, although based in Boston, achieved the singular honor of being recognized by Dvorák in New York. The tradition of Broadway and the American musical theater in New York owes much to Herbert and Kern. But to the credit of both American concert and popular music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the distance between Tin Pan Alley–the center of sheet music publishing in New York–which a century about was located between 14^th and 28^th Streets, and the more refined reaches of Morningside Heights or Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, was, as I hope tonight’s performance demonstrates, far narrower than we might at first glance imagine. Perhaps as this century comes to a close, we will once again witness a new incarnation of the inspired creative influence of immigration on the arts in America and a convincing cross-fertilization between popular and concert music.

Admiration and Emulation: The Friendship of Brahms and Dvorák

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Admiration and Emulation: The Friendship of Brahms and Dvorák, performed on May 14, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The American Symphony Orchestra has thought to contribute to the centenary of Johannes Brahms’s death by highlighting two unusual but significant dimensions of Brahms’s work and life. In this concert, we focus on Brahms’s friendship with Antonin Dvorák, a relationship that is quite unparalleled in music history. Next fall, we will explore some of Brahms’s works for chorus and Orchestra which are not often performed and deserve representation in this centenary celebration as a means of deepening our appreciation of the many sides of his complex genius.

Conventionally, music history has characterized Brahms as a conservative force at the end of a tradition, rather than as the herald of a new era. That distinction is usually reserved for his presumed arch-rival, Richard Wagner. We sometimes forget, however, that Brahms held Wagner in the highest esteem, and among his extensive collection of manuscripts, he sincerely treasured the works of Wagner. Nevertheless, it is true that Brahms lamented Wagner’s influence on a younger generation. Brahms’s conservative image was also reinforced by the fact that he often did not have a generous opinion of the work of his contemporaries, He had no pupils in the formal sense, though he sat on the board of Directors of the Conservatory of Vienna by holding a lifelong trusteeship at the Society of the Friends of Music. In 1875, he relinquished his post as conductor of the Society’s concerts.

Though surrounded later in life by a younger generation of admirers, Brahms was not noted for his encouraging manner. Quite to the contrary, the composers Hugo Wolf and Hans Rott developed psychotic obsessions with Brahms’s lack of appreciation for the aesthetic ambitions of the younger generation. Before he was institutionalized, Rott experienced a paranoid fear that Brahms had placed a bomb under his carriage. Wolf’s criticisms of Brahms during the 1880s make any subsequent example of critical vitriol seem pale. Gustav Mahler, also of Wolf’s generation, was somewhat more appreciative, since he was indebted to Brahms for having indirectly helped Mahler get his appointment at the Vienna Opera. Brahms had seen the young conductor in Budapest and was impressed with his talent, though he might have been less enthusiastic had he an inkling of Mahler’s compositional aspirations. Mahler considered Brahms a conservative master, whose allegiances were turned backwards in time rather than toward the future. There is also a famous anecdote concerning Brahms’s visit to a friend who was a composer of minor note. Brahms arrived to find the man playing outside with his children. His wife apologized for the host’s absence, explaining that her husband composed so much that he rarely found the time to break from his work – to which Brahms replied, “Thank God, it should happen more often.”

In Vienna, the circle of Brahms’s followers were pitted against the coterie surrounding Anton Bruckner, a circumstance which further lent to the perception of Brahms as a conservative force. But the Brahms circle was actually progressive and cosmopolitan. Brahms himself was a far-sighted individual, proudly self-educated, with a deep interest in literature and art as well as the history of music. And he was an intensely loyal friend. In exploring Brahms’s influence on and support of one composer of the younger generation — Dvorák found another avenue toward understanding Brahms not as the end of an era, but as the beginning of a new one.

In 1874, Brahms reluctantly sat on the jury of the Austrian State Stipendium with the critic Eduard Hanslick and the Director of the Imperial Opera, Johann Herbeck. The jury was to award financial support to talented composers in need within the Habsburg Empire. Brahms encountered a massive submission from an obscure Czech composer: fifteen works including two symphonies, several overtures and a song cycle (Op. 7). Brahms was visibly overcome by the mastery and talent of this unknown individual. As a result of Brahms’s support, Antonin Dvorák received the stipend (and twice more in 1876 and 1877). In 1877, Brahms arranged for Dvorák’s work to be given to Brahms’s own publisher, Simrock. Simrock not only accepted Dvorák’s Moravian Duets, Op. 20, but commissioned what was to become one of Dvorák’s most enduringly popular works, the Slavonic Dances, Op. 46.

It was also through Brahms’s intervention that the critic Louis Ehlert came to write his famous critical essay in 1880, which brought the international breakthrough in Dvorák’s career for which the dispirited composer had been waiting. Throughout Europe, German musical criticism and the German music industry dominated, and recognition by the German-speaking community was indispensable for any aspiring composer in both central and eastern Europe. Dvorák’s prior success in Prague constituted at best a provincial achievement; he needed to be accepted internationally – and that is precisely what the acknowledgment of Brahms provided. As Hanslick wrote to Dvorák in an 1877 letter discussing Brahms’s enthusiasm, “it would be advantageous for your things to become known beyond your narrow Czech fatherland, which in any case does not do much for you.” For Brahms, Dvorák’s Czech “otherness” was no more exotic than the Hungarian elements in his own music. What impressed Brahms about Dvorák was the seemingly unlimited inventiveness of Dvorák’s melodic materials, his uncanny sense of time and duration, and the dazzling sense of musical line that the younger composer achieved. Brahms considered string quartets to be one of the most difficult forms of composition; he did not think well of his own efforts in this area. Though he criticized Dvorák s as well, Dvorák was unique in Brahms’s view for having produced worthy contributions to the genre. Brahms’s enthusiasm for Dvorák was rooted in his recognition that Dvorák was a composer of such tremendous capacity that he possessed more than the ability to write novel tunes; Dvorák could in fact write extended musical essays of the quality to which Brahms himself aspired – modern incarnations of classical models.

Dvorák never forgot that he owed his dramatic international rise to Brahms’s interest. From the mid-1870s on, Brahms and Dvorák were in regular contact with each other, the older composer constantly offering advice and support. During Dvorák’s sojourn in America, Brahms took the remarkable step of serving as copy editor and proofreader for Dvorák’s submissions to Simrock in order to facilitate their timely publication. Even Haydn’s admiration of Mozart did not reach such an active level of involvement. Brahms even offered to leave his entire estate to Dvorák if he would move to Vienna, an offer Dvorák ultimately refused. Brahms was once quoted as saying that any composer would be honored to have the ideas that Dvorák discarded.

The capacity in Dvorák, recognized immediately by Brahms, to transcend the provincial or partisan is evident in Dvorák’s mature success in balancing the Wagnerian and Brahmsian influences in his work. His late works–the tone poems that were written after his return from America and after Brahms’s death–reveal a Wagnerian and Lisztian influence. But during the 1880s, when the Sixth Symphony was written and first performed, the neoclassicism represented by Brahms was for both aesthetic and biographical reasons in the forefront. Dvorák’s Sixth pays homage to Brahms and to Beethoven, particularly the latter’s Eroica. At the same time, however, it is unmistakably Dvorák. Here, Dvorák uses the Brahmsian example to surmount his status as an exotic, Czech folk-composer without forcing him to abandon his overt affection and debt to his musical heritage. What is perhaps most striking about this symphony is its explicit foray into large – scale symphonic form. Dvorák, like many other composers from the so-called European periphery (even Tchaikovsky), has been subject to the academic and often Germanocentric criticism of weakness with respect to their use of formal procedures in symphonic music. There seems to be something sentimental, formless, and purely lyrical in their use of techniques of musical elaboration, as opposed to the organic and dramatic way in which many composers have been seen as adapting symphonic form – the use of development, recapitulation, the coda, and, above all, patterns for the final movement. In his Sixth Symphony, Dvorák undertook to assume his place as master of the grand symphonic essay (much as he had in his First Symphony–the C Minor–which was only discovered in the twentieth century), by placing considerable weight in the finale.

Brahms’s Second Symphony one enters a somewhat different world. Like Dvorák, Brahms works explicitly within the context of Beethoven, and, to a lesser extent, Schumann and Schubert. As Reinhold Brinkmann makes apparent, Brahms’s Second Symphony also refers to his own Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. In Brahms’s Second, the gravity of the structure has often been understood to rest with the opening two movements; in Dvorák’s Sixth, one senses an attempt to find a way to balance the traditional emphasis on the first movement with the continuation of the post-Beethoven experiment of shifting the weight to the finale. Brahms, however, creates a finale with a more compact, condensed profile, thereby leaving the weight of the first movement undisturbed.

In this concert, we reverse chronology by performing Dvorák’s symphony first, because it gives more room to the listener to make his or her own judgment on the matter of influence. Brahms’s symphony is much better known and legitimately acknowledged as a masterpiece. Dvorák clearly uses Brahms’s symphony in the same key as a model, but by no means should Dvorák’s be seen as mere aftermath. Listen, then, to the Sixth Symphony in its own right, and then remember its answer to the great achievement of Brahms. Furthermore, since both composers refer consciously back to Beethoven, let us allow Dvorák to initiate that dialogue first. It remains to the listener to discover the many interactions between Dvorák, Brahms, and Beethoven.

The central purpose of this concert is not only to celebrate the remarkable relationship between two great composers, but to remind us that the cantankerous Brahms was also a generous and devoted friend and mentor, and a dynamic visionary. Brahms managed to bring new life to forms which Wagner insisted were dead: the piano sonata, the string quartet, the song, and the symphony. Brahms’s example and achievement became an inspiration not only to composers in Germany, but throughout Europe and America, regarding the adaptability of classical and early Romantic traditions of music writing. In the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg reinvented Brahms as the father of modernism and of a progressive approach to musical composition. This radical revision of Brahms’s historical role has found many defenders. The “artwork of the future” need not turn out to be the music drama and tone poem exclusively. Brahms’s influence on Dvorák is comparable to Brahms’s influence on a wide array of turn-of-the-century composers, including Schoenberg, who saw the Wagnerian example as more daunting and less encouraging than the inspired achievement of Brahms, who, in his own time, despite staggering success and world-wide renown, suffered the misfortune of being branded a reactionary. The potential of the traditional to nurture the possibilities of the new finds ample testimony in what Dvorák learned from Brahms.

Against the Grain: The German Influence in French Music at the Turn of the Century

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Against the Grain: The German Influence in French Music at the Turn of the Century, performed on April 13, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

French music in the late nineteenth century can be understood as possessing a tripartite character. One aspect was associated with Jules Massenet: a tradition of well-crafted but stylized music that appeared to lack substance and suffered from the apparent absence of compositional gravity. Another strain reflected the not always consistent amalgam of French composers who were influenced by Richard Wagner and by German traditions of instrumental composition, particularly by Beethoven. And a third development–equally indebted to Wagner–emerged in the 1890s. It proved to be the dominant one; at its center was the work of Claude Debussy, whose Prélude à L’Après_midi d’un faune of 1894 marked a turning point in French music.

The works heard today are on the program for two reasons. First, Albéric Magnard’s Symphony No. 3 (1902) and Florent Schmitt’s Psalm 47 (1904) are relatively unknown but are by any standard remarkable pieces of music that deserve more frequent representation in the orchestral repertory. Vincent d’lndy’s Istar (1896) has fared somewhat better, because it was a favorite of Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch. The second reason is that today, when we think of turn-of-the-century French music, the only composer who initially comes to mind is Claude Debussy. The originality of Debussy’s music propelled him to prominence not only as an innovator but also as a representative of a distinctly French sound and style. But Debussy’s tong shadow over the French fin de siécle tends to obscure the richness of French musical life of which he was only one part. Of course, many works by Saint-Saëns survive in the repertory. So does the music of Gabriel Fauré, and we encounter regularly a few works by Edouard Lalo. Belgian born César Franck’s D-Minor Symphony (1888) also stands out in the French symphonic tradition. Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony has retained some popularity in part on account of its use of the organ. But Saint-Saëns is often perceived as standing apart from French music as a sort of French Brahms. In the end, the distinctive tradition of French composition has been associated almost exclusively with three names: Franck, Fauré and Debussy. Today’s concert seeks to restore the balance somewhat by bringing back onto the concert stage music of French composers who were contemporaries of Debussy, but who forged an ambivalent synthesis between Wagner and German musical traditions and a French sensibility. An important figure in the development of that synthesis was César Franck.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Paris in 1861 set the direction of French music until the outbreak of World War I. Baudelaire’s famous essay “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” and the later founding of the Revue Wagnerienne serve to remind us how important Wagner was to the world of French letters well beyond the realm of music. Too often, we are content to speak of music in reductive nationalist terms, but the idea of a “French” or “German” style seems practical when talking about nineteenth-century music, because identity was a primary concern of the composers themselves. At the same time, however, there was a concurrent assumption of transactional traditions. Crucial to that notion was the concept of classicism, itself an invention of the later nineteenth century. Despite the unmistakable Germanic ideology and content of Wagner’s music dramas, they were as popular outside of Germany as they were in Germany even after 1871. The French defeat at the hands of the Prussians inspired composers in France not to abandon Wagner, but to appropriate him. In fin de siécle England and France, Wagnerism remained as much of a cult as it was in the new German empire.

The French engagement with German traditions of music-making in the nineteenth century began with the deification of Beethoven. The first performance of Beethoven’s symphonies in Paris by Habeneck and the writings of Hector Berlioz on Beethoven were pivotal events in the evolution of music in France. The Magnard symphony reflects the struggle among French composers to develop a tradition of symphonic music which could match the sequence of German achievement, predominant since Beethoven and unbroken until the era of Bruckner and Mahler. There is no better example of the French obsession with Beethoven and German music than the case of Romain Rotland (1866-1944). Rolland won the Nobel Prize for his novel, Jean-Christophe, based on the image of Beethoven (which first appeared in 1904, precisely when Psalm 47 and Magnard’s symphony were either being written or performed). He wrote eight books on Beethoven and was among other things an ardent admirer of Strauss and at the same time a powerful force in turn-of-the-century French musical criticism.

The embrace of an ideology of universalism and internationalism in music-making coexisted therefore not only with the search for individual originality, hut with the development of distinctly national cultural identities. In the case of France, the career of Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931) makes this point most poignantly. D’Indy was perhaps the most energetic and influential as well as controversial figure in French musical life at the turn of the century. He revered Franck (his uncle, an amateur composer, studied with Franck). But Franck’s negative reaction to d’Indy’s early music inspired d’Indy to study the craft of musical composition in a rigorous manner. Parsifal was, in d’Indy’s opinion, an unimpeachable model of musical and dramatic achievement. In the early 1890s, he was asked to submit a plan for the reorganization of the curriculum of the Paris Conservatory. D’Indy had contempt for what he regarded to be the sloppy and lackadaisical traditions of Massenet and the Paris Conservatory. Later, he also opposed Debussy. D’Indy’s recommendations, which called for the imposition of a rigorous curriculum, involving close study of the German symphonic tradition, including Beethoven as well as medieval and Renaissance music, were rejected. D’Indy then used his wealth to found a rival institution, the famous Schola Cantorum, which became known for its emphasis on the study of counterpoint and complex formal strategies. But for all of his advocacy of Wagner, and the symphonic form as developed by German-speaking composers, d’Indy was a nationalist. He used French folk material, and in Istar turned to the East for inspiration and participated in a quite distinctly French fin de siécle Orientalism. At the same time, he was time devoutly Roman Catholic and arrived at an anti-Semitism as virulent as Wagner’s, though formed independently of the German composer’s influence.

Albéric Magnard (1865-1914), like d’Indy, came from a prominent family. He had the particular misfortune of being the son of Francis Magnard, who later became the editor of Le Figaro, the most influential newspaper in Paris. Magnard struggled against the loss of hearing in his career. Like Smetana and Beethoven, he became increasingly isolated and even misanthropic as a result of his disability. Above all, Magnard was eager to show that any success he had as a composer was not the result of family influence. It was perhaps this determination to gain respect in his own right that led him to leave the Paris Conservatory and study with d’Indy. Magnard wrote to a friend that “the artist who does not draw his strength from self-denial is close to death or dishonor.” This exacting Christian asceticism tinged by a sort of vague Nietzscheanism was not too dissimilar from d’Indy’s own ethos. Magnard’s Third Symphony, which closes this program, was one of the few works to gain him international recognition. It was performed by Busoni in Berlin during the 1905-06 season. As Martin Cooper has noted, in contrast to d’Indy’s music, the influence of César Franck is less audible, even though Magnard considered himself one of Franck’s disciples. In this symphony, one senses a direct affinity with contemporary German symphonic practice. Magnard was extraordinarily talented. His obscurity derives from the fact that he was killed by the advancing German army in 1914. Apparently, when German troops trespassed onto the grounds of his estate, Magnard shot and kil1ed a German soldier. The Germans responded by burning his house to the ground, killing all its occupants, including the composer. It is to the credit to the late conductor Ernest Ansermet , who performed and recorded the Third Symphony at the end of his life, that this work retains any contemporary presence at all.

In contrast to Magnard, Florent Schmitt (1870- 1958) took his entire training at the Paris Conservatory. But like d’Indy, early in his career he became attracted to German music. Schmitt traveled throughout Europe, and his first efforts at composition, including Psalm 47, mirrored the influence of trends outside of France. The two most prominent figures in terms of their influence on Schmitt are, finally, Debussy and Strauss. What all these French composers shared was an on going and nearly obsessive engagement with the legacy of Wagner, the classical traditions of German music exemplified by Beethoven, and the vitality of late-nineteenth-century German Romantic composition, most elegantly represented by Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, and Richard Strauss. It is no accident that Mahler and Bruckner in particular were received coolly in France. The skeptical reaction of the French was a result of rivalry and pride, perhaps tinged with envy. Only Debussy and Fauré found independently in their maturity a stylistic’ and compositional originality which set them wholly apart. But the overvaluing of stylistic’ originality is a common error which often prevents us from coming to terms with first-rate music that unabashedly shows its debt to prior models and practices.

The plain truth is that both French and German composers of the later nineteenth century understood their task as reacting to the challenges that took their most daunting shape in Wagner’s last work, Parsifal. The issues of composition that concerned composers of this time were whether classical symphonic forms and procedures were still applicable, despite Wagner’s abandonment of them. Was it possible, as d’Indy suggested, to turn to medieval and Renaissance music as new sources of inspiration that could be melded with Wagnerian strategies of sound and color? If instrumental music had an unambiguous dramatic function, was it necessary to have a program and if so, what sort of program? For all of the explicit and implicit critique of Christianity, evident in most of Wagner’s work (Parsifal notwithstanding) what was the future relationships) between religion and music, particularly Roman Catholicism? The works on this concert grapple with each of these questions. Istar uses aclassical strategy–variation–but reverses its sequence in almost Ivesian manner. Classicism in d’Indy is merged with a late_nineteenth_century Wagnerian sensibility. And there is a program that is set of variations follows closely. In contrast, Magnard eschews all programs, and presents a convincing achievement in the four_movement symphonic form. It has a distinctly French Aspect it in both the dance movement and pastorale, but in a manner that makes it understandable that while Schmitt was composing the Psalm, he was contemplating a ballet on the subject of Salome. Like Debussy’s The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, sensuality and religiosity of the fin de siécle seemed capable of being paired much the way Wagner had done so alluringly in Parsifal.

It is hoped that this concert will encourage listeners to explore other works by these three composers, and seek out the riches of the late nineteenth-century music written in France. What is “against the grain” in this concert is not so much the German influence in French music, but rather a challenge to the ideology which has driven the development of the canonic repertory in the twentieth century. Central to that ideology is the simplistic application of nationalist criteria. We celebrate Sibelius because he appears quintessentially Russian, and Elgar for being typically English. Although within these nations there were spirited debates about developing autonomous national styles, it is a mistake to overlook the repertoire of the past that does not seem to us sufficiently typical according to reductive definitions of national spirit. If we set aside criteria linked to nationalism, we will rediscover an enormous treasure of symphonic music produced between 1885 and 1918 throughout Europe of outstanding quality, written by composers who regarded the nationality of Beethoven and Wagner as either secondary or irrelevant.

Dreams & Realities: Reinventing American Music 1929-42

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Dreams & Realities: Reinventing American Music performed on March 12, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In his classic 1983 study Music in the New World, Charles Hamm characterizes the period from 1894 to the outbreak of the second World War in the history of American music as “the search for a national identity.” Hamm, like many writers before him, begins the discussion of this “search” with the controversy that erupted over Antonin Dvorák ’s endlessly quoted assertion that American composers should find their own voice by doing something other than producing bland imitations of European musical models. Dvorák had come to America to take over the National Conservatory in New York, but unlike many subsequent European composers who came to work in America, including Mahler and Schöenberg, Dvorák was enchanted by that which he regarded to be uniquely American. He did not wield the heavy hand of presumed cultural superiority as did many European musicians who worked in the New World. Dvorák students included Will Marion Cook, the African American composer who helped create the American musical theater; Harry Burleigh, another distinguished African American musician; and Rubin Goldmark, the nephew of Karl Goldmark and one of Aaron Copland’s teachers.

Dvorák encouraged his students to seek in African American and Native American music the sources for a new American musical vocabulary and sound. His example inspired Arthur Farwell, among others, who was a particular champion of Native American traditions. Dvorák was indeed prescient, in that the decades which followed his brief sojourn in American saw the emergence of jazz amid other American and popular folk idioms, all of which would eventually leave an indelible imprint on musical culture not only in America, but in Europe and elsewhere in the world. However, the struggle over national identity remained unresolved, not so much in popular culture, but in the concert music tradition. Among American composers, Dvorák proposition was not greeted with unmitigated enthusiasm. Quite to the contrary, prominent Americans ranging from Amy Beach to Edward MacDowell to Charles Ives took exception to Dvorák’s contention. To many of them, America had already developed its own voice through the ways in which the European musical heritage had been transformed in an American manner–particularly in New England–by English, Irish, and German immigrants.

The polemics of the early twentieth century regarding the “true” and “proper” nature of American music paralleled anxieties about American national uniqueness in painting and literature. America was, by any European standard, a young country marked by brashness, wealth, and superior industrial and economic achievement. The American piano had by 1900 become the world’s standard. After 1919, America, by virtue of its decisive entrance into World War I, emerged as a dominant world military and political power. However, American artists and writers continued to struggle with what seemed to be the overwhelming allure of European trends. These trends included modernism, whether in the form of Stravinsky’s work, or Dada, or Surrealism. At the same time, a new American culture, particularly the jazz and dance which emanated from New York in the 1920s, became wildly popular in Europe. For composers who saw themselves in a European tradition, the challenge was to find ways to bridge the gap between a vital popular culture that culture that seemed unquestionably American, and the prestigious high cultural traditions of a European character, which could also plausibly be argued to be American, albeit more evidently derivative.

External events helped to focus the identity problem and point the way to new solutions. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Depression which ensued radically transformed American life. To begin with, no American artist could avoid coming to grips with the economic and social crisis of the decade. Furthermore, the extent of unemployment and poverty foreground the knotty question of the purpose and role of art. Would music continued to be an art form in America, designed for concert-halls constructed during the gilded age and populated by upper middle-class citizens, self-consciously emulating habits of patronage and taste which took their model from English and continental examples? How could composers trained as “classical” musicians reach their fellow citizens on a large scale, in a decade in which the talking film, the radio, and the phonograph exerted an unparalleled influence and in which a nation turned to art and mass entertainment for solace, escape and inspiration? The stark realities of modernity and national soul-searching demanded an imaginative response within the arts, particularly music.

The composers on tonight’s program offer the listener a glimpse of a decisive decade in the equally momentous political and social shift in our nation self image. During the 1930s, Frederick Converse taught at the New England Conservatory. The movement “Manhattan” from his American Sketches is the earliest music in our program. It was written in 1928, just before the onset of the Depression. Of it the composer wrote that its improvement was “descriptive” without being “realistic.” Indeed, the optimism and exuberance of the 1920s are evident to the ear. Converse said that he sought to express “the activity and turmoil of the great city; the grandeur as well as the sinister sordidness of its various scenes. Through it runs a thread of loneliness which is often felt by sensitive souls in such overpowering surroundings.” Converse studied at Harvard with Julia Knowles Paine, who in turn had studied in Germany. Converse himself also went to Munich to study with Rheinberger. Perhaps motivated by the momentum of the twenties, he turned to the task of writing music which would mirror the distinctly American. American Sketches bears the subtitle “Seeing America First.” Converse’s most famous piece, Flivver Ten Million, written 1927 was a take-off on the staggering success of the Ford Motor Company’s production line.

The spirit of Converse’s music quickly became dated (despite the merits of the music itself), as can be inferred from Aaron Copland’s Statements, which was the next work in this program to be written. It was begun in 1932, although it was premiered a decade later in New York The work occupies a pivotal place in Copland’s cannon. He had gone to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, and the music he wrote during the 1920s represented a period of experimentation with modernism. Between 1928 and 1931, he and Roger Sessions sponsored a legendary series of concerts in New York devoted to new music. But in the summer of 1934, Copland underwent a political transformation. Moved by the Depression, his politics turned to the left. He was impressed by the radical farmers of Minnesota, where he was staying that summer and he realized that the people of America, not merely the urban intellectuals of New York, were attracted to socialism and communism, despite the surface dissimilarity to the voluble and highly intellectual New York radicals he knew so well. In fact, as Vivian Perlis recounts, Copland made the only political speech of his life to the farmers in Bmidji, Minnesota in the summer of 1934. It was during that summer that Copland completed most of the work on Statements. This piece represents Copland’s transition from his modernist strategies to the more populist work of the late 1930s and 1940s for which he has became most famous. In Statements, one can hear Copland’s initial efforts to find a modern voice which could reach a larger population with integrity. The work is designed to be the beginnings of the aesthetic bride Copland sought to build linking radical New York, modernist Paris and rural Minnesota.

Elie Siegmeister went further than Copland in terms of his politics. The New Deal, for all its merits, did not in the end effectively solve the economic problems of the decade. The war ultimately would. Siegmeister, who also studied with Boulanger, was a political radical. He became a member of the Composer’s Collective in New York, and wrote under the name of Swift. He pioneered the use of American folk music and was determined to write music that was both populist, politically inspired, and unmistakably American. He was, among other things, a founder and moving force behind American Ballad Singers. Like Copland, but more aggressively, Siegmeister returned to Dvorák’s exhortation, but extended the search for American roots beyond race, focusing instead on class. He found in rural America and the urban working class a powerful musical voice and a new public for modern composition.

Ruth Crawford Seeger, as her distinguished biographer Judith Tick notes, was a committed experimentalist and modernist. Unlike Copland or Siegmeister, she displayed less of an initial debt to European models. Ironically, however, the work on this program, written one year after the Siegmeister, was her only foray in the use of folk materials. Nevertheless, like Siegmeister, she worked on behalf of the documentation and dissemination of American folk music. Rissolty, Rossolty emerged out of a collaboration with the towering figure of the American folkrevival of the 1930s and 1940s, Alan Lomax. Seeger was one of America’s most gifted composers. Unfortunately her name remains familiar to the public primarily through her association with her husband Charles, the distinguished theorist and experimentalist composer, and her stepson Pete Seeger, who has unflaggingly continued the progressive political and aesthetic traditions of the 1930′s to this day.

Roy Harris, unlike Copland, became famous first during the 1930s. He was born on Lincoln’s birthday in Nebraska. He came from a working-class family, grew up in California, and worked for a time as a truck-driver. Unlike Copland or Siegmeister, both of whom were Jews who came of age in New York, Harris seemed quintessentially American, rather like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Harris preferred to think of himself as an autodidact, even though he too had studied with Nadia Boulanger and had been influenced by Arthur Farwell, who among other things introduced him to the work of Walt Whitman (whose poetry Frederick Converse brilliantly set in The Mystic Trumpeter in 1904). Harris’s first symphony ,entitled 1933, was premiered in Boston by Serge Koussevitzky. In 1936, Harris married Beula Duffey, later known as Johana Harris, a pianist with whom he collaborated for many years. The Folk Song Symphony, which was first written in 1940, revised in 1942, and premiered on the last day of that year, marks the high point of the intense effort which began in the early 1930s to integrate American folk music with symphonic concert music. This symphony has always stood in the shadow of its predecessor, the third symphony, the only one of Harris’s to retain a place in the current repertory.

Apart from the recurrent references to folk music in several of the works on this program, there is little question that there is something uniquely American about all the music on tonight’s program. Particularly intriguing is the way in which many of the composers, especially Seeger and Copland, seek to make a synthesis out of modernism and a recognizable Americanism. All of the music with the exception of Converse’s takes inspiration from a political commitment to the renewal of participatory democracy and social justice. In this sense, all the music written after the Converse work (although it as well in its own way) can be understood as political. The question then for the contemporary listener is whether this music still speaks to us today.

We have become accustomed to an overarching assumption of how the standard repertoire of music evolves. We are given to understand that many pieces of music are written and even well-received when first played, but few stand the proverbial “test of time.” Somehow, certain works are able to transcend their context and speak to succeeding generations and are played over and over again. When works such as the ones on this program are revisited, we are often told that the exhumation is either unjustified or in vain. The music which is revived which has not remained consistently on concert programs is understood to be- however well intentioned-simply not great music.

It may very well be that this commonplace assumption about how a canon of musical works comes into being is flawed. Perhaps there is nothing inherently objective or right about the “test of time”. The music for this program was not chosen simply because it fits a coherent historical narrative. There are many works from the 1930s and early 1940s which would have qualified just as well. No doubt there was and still is much well intentioned and well crafted “political art” that fails to do more than merely be political. That is not the case with respect to the works on today’s program.

Nevertheless, it is particularly instructive for us today to reexamine the art and music of the 1930s. Their reappearance in today’s political context can be illuminating to us as we grapple with today’s issues concerning art and politics. The 1990s have turned out to be a decade in which questions of national and ethnic identity have come to the forefront of national debate. We are inundated by discussions of multiculturalism. We hear much talk of social fragmentation and the loss of a coherent sense of America’s culture. Insofar as music is both a mirror and catalyst of cultural movements, it is particularly apt to listen once again to the music of the 1930s written by composers who struggled with comparable issues of identity and purpose. Whether one is interested in these political and cultural questions or not, as one turns the pages of these various scores, one cannot help but be impressed by the quality of the musical imagination in these works and by their ambition, integrity and freshness of spirit. They are worth hearing, not only as works of music in and of themselves, shorn of their historical context, but as expressions of American composers who understood their role as doing more than just writing music for the sake of career and fame, or music simply designed to entertain and win the approval a small group of self-styled experts. It is our view that these American works deserve to be heard and appreciated more than a half-century later as worthy and convincing contributions to a distinctly American twentieth-century compositional tradition.

The Soul of Poland in Modern Times: The Music of Karol Szymanowski

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Soul of Poland in Modern Times, performed on Jan 24, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Karol Szymanowski’s life and work are bound up with the question of Polish independence and identity, and with the creation of an authentic cultural voice for modern Poland. Unlike some other concerts that are organized around historical and biographical themes, this concert possesses particular significance in terms of contemporary politics and culture. One might have thought that nineteenth-century styles of nationalism had become things of the past, but the events that have transpired since 1989, particularly in eastern Europe, have been startling in their demonstration of the extent to which an old-fashioned sort of national fervor persists and flourishes.

Nationalism is especially alive today in those countries which found themselves after the beginning of the nineteenth century squeezed between two opposing political and cultural giants, Russia and Germany. The corridor of eastern Europe, ranging from Ukraine (Szymanowski’s birthplace) in the east to Serbia and Bosnia in the south and Latvia and Estonia in the north, is composed of national groups whose sense of their distinct identities have been forged in a struggle against external political and economic domination. It is only in the twentieth century that many of these entities have experienced political independence for the first time. Principles of self-determination and the specific details of the Versailles Treaty after World War I created an independent Poland (with very different borders than the one we know today), a Lithuania (much smaller and with a different capital), a Hungary (reduced in size), a Czechoslovakia (now divided into two states), and a Yugoslavia (which has disintegrated). One of the knottier problems in this region is the difficulty in defining the borders that separate these groups, a situation which has created a number of minorities in an environment where, precisely because of the precariousness of political independence, inclusion in a majority is crucial to the safety and survival of individuals.

The post-World War II era of Communism as a supranationalist ideology ultimately did little to deflect or suppress the intense debate within these national groupings about what constituted the essence of their distinct characters. From 1848 on, in the spheres of literature, art, and music, this issue was also informed by an awareness of an international world of arts and letters. The idea of cosmopolitan and transnational standards ironically raised a circumscribing specter, for anything that was not connected in some way to the cultural lives of London, Paris, Berlin, or Vienna was immediately deemed provincial. Even the turn-of-the century intellectual and artistic community of St. Petersburg and Moscow quarreled over whether to prize native and presumably authentic sources for art or to defer to German and French models of compositional technique, style, and form.

If painters, poets and composers residing in the capital of the empire of Czarist Russia could turn to Berlin, Paris, and Vienna as models, it should come as no surprise that the leading literary, artistic and musical talents in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia would do the same. For these smaller nations, the search for an authentic and autonomous cultural tradition befitting political independence and connected to one s own language while still internationally viable was, to put it simply, daunting. For the Czechs and the Poles, however, the matter was further complicated by the fact that, apart from the allure of French and German traditions, there was the overwhelming presence of a dominant Slavic culture as well: Russia. Leos Janacek, for example, was fascinated by the idea of Panslavism, and the Polish poet Julian Tuwim (represented on tonight’s program) deeply admired Pushkin and translated Pasternak into Polish. Ciurlonis, the greatest Lithuanian musical and painterly talent at the turn of the century, was trained both in Poland and Russia. The spiritual capital of Lithuania before 1914 was Vilnius, which also happened to be the home of Poland’s greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz. To further complicate matters, Vilnius was a legendary center of Jewish learning, a fact that just hints at the crucial presence of Jews throughout the nations of eastern Europe. One of the most tragic ironies in modern European history is the extent to which the distinct culture and religion of the Jews were vilified during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a means of galvanizing exclusive national identities.

The case of Poland is perhaps the most familiar to Americans, in part because of the massive Polish immigration at the turn of the century. America and France both have special connections to Polish history. Kosciuszko and Pulaski both fought in the American Revolution. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau drafted a constitution for Poland. Dombrowski formed a Polish legion which fought in Napoleon’s Italian campaign; in fact, the marching song of those Polish troops later provided Poland with its national anthem. Unlike the English, the Poles revered Napoleon because of his brief creation of an independent albeit fragmentary Poland. Poland also differed from Hungary and Czechoslovakia in its distinct advantage of having a single unified and powerful religion, Catholicism (if one excludes the large Jewish population in Poland before 1939).

Poland faced a number of problems in its search for a national character. Inter-war Poland (the state created after 1918) contained significant German-and Russian-speaking minorities. The city in which Tuwim was born–Lodz–was during his childhood nearly one third German-speaking. Another third primarily spoke Yiddish. Therefore only one third of Poland’s second-largest city could consider itself entirely Polish. At the time of Szymanowski’s birth, the Polish aristocracy of Szlachta, was composed primarily of landowners in a largely rural nation. They constituted a significant percentage of the population. Since the time of Chopin, they maintained a decidedly francophilic intellectual perspective. The Polish language, although Slavic, uses Latin characters and has a subtle and elegant palette of sound that make it of all the Slavic languages the most like French. A further ironic dimension in the struggle for independence and a secure national identity in the history of modern Poland, particularly after the failed rebellion of 1863, was the memory of Poland’s distant past. Many Americans may not realize that centuries ago, Poland, under the leadership of national heroes like Jan Sobiewski, was a great and powerful empire with a sphere of influence that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. That past greatness–it’s heroism and chivalry–was glorified throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Polish literature. The great national poem of Poland, Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, bears eloquent testimony to this fact.

Karol Szymanowski remains after Chopin Poland’s greatest composer. He was born into the privileged, landowning class of the Polish aristocracy. His mother, to whom he was extremely close, was highly sophisticated and encouraged her artistic children. One sister was a professional singer, the other a writer and a poet, and Karol’s brother Felix was a pianist and composer. Like many other intellectuals and artists who lived under the shadows of Germany and Russia, Szymanowski sensed that knowing only his native language was not enough. He became fluent in Russian, German and French. He also spoke Italian, and shared with many of his German counterparts a special romance with Italy. Szymanowski was a great patriot, despite the fact that the conservative Polish public never appreciated his music. He spent many troubled years at the Warsaw conservatory, which he had helped to revive after World War I. His sense of his own compatriots’ lack of appreciation was somewhat mollified, however, by an honorary degree from the University of Cracow.

In his personal life, Szymanowski was frequently depressed and lonely; he suffered from tuberculosis and other chronic illnesses. Money was a continual source of anxiety for him, and he tragically became one of the many in the long list of composers whose financial strains were in part responsible for an untimely death. Szymanowski was also truly cosmopolitan, living for a time in both Vienna and Paris. His relation to French music may be compared to that of the Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinu. Szymanowski, however, was profoundly impressed by Mahler, and avoided the intense germanophobia of some of his Polish contemporaries. His first symphony (performed in our subscription series three seasons ago) clearly reveals the influence of the music of Richard Strauss. But Szymanowski’s closest friends were Polish-most of them from the very prominent and significant Polish Jewish middle-class community. They included composer and conductor Gregor Fitelberg, pianist Artur Rubinstein, and violinists Roman Totenberg and Pawel Kochauski.

Musically, the three composers most readily comparable to Szymanowski are Bartók, Stravinsky, and Janacek. Bartók, especially, admired Szymanowski and was particularly influenced by his innovative use of the violin. Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater (performed in our subscription series two seasons ago) speaks to the close connection between Stravinsky and Szymanowski. Like Janacek, Szymanowski was deeply fascinated by the specific character of his native language. Szymanowski shared with all three composers an exploration of folkloric traditions as an expression of an autonomous cultural past, to be used as a source for creating music which could compete with the “universal’ standards set by German and French music while also asserting a distinctive and discrete national voice. The key in this approach was to compose music that expressed a national character without leaving the overtly local or specific untransformed. These composers sought to use the national as a fresh aesthetic foundation, not as a superficial illustrative symbol. To Szymanowski, Bartók seemed the most successful at this effort. Rather like the young Stravinsky, Szymanowski in his early years chose to turn eastwards, away from occidental Europe, for a different perspective. Many ofSzymanowski’s generation flirted with the idea that the real distinction between eastern and western Europe lay in eastern Europe’s closer cultural proximity to the Orient.

But Szymanowski’s deepest connection to these three composers is their mutual determination to escape becoming marginalized as artists purely because of their exoticized national identity. Polish writers may win Nobel prizes–Sienkiewicz, Reymont, Milosz, and Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, for Example–but the fact remains that, like Hungarian and Czech, Polish is not an international language, and Polish writers for the most part still struggle against obscurity. Music, however, holds the promise of being universal and international. A nationalist composer of the twentieth century could aspire to compete globally on the highest artistic level without abandoning his cultural authenticity or his love for his native soil, history, and language. Bartók and Stravinsky are two of Szymanowski’s contemporaries who succeeded brilliantly. It is time that we allow the same triumph for Szymanowski, whose music will continue to stand the test of time in concert halls far outside of Poland.

The four works on this program provide a short but dense overview of the mature composer’s career. The concert closes with Symphony No. 3, which Szymanowski considered one of his two best pieces. It reflects Szymanowski’s attraction to orientalism, an attraction which diminished after Poland’s independence. Szymanowski then turned like Bartók to forkloric traditions, particularly those from the Tatra region in the Carpathian mountains. Our concert opens with a composition which falls chronologically between the third and fourth symphonies: Slopiewnie, Szymanowski’s setting of a poem of Julian Tuwim, Poland’s greatest inter-war poet. In his magisterial work The History of Polish Literature, Czeslaw Milosz describes it as “a whole poem [which] conveys no meaning other than an aura of some inventive proto-Slavic language.” As Milosz notes, it betrays a “sensual, amorous relationship with word-stems, their prefixes and suffixes.” By setting Poland’s great contemporary poet to music, and by choosing a text which celebrated the distinctive sound of the Polish language, Szymanowski set the stage to declare his own equivalent in the music: a timbral, tonal, and rhythmic sound which could be heard as national without becoming exotic or caricaturizing. Symphony No.4 was written at the end of the composer’s career. It focuses on Szymanowski’s own instrument, the piano, which was of course also the instrument of his great predecessor, Chopin. In this work, perhaps the best-known on the program through its prominent place in Artur Rubinstein’s repertoire, Szymanowski’s idiosyncratic way of integrating the national and the universal–the particular and the general–becomes as invisible as it is transparent. The concert also includes Symphony No.2, which represents Szymanowski’s transition from a complete dependence on the models presented by Mahler and Strauss to the formation of his own distinct musical language. Although less known and critically considered less typical of the mature Szymanowski, it was clearly one of the composer’s favorite works. He returned to it and struggled to improve it in the last years of his life. His affection for it derived not only from the breakthrough it represented in his own mastery of composition, but also because it gave him his first important international success. All of these works represent major achievements in Szymanowski’s career. They are not presented in chronological order, but are arranged to give the listener a sense of the remarkable scope of his composition.

Tonight’s program mirrors the striking variety of experimentation, unerring refinement, and intensity of this great composer s oeuvre. The contemporary listener should perhaps reflect that without the example of Szymanowski, the post-World War II Renaissance of Polish music, most recently exemplified by the popularity of Gorecki, would be difficult to imagine. For those concerned with the future of Europe as well as with music, listening to Szymanowski should engender hope. If Europe is to be unified without relegating eastern European nations once again to their peripheral status as oppressed annexes of dominant superpowers, then the music, art and literature presently being created might do well to emulate Szymanowski’s example, in which both the intimate is expressed and the national embraced in a voice that is distinctively individual, yet compelling to listeners from all parts of the world and from different generations.

Szymanowski, Symphony No. 2 (1910)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Soul of Poland in Modern Times, performed on Jan 24, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The Second Symphony was considered by Szymanowski one of his best works. In the context of this concert, it provides the listener with an impressive point of departure from which to consider the composer’s artistic evolution. It was completed in 1910 and premiered in Warsaw in 1911, while Szymanowski was still in his twenties. It was Szymanowski’s first great success outside of Poland, and was performed to enthusiastic response in Vienna and Berlin. The reaction at the Warsaw premiere was predictably lukewarm. As a result of the Second Symphony’s success in Vienna, however, Szymanowski was given a publishing contract with the prestigious Universal Edition, Europe’s premiere publishing house for new music.

The symphony has been long considered an example of Szymanowski’s mastery of counterpoint. One encounters fugal writing and variation form. The music shows the continuing influence of German contemporaries, particularly Max Reger, but Richard Strauss is still present in the lush sound and large-scale ambition of the work. What is immediately apparent in listening to the work is that Szymanowski had begun to cut his own path, particularly in the use of tonality. The work extends tonal vocabulary through the use of rapid shifts, giving the impression of a highly chromatic and variable tonal logic. Szymanowski’s preoccupation with this symphony is evident in the fact that in the 1930s, he undertook a revision and a reorchestration of it with the help of Gregor Fitelberg. Although Szymanowski died before the revision of the second movement was completed, it is in the revised Fitelberg version that the work is performed. Even in its revised form, one can hear the influence, particularly in terms of orchestration, of Mahler. But if, as the leading commentators on Szymanowski, including Christopher Palmer and Jim Samson, have observed, this symphony clearly shows the distinct musical voice of the composer. In a daring and unusual step, for example, he opens the symphony with one of his most trusted and characteristic instrumental vehicles, the solo violin.

Szymanowski was intent in this work to eschew any programmatic association. It is as if he wanted to distance himself from his earlier association with the “Young Poland” literary movement, exemplified by his friendship with Tadeusz Micinski (1873-1918), the philosopher poet. Micinski was the translator of the poem by the Persian mystic Jallal al-din Rumi that Szymanowski later used in his Symphony No.3. Like Julian Tuwim, Micinski was born in Lodz and traveled extensively. He shared Szymanowski’s fondness for the Tatra mountains, particularly the town of Zakopane, a gathering point for artists.Micinski’s life came to an end during World War I, when he was mistaken for a Russian general and murdered.

The Second Symphony betrays an almost obsessive ambition to demonstrate the composer’s ability to transform and yet weave seemingly disparate material together. Szymanowski described his work as having “a first movement in a grand manner” followed by “a theme in nine variations, the adagio and finale with a fugue.” References to the primary theme of the first movement are heard in the second. The distinct fugal subjects at the end of the second movement are also audibly related to the work’s beginning. If this structure seems to resemble Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Op. 111, that is because Szymanowski used it as a model. But unlike other early Szymanowski works based on German models, such as the Concert Overture, Op.12, which was based on Wlast the Hero by Micinski, a poem in the spirit of Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and which has been condemned unfairly as being derivative, (despite the fact that it was hailed at its 1906 Warsaw premiere,) this second symphony is clearly the work of a composer that has come into his own. Here Szymanowski uses models only to make a distinctive musical statement within the confines of the central European symphonic tradition. In his letters, Szymanowski himself did not hesitate to make the confident assertion that it would be his second symphony that would be remembered after his death as a masterpiece.

A “Politically Incorrect” Masterpiece

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert A “Politically Incorrect” Masterpiece, performed on Nov 22, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When the history of twentieth-century music is written from a distance greater than our own, the story that is told may very well be different from the one with which all of us have lived. Until recently, we have understood the history of twentieth-century music as a history of progressive development. The essentials of the story begin in the nineteenth century with Wagner. He is credited with extending harmonic practice, transforming time and duration, and enlarging the palette of musical sound. He abandoned the traditional forms of classic and romantic music. From Wagner on, progress–understood as the pursuit of originality and innovation–continued unabated until tonality was abandoned altogether. Modernism in the form of the twelve-tone strategy of Arnold Schoenberg and the work of second Viennese school appeared to be the logical culmination of the evolution of a musical language specifically appropriate to twentieth-century life and culture. The motto on the Secession building designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, which was completed in 1898–when the twenty-four year-old Franz Schmidt (who was born in 1874, the same year as Arnold Schoenberg) was already a member of the Vienna Imperial Opera Orchestra under Gustav Mahler–read, “To each age its art, to art its freedom.” This motto implied historicism; it meant that each age would place its distinctive stamp on the many forms of aesthetic expression that it produced. That stamp was linked to the dominant and unique historical circumstances which artists and audience shared alike.

In this familiar story, two exact contemporaries, Schoenberg and Schmidt, ended up occupying two radically different places in the progressive narrative of music history: Schoenberg was placed the center and Schmidt ended up at the periphery. Why? Although Franz Schmidt grew up in the same Vienna as Arnold Schoenberg, the inspiration he took from the city was radically different. As a cellist in the opera orchestra, he did not particularly like Mahler’s personality. (Listeners to tonight’s concert, however, will notice many Mahlerian touches in Schmidt’s score, particularly in the orchestration.) Schmidt studied with Bruckner and Robert Fuchs and aligned himself with a cultural movement which saw itself as the healthy mainstream, and viewed the innovators of the Viennese fin de siecle as narcissistic rebels and philistine purveyors of change for change’s sake.

Indeed, not all composers in the early part of the twentieth century understood the legacy of Wagner in the same way. By the 1920s, an open rift existed in the German and Austrian musical world. In 1917, a leading German composer, Hans Pfitzner, wrote a polemical essay entitled “Danger: Futurists!” designed as an attack on Ferrucio Busoni. Pfitzner then published a more extensive essay, “The New Aesthetic of Musical Impotence,” in 1920. An anti-modernist conservative camp developed. Although Max Reger died in 1916 on the eve of the rift, he emerged as a founding father of the anti-Modernist tendency in twentieth-century musical composition. There are many points of comparison between Reger and Schmidt, not the least of which can be discerned in moments of extreme chromaticism and in the organ solo which opens the second part of the work on tonight’s program.

Reger, Pfitzner, and Schmidt are the three central figures of the anti-Modernist German and Austrian line in twentieth-century European music before 1950. All three composers believed that twentieth-century music needed to retain the ideal of a common musical language rooted in tonality. They were determined to continue a historical tradition reaching back into the Renaissance in a manner that was wholly recognizable as unbroken to the contemporary audience. They drew inspiration from both Wagner and Brahms, and saw themselves as sustaining the true German Romantic tradition. They were eclectic in their use of “pure” musical forms and the writing of so-called “program music.” Ironically, they had much in common with their Modernist enemies, particularly Schoenberg. For example, Pfitzner, Schmidt and Schoenberg all believed in the superiority of German music, and each considered himself in his own way a great patriot. Schmidt, like Pfitzner, paid overt homage to the classical past by using both the symphonic form and the variation form. In tonight’s work, he undertook a task reminiscent of the great Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach. In Schmidt’s case, there is a particular affinity between this work and the religious intensity and commitment in the choral music of his teacher, Anton Bruckner.

The great divide between Modernist and anti-Modernist music had its echoes in politics. Pfitzner became an avid Nazi and had the misfortune of outliving the Third Reich. Unlike Richard Strauss, his political engagement was fanatical, a fact which has helped keep much of his music from the concert and opera stage. Only the monumental Palestrina, among whose admirers was Thomas Mann, seems to return periodically. Schmidt was an Austrian who died shortly after the Anschluss in 1938. There is some dispute about how bad his politics actually were, and there is some evidence that, like Wilhelm Furtwängler, Schmidt behaved decently in his personal relationships with his Jewish colleagues. But any attempt to improve Schmidt’s image cannot avoid coming to grips with his sympathy for Austro-fascism. Aesthetic conservatism and political conservatism went hand in hand in the cultural politics of early twentieth-century Austria. Schmidt, after all, did begin work after the Anschluss on a celebratory cantata entitled Die Deutsche Auferstehung (The German Resurrection). His profound commitment, evident in this work, to the traditions of Austro-Catholicism lent him both prestige and an image of nativist authenticity dear to Austrian conservatives. Like Bruckner, he took on the mantle of the uncorrupted, anti-cosmopolitan artist rooted in his native soil and culture.

Owing to Schmidt’ s political leanings during the 1930s, his music became associated with Austrian fascism and Nazism. In the years between 1938 and 1945 in the concert programs of Vienna, the music of Franz Schmidt played huge and prominent role. This association resulted in making his music unwelcome and politically tainted after the war. In this sense, his music and career was labeled “politically incorrect” and took on a symbolic role directly in conflict with any effort at de-Nazification. The situation in Austria was even more complicated than in Germany, for in Austria, the process of coming to terms with the past was delayed and submerged by Austria’s delusive and inaccurate self-image an unwitting dupe of Hitler.

The coincidence of art and politics cannot be brushed aside. But at the same time, it cannot give us the right to turn away from the musical achievement of Franz Schmidt. Unlike Pfitzner, Schmidt was not a collaborator, but merely a fallible human being with his share of relatively commonplace but dangerous prejudices. He was also, however, a composer of remarkable gifts. Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln is unquestionably his magnum opus. Like the music of Max Reger, it shows its debt to the past even as it displays unmistakable originality. Schmidt did not write music as an act of restoration. He used historical models to fashion something new. The tenor role of Saint John may conjure up the memory of Bach, and there may be other glimpses of direct references to the musical past, but all these allusions are cast in an ambitious, sweeping and intense fabric of musical and spiritual inspiration. This work qualifies as few others do as a neglected masterpiece. It should lead the listener on a spiritual journey that illustrates and magnifies the mysteries, metaphors, and images of the Apocalypse. It stands in the greatest tradition of the sacred oratorio.

To return to the story of twentieth-century music, a revival of Das Buch at the end of this century is particularly appropriate. The heyday of modernism has passed, and in that amorphous and eclectic aftermath called post-Modernism, tonality and traditional forms of composition and narrative music have returned. Franz Schmidt may have a place in the story of this century that will be told in the future, that is closer to that occupied today by Arnold Schoenberg than we may heretofore have suspected was possible. New generations may discover the unbroken conservative line of music making in this century with enthusiasm. They may hear it in a new way, detached from the polemics of the day, much the way we now hear Wagner, Brahms, and Bruckner side by side. It is therefore poignant and fitting that the first performance in recent years in the United States should feature the Arnold Schoenberg Choir from Vienna with the American Symphony Orchestra in New York. The pairing of Schoenberg and Schmidt in this way constitutes not only an act of symbolic reconciliation, hut also a more precise and penetrating reflection on the history of music in the twentieth century.

The Composer’s Voice: Influence and Originality in Hartmann and Mahler

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Composer’s Voice, performed on Oct 6, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann was, as Andrew D. McCredie, the leading Hartmann scholar, has pointed out, an artist of conscience. The central question for his generation–the crucible of its creative work–was the rise of fascism and the Second World War. Hartmann was a Bavarian and born a Catholic. He was the descendant of generations of artisans, artists, and teachers. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, he was unable to come to terms with the horrors of Nazism. Emigration was unreasonable and collaboration impossible. As a result, in his formative years, he found himself driven to silence.

It should therefore come as no surprise that a large portion of the music that appeared publicly after 1950 which made his reputation drew from music written during the 1930s and 1940s. Before 1945, Hartmann could find practically no acceptable venue for expression. Writing music in opposition to the world around oneself with no opportunity for performance and the ever-present possibility that one could put oneself in jeopardy present a psychologically terrifying reality. Hartmann was one of the very few German artists and intellectuals who maintained a truly honorable “inner emigration.” He stayed in obscurity, out of the public eye. At the same time, he composed arguably some of this century’s greatest, most intense music. What characterizes his symphonic work is not only an extraordinary command of the craft of composition, but a thorough commitment to the complex and subtle elaboration of musical ideas. Hartmann’s music, from the first note to the last, reveals an emotional power and a moral honesty. Human decency and talent are transfigured into a distinctive musical voice. Most of his works from the 1930s and 1940s function simultaneously on a formal and programmatic plane. In the formalist matrix, the pain of recognition around the composer is audible throughout. Hartmann’s heroism and achievement are all the more remarkable because his music affects us decades after the political events have passed into history.

The core of Hartmann’s accomplishment is his eight symphonies. In this sense, his work can be compared to that of Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was another leading composer caught in the web of dictatorship and terror, but he remained a public figure and sought to come to some accommodation with the world around him, despite its evident evil. The cost to Shostakovich was profound and gave rise to elements of satire, banality, crudeness, irony, and bitterness. Hartmnann’s retreat from the world lent his music a pervasive integrity and the aspect of suffering. I believe that Hartmann is a symphonist equal in stature to Shostakovich, and one of the few great symphonic composers of this century.

The First Symphony is typical of Hartmann’s struggle to reconcile music with life. Much of it was written during the 1930′s. Hartmann took his text from the American poet Walt Whitman, who himself was profoundly influenced by the American Civil War. In Hartmann’s First Symphony, then, we have a German composer setting the words of the poet of democracy and the enemy of his own country. But Whitman’s significance for twentieth-century musical modernism was not solely political. By the 1920s, Whitman had become a favorite of the German avant-garde. In 1913, the leading journal of turn-of-the-century musical modernism, Der Merker, published aphorisms by Walt Whitman. Hartmann’s choice was therefore also a statement about the necessity to continue the modernist idiom in music which came into being during the first three decades of this century.

During the 1930s, the Nazi Party spearheaded an aesthetic turn away from modernism toward a nostalgic conservative neoromanticism. Music and text in the First Symphony set the stage for Hartmann to write a symphonic essay that integrated political resistance in the form of aesthetic experimentalism. Although, as Robert Maxham points out, Hartmann was deeply influenced by Bruckner, the First Symphony reminds one also of the Mahler of the Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Symphonies. Hartmann’s musical language is an eclectic but thoroughly original achievement. Arnold Schoenberg was reputed to have said to an aspiring composer that no one should write music unless it sounded as if it had to be. There is this aura of necessity in all of Hartmann’s scores. lie never lapses into sentimentality or self-indulgence. Hartmann was severely self-critical and as a result, the final versions of his music are tightly structured and unerringly well-paced, with magical and terrifying timbres.

The Sixth Symphony, like the First, was derived from another case of the symbiosis of the literary and the musical. This time Hartmann chose Emile Zola, who like Whitman had become a symbol of a humanistic social conscience. Zola, more particularly, was the most celebrated opponent of political anti-Semitism owing to his courageous role in the Dreyfus affair. Once again Hartmann’s anti-German feelings are evident in his use of a French writer. His legendary penchant for revision and his difficulty in letting works go may (as in the case of the Sixth Symphony) indeed constitute a final piece of evidence regarding the nobility of his spirit. finlike other composers in the post-World War II era, Hartmann never exploited the public recognition of the war’s atrocities. He never conveniently used the pain and suffering of the past in order to spur his own muse. A listener today will find access to the aesthetic and the emotional in Hartmann’s music without any awareness of the specific historical circumstances which occasioned the music’s composition. It is to be hoped that the music of Hartmann–which is entirely neglected in the American concert hall–will be given its due not only because it reminds us that it is possible to sustain human decency without martyrdom even in the worst of times, but because it is great music that is accessible upon first hearing, which does not lose its magic after repeated exposure.

Today’s listener will have already anticipated many of the links between Hartmann and Mahler. To refer once again to the insights of Schoenberg, Mahler’s integrity as an artist and friend was what made him the idol of a younger generation of musicians, composers, and writers. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, three of the most influential twentieth-century composers, saw in Mahler their most significant predecessor. As the distinguished Mahler scholar, Edward R. Reilly, has written, Das klagende Lied held a special place in Mahler’s life. It was his first foray into large-scale composition, and its rejection led to a period of self-doubt. Like Hartmann, Mahler reworked and reutilized his own music. The material of his songs appear inure than once in his symphonies. In Hartmann’s case, the thematic material in the symphonies can be found in other works. It was with a sense of triumph and irony that Mahler chose the revised version of his early work with which to make his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1901, after he had been elected by that orchestra as its conductor. If Hartmann, who was no outsider in his own community in terms of nationality and religion, chose as literary inspiration the writings of foreigners, Mahler, a Jew from Bohemia, chose the quintessential nineteenth-century source of German cultural authenticity–the fairy tales of Grimm–with which to appear in triumph before the Viennese audience. In one clear sense, Mahler, in this work, provided a model for Hartmann. As in Hartmann’s First Symphony, text and the procedure of symphonic writing work together. Both composers believed deeply in the ethical and in oral power of art. If neither of them succeeded in writing music that encouraged more goodness and perhaps even tolerance in listeners in their own time, they nevertheless wrote music which to this day retains the potential to inspire its listener to reflect and to resist evil. The achievement of both of these composers bears witness to the resiliency of the aesthetic imagination in this century.