Opera Scandal 1920s

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Opera Scandal 1920s, performed on March 5, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The impetus for tonight’s program is the need to revisit the career of one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers. Paul Hindemith was one of the most prolific composers in recent history, as well as one of modernity’s most important teachers. Born near Frankfurt in 1895, he began his public career not only as a composer but also as an instrumentalist. He was an accomplished violinist who rose to the position of concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra at the age of twenty-two. But his real reputation as a performer came primarily with his turn to the viola, an instrument for which he wrote an enormous amount of music and on which he was one of the leading practitioners of the day. Hindemith also distinguished himself from the beginning as a composer. His principal teacher was Bernhard Sekles, the eminent German-Jewish composer.

Hindemith first burst onto the scene in the post-World War I period. He quickly came to be regarded as a leader of the post-War avant-garde, but the fame which he had acquired during the Weimar Republic came to haunt him when the regime changed in 1933. The Nazi campaign against “degenerate” music was directed not only at Jews but at modernists, the symbols of the progressive aesthetic experiments associated with the Weimar period. Despite his Aryan background and the nationalists’ celebration of him as a great German talent, Hindemith was not exempt from the Nazis’ ire, especially that of Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi attack contained more than one aspect of inconsistency. As the 1920s progressed, Hindemith’s accomplishments were increasingly in harmony with the right-wing call for a renewal of active music-making and of a national cultural revival based in populist amateurism, singing, and instrumental playing. This movement disparaged the arcane and oblique language of the avant-garde. Hindemith, who embraced the “new objectivity [neue Sachlichkeit],” held views that could have been perceived as compatible with this cultural agenda. In this sense his compositional ambitions went in a different direction from those pursued by the Berlin-based Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils. But despite all this, Hindemith’s reputation from the early 1920s as a radical and confrontational figure was not effaced. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler tried to intervene with the Nazi authorities on behalf of Hindemith. Furtwängler was convinced that Hindemith was the most important young composer of the age. In 1933 Hindemith occupied himself with writing the opera Mathis der Maler from which he also extracted a symphony. The first performance of the Mathis der Maler Symphony in 1934 in Berlin was a great success. However, Hindemith continued to be attacked and although Furtwängler went to great lengths to protect him (including an audience with Adolf Hitler), the composer was forced to emigrate.

In 1935 Hindemith found himself in Turkey, from whence he traveled to Switzerland. He ultimately emigrated to the United States. From 1940, he taught both at Tanglewood and at Yale University. Among his pupils were Easley Blackwood, Lukas Foss, and Harold Shapero. In his “American period,” which lasted until the early 1950s, Hindemith emerged as an extremely tough and conservative personality. He was not only legendarily hard on his pupils and critical of their abilities, but his music became more traditional in its ambitions. He struggled hard to maintain high standards of compositional craft against a tide of what he considered to be undisciplined fashion in the continuing avant-garde of the post-war era. As a result he published extensively on music theory and the art of composition. He called on performers and composers alike to command a formidable range of musical skills. By the end of the 1950s he moved back to Switzerland. He died suddenly in 1963.

In the near half-century that has elapsed since his death, most of Hindemith’s music has disappeared from the active repertory. His most performed orchestral works are the concerti he wrote for instruments for which the concerto literature is thin, such as horn and viola. Occasionally, one may find a performance of the Symphonic Metamorphoses after Themes by Weber (1943) or the Mathis der Maler Symphony (1934). But Hindemith’s long career was so evolutionary and varied that these great works provide only a partial view of this composer’s output and achievement. Tonight’s program focuses on the first period of his compositional development. To many observers it is precisely the early Hindemith, works written before Mathis der Maler, that is the most compelling. This phase of his career includes all of the Kammermusik pieces as well as the brilliant opera Cardillac (1926) and several other works for the stage, including Hin und zurück, Op. 45a (1927) and Neues vom Tage (1929).

The three one-act operas presented tonight catapulted Hindemith to notoriety. The last of these to be composed, Sancta Susanna, seemed so outrageous at the time that even as progressive a man as Fritz Busch declined to perform it. In middle age, Hindemith himself suppressed it. His is not the first case of a composer reconsidering the ethical and moral character of earlier works. In the 1960s Shostakovich brought his maturity to bear on the youthful bravado of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932), for example. The source of anxiety in Sancta Susanna, however, was never the music, but the libretto. The same is true of the sadistic depiction of sexuality in Kokoschka’s play, which Hindemith set with minimal alteration, and of the cruel humor of Das Nusch-Nuschi, in which the comedic music contrasts sharply with the subject matter of castration and the orientalist depiction of an inhuman society and irrational fate. It may seem incredible to some of us today that these operas shocked audiences through their audacious subject matter.

But in order to understand why Hindemith was so deliberately scandalous, one must remember the historical moment of these operas’ composition. As Professor Giselher Schubert rightly points out, the 1920s was the time when a generation was staggered by the senseless brutality and carnage of World War I. The claims of reason, assertions of political ideologies, and high-minded moralizing of official religions inevitably provoked a pervasive cynicism when “civilized” Europe enthusiastically embraced a war that appeared to have little purpose or rationale. The rage at those in power and at the cultural values of the educated and elite classes who displayed such smug confidence in 1914 was palpable throughout Europe. It provided a source of profound artistic energy and ambition. The shock of Hindemith’s triptych, like many other works of the time, was an attempt to articulate the hypocrisy of the traditional beliefs that mandated such a catastrophic war. The operas force the issue of how such concepts as romantic love, fidelity, and spiritual obedience could possibly continue to be taken seriously. But as in all immediate responses to tragic destruction, when time passed and Hindemith’s world rebuilt itself, his early operas seemed to him unnecessarily stark and provocative, and he renounced them. Nevertheless, they remain musically brilliant, and provide a fascinating perspective on the early life and creativity of a great composer.

Psalm 21, v.5 (on music by F.J. Haydn) (1865)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Jews and Vienna, City of Music, performed on Feb 8, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Salomon Sulzer was born in 1804 in Hohenems and died in 1890 in Vienna. He was the chief cantor (Oberkantor) of the Viennese Jewish community for nearly three quarters of a century. His career bridged the pre-1848 culture of Vienna and the late nineteenth-century period that was marked not only by Brahms and Bruckner, but by a massive Jewish immigration to the city that began in the late 1860s. Hired by the elite and privileged Jewish community of the late 1820s, Sulzer radically reformed the Jewish liturgy and created the basis of the Viennese rite that in turn influenced synagogue cantors all over the world. When Sulzer came to Vienna, he found a city in which Jews and non-Jews, particularly in the area of music, shared common public and private spaces. Sulzer was highly respected as a singer outside of his cantorial role and also taught at the Vienna Conservatory. He commissioned Schubert to set a psalm in Hebrew. He befriended Lizst, Meyerbeer, Paganini and Schumann. Sulzer also wrote secular music, setting the texts of the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau. Sulzer’s son Joseph, who helped edit later editions of Sulzer’s monumental compilation and arrangement of Jewish liturgical music, Schir Zion (Song of Zion), became principal cellist of the Vienna Philharmonic. Sulzer’s fame extended well beyond the confines of the Jewish community.

In order to understand this unusual and gifted man, it is important to note that the Habsburg monarchy, which in 1867 had become a dual monarchy because of the Austrian defeat by the Prussians, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, was until its dissolution, a dynastic enterprise. Its politics and culture were dominated by an Imperial presence and an aristocracy. The Emperor for most of Sulzer’s life was the venerable Franz Joseph, whose attitude toward Jews was benevolent. The Emperor (as the pro-monarchist and the nostalgic Austrian Jewish writer Joseph Roth never tired of reminding his readers), was distinctly resistant to anti-Semitism. He considered Jews to be his loyal subjects treated them like all the other cultural and national groups in his vast realm: all were equally subordinate. In return, the Jews of the monarchy revered the Emperor and Empire.

Loyalty to the Habsburgs, the imperial city, and pride in one’s Jewish faith were for Sulzer’s generation entirely compatible. This rare symbiosis is best exemplified in Sulzer’s music. The first work on the program is a bittersweet picture of the confidence his co-religionists felt as Habsburg subjects. It is sharp with irony for the modern listener. From Schir Zion, this is a setting of the Habsburg imperial anthem written by Franz Josef Haydn: “God Preserve the Emperor.” Sulzer intended it to be used in the Sabbath service, much in the same way as today in most reformed and conservative synagogues, there is a prayer for the United States of America and for the leaders of the government. Sulzer’s interpolation of a verse of a Hebrew psalm into his setting of the hymn resonates with the optimism and security of the integrated nineteenth-century Jews in Vienna. That this hymn was taken up in Nazi Germany does not delegitimize its prior history or its presence here. It is a grim reminder not of what might have been, but what should have been preserved.

The Hymn is followed by a setting of Psalm 111. The musical language is distinctly influenced by the style of early Romanticism of the generation of Schumann and of Schubert and Mendelssohn. The westernizing of what was at that time considered an “oriental” tradition, a Mediterranean if not Eastern religious faith transplanted into Europe, was pioneered by Sulzer and later in northern Germany by Lewandowski. It would of course come under fire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the rise of radical anti-Semitism in German-speaking Europe. The synthesis of Judaism and western culture that Sulzer personified came up against two currents widespread in later generations. His form of modernization and accommodation was challenged on one hand by the embrace of an Eastern European tradition, including Hassidism, as the authentic and uncorrupted tradition of Jewish autonomy and spirituality, and on the other hand by Zionism, which sought a political future for European Jews outside of Europe. But for many, including the great theorist (and practicing Jew) Heinrich Schenker, a friend of Joseph Sulzer and like Eduard Hanslick an admirer of Salomon Sulzer, Salomon Sulzer’s musicality and aesthetic were not concessions, but instead compelling symbols of Jewish achievement.

Jews and Vienna, City of Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Jews and Vienna, City of Music, performed on Feb 8, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Today’s program represents a collaboration with two exhibits, one in Vienna organized by the Jewish Museum of Vienna that opened in May 2003 as part of the Vienna Festival, and its English-language counterpart that has just opened at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in New York. These exhibits chronicle the relationship between the Jews and the musical culture of the city of Vienna from the early nineteenth century through the period of emigration, deportation and murder that began in 1938 and ended in 1945. One of the most striking aspects of these exhibits is their demonstration of the diversity and multiplicity of identities that fall legitimately under the rubric “Jewish.” There were many responses among Jews over several generations to the challenges of integration, acculturation, and assimilation, and while this concert does not pretend to be comprehensive, all of the music you hear today bears a relation to the complex range of the Jewish experience in Vienna. Perhaps the most noticeable omission is in the massive arena of popular music and operetta. Viennese popular music, from the waltzes of Johann Strauss to the operettas of Emmerich Kálmán, was decisively influenced by the Jewish presence in the city. But assuming that many modern listeners are already familiar with the idealized vision of Vienna promoted by those genres, we have decided to concentrate on some of the more intriguing and complicated aspects of Jewish musical life on the banks of the Danube.

For instance, one Viennese Jew on this program did not consider himself a Jew at all. Franz Schreker (1878-1934) was a Catholic and perceived to be a Jew only by the Nazi definition. His case uncomfortably reminds us that sometimes our definition of who is a Jew bears the insidious influences of the views of anti-Semites. It is common to acknowledge that Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Franz Schreker were Jews when in fact from the vantage point of religious faith and communal membership they would be the last to so define themselves. Schreker, however, who had moved from Vienna to Berlin after World War I, was stripped of his position in 1933 and his work banned because of his Jewish origins, despite his perception of his own identity. Schreker had been perhaps the most successful composer of operas after Richard Strauss in central Europe, and he was a leading protagonist of a new modern music in the early twentieth century. Anti-Semitic critics of the early twentieth century and their Nazi successors, however, found something “Jewish” or exotic in Schreker’s music. Indeed, as Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern (neither of whom were Jewish) would discover, cosmopolitanism and modernism were already deemed “Jewish” phenomena in turn-of-the-century reactionary criticism—an ironic reversal of the logic proffered by Richard Wagner’s mid-nineteenth-century polemics concerning anti-Semitism and a music “of the future.”

The program opens with a Jewish composer and performer whose status as a Jew was beyond doubt: Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890), the chief cantor of Vienna and the leading figure in liturgical music. This robust declaration of Jewish identity is followed by a work by Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894), representing a historical complication of the issue. Anton Rubinstein, one of two famed brothers, was a great pianist and popular composer of the late nineteenth century. He was in no sense an “official Jew.” He was adored by the Viennese public. Eventually his popularity led to his appointment as Director of the Concerts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in the early 1870s, a position he would eventually turn over to Johannes Brahms upon deciding to devote more time to his international concert career. Rubinstein’s place on this program points to an important development in the demography and culture of Vienna from the late 1860s to the mid-1920s. When mobility and open access to residency was made possible by the constitutional reforms of 1867, the result was a steady influx of Jews from the eastern provinces of the Empire and from Russia. By 1900 the percentage of Jews in Vienna rose well above 10% of the total population. In terms of enrollment into the Conservatory and participation in music-making and concert attendance, by the time the most famous Jew in Viennese musical life, Gustav Mahler, took over the Court Opera in 1897 (an imperial appointment for which conversion was necessary), Jews made up arguably between one-third and one-half of the audience for concerts and opera. As the career of Rubinstein suggests, by the early decades of the twentieth century, the number of all Viennese, including the Jews who had actually been born in the city, constituted a minority. In this immigrant, polyglot, modern city, music thus became the crucial vehicle for creating an artificial cultural center, a common ground for the fashioning of a myth of a local tradition and authenticity. Membership in a shared culture bases on a myth that extended back to the era of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert was rendered plausible through music.

Karl Goldmark (1830-1915) represents the compromise between isolation and assimilation. He came from Hungary before the turmoils of 1848, but unlike Mahler or Schoenberg, he never converted. Furthermore, he maintained a synthesis in his music between the two warring aesthetic camps of Brahms and Wagner. Goldmark’s most famous work was in fact an opera of an essentially biblical, if not Jewish theme, The Queen of Sheba (1875), with a libretto by fellow Viennese Jew Salomon Mosenthal. Goldmark had a brilliant career and was highly respected throughout his long life. He was even sought out by the young Sibelius as a teacher.

The program concludes with a masterpiece by a great composer and conductor, the one-time lover of Alma Mahler, a friend, teacher, and brother-in-law of Schoenberg, the protagonist of a new generation of composition, and also a winner of the coveted Beethoven prize—a composer whose promise was acknowledged by the highly critical but decidedly philo-Semitic Johannes Brahms. Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) demonstrates a more obscure dimension of Vienna’s Jewish community. The dominant Jewish part of his family was Sephardic; he came of age in the large Turkish Sephardic synagogue in the second district on the Zirkusgasse. This was the same community in which the violinist Felix Galimir and his sisters were raised. Zemlinsky, however, became fully assimilated, and apart from some psalm settings, he made his name as a composer particularly of operas and vocal music. He enjoyed much of his career in Prague and Berlin but with the onset of fascism he was ultimately forced to emigrate, an elderly and nearly forgotten man. He died in obscurity and penury in Larchmont, NY in 1942, a few years after his arrival.

As the exhibits and this concert attempt to demonstrate, the idea of Vienna as a city of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is unthinkable without acknowledging the participation of its Jewish citizens. The two figures most closely associated with this claim now certainly receive their share of performances in concert—Mahler and Schoenberg. It is only relatively recently that scholars and audiences have turned their attention to the effects of the destruction of the Viennese Jewish community and the persecution of many artists and composers, a process that began ominously with Austro-fascism after World War I and occurred decisively with the Anschluss of 1938. The record of Jewish contribution that was obliterated extended not only to composition, amateurism and audience participation, but also to music criticism, concert management, music education, and music publishing. In 1922, a famous book was published by a Viennese journalist Hugo Bettauer, who was born a Jew but like Schoenberg, converted to Protestantism as a young man. The book was entitled The City Without Jews: a Novel of the Day after Tomorrow. A kind of anti-utopian fantasy, the novel describes a Vienna without a Jewish population. Bettauer was assassinated in 1925, but his assassin was acquitted.

Bettauer’s prediction became a reality in the 1940s. In comparison to its previous history, postwar Vienna was a sterile, dreary place. Indeed for years after the war, the few surviving Jews who sought to return were not made to feel welcome. There was no decisive postwar engagement in Vienna with its and Austria’s enthusiastic participation in the activities of the Nazis against the Jews. The acceptance by Vienna’s conservative audience of Leonard Bernstein in the 1970s marked an awkward and ambivalent beginning to the opening up of the past. Today there has been some remarkable work done by Austrian scholars and institutions on behalf of those who were persecuted and forgotten. This concert and exhibits are dedicated to the achievements of the past as well as to the efforts of new generations who have fought during the past two decades, not only to recover the historical facts but to restore to the concert stage the works of composers whose careers were irreparably damaged and cut short. Their ambition is to make it impossible to sentimentalize Vienna as the city of “Wine, Women, and Song” without recognizing both the Jewish contribution and the fate of the Jews. If this sounds like an overstatement, consider that when the Nazis entered Vienna in 1938, one of their first actions was to falsify certain records of baptism and marriage in the city’s cathedral, St. Stephen’s. The Nazis knew very well that Johann Strauss, the composer of that quintessential emblem of Vienna, the “Blue Danube” Waltz (1867) by Nazi law had to be defined as a Jew. Is there a more compelling example of the vicious distortions of Nazi anti-Semitism than the altering of the Catholic Church’s records in order to preserve the Viennese spirit as an “Aryan” achievement? The joint project of the exhibits and performances in New York and in Vienna represents one step in a long overdue effort to reconstruct the historical debt Vienna owes to its Jewish population of the past.

The Future of Conducting

When Hans Keller set about debunking musical professions he considered "phoney," his "hit list" was predictable: opera producers, music critics, musicologists, and of course, violists and conductors. These professions were new to his generation as independent full-time activities; they were consequences of a historical process in Western Europe sociologists once termed "rationalization." Read the full PDF

The Neoclassical Mirror

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Neoclassical Mirror, performed on Nov 21, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

As time passes, our perception of past events undergoes revision, and sometimes a discrepancy emerges between the self-conceptions of the notable protagonists of history and our retrospective assessment of their accomplishments. Reputations and aesthetic judgments change dramatically, constantly recasting the significance and value of principal actors in history. Of the composers represented on tonight’s program, two died after World War II in relative obscurity. Respected by their contemporaries, both Leó Weiner and Ernst von Dohnányi ultimately ended their careers in the shadows of their more prominent countrymen, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. But today, Kodály’s achievement has receded into the background, though the music of Bartók has remained central to twentieth-century repertory. Of our three composers, Igor Stravinsky is clearly the best known. But even in his case, his achievements, once thought akin to those of Picasso in their breadth, variety and consistent brilliance, no longer play such an overwhelmingly dominant role in our conception of the history of music in the last century. As time recedes, we discover attributes and achievements we have overlooked. The works of Dohnányi and Weiner constitute striking discoveries.

The irony in observing the changing reputations of these composers rests in the fact that they themselves were obsessed with history and their place within a tradition of musical composition. This concert explores an impulse on the part of many composers from the first half of the twentieth century to come to terms with the legacy left by composers before them, particularly those who dominated the golden age of nineteenth-century romanticism. Neoclassicism is a term often loosely applied to a wide range of artistic strategies. In the first instance, it describes precisely a tendency in musical composition that took hold between the two World Wars. It is thus used here to describe a particular view of history, through which these composers defined their work. Neoclassicism, or the deliberate use of antique models in music that predate romanticism, represented a critical reaction by these composers to their own culture and historical period, and had much broader philosophical implications than one might at first think. In all cases, neoclassicism can be understood as a reaction to modernity. Indeed, the astringent, crystalline clarity of the textures employed by Stravinsky and Weiner mirror a sound ideal characteristic of modernity: direct, non-reverberant, clean and almost reminiscent of the directional focus of a loudspeaker, as opposed to the reverberant acoustic space of a nineteenth-century opera house.

In order to grasp what it was about the nineteenth century that affected them so deeply, we need to confront how that century itself used history. That pattern is most clearly revealed in the example of architecture, for today we can still see how nineteenth-century buildings are often based on styles of design and decoration adapted from Greco-Roman classicism, the baroque and the Renaissance. Late nineteenth-century buildings can look like temples, medieval buildings, or baroque and Renaissance palaces, but they are larger, grander, more opulent. They are triumphs of modern construction technology. And what were the functions of these grand buildings? They were not really temples or palaces, but the banks, houses of parliament, stock exchanges, concert halls, and apartment buildings that line the major boulevards of European and American cities. Antiquity and tradition were used to glorify not the past but the future; to lend a sense of endurance and legitimacy to these monuments that embodied progress and technology. In the nineteenth century, the dominant spirit was one of pride in achievements of science and industry, a conscious sense of living in a “modern” age that was the high point of civilization. The use of historical models was therefore never a matter of slavish imitation, but rather, an appropriation of history into the triumph of modern progress.

In music, the Romantics from the early part of the century, particularly Schumann and Mendelssohn, could admire Beethoven and Bach to the point of obsession, but they always saw themselves as innovators, not imitators. They did not copy from models; they experimented with inherited forms, such as the sonata and symphony. But the most radical assertion of the priority of modernity came with Richard Wagner. His interpretation of Beethoven epitomized the perspective of the second half of the nineteenth century. He expounded a progressive theory of aesthetic development with an almost Hegelian notion of how history and progress interconnect. For him the art of the future, although the necessary result of history, must be greater than the art of the past.

In this way, the idea of progress in commerce and science worked their way into the arts. As a result, new instruments were invented, better pianos were designed, and new acoustical standards were formulated. The music written for the operatic stage and concert hall achieved a comparable monumentality and novelty in scale and sound to the buildings of Paris, London, and Vienna after 1850. A similar scale, innovation, and density are reflected in the rise of giant prose novels such as those by Tolstoy, Eliot, and Gottfried Keller.

This notion of progress involved a distinct shift in aesthetic ambition on the part of composers. In the eighteenth century, beauty and goodness in the ethical sense were thought to be closely related. Moral duty, like art, was not only a matter of form, but explicitly aligned with what was alluring and sublime, making beauty a species of truth. Astonishment as a result of an aesthetic experience could be an act of moral recognition. In the nineteenth century, what was beautiful began to be separated from universal ideals of goodness and truth, and music began to veer away from formalism. Music came to be seen as an instrument of human consciousness, an expression of individual meaning rather than a demonstration of some external truth. Musical communication was powered by intense expressiveness and emotional impact on the listener. Successful music was expected to transport the listener out of the mundane. Music emerged as an instrument of individual and collective subjective consciousness, which is why it could be appropriated by nationalism. Consequently, instrumental music began regularly to suggest an emotionally evocative storyline and to use hyperbolic gestures and spectacle to help engage the listener’s sympathies, much like the larger-than-life cinema of today, which takes a comparable pride in technological progress and innovation. The sheer power and intensity of late nineteenth-century musical emotionalism even influenced Johannes Brahms, who was deeply suspicious of the Wagnerian celebration of the new and the monumental. But all this came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I. Two of the last of these highly charged, epically proportioned compositions were Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, which premiered in 1913, and Stravinsky’s The Firebird (1910).

After 1918, the idea of progress seemed implausible. Although Stravinsky never lost his admiration for his great compatriots Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, their musical strategies seemed exhausted and obsolete. Stravinsky and Weiner both felt the nineteenth century had taken the wrong path by making music dependant upon subjective and transitory extramusical frameworks, rather than on the more significant and enduring potential autonomy of art and consciousness. They found themselves attracted to an idea that preceded the Romantic age, an idea that music could be linked to objective notions of beauty and truth, and therefore emancipated from the ephemera of the historical moment. That belief itself was a vibrant response to contemporaneity. Both composers became concerned with the logic of music and its formal implications as an independent system of expression, distinct from any visual or literary narrative. Yet they rejected late nineteenth-century aestheticism with its narcissistic ideology of “art for art’s sake.” Rather, they aspired to the aesthetic values of Haydn and Mozart, who shared the notion that there was some parallel between aesthetics and ethics. Both Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto and Weiner’s Concertino reflect two twentieth-century neoclassical ambitions. The first was to rehabilitate music’s capacity to speak as music in a formalist sense and to direct the listener away from symbolism or narration. The second was to use an almost miniaturist historical model to puncture the nineteenth century’s artistic hubris.

These two works suggest some irony, and even satirical humor. Both composers reveal an unmistakable originality as they appropriate and adapt the past. In these works they try to fashion artworks adequate to a notion of modernity that is independent of any claim of technological progress. At the same time, there is little doubt that the music mirrors the experience in space and time of modernity, particularly its pace. But novelty and grand scale are not prized for their own sakes. Indeed, the works aptly demonstrate one of the hallmarks of this post-war era of neoclassicism: a reaction of almost ascetic leanness and transparency. These two works emphatically reverse the Wagnerian premise that small forces and pre-Romantic musical forms were obsolete.

There was of course a wide range of reactions against the extremes of romanticism. Weiner and Stravinsky chose to return to what they felt was the source: the Classical and Baroque eras. Others, however, sought a different source entirely; namely, atonalism and radically progressive experimentalism. Edgard Varése, the futurists, George Antheil and Charles Ives are examples. Stravinsky and Weiner were in no way less modern, but they felt they were acting as correctives. But many contemporaries saw them as deeply conservative. Even so, these composers cannot be called reactionary or nostalgic. They did not reject the world after 1918, nor did they idealize the earlier ages. For them, history provided the best means for commenting on the modern world, and for retaining a critical perspective on the spirit of the age. By rejecting the arrogance of the nineteenth century that had led to unprecedented destruction, they sought to chart a new path.

Ernst von Dohnányi, however, represents a different view. His neoclassicism was the result of his steadfast allegiance to the accomplishments of the nineteenth century. Weiner and Stravinsky used sources from classical and baroque music composed before the Romantic era, but Dohnányi saw himself as an exponent of the best of late nineteenth-century music-making—not of a Wagnerian kind, but in the tradition of Brahms. For the young Dohnányi, Brahms was a seminal figure. Dohnányi’s early music is a kind of homage to Brahms and reveals a profound mastery of the Brahmsian tradition. Brahms was as obsessed with history as anyone in the late nineteenth century, but he did not possess the Wagnerian optimism about progress. Brahms was an avid historian of music, and deeply interested in baroque and Renaissance repertoire. He shared with Wagner a strong sense of his own historical contribution, but unlike Wagner he did not believe himself to represent the starting point of a new age. Indeed Brahms felt himself to be the last exponent of a dying tradition of great composition.

Dohnányi was best known in his lifetime not as a composer, but as a pianist and conductor. As a composer, he remains staunchly conservative and rooted in the language of music he learned early in his career. His First Symphony of 1900 is one of the great examples of the Romantic symphony. The work on tonight’s program is written in somewhat the same vein, although composed much later. But it is important to note (and this links him to Stravinsky) that in the context of momentous political and economic changes around him, Dohnányi wrote a work that includes an homage to Bach. However, unlike Stravinsky’s use of Bach, the last movement of Dohnányi’s symphony is more reminiscent of Reger’s use of counterpoint and history, or Brahms’s “Variations on a Theme of Handel.” Dohnányi’s work is a plea not to reject romanticism, but to retain its significance. Unlike Weiner and Stravinsky, it is not a reinvention of the eighteenth century, but a defense of the late-nineteenth. It is not a work of critical neoclassicism, but an affirmation of continuities with the recent past. Its neoclassism, from the perspective of the mid-1950s when it was completed, expresses itself in the assertion that Brahms was himself a classical model and that all the fashions of the twentieth century—experimentalism, atonality, astringent neoclassicism, and folkloric nationalism—are not the art of the future because they represent superficial distortions of the great compositional traditions of Western concert music.

Unfortunately for Dohnányi, the composition of his Second Symphony occurred at a time when such assertions of continuity and affirmation of late nineteenth-century aesthetics could not be posited without the implication of awkward and difficult political overtones. Unlike those of the other two composers on tonight’s program, Dohnányi’s politics have consistently remained a subject of controversy. Of Weiner’s politics we know very little except that he lived and worked under several regimes, including (like Kodály) the Cold War under communism. He had always been, perhaps primarily, a great teacher. Among his most distinguished pupils was Fritz Reiner, one of the few conductors to perform his work. Stravinsky’s politics are better known. They were marked by anti-communism and later in life, religiosity. But of Dohnányi, unresolved questions abound. While composing the first draft of the Second Symphony, he was living and working in fascist Hungary, even when the dictator Salaszi came to power and when Eichmann, with the assistance of the Hungarians, began to liquidate the Jewish community of Budapest. Dohnányi was seen by many as a collaborator. In the immediate aftermath of the war, he fled to Austria where he encountered suspicion from the Allied Administration that he had been a nazi sympathizer (even though his son had been executed in Germany on suspicion of conspiring against Hitler). If one believes the shockingly pro-fascist and profoundly racist biography by his second wife, Ilona von Dohnányi, A Song of Life (recently reissued by Indiana University Press without any attempt to point out obvious factual errors and misstatements), Dohnányi, unlike Bartók, indeed failed to distinguish between the good and the evil. However, he was not a collaborator even in the sense that Strauss had been. Even through the tainted lens of the repellant perspective of his widow, Ernst von Dohnányi turns out at best to have been a hapless figure, naïvely imperceptive of his current historical moment.

Dohnányi eventually ended up in Florida and was on the brink of a comeback as a pianist at the time of his death. Of all three composers, his life was perhaps the most tragic. His deep attachment to history did not assist him in understanding the events of his own life. In attempting to disengage his music from politics and the characteristics of the moment, he fell headlong into them, perhaps showing quite poignantly the impossibility of ever composing music that is completely without politics. One could argue therefore that although his Symphony was at one time properly considered old-fashioned and nostalgic, it actually comments upon the age in which he lived. Like most forms of nostalgia, its rebellion against the present is among its most powerful and revealing aspects. In this sense the musical language of Dohnányi’s youth, resisted by the composer in his later years, sounds to us perfectly appropriate to express the anguish of his maturity.

The Artist’s Conscience

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Artist’s Conscience, performed on Sep 28, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Many of our preconceptions about music as an art form date from the late eighteenth century, when music-making in the courts and urban centers in its secular forms achieved high intellectual and social prestige. This period in music history has come to be known as the Classical era. The term classicism seems appropriate. First, music in the age of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven thrived in the context of a rebirth of interest in classical architecture, philosophy, and literature. This intense preoccupation with Greco-Roman culture and art was associated with the Enlightenment, an age traditionally (but not altogether accurately) linked to the cause of reason, empiricism, and a conscious modeling of thought and ideas on the ideals of antiquity. The Enlightenment was also the age of the American and French Revolutions, a period when ideals of democracy and freedom as rational objectives flourished. The second justification for calling late-eighteenth-century music “classical” is that western secular art music was a relatively younger sibling to painting and literature. Comparative history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often paralleled the founding phase of late-eighteenth-century music to Pericles’ Greece and Cicero’s Rome.

Part of the logic for this comparison was classical music’s assertion of a universal aesthetic, of normative values and standards. The rules of musical composition were thought to be objective and naturally evident, as it were. For example, the organization of pitch and the system of western tonality were understood as inherently logical and indicative of proper formal procedures and compositional structure. What constituted good and bad music, the beautiful or sublime and the ugly or vulgar, were not merely matters of taste or prejudice; they were fixed categories deduced from prescribed aesthetic practices. But as the nineteenth century progressed, this notion of a rational, objective aesthetic and a universal language of music was met with increasing skepticism. An important source of this skepticism derived from nationalist movements that used culture as politics. Nationalists favored the specific and peculiar attributes of a constructed community (usually defined by a mythic and endangered rural past) as the basis of deciding what was valid in musical expression. Music for these nationalist schools of composition was no longer based on a universal paradigm. There was a new objective in the expression of a singular ethnicity or culture. This tendency was strong both in smaller nationalist groupings under the thumb of larger powers as well as in the leading imperial nation states of Europe. The challenge to the ideal of a universal, rational aesthetic was also a hallmark of romanticism in which the unusual and original were prized. The exercise of freedom and subjectivity marks the achievement of the hero of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (1868). Walther, in his “Prize Song,” renders music truly expressive for his contemporaries by breaking all the rules. By the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism and a late-romantic sensibility in music dominated the concert stage, the dance hall, and the theater in both opera and operetta.

Romantic music, favored by the urban elites in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Milan, is often richly textured, lush, and highly chromatic. In orchestral and choral music, large forces and long durations became the rule. This was, in part, the legacy of a reaction against the austere rationality of classicism. However, late-nineteenth-century romanticism was itself destined to become the object of attack by subsequent generations. In the twentieth century, in the wake of the carnage of World War I, the poverty and suffering of the Great Depression, the inhumanities of World War II, and the anxiety generated by the atomic age and the Cold War, the excessive emotionalism associated with romantic music seemed trivial, artificial and self-indulgent. There was also growing concern among composers during the first half of the twentieth century about commercial and popular music. There was too much “easy listening” music that seemed derivative and manipulative. This debate raised an important issue for composers who sought to reconcile their art with their political beliefs. They worried about the ways in which a public art form like music could be used for good or evil in a social and cultural system that seemed at best utterly mundane, and at worst responsible for egregious horror and suffering. In other words, many socially-conscious composers were confronted with the following question: how could music inspire the public to resist oppression and intolerance or to instill ethical responsibility into modern life? Conversely, how might their music, composed in the name of beauty and aesthetic standards, inadvertently support political regimes like Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, or Stalin’s Russia?

Thus in the last century, aesthetic choices often became explicitly political and philosophical. At the same time, composers in the early decades of that century searched for a way out of the shadow of Richard Wagner and his followers. Wagner after all was a perfect example of how uncomfortable the connection between aesthetics and politics could be. Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg in their own respective ways drifted back toward the ideals of classicism. In doing so they offered an implicit denial of the dubious achievements of modernity. They adopted an aesthetic that predated the French Revolution and romanticism and even the Age of Enlightenment. In the 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg developed an entirely new system of music, the twelve-tone method. This self-referential construct of how pitch is organized offered composers a way to compose that was free of any express complicity with the evils of contemporary society. The twelve-tone method was for Schoenberg the equivalent of the classical rules of composition that late romanticism had abandoned. A new rational, universal aesthetic that defended the aesthetic and ethical autonomy of music could be asserted. Schoenberg’s modernist innovation, precisely because of its rational structure and novelty, became closely associated with anti-fascism. His disassociation from the luxuriant indulgences of Wagner and romantic traditionalists was a vivid refutation of the official aesthetic of fascist Germany and Austria; his intense, nonconformist music became a symbol for artistic and social freedom. Radical modernism in music became synonymous with the spirit of resistance to oppression.

The two composers on today’s program are two undisputed giants of this tradition of modernism. They are also two of the greatest Italian composers of the twentieth century. The older of the two was Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975). He was in his twenties when, after years of enthusiasm for Wagner, he discovered Debussy. By the early 1930s he had become aware of the Viennese school associated with Schoenberg and his two most prominent disciples, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Dallapiccola, not unlike many well-intentioned European intellectuals, held a relatively mild and sympathetic view of Mussolini in the early 1930s. But he later became a staunch opponent of fascism. He was horrified by the Spanish Civil War, anti-Semitism and the war in Ethiopia.

In the aftermath of World War II, Dallapiccola’s politics and aesthetics became entirely integrated. He used the twelve-tone method of composition as a basis for his work. He sought to express through music a profound anxiety concerning the state of liberty and the human condition in the contemporary world. It is important to note that Dallapiccola’s engagement with Neoclassicism was already audible before World War II, yet Dallapiccola’s reputation as an important composer in the history of music stems from the works he wrote after 1939.

Dallapiccola is to Italian modern music what Alban Berg was to modernism in Central and Eastern Europe. His work combines a palpable emotionalism and individuality with the new techniques spearheaded by Schoenberg and adapted by Webern. It was a highly personal and charged mode of expression, particularly evidenced by the libretti and music of his operas Il prigioniero (1948) and Ulisse (1968). Dallapiccola’s spirit is partly mirrored by the philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their famous book The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The character of Odysseus figures prominently. His story is used both by Adorno and Horkheimer, and by Dallapiccola to challenge the conceits of reason and progress, of romanticism and the Enlightenment.

The first of the Dallapiccola works on today’s program, Canti di prigionia (1941) was written during the war, to texts from victims of oppression and arbitrary political power: the Scottish queen Mary Stuart, the philosopher Boethius, and the Florentine priest Savonarola who was burned at the stake. Incidentally, Dallapiccola himself was a long-time resident of Florence. The second, more optimistic, Canti di liberazione, completed in 1955, suggests the more reflective and interior dialogue characteristic of the generation of writers in France and Italy after the war, particularly Albert Camus and Eugenio Montale.

These works should, for the listener, justify a comparison between Dallapiccola and Berg. Like Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937), Dallapiccola’s works are searing and powerful musical representations of the contradictions and sufferings peculiar to individuals in the twentieth century. Today, at the moment these works are being performed, it is perhaps not too excessive to suggest that American democracy is itself in a precarious state. Our freedoms in the post 9/11 environment are threatened by fear, the politics of fundamentalist religion and mass apathy. In the place of a healthy political debate we remain as a culture stimulated only by commercial entertainment. How else can we explain the continuing appearance of second-rate movie stars as political hopefuls? Perhaps we might take some inspiration from the integrity and unsettling beauty of Dallapiccola’s vision of the possibilities of freedom and his setting of the voice of the oppressed.

If politics played an important part in Dallapiccola’s evolution as a composer, they were the overriding element in Luigi Nono’s career. Nono (1924-1991) was twenty years Dallapiccola’s junior and died sixteen years after Dallapiccola. He was deeply influenced by Bruno Maderna and his evolution as a composer can be compared to contemporaries in post-war France and Germany, such as Boulez and Stockhausen. Nono saw in the second Viennese school the ideal synthesis of high aesthetic values and political virtue. He accepted its utility as a force against fascism and capitalism. Unlike Boulez, Nono never acquired the reputation he deserved in the United States; until relatively recently, his work was rarely performed in this country. My own first encounter with the work of Nono came through a strange circumstance when I was seventeen years old in the mid-1960s. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was asked for some inexplicable reason to be the official guide and host to a visiting painter, the Italian Emilio Vedova. He spoke no English and I spoke no Italian, but the three days I spent with him left a lasting impression. Language did not prevent Vedova from urgently communicating his thought that I should look into the music of his friend Luigi Nono. For Vedova, Nono represented the ideal integration of modernity with the politics of conscience and aesthetic inspiration. Nono was a member of the Communist Party; hence the rarity of his music in America. Indeed, one of the reasons the Arnold Schoenberg Archives, when they left the University of Southern California, ended up in Vienna (something Schoenberg himself probably would have viewed with horror) was that the daughter of Schoenberg was married to Luigi Nono. Nuria Schoenberg Nono may have harbored a long-term resentment against the United States for the obstacles it caused even in allowing Nono to visit this country.

Nono’s political radicalism went much further than Dallapiccola’s, but precisely this political commitment led Nono to experiment in modes of musical expression that went well beyond the mid-twentieth-century twelve-tone style. Very few of Nono’s works from the 1960s and 1970s are divorced from an engagement with the figures and events of the time, whether they be the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X, or Latin American politics. Nono retained constant admiration for the radical philosophical and political theorists of German-speaking Europe including Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin.

The works by Nono on today’s program date from the 1950s and focus on the events of the Spanish Civil War. For the generations of both Dallapiccola and Nono, the Spanish Civil War assumed a symbolic importance as the pivotal moment in history when the civilized world that celebrated freedom and reason and the ideals of the Enlightenment could have proved itself to be true to itself and failed. Today’s revisionist views of Franco and the Spanish Republic notwithstanding, for Nono and his contemporaries, the Spanish Civil War represented a good and just cause that unmasked the hypocrisy of the western world. There have been many literary and artistic celebrations of the heroism of the defenders of the Spanish Republic and the horror at their defeat and destruction. Picasso and Casals are two of the most famous defenders of the Republican cause. The Epitaffi are the musical equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica.

The works on today’s program were intended by their composers to be more than depictions or reactions to past and present. These composers wanted to create works that could serve as a shock, a call to resist the consolidation of economic and political power in the hands of the few. In their view, art needed to inspire citizens to protect themselves against the suppression of freedom in the name of order and church and state authority. For both Dallapiccola and Nono, the answer to the question posed earlier of how to make one’s music relevant to and participatory in the social and political realities that influence every other aspect of life, is to offer highly personalized and riveting musical fabrics. Listeners may disagree and even object to their politics, but there is little doubt that the idealism and the ethical character of their aspirations are beyond reproach. Their music was designed to transform the listening experience. For them, music is never merely a matter of entertainment or cultural condescension. The concert experience should be one in which music and art serve the task of awakening in listeners a sense of value and significance as actors in the public realm. The works on today’s program affirm the possibility of each of us to stand up against uniformity, passivity, the absence of liberty, and the intolerance imposed not only from above, but from our fellow citizens.

The Circle of Shostakovich

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Circle of Shostakovich, performed on April 11, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

One of the most intriguing and confusing eras in the history of music occurred between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939. In these two decades, the life of the artist, especially of the musician in Russia, was transformed. The vibrant tradition of composition and performance that had flourished during the last decades of the Czarist regime in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and indeed throughout the Russian empire, was forced to accommodate new political conditions. These conditions were unprecedented not only in ideological terms with the advent of Communism, but in terms of the personal judgments, methods and ambitions of the political leadership concerning the development of social consciousness through art.

Unlike many of its Western national counterparts, the new Soviet utopia did not perceive art and culture as peripheral or subsidiary. Quite to the contrary, the arts served multiple social functions. First, they were potently symbolic of collective human aspiration, primary vehicles for the expression of secular hope and idealism. Second, their cultivation was a tangible reflection of the progress of Socialism. Since the establishment of the first truly socialist government was supposedly a historically progressive step, the government initially sought to encourage art expressing the triumph of Socialism, art embodying a progressive rather than nostalgic spirit. Third, art was a medium for balancing the national and the international. It could proudly exhibit Russian artistic distinction and yet reach out to people of other nations, particularly the Proletariat. Art was the voice of Russia, communicating an ideal vision of a classless solidarity to the rest of the world. It was art for the common populace.

Ironically, however, this Soviet policy for the arts was enacted precisely at a moment in history when the arts across the Western World were relishing their radicalism and their break with tradition and convention, a movement we now identify as Modernism. The task of reconciling these two seemingly disparate aesthetic and political agendas presented a daunting challenge to Soviet artists. The revolutionary idea they were trying to represent in their work was supposed to promote the end of radical inequalities in political power and wealth, but this parallel revolution in the arts seemed to move in precisely the opposite direction, favoring an elite by privileging an aesthetic that the broader population found incomprehensible. By the end of the 1930s, therefore, the political requirements of the state explicitly stipulated a form of socialist Realism for the arts. In music, that meant a predisposition toward transparency and conservative harmonic and rhythmic strategies. Soon, the demand for an “official” art compatible with the state’s ideals grew into an attack on musical Modernism and what would be decried as “Formalism,” the making of art for art’s sake, or for the narcissistic, individualistic bourgeois conceits of the artist rather than for the education of the masses.

Within this framework, the chronology of the interaction between the Soviet state and its artists makes for terrifying study. Of those initial moments in the 1920s, when despite severe economic hardships there was a remarkable flourishing of experimentation, and the notion reigned of a progressive art for a progressive politics, there is no better symbolic example than the competition for the design of Lenin’s Tomb, that famous icon in Red Square. This utterly austere building stands as a monument to an ascetic, linear Modernism, placed in stark opposition to the walls of the Kremlin and the elaborate traditional architecture of its interior, the late nineteenth century arcade on the other side (later Gum), and St. Basil’s Cathedral. It is a striking comment on the early aspirations to reconcile Modernism and Communism. But Lenin’s death in 1924 marked the beginning of the end of this fragile symbiosis. The experimentalism represented by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), the constructivist and modernist painters Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) and Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), the director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), with whom both Popov and Shostakovich worked, had its parallel in music with composers like Alexander Mosolov (1900-1973), and Nicolai Roslavets (1881-1944). This modernist enthusiasm was in part a reaction against the academicism of an older generation of composers who continued to write in a very traditional idiom after the revolution, such as Nicolai Miaskovsky (1881-1950), Reinhold Gliere (1875-1956), and Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936). This Russian experimentalism of the 1920s was also seen as an alternative to another kind of experimentalist Modernism associated with that outspoken critic of Communism, Igor Stravinsky, and the development of atonality and the twelve-tone system, not to speak of Neoclassicism in Western Europe.

But this romance with the new was short-lived. As the government subsidized theaters, schools, publishing houses, orchestras, and opera houses, and supported formal organizations of composers and artists, it became acutely aware of and preoccupied with the relationship between the making of art and potential political criticism of dissent. That fear quickly eclipsed any desires for a coherency between Modernism and new political ideals. By the time Stalin solidified his power, what would become a Soviet pattern of internal criticism and the imposition of politically proper aesthetics was already being formulated. This was followed by a purging of dissonant artists by Stalin, which took the lives of many prominent writers, musicians, and artists. Between 1917 and 1939 there was a steady emigration from the Soviet Union that included Glazunov as well as younger talents including Vladimir Horowitz and Nathan Milstein. Western Europe and America became the beneficiaries of an ever-growing group of émigrés who joined an earlier generation of exiles. Russian artist expatriates believed that the necessary freedom for artistic integrity could not exist in post-revolutionary Russia.

This concert focuses on three composers who, during the 1930s, came to grips with the rapid transformation of the Soviet artist’s condition from optimism to oppression. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and Gavriil Popov (1904-1972) came of age as young artists immediately after the Revolution. They represented the first new generation of socialist Russian artists. They were profoundly enthusiastic during the 1920s about what seemed to be a utopian system of patronage and encouragement. Some of Shostakovich’s greatest music was written during this period of idealism and possibility, including his opera The Nose. But as the wind turned colder, survival and conscience became locked in an irreconcilable conflict. Shostakovich, the man and his music, would be marked all his life by the contradiction between “official” artist and private person. Debates still rage concerning the relation between his music and his ambiguous political position. In the 1930s he was severely chastised and then adjusted, but came in for considerable criticism again after World War II. When one looks back on Shostakovich’s career, he was triumphant as an official artist, the winner of numerous Stalin prizes and a holder of key positions. Indisputably the greatest of the Soviet era composers, he was not, however, the most enthusiastically official. He carried his political obligations with considerable discomfort (unlike many of his celebrated contemporaries, including Khrennikov, Khachaturian, and Kabalevsky). If he buckled under the pressure exerted by Stalin, who seemed to have had a very clear idea of appropriate music for the socialist state, it does not make the matter of figuring out what Shostakovich really believed any easier. At the end of his career he joined a long list of prominent artists and musicians condemning Andrei Sakharov.

Like Shostakovich’s controversial opera Lady MacBeth of Mtensk (which was suppressed), Gavriil Popov’s Symphony No. 1 was initially condemned and withdrawn, only to be briefly reinstated after its first performance and then once again consigned to obscurity. It was not revived until Perestroika in the late 1980s. But unlike Shostakovich, Popov never discovered a way to carry on with the promise that this remarkable symphony shows. The bold and innovative character of the First Symphony seems to find no further expression in Popov’s later work. He had a career and won prizes, but his music never regained its claim to real distinction. Perhaps the intervention of state and the atmosphere of terror and constraint permanently damaged this remarkable talent. This Symphony, considered Popov’s masterpiece, dates from the waning years of aesthetic freedom and experimentation in Soviet Russia.

If Popov can be considered a victim of the system whose one great work was an inspiration to Shostakovich, and if Shostakovich can be viewed as a genius who found a means to reconcile success in the Soviet system with the writing of great music throughout his career, then the third composer on tonight’s program, the equally famous Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953 [ironically he died on the same day as Stalin]) is still the most enigmatic of the three. Prokofiev voluntarily returned to Soviet Russia from the West during the 1930s at Stalin’s invitation, when the dictator’s policies and practices were well understood. Prokofiev had acquired a great career and reputation in the West, yet he chose to return, and his first wife would end up spending many years in prison as a result. Prokofiev apparently had no difficulty in composing official music in praise of Stalin. The last years of his career from 1930 to his death saw him write some of his greatest works. Like Shostakovich, Prokofiev seemed to thrive under Stalin. That is not to say that everything was especially easy for Prokofiev. To his credit, he was one of Popov’s staunchest defenders, pushing to have the First Symphony performed in the West and defending the work against its Soviet critics. Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 4, commissioned by a wealthy Westerner, Paul Wittgenstein, actually premiered in the West under the baton of Martin Rich three years after Prokofiev’s death. Unlike Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony, but like Popov’s First, it never maintained a public presence the Soviet era.

Though we can never know everything that happened during those dark years of Stalin’s artistic agenda, we can certainly draw some intriguing conclusions. As Popov’s symphony reveals, there is an enormous wealth of composition by composers whose names are still unfamiliar to the West. What wonderful works are still waiting to be re-examined? We tend to think that the political context was so reprehensible that it stifled creativity, but perhaps there was more to it than that. An abundance of fine music is now being discovered, written by individuals whose opportunity to be heard outside of Russia was restricted both by Soviet authorities and Western prejudices against the Soviet Union. Because of the Cold War, there are over sixty years of music-making to which we have not been exposed and through which we must sift in order to have a truly comprehensive account of what was clearly, despite all its constraints, a great age of music-making in Russia. We certainly recall Oistrakh and Richter, among other great Soviet performers, without remembering that there was an equally vibrant subculture in composition that extends beyond the famous names.

When we, in the post-Cold War and postmodernist environment, encounter the music of Shostakovich or Prokofiev from the 1930s and 1940s, there are many ways in which we can choose to hear it. For some it is merely a form of neoclassical, twentieth-century music, and for others, simplistic nationalist expression. Some may argue that there is encoded meaning that lies underneath the officially sanctioned surface. Are we entitled to hear sarcasm, irony, parody, and despair within these lively forms? Was music in the hands of these masters a subversive art placed in an uneasy, surreptitious relationship with the state?

There is no doubt that as we continue to historicize the twentieth century, Shostakovich and Prokofiev will retain their prominence as we seek to understand and evaluate their music. The presence of the Popov reminds us how much there is to learn and to know now that the veil of secrecy has been lifted from recent Russian history. It has often been observed that instrumental music is one art that not only can survive intact but flourish under conditions of repression and censorship. The works on tonight’s program exemplify this fact, and the inclusion of Popov’s unfamiliar work starkly reminds us of the aesthetic inferences and concerns that Shostakovich and Prokofiev were forced to engage. All three works remind us that for the public in the Soviet Union, as well as for composers and performers, music throughout the Soviet era remained a vital, personal realm marked by intense engagement, commitment, and emotional power. In no other era in modern history did music so forcefully redeem its promise of a reminder of the possibilities of the human even under the most inhumane conditions.

Musical Autobiography

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Musical Autobiography, performed on March 14, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

On some level all music is autobiographical. This can be argued even for instrumental music since at least the late eighteenth century, when music was explicitly conceived as a medium to communicate sensibility and refined feeling. The idea of music as expressing the emotional was a fundamental principle of Romanticism, and later, after the mid-nineteenth century, music was thought of as a psychological mirror of the will, manifesting those portions of human consciousness that could not find proper expression in language. It assumed the status of a private or encoded form of communication that was simultaneously public. Not only was the inexpressible or ineffable capable of communication through music, but a popular notion evolved which held that music was more accurate than spoken language in reflecting the human condition and the essence of feeling. Although the distinction between absolute music and illustrative or narrative music was debated endlessly during the second half of the nineteenth century, the early Romantics, including Mendelssohn, cherished the idea that music was in some way the clearest and most precise means by which a human being could publicly and properly express his or her response to experience of life.

Scholars have found autobiographical implications and narratives in the work of practically all nineteenth-century composers including Beethoven, Chopin, Rossini, and Schumann. Perhaps the most famous exponent of autobiographical experience in music was Hector Berlioz, whose centenary is now upon us. His Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy are two classic works with autobiographical dimensions. A musical response to critical moments in life was also the impetus for such great compositions as Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage (1877), Berg’s Lyric Suite (1926), Janáček’s On the overgrown path (1901-8), Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (1888-94), Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben (1898) and Symphonia domestica (1903), Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (1870) and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (1893). Even Schoenberg, in one of the sketches of his Piano Concerto Op. 42 (1942), chose autobiographical designations for each of the four movements.

In each of these cases, as well as for the pieces on tonight’s program, a particular autobiographical impulse or event may have been crucial to the composition of the work, but it is not indispensable for the listener. To appreciate and follow a work, one doesn’t really need to know about the intentional meaning or the circumstances that compelled it to be created. In this sense autobiographical music functions on more levels than that of the composer’s intention. However, in explicitly evoking an autobiographical dimension, the composer draws out and highlights each listener’s inclination to weave into the sound some sort of plausible imaginary narration. Even if the autobiographical element is as indirect as in Lehár’s case, there is an intensity and immediacy that is implied by the acknowledgement that the work is a reflection of personal history. Autobiographical music seems the polar opposite of commissioned or occasional music. It embodies art as generated by inner necessity. Its intimate subject matter somehow seems to imply heightened candor and a greater sense of the autonomy of the work of art.

But anyone who lives in the society of others knows that self-representation is often far from honest—not because it is deliberately deceitful, but because the very act of self-analysis and description ignites all the wishes and despair of unconscious ambition, desire, envy, and doubt. To describe oneself without falling into the trap of instead describing how one wishes to appear to or hiding that which may have been from others is exceedingly difficult. The rendering of subjectivity that was prized and strived for in all the arts of the nineteenth century, and of which music was thought the quintessential medium, was clearly a quicksand, diversely exploited by such writers as Flaubert, James, and Dostoevsky. What is not said or perceived is infinitely more revealing than one’s calculated revelations and perceptions.

In music this tension between truth and subjective impression can also exist. Autobiographical music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regularly functioned as a vehicle through which the composer could define his or her originality. Individuality was a prized attribute in the Romantic tradition of composition. The “artistic personality” was privileged as a reflection of human autonomy and freedom. Autobiographical music offered composers an opportunity to distinguish their music from that of anyone else. The autobiographical works of composers are therefore often considered in retrospect to be their most characteristic. This is certainly true of Suk and Schnittke. For Lehár, as Morton Solvik aptly points out, the autobiographical dimension of the work on tonight’s program resided in its capacity to express an unfulfilled ambition. It does not reveal that for which we remember Lehár but rather that which he wished to become but did not. It is therefore not surprising that the fantastic and the heroic often come to the fore in autobiographical music. Nowhere is this more apparent and chilling as in Wagner, whose autobiographical fantasy of heroism and chronic megalomania found unbridled expression in music. Contrast him to Richard Strauss, whose Symphonia domestica shifts between the fantastic and the shockingly candid and puts forward the most mundane aspects of daily life without embarrassment. In the American tradition, perhaps the most unusual and fascinating reflection of the autobiographical impulse is exemplified by the music of Charles Ives—particularly his Three Places in New England, in which the listener is invited to share the consciousness of memory and loss, particularly of childhood.

But precisely because instrumental music is not linguistic and the specifics of any autobiographical narrative can never be pinpointed, sometimes the difference between truth and subjectivity can be expanded beyond the ordinary oppositions that are delimited by the written word. The autobiographical in music is offered as an emotional characterization of the composer that is inferred by the listener. In this sense, music perhaps possesses a great advantage over the written word in representing subjectivity. Not bound by the limits of linguistic description, composers have sometimes used the intimacy of the autobiographical and the subjective as a covert act of artistic freedom. For example, Schnittke, who lived and worked in the Soviet Union, used, as did Shostakovich, autobiographical elements to express a range of responses to conditions of life not permitted in painting or literature. For the composer, musical autobiography unfettered by descriptive clarity could publicize private impressions and sentiments without endangerment.

The biographical details of each of the composers on tonight’s program suggest different ways in which lives could intertwine with musical creation. Franz Lehár (1870-1948), for example, may be famous for his operettas, but happiness and merriment were not the hallmarks of his life. The Merry Widow (1905) was particularly beloved by Hitler. Lehár (whose wife was Jewish) conducted himself through the Nazi era with unheroic ambivalence. The Viennese operetta, of which he was the most famous practitioner after Johann Strauss, had been until 1938 nearly dominated by Jewish colleagues among composers and librettists. His own work was thus easily appropriated as the true Aryan, rare, uncorrupted form of a popular genre. He died in 1948, long after his greatest success, a wealthy but isolated figure from the past. Despite the fact that he never achieved the respect he sought in the public imagination as a serious composer (even though his music was far superior to that of many of his fellow operetta composers), he did gain the high regard of none other than Arnold Schoenberg.

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) is widely regarded as the most successful and important composer of the Soviet era after Shostakovich. His music had an enormous currency and popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the West. Like Shostakovich he suffered the disapproval of the regime. In the 1970s he was persecuted by the head of the union of Soviet composers Tikhon Krennikov, and was almost entirely ostracized in his native country. In 1991 Schnittke moved to the West even though in the era of Perestroika his music had been embraced by a new generation of Russian musicians in the Soviet Union. Schnittke’s work was immensely influential in its austerity, irony, appropriation of historical fragments and models, and the composer’s determined desire to bridge the gap between the popular and concert genres. Schnittke fused a unique synthesis between modernism and post-modernism. Much of his music has, like the Viola Concerto, an explicit connection to narrative. Since his death his popularity has receded somewhat, but there is little doubt that despite the changing tides that often plague the posthumous reception of composers who enjoyed enormous success during their lifetimes, Schnittke’s music will remain a vital part of the canon of music composed during the second half of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the least known composer being performed tonight is Josef Suk (1874-1935). The name may be familiar to many concertgoers because of the violinist Josef Suk, the composer’s grandson, whose recordings and performances have earned him a place as one of the great violinists of the twentieth century. Music was a long and proud tradition in the Suk family. The composer’s father (also Josef) was a music teacher and choirmaster. The composer himself was also the second violinist in the famous Bohemian Quartet (also called the Czech Quartet). But Suk’s real ambition was to compose. Consequently he studied composition with Dvořák and went on not only to become Dvořák’s favorite pupil but also Dvořák’s son-in-law. Suk was himself a teacher of considerable importance whose own pupils included Bohuslav Martinů. Suk was also responsible for bringing Janáček to the attention of the writer Max Brod (who had written extremely laudatory essay on Suk’s music). Suk urged Brod to go to a performance of Janáček’s Jenůfa in Brno. As a result of that performance, Brod arranged to bring Jenůfa to Prague and ultimately to Vienna and Berlin, thereby launching the international career of the then sixty-year-old Janáček. Unlike many of his Czech colleagues, Suk’s relationship to folk elements was not very pronounced. He saw himself a multi-faceted composer in the European tradition. Among his finest works are the Piano Quintet Op. 8 and the String Quartet Op.11, both of which reveal the enormous craftsmanship at his command. In this regard he can be compared to his contemporary, the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi.

In many ways, Suk innovated on the training of his celebrated teacher and father-in-law. Like Schumann, Suk’s piano works often have a powerful and intimate quality and are deeply personal and autobiographical works. Most commentators, however, consider Suk’s orchestral music his finest, which makes it difficult to understand why so little of it survives the standard repertory. (His wonderful Violin Fantasy, Op 24 (1903) was performed by this orchestra at the Bard Festival in New York in 1993). After the Asrael Symphony, Suk completed in 1917 the other orchestral work, entitled Ripening, Op.34, that one might still find on the occasional concert program. But it is clearly Asrael that stands as his orchestral masterpiece, and for some, his greatest work in any genre. In this work, Suk integrated the finest traditions of the Lisztian tone poem with that of the symphony. This work represents a musical experience that can certainly hold its own alongside Strauss, Elgar and Mahler.

Music that reflects the deeply personal and autobiographical creates a form of intimacy between creator and audience that exploits the exclusive qualities of musical communication. In a way that is quite distinct from reading a novel, attending a play, or gazing at a painting, the listener can accept the candor and specificity of another person’s experience of life without being locked into the passive position of an observer. The sense of communication through the evoking of corresponding emotion allows for the translation of another’s sensibility into the listener’s own. As the works on tonight’s program make plain, the autobiographical in music depends on a kind of empathetic parallelism. It is this singular form of connection that makes instrumental music an utterly unique medium for autobiographical introspection and expression.

The Romantic Soul: Lord Byron in Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Romantic Soul: Lord Byron in Music, performed on Feb 9, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Few writers in any language at any time in the history of European arts and letters have so completely captured the imagination of a generation as did George Gordon, Lord Byron. A member of the second generation of English Romantic poets that also included Keats and Shelly, he was born in London in 1788 and died famously in the defense of the Greek national cause in 1824. During his lifetime Byron was a rather scandalous figure, beautiful, brutal, deeply intellectual, eccentric (he could not stand the sight of a woman eating), profligate, brilliant. He was generally regarded as a fallen angel, to be pitied and secretly admired. With his premature death Byron shared the apparently inevitable fate of a Romantic poet, but the fact that he literally sacrificed himself for those classical ideals (which in reality had little to do with the modern Greek state) that so infused his work gave his death a special resonance for European artists and thinkers, and he posthumously became a iconic figure of dark fascination, a compelling mixture of idealism and disillusionment, heroism and demonism, noble defiance and tragedy. In other words, his image after death merged utterly with that of his poetic creations and he himself became the quintessential Byronic hero. Today, although he retains his dominance as one of the greatest of the English poets, his work no longer engages a popular readership as it did throughout the nineteenth century. We live in a post-Romantic age; it is more difficult to relate to essential concepts of guilt, burning introspection, and sympathetic, sinful desire when we now expect a hero, if he is to die, to at least first use his fanciful technological weaponry to obliterate the enemy with assurance. The Byronic hero, all questions and no answers, has already lost before he begins, which does not make for a good market in action figures. Further, the events of the last century have given us a very different conception of the human capacity for evil and suffering than Byron could ever have imagined.

But the three composers on today’s program – Bennett, Liszt, and Schumann – were members of a generation captivated by Byron’s life and work, a generation for whom Byron embodied the painful ambiguities and perplexity of a changing, spiritually confused world. Of the three composers Schumann was the oldest, born in 1810. Liszt was born in 1811 and Bennett was the youngest, born in 1816. Schumann was the most articulate and literary, though Liszt was a close second. Schumann’s first love was literature. His father was a bookseller and a publisher, and Schumann, like his colleagues and every other well-read person of his time, was intimately familiar with the works of Byron. Indeed, Byron’s appeal to these three very different composers reveals the poet’s significant, universal influence during the nineteenth century. This common thread gives us an opportunity to explore not only Byron’s representation in music, but also the different ways these composers thought about the relation between words and music.

Schumann’s setting of Byron comes from a close reading of the text and a deep admiration for its poetic virtues, so much so that there were large sections of the text Schumann chose not to set because he found the verse itself overwhelmingly musical on its own. His response is not surprising when the original poem’s structure is considered. With its choruses and climactic monologues, it seems made for music in a manner similar to Goethe’s Faust (also partially set by Schumann). Schumann wished the text to be declaimed and then to move into song almost as in musical theater. This in itself reflects the symbiotic tension between the poetic and the musical in the aesthetics of the early nineteenth century, particularly in German-speaking Europe. The German Romantic poets of Schumann’s time tried to elevate poetry to the status of music and thus widen language’s power beyond its capacity for representation. They wished for a use of language that more nearly approximated the ineffable and the infinite. In the aesthetic views of Schumann’s generation, music was the highest of the arts for a Romantic sensibility precisely because it was not literal or representational. The transfer of Schumann’s ambition from the literary to the musical echoed the conceits of his hero Jean-Paul Richter, for whom music (which he called the act of improvisation with sound) was the deepest form of personal expression, outstripping the use of language.

Schumann, like Schubert before him and Brahms after, was a master of the merging of text and music through the form of the Lied. But as Mendelssohn (one of Bennett’s greatest defenders) discovered, the transition from songwriting to drama is difficult for a variety of factors, not the least of which is the epic greatness of the text to be set. The merging of the vocal with the dramatic is for Schumann only partially successful. There is one unperformed opera, Genoveva (1849) and the brilliant torso of a work, his setting of Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844-53). As his unsettled and provocative Manfred suggests, the beauty of Byron’s words and of Schumann’s musical expression were perhaps equivalent only in Schumann’s appreciation for both forms, but such an appreciation was not easily transferable for the composer. The story of Manfred is itself an ambiguous one. The hero, a man of fantastic powers living half in the human world and half in a world of spirits, laments his life and his terrible sinful nature of his love for his sister. In his wandering he meets numerous spirits, a deer hunter, the Witch of the Alps, and a kindly abbot who attempts to save him. He is ultimately swallowed by darkness both within and without, a figure both pitiable and cursed. The text is subtle and complex, invariably leading to the question of what a musical setting can do to elucidate it. In the partially staged version you will see today, we have tried to highlight the musical aspects to honor Schumann’s intention of using music to elevate language. Byron’s intention, of course, was never to have Manfred staged or publicly performed in any way.

Schumann’s colleague Liszt was a prolific author and wrote extensively on music (sometimes with not entirely discreet ghost writers). But Liszt was undoubtedly a polymath, and tirelessly energetic as a performer, organizer, conductor, politician, and teacher. Tasso is Liszt’s reworking of a first version of this piece orchestrated by his friend August Conradi, and a second version orchestrated by Joachim Raff, who went on to achieve considerable fame as a composer and teacher. Like Schumann, Liszt was enamored of the literary. But that love drew him to a very different conclusion regarding text and music. Instead of trying to set the text in a conventional sense as Schumann did, Liszt invented an instrumental form: the tone poem. Liszt deserves much more credit ultimately than Wagner for transforming the aesthetics of nineteenth century music. More than Schumann and Wagner, Liszt pursued the symbiosis between language and music with a truly innovative idea. That idea was grounded in his belief that instrumental music could carry language further than language could go on its own. Insofar as language reached the individual and transported the reader beyond the quotidian, it was music that could render that experience concrete, and rekindle the memory of that which was once read.

Schumann and his subsequent supporters, suspicious of what later became known as the new German school and “program” music, accused this approach of subordinating music to language and narration. But the opposite case can be strongly made. The tone poem Tasso has in fact very little to do with the story and certainly much less to do with any particularly poetic text. Byron’s poem is about the Italian poet Tasso, whose love for the Duke d’Este’s sister led to seven years in jail for the poet. But the listener does not need to be intimately familiar with Byron’s text to appreciate Liszt’s tone poem. The writing of tone poems is not altogether different from an operatic overture in the sense of Beethoven’s three Leonore overtures, despite what reductive theories of “program music and absolute music” suggest. The primary difference is that as in the case of a tone poem such as Tasso, the inspiration and structure are free-standing and self-sufficient. They are literary but one step removed; they are in fact meta-linguistic. The music emulates a literary narrative, but its impact is not at all that of reading. It does not require text because it is only remotely narrative. Music in Liszt’s treatment retains music’s infinite unapproachable quality and expressive rhetoric, despite the superficial ordering of the music along the lines of a dramatic story that has been mediated by poetic diction. (It is interesting in this light to consider why the only part of Schumann’s Manfred to survive in the repertory is in fact the overture.)

What inspired Liszt ultimately was not plot but poetic language. It is in this sense ironic that his initial inspiration was Goethe. On the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth Liszt was due to write (as was common at the time) an overture to a new production of Goethe’s Tasso. But as Liszt himself said, he was inspired by “the most powerful poetic geniuses of our time, Goethe and Byron.” For Liszt, Goethe was the poet of “brilliant prosperity;” Byron, despite “advantages of birth and fortune,” was the symbol of “much suffering.” By Liszt’s own admission his tone poem was “more immediately inspired by the respectful compassion evoked by Byron…than by the work of the German poet.” What Liszt supplied in his own view was “the remembrance of the bitter sorrows of the protagonist of Byron’s poem.”

Liszt’s evocation of Goethe and Byron has its own historic irony. Goethe’s review of Byron’s Manfred, as well as his review of the English poet’s other works, reveals that Byron was the only contemporary poet with whom Goethe felt a keen competition and envy. Toward the end of his life, Goethe remained obsessed with Byron even though he had embraced a new neoclassicism distinctly in opposition to the Romantic movement in German poetry. In fact Byron, in his own way distinct from Goethe, bridged the classical and romantic in its conventional definition and was the inspiration not so much for Goethe but for European poets including Mickiewicz and Lermontov. The impact of Byron on composers ranges from the three composers on tonight’s program to the following list of composers, all of whom at one time or another set Byron to music either directly or indirectly: Busoni, Loewe, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Joachim, Verdi, Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff, MacDowell, Nietzsche, Wolff, Donizetti, Berlioz, and Tchaikovsky, whose symphonic masterpiece Manfred remains one of the most well known efforts to render Byron into instrumental music.

The composer who opens today’s program was, appropriately, English. His approach to Byron is probably the most conservative of the three musical responses offered here. Bennett’s music shows a strong debt to Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn died in 1847 before the great breach in musical aesthetics that placed Liszt and Wagner on one side and Schumann and Brahms on the other. Most of Bennett’s output actually dates from Mendelssohn’s lifetime. In contrast to Schumann’s Manfred and Liszt’s Tasso, Bennett offers almost no apparent relationship between his music and Byron’s poem. We can appreciate Bennett’s adherence to the very early Romantic exploration of the connection between poetry and music if we remember his mentor’s overtures and music for plays. In the famous A Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, a mood and sensibility is evoked but no plot or narration. Instrumental music is left to its own devices, in contrast to the opera or oratorio form on the one hand and the innovative Lisztian tone poem on the other. A brief look at Mendelssohn’s Die shöne Melusine (1833) overture makes this point poignantly. Mendelssohn wrote it after seeing the Grillparzer play at which an overture by another composer was performed. After experiencing the play Mendelssohn was shocked at the inadequacy of the musical evocation, and so he wrote his own as a musical response to the dramatic experience but not the particular language or dramatic structure. So it is with Bennett’s Parisina. In contrast to Schumann or Liszt, there is no need to find specific connections between poetry and music in Bennett’s composition. It is only important to remember that to be inspired by Lord Byron and his poetry had become an obligatory hallmark of artistic authenticity for any aspiring composer or poet. It is indeed astonishing to see how one poet, arguably prolific and notorious in personality, could have so completely enraptured and influenced the course of music in the mid-nineteenth century.

Bruckner’s Journey

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner’s Journey, performed on Jan 10, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Anton Bruckner’s (1824-1896) birthplace is described by The New Grove Dictionary as “Ansfelden, nr. Linz.” This reveals a key factor in considering the career of this formidable Austrian composer—that is, that he was not a native of Vienna, or even Linz, but of a provincial place “nr. Linz.” The distinction between the “cosmopolitan and urban,” regarded as rich in culture and sophistication, and the “provincial,” regarded as some sort of hermetic backwater, is an old one; indeed it dates back to antiquity. Thucydides strongly implies such a distinction in the Funeral Oration of Pericles, where Pericles boasts of what could be called the “cosmopolitanism” of Athenian life and culture. Later in Europe, the arrogance of capital cities and their social elite as the standard bearers of value in everything from linguistic accent to literature to fashion flourished when the power of the feudal landed aristocracy began to wane. This sense of superiority through social taste and custom grew acute in eighteenth-century Vienna. Although Emperor Joseph II sought to centralize imperial administration at the end of the eighteenth century, a powerful, autonomous upper middle-class had not yet developed. Therefore the imperial court, as well as the homes of wealthy nobles, were the seats of formation of taste both in art and music, cultural forms maintained primarily through the patronage system. Esterhazy’s court at Eisenstadt and the Archbishop of Salzburg set artistic standards every bit the equal of the capital city of Vienna. Only towards the end of the century did culture begin to concentrate in royal cities, particularly in German-speaking Europe.

Paris and London of course were already advanced urban cultural centers earlier in the eighteenth century, because of a more progressive and aggressive economic and political climate. Haydn famously discovered the benefits of a more expansive, wealthier urban base of appreciation during his famous tours of London. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a very different view of urban elitism in his bitter critique of late eighteenth-century urban values and aesthetic taste as false progressive conceits of the fashionable ignorant. In this he prefigures the scathing, ambivalent assessment of Paris one finds in the pages of Honore de Balzac, who spares nothing in his savaging of Parisian pretensions with respect to journalism, and the resultant tastes in literature, painting, and music. However social critics felt about the quality of their aesthetic decrees, London and Paris by the mid-nineteenth century were the arbiters of culture for their respective homelands, much as Athens served for Pericles as the “school of Hellas.”

Such dominance over the countryside and smaller towns could not have occurred without the development of what scholars like to term “public space,” the forum for a new class with expanded privileges that overtook society in the early-nineteenth century. The dominant participants in this new public space were not landed aristocrats but civil servants, professionals, and commercial leaders that constituted a new consumer middle class. These individuals belonged to reading societies, subscribed to publications, bought books and attended concerts. In the twentieth century their power increased, and so did the process of centralization proportionately. New organs of dissemination, newspapers and journals, proliferated fashion and aesthetic taste beyond city walls into the landscape, and fortified the key cities’ positions as central authorities. Such dominance over the provinces, expressed in the snobbery and arrogance of urban dwellers, invoked a deeply ambivalent reaction. Provincial residents both admired and imitated their city cousins, as Emma Bovary illustrates, but there was also a fear and insecurity concerning the elitism of the big cities, and their inaccessibility for those not born there (as Emma discovers). A wonderful metaphor of such fear in American literature can be found in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, in which the witches of the east and west represent the perils as well as the allures of New York and San Francisco.

But as Pericles pointed out long ago, cosmopolitan sophistication was not merely a function of civic wealth or political importance (consider how culturally moribund Washington and Brasilia are compared to other centers in the United States and Brazil) but precisely the openness and diversity to be found in dynamic urban environments. The notion that a great center of artistic culture was also a crossroads for a vast cultural (in its anthropological sense) spectrum became especially significant in Vienna. Its fin-de-siécle reputation as a great center of art, literature, and architecture as well as its importance as one of the first focal points of modernism were closely tied to the city’s function as a destination point of emigration. The economic boom of the 1860s, the World’s Fair of 1873, the subsequent financial crash and, above all, the political reforms that followed Austria’s defeat in 1866 in its war with Prussia, served to mushroom Vienna’s population. The growth consisted of immigrants from Moravia, Bohemia, Galicia, and the eastern parts of the Empire as well as the southern regions of the Habsburg monarchy. Vienna became a polyglot city. Its most distinctive minority was its Jewish population, which by the eve of World War I accounted for over ten percent of the city’s population.

The multi-ethnic and multi-national character of Vienna and other cities considerably complicated the distinction between the cosmopolitan and the provincial as Pericles defined it. City and country no longer equated with the snobbish sophisticate and his provincial cousin. Rather, the provincial came to signify the native inhabitant rooted in land and tradition, and the cosmopolitan the foreign-born, relocated neighbor, the natural and the assimilated. Modern nationalism and religious and ethnic differences became cross currents in a growing tension between the provincial and the cosmopolitan. A case in point (nearly contemporary to Bruckner’s life) was the writer Max Brod, a German-speaking Jewish polymath also fluent in Czech, who promoted the worldwide fame of the pan-Slavic provincial Czech composer Leós Janáček. The distinction here is not merely between Prague and Brno, or even Vienna and Prague, but between Czech and German, Christian and Jew. In the Habsburg monarchy before 1914, the cosmopolitan was often polemically confused with the anti-traditional, the infiltrative modern, the rootless and abstract. The provincial was viewed as pure, nationally centered, spiritual, and in touch with basic moral and conservative values. Populations outside of Vienna claimed to be uncorrupted by the blandishments and decadence of big city life marked by a largely non-Austrian community with an artificial polyglot culture. (This was the feeling in many of the urban centers; for example, as a young man Béla Bartók was suspicious of the high culture community of Budapest.)

This was the environment into which Anton Bruckner entered as a composer in mid-career in the late 1860s. The tension he felt between provincial and cosmopolitan was a formative principle in his career. The works on tonight’s program document the transformation that Bruckner underwent with a considerable degree of discomfort from an organist and musician in Linz to a major musical force in the capital city of Vienna. The Mass in F minor, first performed in Vienna in 1872, won the approbation of the great critic Eduard Hanslick (later a vocal skeptic of Bruckner’s symphonic achievement). By all accounts, Bruckner was a deeply religious and unpretentious man. When he came to Vienna, his skill as a master of counterpoint earned him the professorship of counterpoint at the Vienna Conservatory. His virtuosity as an organist and his capacity for improvisation that had distinguished him in Linz led to important posts in Vienna. But Bruckner never adjusted completely to Viennese life, nor to its urban cosmopolitan high culture. He wrote for the Vienna Men’s Chorus which itself increasingly became a bastion of nostalgia for the myth of a provincial, old Vienna without all the immigrants. His relations with the power brokers and the major institutions were tenuous, despite efforts on his behalf by Johann Herbeck and Hans Richter, both of whom wielded considerable power as conductors.

The widening gap between nativism and cosmopolitanism in Vienna between 1880 and 1896 was mirrored in the opposition between partisans of Bruckner and Brahms. Bruckner was seen as a champion of an authentic Austrian Catholic tradition with a nativist sensibility, and therefore the heir to Schubert. His music (despite its debt to Wagner) seemed to be a spiritual link to the past and an antidote to the facile cosmopolitanism one might encounter in varying forms from the music of Brahms to the operetta tradition pioneered by Johann Strauss. Bruckner succeeded in Vienna as a foil, not lightning rod, for conservative political and cultural sentiments. His music was enthusiastically endorsed by a generation of rebellious young students who sought to combat a reigning academic aesthetic enshrined in the Vienna Conservatory, where Bruckner taught counterpoint but not composition. Bruckner was not comfortable in society or with the Conservatory’s governing board or even its faculty as Brahms was. In addition, Brahms was a favored presence in the leading high-culture salons of Vienna. Bruckner was ill at ease in such situations. He embarrassed himself at one formal dinner party attended by nobility, leading business people and artists when he exclaimed his horror in his Linz dialect at being served raw fish eggs, that is, caviar.

Social maladroitness falls on the benign side of Bruckner’s fame in Vienna as an antipode to the cosmopolitan establishment. There were also darker implications. For example, he allowed himself to serve as the honorary chairman of a new academic Wagner Society—a different one than that to which Guido Adler and Gustav Mahler once held memberships. This new Wagner society had in its bylaws the explicit prohibition of Jews as members.

Predictably, since his death Anton Bruckner has been the subject of a fierce scholarly debate, especially concerning the editions of his work. This debate has been fueled by a pronounced desire to preserve his provincially pure standing and to protect him from such cosmopolitans as his own disciple Ferdinand Loewe, who was of Jewish origin. Bruckner scholarship in the last century became tainted by nationalists, and ultimately by national socialists. To this day the debate continues between a “loyal Bruckner” community of German and Austrian scholars and a more critically-minded assemblage of international scholars (including some young Germans and Austrians) who refute the traditional image of the composer, and seek to acknowledge the facts of his biography and the cultural politics of the city in which Bruckner lived, the Vienna that contained both the provincial and the cosmopolitan.

Tonight we offer two relatively rare and under-performed works, which date originally from Bruckner’s Linz period and his transition to Vienna. He reconsidered them from the retrospective of his own struggle to become established as a composer in the capital city. Some argue that Bruckner softened the provincial touches of his earlier versions and listened to arguments to imbue his music with a veneer that was more palatable to the sophisticated Viennese audience. He let his disciples suggest cuts and changes in instrumentation, and he himself revised aspects of the music in the 1880s and 1890s so that it would more likely win favor in Vienna. In fact, much of the critical revisionism of Bruckner in the twentieth century has been what might well be termed a misguided effort to return to the “original” Bruckner, as though the environment of Vienna and its standards of taste were a deleterious influence. The choice to perform the later versions of these two works is itself a comment on the danger of investing the tensions of the past with contemporary aesthetic value. There may be earlier, equally authentic versions of these works, but we have an opportunity to listen to a great composer who like all other creative artists absorbed the influences of his life sequentially without losing the distinctive fingerprints of his initial aesthetic vision. For whatever reason, Bruckner reheard his own music. This concert is a reminder that historical divisions in politics and culture possess a creative residue. This residue transcends the hate and mistrust and violence that descended on the modern world, in part in the service of a conflict between center and periphery not only over mores and taste, but wealth, privilege and standards of living.

American Originals

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert American Originals, performed on Nov 17, 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The evolution of an American tradition in orchestral music has always been beset by an equivocal attitude to what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. As a former European possession and a nation of immigrants, the United States initially derived much of its high culture from the old world. At the same time, however, European art and culture came to be viewed beginning in the nineteenth century with increasing suspicion and resistance. European traditions smacked of elitist and aristocratic societies, and therefore did not seem compatible with American democratic ideals. Americans were proud of their national character, which is even today still often equated with the middle-class Protestant values of the first group of European immigrants to dominate the United States socially and politically. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American painters and writers (many of whom studied in Europe) were torn between emulation of European traditions and the desire to express an original American identity.

In music, this tension was especially acute because music was particularly affected by the massive and continuous European immigration after the Civil War. As the United States began to embody innovation and entrepreneurship in all fields from commerce and industry to design and architecture, distinguished Europeans visited America to learn and partake of American originality. But music was not part of the nineteenth-century conception of the American achievement of originality; Europeans did not come to learn about music in the new world but rather to supply it. Music differed from other disciplines in America in several respects. First, it was a performing art that did not present linguistic obstacles for the performers; second, its most established stars were Europeans with European training; and third, its audience was constantly replenished from the waves of new immigrants pouring into the United States who carried their cultural legacies with them. As a result, the United States became a dominant market for classical music from Europe in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the American market for classical music in the half century before World War I can be compared to the Japanese and Korean markets for classical music after World War II. Every major European performer and composer from Anton Rubinstein to Richard Strauss traveled to America, lured by big fees and enthusiastic audiences. Among the most spectacular occasions in American music in the nineteenth century was Johann Strauss’s tour of America. Theodore Thomas, the legendary conductor and builder of American orchestras in the late nineteenth century was born and schooled in Germany. Many Italian, French, and Scandinavian performers and composers helped build America’s great orchestras, conservatories, and musical life. The first conductor to perform in the United States’ greatest concert hall, Carnegie Hall, was Tchaikovsky. When the Boston Symphony Orchestra was founded, its conductor and most of its players were imported. James Levine is in fact the first native-born American music director in that venerable orchestra’s history.

Therefore as Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dickinson were shaping a distinctive American literary tradition, those musicians and composers who wanted to discover an American musical tradition were facing a particularly complex problem. Some American composers of the late nineteenth century, such as John Knowles Paine and George Chadwick, remained faithful to their European training, and wrote music that discreetly displayed American subject matter (Rip van Winkle, for instance) brilliantly ensconced within the finest European symphonic traditions. Ironically, it was Antonin Dvořák (with the help of Henry Krehbiel) who upon his arrival as the newly chosen head of the National Conservatory in New York in 1892 pronounced that America should look to its own native traditions for its musical identity. Adding to the irony, he specifically mentioned as sources for these traditions the descendents of the United States’ two largest involuntarily displaced populations: the native Americans and the African slaves. But what Dvořák of course was really advocating was that Americans follow a firmly established European tradition in which Dvořák himself excelled, that of exoticizing the classical tradition by applying folk-music elements. For Dvořák, African American music could have the same invigorating effect on a base of European classical form as Moravian and Bohemian music did. But these appropriations do not make a new musical identity. Their purpose is only to enhance the old, established tradition, which is why the folk elements used before World War I did not even have to be authentic, but only sound appropriately exotic.

The composer, however, who answered Dvořák’s challenge in an utterly innovative and unexpected way, indeed a way that succeeded in self-consciously legitimizing a distinct American identity in music was neither Paine nor Chadwick, but Charles Ives (1874-1954). In personality as well as artistic career, Ives was the quintessential New Englander. The son of a band leader, Ives lived out a dream of success as a pioneering force on Wall Street in the insurance business as well as eventually becoming recognized as a ground-breaking composer. He was a radical democrat without sacrifice to his commitment to ideals of capitalist entrepreneurship, patriotism, and freedom of thought and expression. But like many Puritan democrats, Ives’s America was the one in which he had been raised and the one that he just missed: mid-nineteenth-century Connecticut, a world that infused him with nostalgia and conservatism. Both nostalgia and conservatism in his complicated personality found expression in Ives’s music. As Dvořák had suggested, Ives appropriated elements from non-symphonic, distinctly American forms. For Ives these included tunes derived from the New England hymns, marching band music, Yale football songs, Stephan Foster, and church organ music with which he had grown up. His use of these tunes created a refracted image of American identity tied to the post-Civil War era on the southern New England landscape. However conservative the ideology of this identity created from these tunes may be though, the way in which Ives utilized them demonstrates his unique brand of experimentalism, the innovative freedom that he so cherished in the America he knew. Rather than exalting the American elements in a traditional symphonic rendering, Ives used a collage-like technique that breaks open notions of musical continuity. He layered rhythms and sounds in a manner that transformed the tunes, the form, and the harmony of orchestral music. Familiar tunes made unfamiliar evoke shadows of recognition, which are fragmentary and uncertain markers in a thrilling, unpredictable river of harmonies and dissonances. Ives used the most nostalgic elements of American life to experiment in a way unthinkable outside of the United States. He became the architect of American musical modernism. He stopped composing in the late 1920s, and it was only years later that his originality finally earned him his proper due. Ives had an enormous influence on Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Bernard Hermann, John Cage, and the young Elliott Carter. Ives’s Fourth Symphony waited until 1965 for its premiere by the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. It is thus a fitting selection for the orchestra’s fortieth anniversary season.

John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951) bears some similarity to Charles Ives. Carpenter also had a distinguished career in business as well as composing. Like Ives, his wealth and independence ensured a certain amount of license to do as he pleased. He was not an academic caught in a subculture bound by European tradition. He also shared Ives’s determination to find an original American voice in music. But for Carpenter, the basis of such a voice was not in a nostalgic, pastoral image of New England, but rather in the excitement of a country of advancement in industry and technology. Carpenter’s ideal America was located in its urban centers where astonishing varieties of cultures and classes mixed and new ideas formed, where the continuous work of commercial and social progress was made possible by the new buildings, spaces, and instruments of American invention. For Carpenter, the cultural universalism that existed no where but in the United States and which would come to dominate the twentieth century afforded the United States a stature equal to the greatest societies of Europe. That sentiment of equality with Europe informs his music. In a way, Carpenter is a mirror image in reverse of Charles Ives. Instead of transforming archetypal American themes within a radically new musical vision, Carpenter found American culture itself radical enough to invigorate a tired European tradition. Using contemporary and commercial elements, Carpenter tried to express what was different about modern American life; his originality rests in using American materials conventionally, thereby demonstrating the unconventionality of his America. (His efforts are distinguished from those of his nineteenth century predecessors who wished to show that American culture was as good as European culture because American arts resembled European art.) Carpenter however, partly because he was caught within a classical music tradition, never matched Gershwin’s achievements. Perhaps because of his reliance on ephemeral popular materials and conventional forms, he fell into obscurity. He is only now coming up for serious reconsideration, thanks to a timely new biography by Howard Pollack, who also wrote the leading biography of Aaron Copland.

Between these two counterpoints in American music, today’s program offers a third example of American originality in the work of Morton Feldman (1926-1987). Both Ives and Carpenter, though distinctly different in their approaches, were quite clear on what being an American meant to them. Privileged, successful businessmen, both expressed views of a society and nation created by their rebellious white Protestant ancestors. But for Morton Feldman, a product of the prolonged Eastern European Jewish emigration to New York, such a vision of the United States was distant at best. The intellectual environment created between the 1930s and 1950s by these immigrants, effectively described by such writers as Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe, was steeped in awareness of cultures, both European and American, which they did not find entirely satisfactory and sought to transform. The result in Feldman’s case, as in many others, was a radicalization based not in geography or nationalism but in temporality, a pan-national, pan-disciplinary idea of modernism. Morton Feldman was deeply engaged with the visual arts, and attempted to prove through his musical connection with abstract expressionism the theory offered so eloquently by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard in his great novelistic monologue Old Masters: ultimately it is impossible to separate the aural and the visual from informing one another. Feldman wanted to integrate the aesthetic ambitions of modernist painting into the writing of music; he went even further, and sought to invent a new way of visualizing and notating sound. Feldman’s use of time and sonority derived precisely from the notion of abstraction and non-objectivity that dominated the art and theory among the first generation of abstract expressionists, as well as their successors, the color field painters. If reading Emerson, Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott can help one understand Ives, then contemplating Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and the writer Clement Greenberg would be as useful in appreciating Morton Feldman’s project as a composer.

Feldman’s generation included the first American artists and writers of Jewish origin whose work entered the canon of that which is now considered quintessentially American. Indeed the achievements of post-war American painting dramatically overshadowed the European visual arts and shifted the center of gravity in what defined twentieth century painting and sculpture from Europe to America. In this sense, through their appropriation and extension of modernism (not necessarily American), the painter, writers, and composers of Feldman’s generation created an American tradition as consciously and viably as did Ives and Carpenter. When we try to understand and compare their three very distinctive contributions to the emergence of American originality, we find ourselves asking not only what it means to be American, but what it means to be original. Is American originality based on some simplistic concept of “being American”—whatever that may mean to anyone—or is it perhaps finally a relative concept, always evolving and reinventing itself in order to respond constructively to a changing world in which idealizations of national identity and dreams of universal art still to play a role?

The Egyptian Helen

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opera and Oscar Wilde

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scandinavian Romantics

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strauss’ Musical Landscapes

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dante’s Inferno

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A World Apart 2001

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Last Century

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Carmina Burana

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Remembrance of Things Past

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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