Making Music

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pioneering Influence: Cesar Franck

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Symphonic Mexico

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Art of the Psalm

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Russia with Mozart

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Swiss Accounts

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gathering Storm

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Paradise

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creative Links

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inventing America

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Inventing America, performed on Sep 25, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When Leopold Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra in 1962 as a naturalized European-born citizen, he was still fighting an old battle. That battle was over the question of how to make symphonic music genuinely American. Despite our nostalgia (fueled by distorted accounts of the past) for a time when classical music played to full houses and was embraced as a central part of cultural life, American orchestral life before 1962 was not very American. The rosters of orchestral musicians revealed large numbers of Europeans, both recruits and émigrés fleeing from persecution. The major conductors, with the exception of Leonard Bernstein, were all European. And the standard repertoire was overwhelmingly European. Stokowski, who during his tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra (and with his hand-shaking cameo with Mickey Mouse) stayed in the vanguard for democratizing classical music, made his final contribution to its Americanization by creating the American Symphony Orchestra. Two principles were of paramount importance to him. First, the concerts had to be accessible in price to a wide public in a manner reflective of the egalitarian streak in American democracy (a principle that still guides this Orchestra’s mission). Second, the personnel of the Orchestra were to be all native-born American musicians.

Forty years later, the American Symphony doesn’t need to go out of its way to maintain the second principle. Orchestras in America are now many in number and today the personnel is overwhelmingly American. We still import conductors from abroad but we see many Americans in important posts in the United States and even Americans with significant posts abroad. Indeed the whole issue of this sort of patriotism has changed in character. Internationalism and globalization have asserted themselves for better or worse. Orchestras need not be instruments of national self-representation. This is particularly true for a country such as the United States, which has prided itself on being an inclusive nation of immigrants. In this sense Stokowski’s initial premise was too narrow. If there is a magic to America, it rests on the capacity to make the many émigrés who played in the NBC Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic fifty years ago, feel entirely American. This is a nation, after all, where citizenship is not acquired exclusively by birth or genealogy. This fact ought to give American nationalism a less virulent xenophobic character. What makes many of us proud to be Americans is the absence of a nativism, and the embrace of freedom and the capacity to dissent.

Another aspect that concerned Stokowski, however, remains inadequately addressed: the repertoire. The situation he confronted has, if anything, gotten worse rather than better. The generation of Stokowski, which included Koussevitzky, Klemperer, and in part Bernstein, was committed to the ongoing tradition of new music. Each of the great conductors championed one or two living composers. Stokowski was particularly interested in furthering a tradition of American composition. It is in that spirit that we present this afternoon’s program.

Today’s concert is designed to address two issues: first, the self-conscious effort in the twentieth century to generate a distinctly original American symphonic tradition, and second, the generational question in music history, crystallized in this case by the relationship of teacher and student. The music on this afternoon’s program dates from a crucial era in American history: that between World War I and the onset of the New Deal. What is special about this period is that it represents America’s bold and unabashed entrance into world politics as a dominant force. World War I brought the nineteenth century to an end. Despite the United States’s imperialist adventure in the Spanish American War and its brokering of the peace in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, its debut as a super power really occurred in 1917, when it participated conclusively in what at that time was the largest war in history. The years that followed the end of World War I became a period of experimentation and bravado, glittering innovation and intoxicating prosperity. The works by Ernest Bloch and Roger Sessions were composed in this era of expansion, optimism and greed. The 1920s were also a period that marked the end of open borders for the United States and a decline in rates of immigration. America began consolidating itself as a new national entity. Randall Thompson’s work was composed after the market crash of 1929 during the Hoover years, but before the onset of the awareness of the gravity and extent of the Great Depression, and prior to the progressive agenda of the New Deal.

With the New Deal came a shift in the ambitions of American composers. Roy Harris and Aaron Copland, for example, were inspired by the rediscovery of an American folk tradition and embraced a populist style. They stepped away from the optimistic and in some cases arrogant claims of modernism as it put forward a progressive musical vocabulary, adequate to the burgeoning scientific and technological transformation of the period. This more populist turn was anticipated already by the senior member of today’s trio of composers, Ernest Bloch. Bloch was not a native of America but an immigrant. Born a Jew in Switzerland, he came well equipped to appreciate the United States. Switzerland, despite its xenophobia, is one of the West’s oldest and most successful democracies, with a profound history of civic egalitarianism (though in the 1920s only for men). America was the best hope for the European Jew who wanted to acquire political rights. For Bloch as for many immigrants, America was a dream come true, a land of promise not only in the material sense but in ethical and political senses as well. The Epic Rhapsody is unwittingly as close as any piece can come to the work imagined by the protagonist of Israel Zangwill’s famous play from the turn of the century, The Melting Pot. In that play, the protagonist, David Quixano, is a Jewish composer who has fled persecution and dreams of writing an epic and visionary orchestral and choral work that evokes, in the spirit of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the promise of the New World in a distinctly American way. Bloch materialized Zangwill’s image and produced a work that, when it premiered, was an outstanding success. It was heralded, performed, and held up as the first truly American act of symphonic self-expression. But then after its initial impact, it disappeared quickly from the repertoire, much to the composer’s dismay. The lasting achievement of an American sound would fall to the son of immigrants, Aaron Copland, and Ernest Bloch would be remembered primarily for his powerful expressions of Ashkenazi Jewish faith in works such as Schelomo (1916) and Baal Shem (1923).

But Bloch’s enthusiastic romance with America was not without its residue. The brief fame of the work left a lasting impression on Harris, Copland, and subsequent composers who sought to realize the dream of a truly American symphony. (With a smile we can remember that in the 1920s no one paid any attention to Charles Ives. It would be Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra that would give the world premiere in the 1960s of the most American of all symphonies, Ives’s Fourth.) Bloch’s real legacy in America, however, was as a teacher more than as a composer. Two unmistakably American talents, Roger Sessions and Randall Thompson, both of multi-generational Anglo-Saxon stock and with no apparent insecurities about their identities, seemed to understand that the traditions of classical music were traditionally European. Just as young talents in the 1890s went either abroad to study or sought out Dvořák at the National Conservatory in New York, Thompson and Sessions chose to study with a true European master, Ernest Bloch. Twenty years later it would be Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg who would achieve public recognition as teachers of American composers.

This brings us to the second theme of this concert, generational change and the relationship between teacher and pupil. Today’s program is a study in contrasts. Randall Thompson is the less remembered figure in music history. He was a longtime, well-respected teacher at Harvard. But with the exception of a few choral works, the Alleluia and the Testament to Freedom (performed by the ASO in 2000), Thompson’s music has almost entirely fallen out of the active repertory. But Thompson sustained the somewhat conservative aesthetics and vocabulary of his teacher Bloch. In this sense Thompson’s music can be set alongside symphonic works of Harris and Copland from the 1930s and 1940s. Thompson’s allusion to jazz elements was not only a characteristic habit of composers in the 1920s, including George Antheil, but it was a symbol of both the American and the modern. It might be argued that Bloch did set a direction for American music distinct from European modernism defined by Stravinsky and Nadia Boulanger and the more radical post-tonal variety pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. However Thompson also, like Bloch, may have his greatest importance as a teacher rather than as a composer.

The same can be said of Roger Sessions. However, Sessions’s music and reputation have survived in a much more active manner. Sessions steadfastly held to the ideal of developing a modernist American musical vocabulary framed in a European tradition. Unlike John Cage or Henry Cowell, he was not, strictly speaking, an experimentalist. His sense of form and structure is classical and conservative, but his realization in terms of sound is visionary and avant-garde. His chamber and orchestra works are still held in high esteem and appear with some frequency. (The American Symphony recently recorded his Eighth Symphony.) Sessions’s music is difficult, but in the spirit of Bloch it is deeply emotional and expressive. Sessions created an expressionist modernism, an American equivalent of the music of Alban Berg. His music is not academic or dry but intense and powerful. Like Thompson he had a long, distinguished career as a teacher. He was also among the most articulate and literate of American composers. His writings on music are among the finest produced in twentieth-century America.

There is an irony in the fact that Bloch’s attempt to transform a European tradition into an American one is eclectic and drifts within America toward a populism that would be fully realized by Copland in Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man. Yet the idea of a sing-along at the end of the Symphony in a moment of patriotic enthusiasm remains startling and novel. For all the talk of finding ways to reach a broader public, no composer of any stature has tried to do something comparable to what Bloch asks for at the end of this monumental work. Bridging the symphonic experience and the habits of popular singing even to the extent of karaoke has never been easy, but here Bloch also pierces the barrier between active participation and passive listening, and between professional and amateur.

Bloch’s two most successful and prominent American pupils developed their own distinct characters as composers, but they learned two vital lessons from their teacher. First, music is an art of emotional expression directed at a broad public. It is an alluring mix of the intimate and the civic. Although Thompson and Sessions took different paths in terms of the musical methods they adopted, they understood from Bloch that the writing of music was not a matter of “art for art’s sake” or simple virtuosity. Second, they recognized along with their teacher the enormous opportunity that America offered. As a mature industrial world power placed in a massive and diverse landscape both urban and rural, America offered a new and challenging context in which a tradition of musical composition could emerge that was clearly a product of novel geographic and historical circumstances. Both Thompson’s and Sessions’s symphonies mirror optimism and opportunity of the sort that would also attract other European artists such as Edgar Varése and Piet Mondrian. What is remarkable is that the era from which the works of Sessions and Thompson date was a moment when the definition of the American, in stark contrast to Bloch’s Rhapsody, bypassed the obvious source of national self-identification: folk tradition. To the immigrant like Bloch or Dvořák, the concept of nationalism could easily be expressed by so-called nativist elements. But for confident American-born white Anglo-Saxon men, the challenge of the 1920s was to find the distinctly American in the modern.

Olympische Hymne (1934)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Richard Strauss Choral Works, performed on April 17, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Strauss wrote the Olympic Hymn with some reluctance, but not because of its political implications. He communicated to Stefan Zweig, the Viennese Jewish librettist of The Silent Woman (and whom Strauss defended, much to the displeasure of the Nazis, at the premiere of their joint effort), “I kill the boredom of the advent season by composing an Olympic Hymn for the proletarians—I of all people, who hate and despise sports. Well, idleness is the root of all evil.” The events surrounding the Hymn’s premiere highlight the ambiguous relationship Strauss was in with the Nazis. The national Olympic committee, which commissioned the work, was not pleased with Strauss’s hostility to sports. At one rehearsal of the Hymn Hitler planned to be present, and Strauss was explicitly asked to absent himself. Nevertheless, Strauss did conduct the premiere at the Games in Hitler’s presence. His contempt for politicians extended to Hitler but his overwhelming egotism prevented him from recognizing the distinction between what was simply distasteful and what was evil. In the years that followed the premiere of the Olympic Hymn, Strauss continued to find accommodation that suited his purposes, seemingly oblivious to the extent to which Hitler and the Nazis were not just another set of contemptible rulers. As the undistinguished text by the undistinguished writer suggests, Strauss was allergic to the primitive muscularity of the ideology of the Games.

Richard Strauss Choral Works

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Richard Strauss Choral Works, performed on April 17, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The posthumous reputation of Richard Strauss has its own extraordinary history. When he died in 1949, he was regarded as an ancient survivor of a bygone era, at best the most facile representative of an outdated musical aesthetic. He was remembered for the now standard works he composed before World War I. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, matters had changed. Strauss was rediscovered as a precursor to the post-modern and as a figure more representative of the twentieth century perhaps than Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Such exaggerated claims hold little value except to remind us of those things about Strauss that are perhaps not well understood. First, he was among the most gifted and unerringly prolific composers in the history of music. Many, like Telemann, Milhaud or Martinu, wrote a great deal of music and did it quickly. But there are few who are consistently productive and never fail to write something that displays consummate craftsmanship, even if it is intentionally designed to be superficial. Strauss was certainly the twentieth century’s Haydn in this respect. He seemed incapable of writing music poorly. Second, Strauss did more than write for the operatic stage and large orchestra. There is a wealth of music for the voice and even chamber music, notably a sonata for violin championed by none other than Jascha Heifetz. This afternoon’s program is a tribute to an entire genre in Strauss’s oeuvre that is frequently overlooked: his music for chorus. In addition to the works on this program, Strauss wrote brilliant pieces for a cappella chorus. Like the classical master he most admired, Mozart, Strauss was a composer of astonishing versatility.

Third, and perhaps most important, is that there was more than one Richard Strauss. There are probably four distinct phases in his career. The first was influenced by the example of Brahms and the prejudices of Strauss’s father Franz, a distinguished horn player. This phase is represented on this afternoon’s program by Wanderers Sturmlied (1884). The second phase in which Strauss emerges with his own distinct voice is the era of Don Juan (1889), Taillefer (1903), and Bardengesang (1905). These are the years when practically everything best known by Strauss was written. The third phase was in many ways the most ambiguous and difficult for Strauss himself. These were the years between World War I and the end of World War II. It is from this phase that the last of the well-known operas come, including Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918), Austria (1929) and Die Tageszeiten (1928). In these years, Strauss felt increasingly marginal and irrelevant with respect to the aggressive claims of modernism and the explosion of new forms of popular music which many serious composers attempted to co-opt, such as jazz, hit songs, and new types of popular dance such as the tango and fox trot.

The fourth and final phase was Strauss’s “Indian Summer.” In the span of four years Strauss produced music that has consistently met with acclaim. In his final years Strauss became sentimental and even nostalgic, and above all pessimistic. This afternoon’s program has only one evocation of those years, Strauss’s own short orchestral pastiche on Die Frau ohne Schatten, his Symphonic Fantasy (1946). After 1945 Strauss’s isolation from modernism was further aggravated by the recognition of his cowardice and collaboration during the Nazi era. On that point, a consensus has finally emerged that Strauss, as the compositions Austria and Bardengesang demonstrate, was first and foremost an egotist willing to flatter any government and form of politics as long as they served his music and what he considered to be valid principles of art, and if they protected the economic wellbeing of musicians and composers. Strauss had always been a shrewd businessman and a vigorous defender of copyright laws. Ironically, the Olympic Hymn, which is not on today’s program, was commissioned before the Nazis came to power, but its symbolism as evidence of Strauss’s complicity is legitimated by the fact that he chose to conduct it in 1936 at the Olympic Games in Berlin.

Before discussing the place of Strauss’s choral music in his overall output, a word has to be said about place and significance of choral music in German culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the 1840s, choral singing became an extremely important aspect of German culture and the evolution of German civic identity. Every town, and particularly all the large cities, had their choral societies, which included mixed choirs and male choruses. These institutions bridged the world of art and culture and the world of everyday socializing. Through choral societies, German folk music became modernized and popularized. The repertoire of these societies included light entertainment as well as compositions of serious artistic ambition. They were secular institutions, distinct from church choirs. In Protestant communities, these were the institutions for which oratorios were written on religious and biblical subjects, notably by Mendelssohn in his St. Paul (1836) and Elijah (1846). Such large-scale works continued to be written well into the twentieth century. They did not always have a religious subject, as the oratorios of Max Bruch, Odysseus (1872), and Achilles (1885), indicate. Curiously enough, when Strauss was approached to write a work for one of Vienna’s most celebrated choral societies, the Schubertbund, he initially was put off by the fact that texts by the poet Eichendorff had already been set for choir by his contemporary Hans Pfitzner in the latter’s Von deutscher Seele [Of the German Spirit] (1921). As the title of Pfitzner’s opus makes clear, by the end of the nineteenth century, these choral institutions, particularly the male choirs, became civic bastions of national sentiment. As the constitution of the Schubertbund suggests, it was originally organized as an association of schoolteachers. Membership in these choral societies ranged over the entire middle class and included professionals as well as artisans.

Vienna, where Strauss lived after World War I, was especially noted for its choral traditions. Austria was written for Vienna’s male choral society, an institution founded in the 1840s by political liberals who were held in suspicion by the reactionary Habsburg monarchy. (Some of the society’s founders died in the 1848 Revolution.) By the time Strauss wrote for that organization (to whom The Blue Danube Waltz is also dedicated), it had become a symbol of pan-German political solidarity. Indeed, throughout Strauss’s career, there were regular festivals of German choirs that gathered German-speaking people from all over Europe to celebrate their common heritage through music. When one looks at the performance history of Strauss’s works for chorus, the list of cities extends well beyond those we identify with international cosmopolitan concert life. These works were written by and large for amateur choirs in Heidelberg, Würtzburg, Düsseldorf, Elberfeld, Krefeld, and Strasbourg. Particularly fertile ground for choral singing as politics were parts of modern day Romania, where early performances of Wanderers Sturmlied took place. Secular choral singing for mixed and male choir became an important assertion of German identity in German-speaking communities outside the boundaries of the German Reich to the east and as far west as the United States.

Today’s program offers a glimpse of Strauss’s evolution as a composer through his choral work, rounded out by two examples of that for which he became most famous, the tone poem and opera. But the program also highlights the fourth and final aspect of Strauss, which perhaps bears the closest scrutiny. Strauss is often compared with his contemporary and colleague Gustav Mahler, whom he admired. In the context of the massive late twentieth-century enthusiasm for Mahler, a convenient dichotomy has been accepted. Mahler is understood to be an artist of deep and complex emotions and intellectual profundity. Strauss, in contrast, has been seen as a composer of extreme facility, charm, superficiality, elegance and even cynicism. Strauss has not become famous on account of the assumed philosophical depth of either his artistic intentions or the meanings his music conveys. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Strauss, far more than Mahler, was a vigorous and disciplined reader and a connoisseur of literature and painting. It was he and not Mahler who struggled with the ambiguities and complexities of Goethe and Nietzsche. As most of the works on today’s program suggest, including Don Juan, literature was a significant source of inspiration for him. He studied Greek tragedy and confronted through music the credo of aesthetic individualism and the myth of the hero put forward by Nietzsche. Above all, consciously following the example of Mozart, he used music to explore not only the joys but the sufferings of ordinary and everyday life, particularly the ambiguities in human conduct inspired by the institution of marriage. Strauss was no self-satisfied bourgeois. Under the mask of external respectability, there was a questioning and deeply reflecting artist overwhelmed by the elusive character of love and the daunting allure of intimacy. In Mahler, parody and irony aspire to the philosophical and mystical; in Strauss they, along with humor, turn inward and reflect backward on the wonderment we can find in the everyday world.

Among the hardest things for us to reconcile with Strauss was his emergence during the late nineteenth century as a preeminent radical. We are so accustomed to thinking of him as a clever manipulator of orchestral sound and melodic gesture that we overlook the bravery of Strauss’s stance in the 1880s and 1890s as a modernist who outraged his public. Strauss did not, as some have argued, shift his allegiances from the Brahmsian camp to the Wagnerian. He was influenced by both, but at the same time rejected the fundamental claims for music that became associated with the names of Brahms and Wagner. For Strauss, music was an expressive medium of ordinary human experience. He rejected the transcendental metaphysics of those who argued that instrumental music was a self-contained, spiritually ennobled world above the quotidian, more profound than words and images. This conceit of early romanticism, which was adopted in part by Brahms, held little appeal for Strauss. On the other side, the elevation of art as a surrogate for religion, as a platform for myths sufficiently powerful to rescue modernity from materialist corruption (a view derived from Wagner and his polemics) was equally foreign to Strauss. Indeed this conventional audience-pleasing composer was the most Nietzschean of all twentieth-century masters. In contrast to Schoenberg, for example, who pursued in his own way the Wagnerian spiritual ambition on behalf of music, Strauss was a confirmed atheist. The only thing for music to celebrate, in his opinion, was the specifically human dimension of life. In his hands music became a radical instrument of realism, expanding our understanding of and relationship to birth, death, desire, entertainment, card-playing, sex, loss, aging, and memory. A wide range of human emotion and experience as articulated by the artist through music can be heard on today’s program from the most grandiose and vulgar, but nevertheless genuine triumphalism to the saddest, most internalized experience of loneliness.

Ultimately, however, what never fails to astonish is the extent to which music was for Strauss an entirely natural language, even more so than speech. The aesthetics of music are often discussed in ways that suggest that music begins where language ends. For Strauss that order was reversed. It is music that precedes language. That frames the irony of today’s program. When Strauss read, it reminded him of music. Unlike some composers, including Schubert and Verdi, Strauss was a severe literary critic and judge. It was not so much that music was, as Mendelssohn once put it, more precise than language, but that music was required particularly for the greatest of literary texts, because Strauss the reader (as for example when he first read Oscar Wilde’s Salome or Goethe’s poetry) heard the music he believed these great writers would have written if they had been composers. The most human of all experiences was music. In Strauss’s view, what defines the human being and the individual is a capacity for music, not the universal gift of language. If there is any truth in the notion that Strauss, as he himself believed, was the last representative of a great tradition, it is in the possibility that Strauss may have been the last composer in modern western history to have lived his life by thinking, but only in and through music, as an act of nature rather than of learning.

Hans Christian Andersen

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Hans Christian Andersen, performed on March 11, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Hans Christian Andersen lived from 1805 to 1875. This year we celebrate the bicentenary of his birth. We are, however, certainly not the first generation to recognize and be fascinated by his peculiar genius. For the composers on tonight’s program, Andersen’s contributions to the genre of the fairy tale held a special enchantment, which actually reflected a larger pattern of recollection and nostalgia for the early romanticism of the nineteenth century. Like E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Hölderlin, and certainly the Grimm Brothers, Andersen seemed to embody for the generations following the pivotal year of 1848 a purer form of romanticism, perhaps even romanticism in its youth. Early romanticism was an era that became idealized by subsequent generations. It was a time when the aesthetic imagination flourished in the first of many encounters with modernity and industrialism. For Andersen, the demonic, mystical, magical and fantastic, in all its darkness as well as joy, dramatized life’s experiences by suggesting a world of morally ordered supernaturalism, of rules and actions which provoked consistent consequences of tragedy or triumph. Such is the world as children might experience it.

Vanished childhood is a theme that runs parallel to the construction of national identity and one of its key components, the study of the history of language. In both Denmark and Germany, the early nineteenth century witnessed an explosion in the creation of dictionaries and the systematic exploration of etymology designed to reveal and stabilize language as a national, historical patrimony. These efforts, on the one hand, reflected a progressive attempt to standardize language and education, and on the other, a reactionary attempt to resuscitate a past that seemed threatened with deterioration by the mores that derived from material progress. Hans Christian Andersen’s earliest readers approached his seemingly simple stories in a context of significant social and political transformation.

The composers on tonight’s program, however, belong to a later era. For them Hans Christian Andersen had already assumed his historical place as a teller of psychological myth and parables. His simple narratives hinted at a fantasy within, a realm of psychic imagination and repressed or displaced desire. What may have first been comfortingly viewed as morality tales became for the early twentieth century modern myths, pregnant with dangerous meaning. As such writers as Bruno Bettelheim later explained, the interest of fairy tales is in what is beneath their seemingly innocent surfaces, and what is beneath is often sexuality. These composers were writing, after all, in an intellectual climate in which Freudian psychology emerged and thrived.

It is this view of Andersen’s stories as psychological mirrors of the inner self that suggests his allure to many composers who were deeply interested in the modern development of music. Zemlinsky, Paul von Klenau, and Igor Stravinsky had a strong desire to be seen as part of the vanguard of the contemporary or modern, but they were also in an important way indebted to a past that modernity threatened. It was during the period of Andersen and his contemporaries—the age of romanticism—that music assumed primacy as the most romantic of the arts. In the aesthetics of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, music possessed a transcendental quality that gave it ascendancy over spoken language. Music had a direct connection to the psychology of the human spirit and was the expressive vehicle of the human will and the non-rational. But prior to the advent of modernism in the post-Wagnerian world, that privileged status of music was threatened by Wagner’s success and influence. Albeit unintentionally, music was stripped of its unique status. Suddenly it was illustrative and contingent on language. Instead of symphonies, the fashion became tone poems which ostensibly narrated an extra-musical source or text. This was not perhaps what Wagner envisioned, but the formulaic clichés of musical rhetoric that he helped make commonplace with the wider audience, and which were ultimately adapted as the foundation of film music, possessed none of the enigmatic meaning offered by the first generation of romantic composers such as Chopin and Schumann. For that earlier generation, the relationship of music to a story or source of inspiration was at best indirect, and triumphant in its assertion of music’s capacity to begin where language ends.

At first glance, these strangely affecting fairy tales seem ideal subjects for narrative musical treatment in the Wagnerian vein. The most famous example of this appropriation is of course in Hansel and Gretel (1894), the greatest opera by Wagner’s disciple Humperdinck. But fairy tales also lent themselves to another use, best expressed by the music of Gustav Mahler, who chose a fairy tale for his sole unsuccessful attempt at an opera, Rübezahl (1893). Tales reminiscent of Andersen and Grimm were a clear source of inspiration for some of his earlier symphonies and for such works as Das klagende Lied (1880/9). Indeed, Gustav Mahler set the tone for the way early nineteenth-century fairy tale material influenced the shape of fin-de-siécle music that does not necessarily have words or images associated with it. For Mahler, the fairy tale became a useful bridge by which music could ultimately emancipate itself from a Wagnerian dependence on words and images by directing music away from external narration to what he believed was its more proper task of inner expression. This may be the only instance in which he found an unlikely bedfellow in Stravinsky, who otherwise had little use for Mahler. For the young Stravinsky, the magical and exotic layers of meaning in fairy tales promoted music’s independence and self-contained logic; the widely ranging resonance of their generic symbols and archetypes (to use Northrop Frye’s term) provided precisely the latitude he desired for autonomous musical expression.

The four works on tonight’s program suggest the diverse applications that Andersen’s stories have undergone in music. Stravinsky’s Song of the Nightingale, based on Andersen’s The Nightingale, is perhaps the most famous work on tonight’s program. Less known but now increasingly embraced in a general renaissance of appreciation for Zemlinsky is The Mermaid, which shares a nostalgic, anti-modern undercurrent with Mahler. Paul von Klenau was a Dane, who was an ambitious but ambivalent modernist. He made the unforgivable choice of embracing the Nazis. Nazism glorified the folk tale with radically different consequences. Finally, the Czech composer Karel Husa brings us into the present age with his rendition of one of Andersen’s most famous and poignant tales. In the traditions of Czech music, the fairy tale has a strong place, particularly in the late work of Antonin Dvořák, such as his great opera Rusalka (1900) and his late tone poems based on Erben, a Czech Andersen.

It is interesting to reflect that there was one composer who resisted the allure of the fairy tale with its faux simplicity and Janus-faced ability to mesmerize children and adults alike, sometimes rather sadistically. That composer was Richard Strauss. Even Till Eulenspiegel (1895) is not a nineteenth-century fairy tale in the ordinary sense. Strauss possessed little nostalgia for early romanticism and was deeply skeptical about the grandiose claims made for music by Mahler and later Schoenberg. He had little use for the fairy tale exoticisms of Rimsky-Korsakov and early Stravinsky. His ambition was to try to find a way to make music that confronted the compromised complexity and density of the real dilemmas of life. He had little interest in hiding behind the façade of the primitive or the artificially innocent or symbolic archetypes of fairy tales—except when they occasionally underwent an almost unrecognizable metamorphosis by his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Strauss is a useful contrast through which to place the objectives of the composers on tonight’s program. The allure of Andersen in the hands of the composers on tonight’s program was, as a basis for a modernist inversion of the Wagnerian, rooted in music’s capacity to generate a radical revelation of the human soul. Their ambition was to use enchantment as a means of aesthetic inspiration (to allude again to Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment [1975]). By so doing they found a way to circumvent Wagnerian myth or Straussian realism.

An Operatic Rarity

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert An Operatic Rarity, performed on Feb 13, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The career of Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894) is intriguing. He ranks among the few notable exceptions among famous composers, such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Ives, who maintained professions outside the field of music. This dual career, as in the case of Ives in particular, has for some cast doubt on the technical proficiency of the music. This accusation cannot be leveled at Chabrier. Furthermore, many composers, artists, and writers have sought to maintain unrelated professions for a variety of reasons. Exigency has not always been the primary motive. In some cases what we might regard as a distraction or diversion was a creative necessity. Chabrier worked for many years in the French Ministry of the Interior as a respected civil servant known for his reliability and his elegant handwriting, a non-trivial skill in the context of public administration that is now entirely obsolete. Chabrier trained in music from the very start of his career, but only in 1881 (after nearly two decades of public service) did he devote himself wholly to music. In 1880, shortly before his retirement, he attended with friends a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Munich. Legend has it that he burst into tears at the opening A from the cellos. Five years later, Chabrier later composed what has been called the French Tristan, his opera Gwendoline (1885), with the distinguished writer Catulle Mendès.

Chabrier’s experience points to the pervasive allure that Wagnerism had for late nineteenth-century France. Wagner’s influence was not only a musical matter. The embrace of the Wagnerian began with Baudelaire’s essay, written in response to the scandal surrounding the Paris production of Tannhäuser in 1861. Wagnerian aesthetics inspired a new movement in art and literature in late nineteenth-century France. The irony of a movement of French national cultural renewal stemming from the work of an arch-German nationalist and proponent of racial thinking was never entirely lost among French participants and observers. Nevertheless, the Wagnerian penchant for symbolism and his conception of the relationship between the artwork and the viewer became crucial to the evolution of French poetry, and profoundly influenced the direction taken by French painters.

French cultural life, particularly in the mid-nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, notably in Paris, was marked by close relationships and collaborations among painters, writers, and musicians. Chabrier himself was a close friend of the painter Eduard Manet, as Vincent Giroud points out in his fine program note. By the time of his death, Chabrier had assembled an impressive art collection of works by contemporaries, as did his musical contemporary Ernest Chausson, who also had ambitions as a writer. Chabrier established himself as a remarkable piano virtuoso, achieving a level of dexterity and panache beyond that of most of his pianist-composer contemporaries, including Debussy. There are several portraits of Chabrier by Manet, but one very interesting, lesser-known portrait of Chabrier is the 1885 painting by Henri Fantin-La Tour, Autour du piano. The portrait depicts Chabrier at the piano surrounded by friends, among them the composer Vincent D’Indy. Chabrier’s other remarkable quality as a musician was his ability to write music in many styles, ranging from the Gallic equivalent of Tristanesque profundity to the humorous parody of contemporary operetta. Central to this mélange of style (much of it audible in Le roi malgré lui), is Chabrier’s love of song, which was perhaps the result of an abiding interest in and association with poetry.

For a composer living in Paris and associating with some of the leading artists of the time, Chabrier led a decidedly un-Bohemian life. He was married for most of his adult life. However, like Nietzsche, Chabrier had contracted syphilis, and it eventually killed him at age 53. Despite considerable success, Chabrier felt some bitterness toward the end of his life that his stage music had not be well enough received. Ironically, less than a year before his death, his Gwendoline had a triumphant premiere, but his mind was so far gone that he did not recognize the music as his own. Understandably, Chabrier’s musical output was not enormous. He is best known for an orchestral rhapsody called España (1883), and his piano music, including Habanera (1885), later arranged for orchestra, and the 10 pièces pittoresques (1881).

Chabrier died before Chausson completed his own operatic masterpiece Le roi Arthus, and just prior to a massive sea-change in French culture and politics. He did not live through the notorious Dreyfus affair, and did not experience the transformation of French musical language through the work of Debussy. Nevertheless, Debussy was one of Chabrier’s staunchest proponents, and as Steven Huebner has noted, Chabrier’s posthumous reputation is far greater than the standing he maintained during his lifetime. Debussy’s advocacy is not surprising, since Chabrier was one of the pioneers of the appropriation of the Spanish idiom among French composers, a tradition built upon later by Debussy and Ravel.

But it is interesting to reflect on the fact that Chabrier’s central ambition, like most of his contemporaries, was to achieve success as a composer for the stage. In part because of the unwavering allegiance to the Wagnerian, it is understandable that the premiere of his last opera Briséïs (1891; after Goethe), was premiered by Richard Strauss in Berlin, or that Felix Mottl, the great German conductor and Wagnerian, friend of Chabrier, and perhaps best known for his orchestrations of Schubert, completed the orchestration of one of Chabrier’s last works, the Bourrée fantastique (1891). Chabrier collaborated with another friend, the poet Paul Verlaine, on two operatic projects, only one of which was completed.

Gwendoline’s resemblance to Tristan (albeit transformed by a French sensibility), has unfairly excluded it from the repertoire of many opera companies. Briséïs has experienced somewhat of a modern renaissance, as has the comic opera L’Étoile (1877). The opera you will hear today, Le roi malgré lui, although revived only in 1929, has long been considered perhaps Chabrier’s most original opera and certainly one that shows the extraordinary range of his musical and expressive palette. Le roi contains some of Chabrier’s finest music at its most demanding, and its most charming. The opera has languished in relative obscurity because of its libretto, which has been proclaimed incomprehensible. It is for this reason that when the opera was revised by Albert Carré in 1929, substantial changes were made.

But the current opera revival that began in earnest during the last two decades has made it possible to reconsider long-held prejudices about the presumably failed repertoire of the past. All the lesser known operas of famous figures such as Mozart, Verdi, and Strauss have been revived, but the repertoire of great French opera written before World War I remains among the most neglected of genres. The American Symphony Orchestra embarked several years ago on a slow and painstaking effort to produce concert versions of great French opera. A concert performance of Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-bleue has led to a fully staged production at New York City Opera next season, and a 2000 performance of Chausson’s Le roi Arthus inspired a BBC broadcast and recording that will become available later this year. Other operas that merit revival include works by Lalo, D’Indy, and Magnard.

In an age dominated by the moving picture with sound, video art, and computer graphics, the relation between the opera stage and the audience has changed from what it was a century ago. The demand for immediate theatricality or plausibility of comprehension has been displaced. We no longer approach opera the way we still approach movies, where we expect to be seduced by the illusions of realism and therefore permit ourselves, much as Chabrier permitted himself, to be overcome by some form of psychological identification generated between the listener and the stage. Perhaps with the exception of contemporary opera, we attend the opera with a candid but indulgent embrace of its evident artificiality. One might think that the ubiquity of supertitles would bring opera closer to the act of reading or movie-watching, but it has not, for we cherish opera now precisely for its inherently anti-modern strangeness. It is perhaps the only pre-modern art form that cannot be adequately represented through technological reproduction, whether CD or DVD. It is an art form that thrives on simultaneity, unpredictability and lack of routine. It therefore requires live performance and human presence on both sides of the proscenium. This holds for both staged and concert performances. Because of the self-consciousness and objectivity imposed by time and changing culture, we need not demand a rigorous verisimilitude in opera stories. We do not even require that the text of the libretto be particularly memorable. Our encounter with opera is as an experience of drama and engagement that is carried overwhelmingly by the musical shape and content. This includes not only great moments but the “long line” of musical form that opera creates (to borrow a favorite expression of the great French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger). This is precisely what Le roi possessed in its original incarnation. More than a century after its premiere, there is no longer a need to revise the original version. It is this version you will hear this afternoon, performed as its composer intended. Much of what audiences in the past may have found odd is, in retrospect, delightful and engaging and quintessentially operatic. In Le roi “Chabrier the inspired composer of song” merges with “Chabrier the Wagnerian” in the integration of language and music. His ambition in this opera was to create a musical and dramatic fabric in which music carries the day, a rather appealing approach for the post-post-modern age. This is an opera that truly deserves a place back in the repertory of the world’s opera houses.

Revolution 1905

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Revolution 1905, performed on Jan 16, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert engages the question of how music can inform our understanding of history. Today’s program is divided into two distinct parts. Three of the works, Glazunov’s Song of Destiny, Miaskovsky’s Silentium, and Stravinsky’s Fireworks come from a short period in the history of Russia in which the most significant event was the so-called Revolution of 1905. In the second half of the program, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, subtitled “1905” but completed in 1957, forces us to reflect on how we conceive of, interpret, and remember history. In looking back, we can be influenced not only by the elapse of time but by the momentous changes that can seem to exceed the particular temporal distance. Consider for example, America in 1950 and the America of 2000, or more poignantly, the America before the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, and the America on the eve of the 2004 election. In what ways will our children and grandchildren commemorate and understand September 11, 2001?

The world in which the 1905 Revolution took place was one of radical economic progress for Russia. In terms of industrialization, Russia could be counted in 1900 among the most backward of European nations. It was the last European nation to abandon the feudal practice of serfdom. It was plagued by massive illiteracy, an enormously powerful state-supported church, a corrupt, landed aristocracy, and an obsolete form of monarchy. Nevertheless, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century through the first fifteen years or so of the twentieth century, Russia became the object of enormous capital investment, comparable in some ways to China of today or Korea and Japan in the second half of the twentieth century.

With Russia’s rapid economic development came a fast-growing middle class and rise in the cosmopolitanism of the nation’s urban centers. This all took place alongside dramatic increases in personal wealth, in the standard of living, and in expectations for the future, particularly in St. Petersburg and Moscow. At that time, the western part of Russia included part of modern-day Poland. The cities of Russian Poland also experienced the boom, such as Warsaw and Lodz, which became a burgeoning center of textile manufacture. Among the expectations that emerged was one of political reform, the demand for which was driven by a need to expand the possibilities for economic development.

This economic and social transformation should be further understood in the context of a long nineteenth-century history of tension between the Russian intelligentsia (both in Russia and expatriated) and the Russian monarchy. Ever since the execution of the Decembrists during Pushkin’s generation in the early nineteenth century, the Russian monarchy and its policies were the object of intense criticism. Restrictions on liberty forced not only the creation of exiles but underground movements within Russia, as well as generational strife. The novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy reflect this. In addition, Russia’s ambivalence in terms of its national identity in regard to the West in the nineteenth century became a rallying cry for vying camps of intellectuals and artists. There were those who believed in the unique Russian tradition, and those who wanted modern social progress on a Western model. Gogol and Dostoevsky expressed the known conservative view of Russia’s character. The older Tolstoy enigmatically engaged both; toward the end of his life he was an outspoken utopian social radical, but also a Christian believer whose faith led him to challenge the virtues of modernity and the traditions of high culture. In music, the division between the Westernizers and Russophiles who saw Russia more natively Eastern is well documented. In this conflict only Tchaikovsky emerged as holding a middle ground successfully.

Peter the Great’s ideals of Westernized modernization continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the October Revolution of 1917, but they were persistently contested. The period from the 1890s to the outbreak of World War I came to a dramatic and notorious end with the Russian Revolution and, shortly thereafter, ultimate victory of the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky. This dénouement followed decades of internal unrest, assassination (most notably of Czar Alexander II), the popularity of anarchism, and the operation of prison systems so eloquently described by Dostoevsky in From the House of the Dead (1860). This prison system laid the groundwork for the gulag of the Soviet era. The tensions between Westernization and an anti-Western Russian nationalism, between a vision of an industrial and a rural Russia, between a cosmopolitan embrace of notions of democracy and freedom and a more communitarian Russian Orthodox vision of a unified people, did not disappear after 1917. Stalin’s success was one of both strategic brilliance and of terror and cruelty. He understood that if there was a way to combine the idea of communism with that of nationalism and patriotism, a more successful and stable Soviet state could be developed. He was less committed to the idea that the Russian Revolution would be a first step in a global communist revolution in which nations and politics would disappear.

Many Americans do not even realize there was a revolution in 1905 which was brutally suppressed. That revolution coincided with Russia’s humiliating defeat at the battle of Tsushima in its war against Japan. The defeat of the Russian fleet was especially symbolic given the heritage of Peter the Great’s longstanding dream of Russian naval power. The unrest resulting from these events inflamed the movements among the urban population for better work conditions and representation in the government. The monarchy was forced to institute some reforms including a parliament, or Duma, but a genuine constitutional monarchy never came into being. However, during this brief period of liberalization, there was enormous optimism. It is in this period that the greatest Russian art collections, particularly of French impressionists, were amassed. Russian theatre and painting flowered. Some of the masterpieces by Russian painters may be seen in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Russia developed not only a middle class but its robber barons and super-rich as well. Education and culture blossomed. The earlier works on today’s program are examples of the energy, sophistication, and originality in this period. Glazunov and Miaskovsky were master craftsmen whose achievements easily match the technical attainments of their contemporaries in Europe and North America. Young Stravinsky, who studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, would later draw upon his Russian training and roots to set one of the major directions for twentieth-century music.

But World War I and the 1917 Revolution brought this hopeful time to an end. In the mid-1920s, after the Civil War and the war with the new independent Poland, there was a huge emigration. Paris was the favorite destination, as it had been for the emigrating intelligentsia since the early nineteenth century. It was there that Serge Diaghilev and Stravinsky found themselves among a fabulous group of colleagues in all fields of art and culture. The “White” Russian emigration included such famous names as Nabokov, Milstein, Heifetz, Rachmaninoff, Chagall, and the young Prokofiev. During the first decade of the Soviet Union, there was also still some limited travel to Russia. Communication was maintained between the musical and visual avant-garde from the West and composers and artists in the young Soviet Union. Art and architecture were also beneficiaries of this early modernist enthusiasm. Shostakovich came of age with the October Revolution. (The 1905 Revolution occurred before his birth and was central to his parents’ generation.) While in his twenties as a student, Shostakovich heard Berg and Hindemith. He encountered innumerable performers concertizing in the new Russia. His own early music, including the opera The Nose, expressed an optimism about modernity and the possibility of new art for a socialist utopia. This lasted until the composition of his Fourth Symphony.

With Stalin’s gradual accretion of power, artistic freedom was restricted and debate ended. The modernists and the left-wing proletarian simplifiers were both taken to task. In 1936, Shostakovich’s second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, was publicly censured. A new relationship between the state and the artist became entrenched. Painters and architects were now understood as serving Stalin’s new vision in which a sense of Russian history and nationality were to be combined with conservative traditions of art-making, all accessible to the masses. What was deemed wrong was condemned as “formalism.”

In this context, Glazunov’s oeuvre was quickly judged to be old-fashioned and bourgeois. Glazunov had been one of Shostakovich’s teachers (as well as a legendary consumer of vodka); ultimately he emigrated. The somewhat younger Miaskovsky, however, took a different path. Based in Moscow and one of Prokofiev’s champions and mentors, Miaskovsky continued to teach and write. His initial optimism turned into a quiet pessimism, but he remained in his homeland and never flagged in his output of music of extraordinary quality, including twenty-nine symphonies, today all underperformed. Miaskovsky played the game with restraint, and in 1940 received the Stalin Prize for his Symphony No. 21. He became a grand old man who salvaged the opportunity to continue composition in the Soviet state.

Shostakovich’s situation was more complicated. He was the most talented of the new generation and became the greatest Soviet artist in any field of endeavor. His First Symphony made him world famous. His second opera resulted in brutal attacks. He adjusted to the criticism, and redeemed himself with the famous Fifth Symphony. The Seventh Symphony once again attracted worldwide attention for its expression of the suffering and heroism of the Russian people during the great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. But in 1948, he again earned Stalin’s censure, only to rehabilitate himself a second time by writing the music for the film The Fall of Berlin and traveling to New York to attend an international congress of culture. This was presented in defense of the aesthetics of the Soviet state under Stalin and of socialist realism against the modernism of the West.

Shostakovich’s relation to Stalin has been the object of scrutiny and controversy. But it cannot be doubted that he was at one and the same time a patriot and loyal son of the country, and a tortured and conflicted artist who had no illusions about the tyranny of Stalin and the price people, including artists, paid. He witnessed Stalin’s crimes, including his final campaign of terror against the Jews that culminated in the notorious Doctors Plot.

With the death of Stalin and the process of de-Stalinization begun by Khrushchev, another era of optimism, reminiscent perhaps of 1905 and 1914, came into being. This was cut short in the early 1960s, even while Khrushchev was in power. By the mid-1950s, however, Shostakovich’s position was secure because of his international fame. For the last twenty years of his life he was not only honored by his nation but served in a wide variety of official capacities on behalf of the state.

This sketchy description of this complex and multi-faceted period of history only suggests the challenges facing great artists writing music. Symphony No. 11 has been interpreted variously in terms of its meaning. What is beyond doubt is that from the perspective of the post-Stalin era, the 1905 Revolution took on new significance. It was not only understood as a precursor of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; it was also remembered as the event that began a period of political reform, greater openness, and prosperity. It symbolized a period in which the arts, especially music, flourished in an atmosphere of greater freedom and material well-being.

Perhaps the ambiguity of Shostakovich’s intentions in the Symphony concerning the way 1905 could be recollected half a century later is an indication of both the Symphony’s power and its so-called purely musical qualities. Like other works of instrumental music, Symphony No. 11 has the merit of being able to break free from its origins and the intentions of its composer. Contemporary listeners do not need to be aware of the 1905 Revolution or the composer’s troubled life and politics to fashion a rewarding sense of the music. This is part of the allure that instrumental music holds for listeners. When faced with tyranny, music becomes a refuge, a protected oasis for the freedom of the imagination. When personal liberty and freedom is under attack, it can be understood as a steady means of escape and detachment. In this sense, music always possesses the plausible capacity to be read in reference to the self. At the same time, however, Shostakovich was committed to writing music that communicated with a large public. It is clear that he was after something more than mere entertainment. That challenge continues to be relevant. What values, ideals, and aspirations can the making of art take up and protect in periods dominated by political disappointment and fear, and in the presence of danger and restrictions of freedom and intolerance of dissent? Although one does not need to know the historical context or references of Shostakovich’s Symphony in order to be affected by it, it is illuminating to reflect on the connection between the Symphony’s genesis and the internal and external political developments and aspirations with which Shostakovich and his listeners struggled. The 1905 Revolution and its memory suggest that there is an inevitable connection between music and history, particularly the political reality which the artist and his or her public share. The complex dynamic between music and citizenship is itself a challenge that no artist can afford to ignore. This admonition holds for all generations, including our own.

Beethoven’s Pupil

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Beethoven’s Pupil, performed on Nov 14, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Throughout the last decade, the American Symphony Orchestra has sought in its programming to challenge the boundaries of music history. It has tried to do so largely through a two-part approach. The first has been to reclaim for the concert stage the greater part of the repertory from the past that is no longer frequently performed. When one looks at concert life in the past, one discovers that there was a tremendous amount of music once often played and revered that has since disappeared. The second part of the Orchestra’s approach centers on providing an historical logic for each concert, some basis that makes sense of performing three or four pieces together, something which stimulates the first-time listener, the occasional listener, and the connoisseur to experience the music in a new and provocative manner. Sometimes that historical framework has to do with the history of music itself, and sometimes the logic of a program may be derived from politics, literature, or the visual arts.

Tonight’s program is perhaps among the most unusual we have ever undertaken. All the music was written by one individual, Carl Czerny (1791–1857). Even more eyebrow-raising than the choice of Czerny as the basis for an entire concert may be the fact that three of the four works have never been performed in North America, and of some there is no record of having been performed at all. They were selected in partnership by me with Dr. Otto Biba, the archivist of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, where the papers and manuscripts of Carl Czerny are housed. These works were in manuscript form, and required a herculean effort by the American Symphony Orchestra library staff with the assistance of the Gesellschaft der Musikfruende to create new scores and parts for the musicians.

But Carl Czerny is a perfect example of why we present the programs we do. There are few cases of comparable historical influence to the great classical tradition, and such neglect. For the past two hundred years, there probably has not been a pianist in the western world to whom the name Czerny is not familiar. For many, the name conjures up arduous, mind-numbing exercises for the keyboard and the dreaded boredom of hours of practicing. But any pianist knows that without Czerny, piano technique as we know it today would not exist—or at least not be accessible to so many. The name Czerny has become associated with repetition, routine, predictability, and the most mechanical definitions of musical skill. But Czerny, at a pivotal point in the instrument’s history, created the basics of technique so that the average student and future piano owner could play. The irony of his voluminous output of exercises is that there are among the exercises works worthy of comparison with the etudes of Chopin and Liszt. The technical exercise for an instrument can in fact be a noble artistic form. Such exercises and their requirements can be compared to the rules for writing odes and sonnets. Each musical exercise functions to teach the user to use some aspect of the instrument. Given that indispensable criterion, making the acquisition of a particular skill at the same time aesthetically engaging becomes a challenge that can bring out the most imaginative and inspired ideas from a composer. Writing exercises for any instrument that are pedagogically effective and engaging is no laughing matter and is not a task that is easily accomplished. There are many Czerny exercises that are worthy of being heard in piano recitals.

This state of affairs led us to the purpose of tonight’s concert, which is intended as an overdue act of reputational reparation. Czerny was a great musician and prolific composer whose fate it was to be remembered only for his exercises. But during his lifetime Czerny was a significant, if not towering, musical figure of serious composition.

As his birth and death dates suggest, he spanned the classical and romantic eras. His music makes this clear as well. He was a pupil of Beethoven, and not just a nominal one either. Beethoven judged Czerny to be extraordinarily talented. The virtuoso took lessons with Beethoven twice a week for nearly three years between the very young ages of 8 and 11. Czerny maintained his close relationship with Beethoven ever after, and was one of the most avid performers of Beethoven’s music. He was said to have been able to play all of Beethoven’s music by memory. Indeed Czerny is one of the most reliable contemporary witnesses of Beethoven as a composer; his writings on the performance and meaning of Beethoven’s works are still standard and indispensable guides.

Despite the fantastic pianistic virtuosity that Czerny displayed, it was not as a performer that he became best known. Partly influenced by Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), Czerny took up teaching. He counted among his pupils Beethoven’s nephew Karl, and most famously, Franz Liszt. The list of his important pupils includes great pianists right through Robert Schumann’s generation. Schumann spearheaded the new romantic generation of composers. He waged a critical war against the new popularity of piano playing and composition. In that context, Schumann’s denigration of Czerny as a composer did a great deal to ruin Czerny’s posthumous impression.

One of the greatest prejudices against Czerny arose from his prolific output as a composer. There is an apocryphal story that Czerny maintained a series of stand-up desks, on each of which was composition of a different genre of music. One desk was dedicated to secular choral music, one to sacred choral music, one to symphonic music, one to exercises, and so on. Czerny was said to move from one to the next effortlessly each day, composing several pieces simultaneously in this manner. In Czerny’s lifetime, performance and composition were inextricably intertwined. Performers wrote their own music and composers performed. But in Czerny’s case there are so many works for all sorts of occasions and ensembles that the number of published items is in the hundreds, not to mention the many manuscripts that have not been published. Add to this Czerny’s many arrangements of music of others, and then also the numerous significant treatises on performance and composition that he wrote, including his pioneering work on the performance of pre-classical music from the Baroque. In the end, his reputation suffered for his apparently boundless energy and devotion.

But tonight we hope to show that this need not be the case. Czerny’s contributions to music took many forms. He was very generous to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, and therefore indirectly to his native city of Vienna. An important legacy left by Czerny’s generation was the popularization of musical culture, particularly through the piano, the instrument most closely associated with him and nineteenth-century musical culture in Europe. The place Czerny occupies in history is in some measure due to his own role as a pedagogue of the transformative generation after Beethoven. It was in this era that virtuosi became popular figures and an active concert life in European cities and towns took shape. Aspiring middle-class Europeans bought pianos and tried to play them, and piano manufacturers, much like the manufacturers of personal computers in our own time, competed with one another not only in the development of better (and less expensive) hardware and mechanics, but of better software, as it were, with easier systems of fingering and methods of learning how to use the keyboard. Czerny stands at the birth of the modern piano and musical life and helped to usher in an aesthetic logic into the musical culture of the nineteenth century. As a child prodigy, Czerny played the fortepiano. He witnessed expansion of its range and sonority. By 1857, the year of his death, the piano that we now recognize was well on its way to realizing its final form. It would be only six years later at the Paris exposition of 1863 that the American Steinway would take Europe by storm with its new industrial-age components, structure, and mode of manufacture. Tonight we hope the audience will come to think of Czerny as more than the nightmarish author of childhood piano lessons, and appreciate the many shapes and influences of his contribution to music. Perhaps we will be inclined to give the composer his due, and perhaps even come to appreciate the beauty of those exercises upon which the art of the piano was built.

Leon Botstein Address to the UN: Why Music Matters

I wish to thank the Secretary-General for his kind invitation. It is humbling for any private citizen to address this organization-the United Nations. This is particularly so for an American. We as a nation are the hosts of the UN, yet we have not always been its staunchest defenders or most vigorous admirers. One of the privileges of being an American is the right to dissent, particularly in these dark times; there are many of us who would like to see the day when the promise of the UN is realized with American cooperation and enthusiasm. Read full PDF

Complicated Friendship

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Complicated Friendship, performed on Oct 15, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Conducting as an autonomous profession in music was essentially unknown until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Even then, however, conducting was not so much a profession as a skill acquired in the course of a musical career that extended beyond the art of conducting. The most frequent impetus for learning to conduct was composition. Throughout the nineteenth century, composition was an integral part of any instrumentalist’s or musician’s work, but it developed a special connection to conducting through the necessity of training orchestras and ensembles to perform new and contemporary music that increasingly was composed for large forces. One hundred years ago, concert music was not the museum-like enterprise it now is; then, music was connected to the central direction of culture, including literature, painting, philosophy and politics. While orchestras performed old masters, performers and audiences expected to encounter the extension of tradition through new music as well.

Among early nineteenth-century composers who were also famous as conductors were Mendelssohn, Weber, and Spohr, who was actually far more historically important as a violinist. Two of the best known mid-century figures were Berlioz and Wagner, who did not possess outstanding skills on an instrument. By 1900, nearly all conductors in Europe and America, even the lesser known, were fine instrumentalists who also engaged in composition. Well into the twentieth century, performers like Fritz Kreisler were virtuosi who relished writing their own material much as a comedian or a particularly gifted vocalist today writes his or her own jokes and songs. From its origins, conducting was a task that required some skills in organization and leadership—the putting on of concerts, the care of finances and the building of institutions. Musical life in America would have been far poorer, for example, had it not been for the organizational talents of Theodore Thomas, whose influence can be felt today particularly in Chicago and New York.

Even today it is a mistake to consider conducting a discreet and separate profession within music, on par with being an instrumentalist or composer. There is technique that must be acquired in training, but as the late Hans Keller put it with affecting derision, conducting was one of three phony musical professions, along with playing viola and writing music criticism. His point was not that these three pursuits were unnecessary, but rather, to do any one of these things successfully, it cannot be done all by itself. Under the skin of a great violist can be found a great violinist; indeed that is where many violists start. Underlying great criticism are often achievements in some other form of music-making or in the field of literature, as the writings of Ezra Pound and George Bernard Shaw suggest. And as for conducting, its roots often reach deep into an ambition to become a composer or instrumentalist, and in more recent years (especially in the field of early music), a scholar. The great conductors of the recent past did something else in music very well. Boulez and Bernstein are recent cases of composer-conductors, in the line of Strauss, Mahler, Markevitch, and Kletzki. Among instrumentalists, we can find Barenboim, Ashkenazy, Rostropovich, and Levine, who have distinguished themselves in that role. Andre Previn, Esa Pekka Salonen and Lorin Maazel are instrumentalists and composers. Among the conductors of the past, Munch, Ormandy, and Koussevitzky were all accomplished string players. George Szell and Bruno Walter were pianists and composers.

In the case of Bruno Walter (1876–1962), a promising compositional career was rather abruptly cut short by the conductor’s acute sensitivity to criticism and a lack of support among those who should have encouraged him. But this sensitivity to criticism should not be misunderstood as being a weakness in some misguided definition of conductorial machismo. Walter did not have the brash, arrogant exterior and manner of Toscanini, Szell or Reiner. He considered himself a great conductor of Mozart and found himself drawn to Lieder of the early romantic age, to the intimacy of communication that music makes possible. He was one of the great vocal accompanists of all time as a conductor and as a pianist.

Other contemporaries of Walter, such as Klemperer, Furtwängler and Weingartner, felt themselves to be unfairly neglected as composers. They wanted to be remembered not for their performances of the music of others but for their own music, which they felt lay undeservedly overlooked. These conductors continued to write music throughout their careers, despite infrequent performances and less than enthusiastic critical response. But Bruno Walter, like George Szell, was an ironic exception in this regard. These two men were, in terms of composition, perhaps the two most naturally gifted of that generation of conductors, and yet they were the ones who stopped composing. One composer/conductor who had been successful in an earlier era was Gustav Mahler, but he did not support the careers of people very close to him. Two victims of his tyrannical megalomania were his wife Alma, and his closest acolyte, Bruno Walter. Mahler may not have thought much of Schoenberg’s music, but on principle in defense of the young, supported him. But Schoenberg was not a confidante. Mahler also suspected that Schoenberg could do little else but teach and went so far as to buy all of Schoenberg’s paintings when they came on view. It is at best unclear if Mahler thought Schoenberg was a worthwhile composer beyond his utility as a warrior for the new and young. But Mahler had no encouragement available for those directly dependant on his good word. And unlike Schoenberg, Walter could do something else and did it very well. He could conduct brilliantly, both from the opera pit and the orchestral stage.

Americans, and particularly New Yorkers, who remember Bruno Walter remember him as a benign and fatherly figure, a distinguished émigré conductor whose name was so well known that he was considered the closest rival of Toscanini during the 1950s, the age of long-playing records. Walter was the gentle, methodic central-European placed as a contrast in the market against the fiery Italian. Indeed Toscanini and Walter crossed paths all over the world, including New York. Both had a close association with the New York Philharmonic. But Walter emerged more as an intellectual and a deeply conservative thinker (despite his years in California in the famed circle of friends shared by Schoenberg and the other notorious central-European exiles).

Regardless of their own compositional ambitions, the great conductors of the past were advocates of the music of their own time. Toscanini allied himself with the cause of Puccini, and Reiner with Bartók, Strauss, and Weiner. Koussevitzky and Stokowski championed a wide range of contemporary music. Furtwängler championed Hindemith, and Answermet and Monteux championed Stravinsky. Walter is strongly associated with his teacher Mahler (whose most effective podium advocate was actually Wilhelm Mengelberg), but when Walter came into his own, the composer whom he supported and performed frequently was Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949). Despite his public advocacy of this contemporary, however, Walter today is associated almost exclusively with the music of the past, especially the “three Bs” and his mentor, Mahler. When we think of Walter today, we do not readily associate him with the name of Pfitzner.

Indeed Pfitzner is not often heard at all these days, which is remarkable if one considers that Pfitzner was a prolific composer as well as conductor, and that after the untimely death of Max Reger, he was the only rival to Richard Strauss as a figure of importance in German-speaking Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. But Pfitzner was not only a powerful composer. He was also a polemicist. He engaged in bitter wars of pamphleteering against a new school of modernist composition. From his pen flowed scathing denunciations of the music and ideas of Busoni and Schoenberg. It was Pfitzner that inspired Alban Berg to write one of the most eloquent defenses of the modern in music. Pfitzner made himself a very controversial figure, not because of his music, but through his aggressively conservative if not reactionary musical ideas. Strauss, in contrast, kept a low profile on such matters, choosing to hold most, if not all, writing about music in contempt. Pfitzner wrote a lot, including books on the idea of musical inspiration and genius. He believed in a non-linguistic dimension of spontaneity in musical inspiration that became seminal to his critique of music that seemed to derive (in his view) from abstract reasoning and puzzle-making and solving. Pfitzner believed music was a truly romantic act of human expression, not based in rationality but in a sensibility beyond logic. Despite similarities in their views, however, Pfitzner was not a neo-Wagnerian. He was attracted also to what he considered to be lost traditions in early German Romanticism. One of his heroes was, oddly enough, Max Bruch, about whom he wrote an excellent and appreciative analysis.

It does not stretch the imagination to realize that in the context of the aesthetic wars of the first three and a half decades of the twentieth century, Pfitzner’s views easily could be understood as being sympathetic to a reactionary set of political cultural values. Indeed, Pfitzner was hailed by Thomas Mann in 1915 as signaling the artistic future of Germany against the corruptive counter-traditions from other western cultures. In German nationalism, cultural superiority always played a significant role. The prizing of “true” cultural values, the spiritual as experienced particularly through the appreciation of philosophy, music and poetry, was lost on the stylized and fashion-conscious French, the dry and restrained British, the barbaric and violent Slavs, or the materialistic Americans.

Despite his notoriety and recognition (partly the result of Walter’s advocacy) during the interwar era, Pfitzner was an unhappy figure. He was a constant object of hostility among modernists including Schreker, Schoenberg, and the pupils of Busoni. Angry and embittered, he considered himself to be unappreciated. He felt he was playing second fiddle, as it were, to Richard Strauss, who among the more conservative figures had an unrivaled preeminence as both composer and conductor. He was smart enough to know that Strauss, with whom on many levels he was ideologically aligned, had little use for him and did not like him or his music. Consequently Pfitzner was consumed with envy for what should have been his traditional ally, and for the success of the new generation. Like a match to kerosene, Hitlerism was the perfect ideological solution, and Pfitzner became a genuine Nazi. He signed letters “Heil Hitler” and maintained a friendship with the notorious Hans Frank, the Nazi official in charge of Warsaw who would be condemned to death and hung. Among his contemporaries, Pfitzner stands out in his embrace of the Nazi party. Strauss was an opportunist but no Nazi. He saw himself above politics and while he had his hand in the till, as it were, his own ego made him express his superiority and contempt for the Nazis and their ideas. Furtwängler was not a very strong personality when it came to politics. He was sufficiently ambitious to engage in rationalizations. Pfitzner, however, was an energetic proponent who also was determined to exploit the regime for his own benefit. His enthusiasm even got on the nerves of the Nazi hierarchy. His involvement with the Nazis did not, however, satisfy his chronic sense of neglect that in part led him to Hitler in the first place. Even when he was a favorite son of the regime, he would complain that he was not getting his proper due. Perhaps there was no more just fate than surviving the war and dying in obscurity and disgrace.

Throughout most of his career, Bruno Walter had been one of Pfitzner’s most ardent champions and admirers, and premiered Pfitzner’s greatest single work, the opera Palestrina (1917). Walter had been born a Jew but beyond that was not actively Jewish. Regardless, there was no way for him to mitigate his friend’s behavior during the war, as there might have been for Furtwängler or Strauss. Despite his strong internal sense of allegiance and generosity of spirit, Walter distanced himself from Pfitzner. In the letters they exchanged after the war, there is heartbreaking sadness on both sides, but Walter, ever sentimental, mourned the loss of his friendship and even offered to help Pfitzner financially. Pfitzner lost in Walter the best and strongest chance he had to have his music performed and remembered. Pfitzner’s music is extraordinary, as Walter recognized, but he is a great composer whose work, particularly in postwar Germany, has for political reasons been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Distasteful as it is, one needs to set personality and politics aside and acknowledge that there is a considerable amount of worthy, if not great music written by Pfitzner. Bruno Walter had good reason to take such an active role on Pfitzner’s behalf. At least we can acknowledge but set aside Pfitzner the contemptible man, and be grateful for the music he left behind.

In light of Walter’s advocacy of Pfitzner, it is fascinating to turn back to Walter’s Symphony. Written under the spell of Mahler, it suggests that Walter might have taken a different direction as a composer had he continued. As in the case of Szell (with whom Walter can be compared as a compositional talent) his music shows an enormous skill and intuition. There is a voice here that should have been nurtured, a gift much stronger than that exhibited by Furtwängler or Klemperer. Walter, the great and troubled advocate of Pfitzner, was himself in need of an advocate that was never found. We are proud this evening to be able to sponsor the third performance in history of this work, the first not conducted by Walter himself, and the premiere in North America. Walter’s place in the musical history of both America and New York is significant enough to merit a re-examination of his legacy not only as a performer, but as a composer.

The complex relation between Walter and Pfitzner reminds us today that musicians are the guardians of their profession. It is their responsibility to champion the music of their contemporaries rather than be satisfied with the relatively narrow list of masterpieces found in any orchestra’s repertoire. Conductors may still fulfill their duties best if they do engage with music in multiple ways. A modern trend toward constraining specialization often prevents many from crossing into other musical disciplines, but such deterrence should be ignored. Mahler was pilloried by contemporary critics as being a “summertime” composer. One of the most distinguished critics of Mahler’s generation, Richard Wallaschek, also an eminent scholar and teacher, writing in the New Yorker of Vienna, Die Zeit, consistently urged Mahler to give up punishing his listeners with his amateur attempts, to leave composition to professional composers and stick to conducting. Mahler suffered but carried on, and future generations are the beneficiaries. We have also benefited from John Adams and before him Aaron Copland, whose conducting helped generate the cross-fertilization between the new and the old in performance that results in a living art. Walter was, in part, a great conductor because he thought like a composer. Perhaps tonight’s performance will make us wonder what treasures we might now have if he had also remained a composer.

Spiritual Romanticism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Spiritual Romanticism, performed on June 6, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The year 1848 marks a watershed in the history of nineteenth-century Europe. The first half of the century was characterized by the rapid rise of industry, urban life, and the crystallization of a reading public and therefore a public for culture. All this occurred after the fall of Napoleon, in a period of political reaction. Concurrent with this reaction were radical revisions to the conceits of the previous century’s Enlightenment, as well as the emergence of a kind of middle-class domesticity that assumed stylistic attributes known as Biedermeier. In everything but furniture design and architecture, that term is understood as pejorative. However, particularly in German-speaking Europe, beneath the expansion of an urban, educated middle class obsessed with respectability, there was after 1815 also a desire to find some way around the harsh strictures of political repression and dynamic economic change. This undercurrent of resistance can be sensed in the dreams and achievements of the young Robert Schumann (1810-1856) and in the entire first generation of musical Romantics. With political liberty denied, the subjective self and the limitless, cloaked world of the imagination afforded by music possessed few rival claims on the souls of artists, poets and writers who came of age after the fall of Napoleon.

As Romanticism developed as an aesthetic sensibility and personal credo during the first half of the nineteenth century, it co-existed with serious considerations of church and state in the revolutions of 1848. Indeed already during the Napoleonic era, the reaction to the Terror and the excesses of the French Revolution had inspired a revival of religious feeling. The nineteenth century turned out, in fact, to be a period of renewed religiosity and the creation of a sense of spiritual inwardness quite antithetical to the attitudes of artists and philosophers of the previous century. The skepticism of Voltaire was superseded by the religious ruminations of the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who felt music was integral to religious sensibility. With the revival of religious emotionalism, the nineteenth century also witnessed a spiritual redefinition of national identity. The universal was subordinated to the particular and the differentiated. Discussion of the universal rights of human kind was left almost exclusively to socialists and communists, as the educated middle classes of Europe increasingly found themselves drawn to an awareness of themselves as part of an indigenous community where land, language and history took on mythic proportions. The marriage of nationalism and religiosity that took shape in the nineteenth century eventually bequeathed to the twentieth that nightmarish replay of the bloody strife of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, despite Karl Marx’s quip that history repeats itself as farce not tragedy, during the twentieth century the internal strife in Europe after 1914 far outstripped anything perpetrated by the Hundred Years’ War.

This is an admittedly simplified account of the historical context for today’s concert. But it is crucial to locating the connection between spirituality and Romanticism. The works on the program are not ordered in a precise chronological manner, since Wagner wrote Das Liebesmahl der Apostel three years before Mendelssohn completed Lauda Sion. But aside from that detail, the sequence is historically proper. Felix Mendelssohn was born in 1809 and died in 1847. He never wavered in his belief that reason and religion could be reconciled. Despite his enormous contribution to the expressive vocabulary of the personal self through music—primarily in his chamber music, piano music, and concert overtures—the spirituality that Mendelssohn possessed was, despite its aesthetic Romanticism, rooted in an allegiance to neoclassicism and eighteenth-century philosophical ideals. In this sense, Mendelssohn was the musical equivalent of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), the great architect of early nineteenth-century Berlin. Lauda Sion not only expresses the deep religiosity of Mendelssohn and his devout Christianity but the underlying universalism that for him rendered the distinction between Protestant and Catholic insignificant. A widely embraced tolerance also extended to the Jews for whom Mendelssohn never lost his sense of solidarity. That solidarity had special urgency for him precisely because of his awareness that a new form of German nationalism was on the horizon. It first made its appearance when he was a child in 1819 and grew in strength throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Mendelssohn abhorred this aggressive form of political and cultural nationalism. Both he and his sister Fanny died before they could witness its triumphant arrival in German politics and culture. Appropriately, therefore, the concert opens with a work for the Catholic liturgy written by a converted Jew, the most important contemporary composer of Protestant church music, and who was married to the daughter of a prominent Huguenot minister.

The concert then turns to an early work by Richard Wagner (1813-1883), rarely performed in the United States. The rage for Wagner has not abated over many years. Concert-goers all over the world travel to the remotest places to catch a Ring cycle, and the number of Wagner’s devotees seems never to diminish. Conventional wisdom holds that Wagner was a revolutionary both politically and aesthetically. Together with Liszt he became the acknowledged founder of what came to be known as the “new German school.” Wagner saw himself as the true heir of Beethoven; he extended the dramatic in classical music into a new form, the music drama, a total work of art that integrated sound, word, and picture.

Wagner also became one of the nineteenth century’s most articulate modern anti-Semites, a theoretician of race, and a rabid nationalist. He had an extremely bizarre and ambivalent relation to Christianity, which appears most strikingly in Tannhäuser and Parsifal. Wagner, like Berlioz, was also a compelling writer who used the power of the pen to control the reception of his own works and his place in history. Like most autobiographers, he wrote in order to cover tracks he hoped no one would find, to guide future commentators, critics, and audiences toward a preconceived conclusion that omitted something important but embarrassing in his personal and artistic development. Wagner’s hidden skeleton in this case is the enormous debt his music owes to Mendelssohn, whom Wagner hated and against whom he held a personal, ill-grounded grudge. Wagner claimed to have been snubbed by Mendelssohn when in all likelihood nothing of the sort ever happened. But Mendelssohn was everything Wagner wasn’t: rich, tremendously talented, naturally adept, and generous of spirit. The work on today’s program not only foreshadows the familiar Wagner, but also surprisingly sheds light on Wagner’s early ambition to rival Mendelssohn on Mendelssohn’s own terms. An 1836 performance of St. Paul deeply impressed the young Wagner, who became determined to try to set biblical scenes into music as Mendelssohn had done so brilliantly. Das Liebesmahl der Apostel thus evidences the continuities rather than the divergences between Wagner and Mendelssohn. At the same time, however, there is no question that the mature Wagner opened up new vistas of compositional technique, musical expression and sonority. In this early work, we can hear the echoes of the male choral tradition of the late 1830s and early 1840s that would blossom into a nationalist medium, and reappear prominently in Parsifal and in the male choral moments of Götterdammerung. Although written in 1843, this work prefigures the dominance of nationalist religion in musical aesthetic after 1848.

The last composer on today’s program, Franz Liszt (1811-1886), was one of the most protean, complex and contradictory figures in the history of music, owing to his long life and the distinct phases in his career. Liszt belongs both to Mendelssohn’s world and to Wagner’s. As a virtuoso and composer he participated in the admiration for Beethoven evinced by Schumann and Mendelssohn. He was a champion of Berlioz, Chopin, and Meyerbeer. He was, as many turn-of-the-century German writers on music noted, almost a French composer because of his close personal intellectual associations with Paris in the 1830s. The next phase of his career brought him to Weimar, where he presided over the most important musical theater in German-speaking Europe during the mid-century, the place where Lohengrin had its premiere. He became a champion of Wagner—and ultimately Wagner’s father-in-law. Wagner had at first been skeptical of Liszt as a composer, but he soon came to be an eloquent defender of the creation of symphonic music written along the lines of poetic narrative. The second phase of Liszt’s career therefore can be considered an integral part of the German tradition of music-making. It is not surprising that the most prolific Liszt scholar of the twentieth century, Peter Raabe, was an ardent Nazi.

At the same time, however, Liszt was Hungarian by birth and by lifelong allegiance. In the last phase of his life, despite his close association with Wagner, he became a devout Catholic and an outspoken defender of the Hungarian national revival. Indeed, the Academy of Music that Bela Bartók attended bears to this day the name Franz Liszt. Liszt was eager to become a Hungarian national hero as an artist, educator, and philanthropist. The Mass performed on today’s concert is not only a great innovative setting of the Catholic liturgy by a composer who renounced his past as a virtuoso and Lothario and entered the Church, but it was also a widely acknowledged act of Hungarian patriotism. He was the nineteenth century’s greatest Hungarian musician and the Mass was designed to celebrate the newly found stature of the distinctly Hungarian Catholic Church.

In Liszt, the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century and the aesthetic transformation associated with Wagner (that utilized Liszt’s own remarkable musical innovations) were turned to the service of the nationalist revival that became commonplace throughout Europe after 1848. But today’s program also offers an opportunity to hear Liszt as an innovator in musical compositions and aesthetic ideals. If Wagner was eager to hide what he learned from Mendelssohn, he was equally loathe to give credit to Liszt for finding ways to make music augment the visual and poetic. It is somehow apt, therefore, that of the three composers, Liszt had the longest life. He died nearly forty years after Mendelssohn and he survived his son-in-law by three years. Indeed, if any composer mirrors the entire nineteenth century, inclusive of its transformations from the classical and rationalist to the spiritual and nationalist, it is Franz Liszt.

Victorian Secrets

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Victorian Secrets, performed on April 2, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

“It is imperative therefore to convince the German people that its enemies of yesterday and today, the foes of its superiority, will remain its enemies tomorrow—eternal enemies! Let us take a closer look: the Englishman in principle and in practice—the Magna Carta for himself, the noose around their necks for the other nations; his house is his castle, but everybody else’s house is his as well—offers no insight into this arid, depraved breed of mankind. England and true culture are as inimical as venality and probity. There is nothing more loathsome, nothing more nauseating, than the Englishman who, his prey safely in his lair, changes his tune and protests allegiance to humanity, culture, and religion…having only yesterday bitten the hand generously outstretched to him by German scholars…Oh what a miserable toad the Englishman is!…Let the German people be guided by history and what history has to tell us through our superior thinkers, artists, and historians; let them especially learn the lesson of the World War and so construct a true picture of the other nation, i.e. the Anglo-Saxon…then they will discover that these peoples all lack power of creativity at the highest level of genius. Genius is possessedness, demonic nature…No Anglo-Saxon…could ever carry in her womb…a Bach, a Mozart…Of all the nations living on the earth today, the German nation alone possesses true genius…”

These startling words were published in 1921 by Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), the most influential and original music theorist of the twentieth century, in an essay entitled “The Mission of German Genius.” The rest of Schenker’s essay is even more virulent in its attack on the culture and institutions of the non-German western world. The French take the most sustained beating, and Americans are dismissed as being unable to “attain the intellectual and moral ascendancy needed to contribute to the higher goals of mankind.”

The nationalities surrounding Germany, particularly to the east, and the French to the west, were keenly aware of this form of German cultural arrogance before 1914. But there had always been the appearance of greater respect between the Germans and the English if for no other reason than that the royal house in England was of German origin and that Shakespeare had been appropriated as a nearly German classical author. Americans are certainly unaccustomed to viewing England as a peripheral nation in terms of culture. Anglophilia has been a dominant feature of American literary and intellectual traditions. It is also unsettling to realize that Schenker’s views are perilously close to those of the Nazi ideologists of the 1920s and 1930s. The fact that Schenker, an observant member of the Viennese Jewish community, adhered to these views and propagated them indicates how deep-seated the sense of German cultural superiority was and how widely it was internalized, particularly in the field of music. For Schenker and for Schoenberg, German music was universal. All other national traditions were marginal and derivative. Of all the non-German composers Schenker discussed, he found positive words only for select pieces by Chopin and Smetana.

Lest one think that these outrageous polemical views were confined to Germans, one needs to recall that the English and the Americans, until World War I, were themselves enthralled with the idea of German superiority in music and accepted it. American composers and performers routinely traveled to Germany for their training. During the nineteenth century the English also looked to Germany first for musical inspiration. For Edward Elgar (1857-1934), hearing Parsifal and listening to Brahms were seminal experiences. One of the most influential figures in turn-of-the-century English concert life was Hans Richter, Wagner’s disciple and the first Bayreuth conductor. It was England that bestowed honorary degrees on Max Bruch (the teacher of Ralph Vaughan Williams) and Johannes Brahms. Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) deeply admired not only Richter but Hans von Bülow. Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) had his first success as a composer during his stay in Leipzig as a conservatory student.

In France, the sway of German music focused on two figures: Beethoven in the time of Berlioz, and later in the century, Wagner (after Baudelaire’s embrace of Wagnerian aesthetic). In England, the dominance of German influence can be dated far earlier. Nineteenth-century Britain was captivated by Felix Mendelssohn. He was without question the most beloved composer of the young Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert. But even before that, the eighteenth century in England was dominated by the rivalry between the Italian and the German musical influences. Even the Italianate style was partially mediated through Germans like Handel and Haydn.

The irony of all of this is that among the audiences and amateur performances of music in Europe, England possessed perhaps the most lively, extensive and engaged. Music had a central role in English culture as far back as the Regency. There is not a Jane Austen novel in which music does not figure. The English middle classes embraced music education and concert life with an enviable enthusiasm. England developed one of the most extensive and enduring choral traditions. Great works such as Mendelssohn’s Elijah to Dvořák’s Requiem owe their existence to the English public of listeners and vocal amateurs. Even Beethoven toward the end of his life toyed with the idea of moving to London. The great violinist Joseph Joachim toured England regularly with his quartet and regarded his visits among the most satisfying experiences of his career. In contrast to France, the power of the Mendelssohnian tradition and non-Wagnerian music from the late nineteenth century (the more conservative tradition of German composition) flourished in English concert programs and in domestic music-making. Wagner, as Bernard Shaw’s advocacy suggests, had his staunch English admirers, but so did Brahms, for whom the French never felt great enthusiasm.

Given the richness of English music life before 1914, it is fascinating to consider the ongoing perception of the apparent absence of great composers in the many decades that followed the death of Henry Purcell in 1695. Indeed the first Englishman to gain significant international recognition after Purcell was Sir Edward Elgar, and only quite late in his career. Even so, despite the acknowledged greatness of Elgar’s music in the accepted pantheon of great composers, he still occupies a subordinate place. His music is celebrated as the best of fin-de-siècle English music, but still overshadowed by contemporary German parallels.

Therefore with the exception of Elgar, most American audiences remain unfamiliar with the achievements of English musical composition from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is only in the twentieth century with Benjamin Britten that English music regained some of its prominence on the concert and operatic stages. Even Gilbert and Sullivan, who enjoyed phenomenal success in the musical theater, have now been relegated mostly to amateur high-school and college productions. How many are aware that Arthur Sullivan wrote music independently of W.S. Gilbert? Stanford was a close contemporary of Elgar; their relationship was delicate and strained. Stanford’s position in English musical life was extremely powerful, yet none of his music is really present in the repertory. Frank Bridge (1879-1941) is held in high esteem among connoisseurs, but to many his is a name even less known than that of Stanford.

This traditional, condescending assessment of Elgar and his contemporaries suggests a problem of national perception. No matter how good English music may be, it cannot approach the heights of German music. Whether we like it or not, we think more like Schenker than we might wish. But precisely this persistent Schenkerian prejudice gives us an interesting insight into the tradition of British music. Tonight’s program suggests that England was not exempt from the search by composers from most non-German European countries in the late nineteenth century for a distinctive national voice in music. English composers, like their compatriots in other lands, often incorporated what they believed to be distinctly native sources and traditions in their art. In the English case, it was Anglo-Saxon and Irish. Stanford’s “Irish” Symphony is comparable to the symphonies of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. In the effort to construct a distinctly national style, Frank Bridge’s Isabella is akin to the work of his French contemporary Claude Debussy. Elgar’s Sea Pictures can perhaps be set alongside the orchestral songs of Gustav Mahler, who, although German-speaking, understood himself as not essentially German. English music experienced the same impulse as other European musical movements of the time—to try to express in music a distinctive national heritage. In this sense, English music during the later nineteenth century took the same path as its continental counterparts outside of Germany. But in all these efforts, as the music on tonight’s program reveals, the compositional tradition and strategies identified by Schenker as German, left their indelible mark.

However, the English view of English culture—its perception of its national heritage—was exceptional. Consider the other cultural accomplishments in Britain that are contemporaneous with tonight’s works: the innovations of William Morris, John Ruskin, and the pre-Raphaelites in the visual arts and essays; the outstanding achievements in prose and poetry of Arnold, Browning, Tennyson, Hardy, and Wilde. England was also a dominant economic and imperial force, at the height of its power and conquest even though the rivalry of the French, Germans, and Americans was considerable. As Schenker slyly implied, the English, precisely because of their empire, appropriated everything in the world as their own. What he perceived as the derivative and imitative elements of British culture indicated for him a British impulse of absorption and mastery. Indeed, if Sullivan’s superb treatment of Mendelssohnian and Italianate traditions, or Bridge’s engagement with the Lisztian and post-Lisztian forms of symphonic essays inspired by poetic narratives are an indication, the British were indeed masters. But no British composer more quintessentially represented the British outlook than Elgar, whose work, despite its debt to German influences, reflects an idealized British character and optimism that perhaps never really existed but remains recognizable and resonant.

This certainty and security in Britain’s national identity may seem in the present era of post-colonial critique to express the arrogance often associated with imperialist nations. It has come to typify the popular perception of the Victorians. But in music it also had a related manifestation that suggests a more complicated relation to those cultures that presumed to eclipse British accomplishment. Elgar, for example, held a deep conviction that music was ultimately a universal language beyond national barriers. He may have been strongly influenced by Brahms, but in return he wished to impart the richness of his own heritage to the rest of Europe. Thus he himself commissioned translations of the English texts of Sea Pictures for French and German performances. Much of his greatest music was tied to Anglicanism and invested with considerable patriotism, but like many English contemporaries, he turned the pride of being citizens of the greatest empire on earth, the heirs of the language of Shakespeare, into a blithe embrace of the best of other national cultures and the offering of his own for others. In this respect, British musical culture in its eclecticism finds its real distinction. Unlike the composers literally on the periphery of Germany—the Czechs, the Polish, and even the French—as well as the American composers before the First World War, English composers were not concerned about the stylistic definition of their own identity as British. The political, economic, literary and scientific dominance of Britain made it, in the absence of a home-grown Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, take Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner to itself. Thus alongside British conceit one can sense in these composers a surprising receptiveness to ideas and a desire for exchange that at the time distinguished them from many nationalist composers on the continent. With the fading of the empire, this certainty also faded, resulting in an intense questioning and fear of “foreign influence,” but at least at this moment in time, these Victorians revealed a secure and successful approach to global music-making. The music on tonight’s program may reflect a hierarchy of values in which originality is subsumed by command of craft and refinement. It is well to remember that an allegiance to this credo marked the ambitions and achievements of two of Schenker’s favorites: Haydn and Brahms.