After the Thaw

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Best Classical Music You are Not Listening To

An American Biography: The Music of Henry Cowell

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Remains of Romanticism

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fervaal

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Composing A Nation

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Revisiting William Grant Still

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Persecution and Hope

By Leon Botstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music of the Other Germany

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music of the Other Germany, performed on Jan 25, 2009 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is hard to believe that twenty years have passed since the fall of Communism. Almost until the very end, the idea that Communism would be a permanent albeit evolving presence in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union was a firmly held belief among the most sophisticated and knowledgeable observers. The wisdom of hindsight (the metaphorical retrospectroscope) should not diminish the momentous and unexpected character of the collapse of the Communist system. Part of that Cold War structure was a divided Germany. Until 1989 the unification of Germany was at best a vague aspiration, and it too occurred with breathtaking rapidity.

Among the nations that were part of the Soviet sphere of influence, East Germany developed a reputation as a stable and doctrinaire socialist state. Its loyalty to Moscow was unquestioned, and it provided a reliable reactionary counterweight to progressive developments in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia during the 1950s and 1960s. East Germany was literally the front line between east and west, the physical locus of that famous phrase the “Iron Curtain,” the most powerful symbol of which was the Berlin Wall. Berlin became the epicenter of spy novels and intrigue, a microcosm of what appeared to be the permanent division in Europe, the geographical and ideological bequest of the defeat of Nazism.

In the twenty years since 1989, there has been a tremendous amount of historical revisionism regarding what actually happened in East Germany after 1945. Conventional wisdom before 1989 held up the creation of a separate East German socialist state as a de facto victory over Fascism. But as it turned out, there was as much continuity between old and new in East Germany as there was in West Germany. A large portion of both bureaucratic and intellectual elites remained in place despite the regime change. Over time, the East German secret police, the Stasi, became emblematic of all Soviet-style secret police agencies. The Stasi successfully infiltrated every dimension of life, including art, culture, and science.

At the same time, however, East Germany as a separate entity began and ended with some measure of idealism. The émigrés and exiles who returned to East Germany in the wake of Hitler’s defeat included Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, and Arnold Zweig. They hoped they could create a radically new world founded on principles of social justice and equality. Even when the wall fell, there were many who thought—perhaps rightly—that there were traditions and beliefs identified with the East and that could and should be preserved in a united Germany. There was something of value to be cherished. For them the fall of Communism did not mean a blanket vindication of Western practices and conceits, particularly in the area of economic and social policy. In the arts in particular, East Germany had developed an enviable system of state subsidy, supporting a fabulous network of theater groups, opera companies, orchestras, publishing houses, and educational institutions, much of which quickly disappeared when the subsidy ran out, depriving the East German population of its local traditions of affordable, excellent artistic achievement and cultural access. It is for this paradoxical reason that the life and culture of East Germany has been such a successful subject for films marked by irony, humor, and a sense of loss, such as the recent Goodbye, Lenin (2003) and The Lives of Others ( 2006).

Ultimately, however, the collapse of Communism particularly in East Germany was caused by a massive gap between ideological rhetoric and reality. Whether in industry or in the arts, the illusion of success and health was really only that: illusion. East Germany was always especially vulnerable to a process of critical self-recognition within its population because of demographic and familial links between East and West, and modern communications, notably television. It was hard for the East German government to isolate its population completely. During the run of a famous television show imported from America named Dallas, the joke was that the theaters and concert halls of East Berlin were empty when Larry Hagman could be seen driving his Rolls Royce around his Texas ranch.

It would, however, be a mistake to dismiss over forty years of cultural and artistic activity in East Germany as negligible or valueless merely because of the complex and compromising role played by the state and ideology. What the music on today’s concert suggests is that composers in the East faced, albeit under different circumstances, problems not entirely dissimilar to those of their Western contemporaries. Given the close association between the musical language of late Romanticism and strains of populism with Fascist aesthetics and Nazi ideals of “healthy” art, what sort of music could and needed to be written that would match the aspirations for a new era?

One central difference between East and West was that in the East there was never– either officially or unofficially–anything approximating the engagement with history, especially regarding the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, that there was in West Germany. The official triumph of socialism in the East over its arch-enemy Fascism, made any public debate or soul searching seemingly ideological superfluous. Nevertheless, the aesthetic problem remained and Hanns Eisler became the central figure in the first decades of East Germany’s musical culture. Although he had an early phase influenced by the radical modernism of Schoenberg, already in the 1930s Eisler rejected modernist developments as somehow detached from people and human experience. He sought to craft an accessible language of music that could at once reach the public and yet be distinguished aesthetically from both commercial Western popular music and the appropriated traditionalism so dear to the Nazis. A moral equivalent of socialist realism in literature ultimately became the ideal in music. But for a composer to find a language that corresponded with ideology and yet was authentically personal or subjective, two ingredients were required that were not in the recipe book of the East German regime. The first was freedom, and the second the consequence of freedom: the expression of individuality. The critique of individuality and freedom as bourgeois illusions could hold sway ultimately only as rhetoric. Therefore each of the composers on today’s program pursued a path which created a dialogue fashioned in coded and particularly personal ways with history. Radical modernism argued that music in the modern age needed to shed history and confront tradition by highlighting its absence. East German composers understood this as a delusive imperative, since history and tradition never failed to hang over the modernist movement that gripped West Germany during the 1950s and 1960s, for instance in the music of the then most celebrated protagonist of modernism, Karlheinz Stockhausen.

In Paul Dessau’s case, history and tradition meant his own past as a Jewish composer and as an idealistic socialist whose perspective ultimately differed from that of the regime. For Rudolf Wagner-Régeny, the past meant an internal dialogue with his own early career that flourished, though with ups and downs, under Nazi rule. And for Eisler, the past meant not only the interwar experimentation and political agitation, but the experience of exile to and deportation from the United States. Above all for Eisler, the past also held the hope that the most treasured part of the German heritage could be celebrated without an obvious connection to Fascism or destructive nationalism, the era of Goethe and Schiller and classical Weimar. It could be reborn in a new Communist Germany without the reservations inherent in the critique of Enlightenment contained in the writings of Adorno and Horkheimer. Despite the deconstruction of Enlightenment, if there was one thing that bridged East and West Germany after 1945, it was the effort to reclaim a “good” Germany rooted in the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment—the Germany of painting, literature, architecture, and music before the onset of modern nationalism.

For the younger generation of East German composers, represented on today’s program by Matthus and Zimmermann, the past meant not one that was experienced but one that was imagined. After 1968, East German composers were more able to absorb influences from developments in the West. Modernism could be adapted for purposes that still put forward ideals compatible with the socialist state. Tradition, as is audible in Matthus’s Responso, could be reborn and reconfigured. In Zimmermann’s music, the discreet use of J.S. Bach and the relation between text and music could justify a measure of experimentation. In both of these works we encounter the special gift of music: its indeterminacy as music with respect to ordinary meaning and significance. Zimmermann’s text is a memorial elegy to Federico García Lorca, the great Spanish poet and victim of the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War. That war was after all a common post-World War II ground between East and West: the so-called last great cause, a lingering symbol of freedom and idealism placed in resistance and contrast to brute force, tyranny, and apathy.

The purpose of this concert is to inspire a tolerant and candid engagement with our past. East German life and culture before 1989 are easily susceptible to ridicule. They are undeserving of nostalgic sentiments. The suppression of freedom, the violence of the state, and the corruption and hypocrisy should not inspire admiration. But at the same time, through music, more than one generation of talented composers in East Germany sought, despite tyranny and the pressure to conform, the redemption of human possibility through music. They employed tradition and innovation in unique and memorable ways. We acknowledge without difficulty that East Germany provided many distinguished contributions to performance practice, from the era of the theater director Walter Felsenstein to that of Kurt Masur. There is a parallel richness to be discovered in the work of East German composers as well, those who lived in the German Democratic Republic between 1945 and 1989.

Music therefore has unique possibilities as a means of human expression, even in eras of censorship and under regimes of autocracy and terror. It is harder to speak of collaboration and complicity for composers than it is for writers and painters, not so much in regard to personal conduct, but in regard to the nature of the works of art themselves. When it comes to music, we should give the period of the German Democratic Republic the same latitude we have afforded to the Soviet era and the era of Metternich.

Against the Avant Garde

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Against the Avant-Garde: Romanticisms of the 1920s, performed on Dec 7, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The act of writing history inevitably forces the historian to simplify and generalize. The object of historical writing seems in part to be the finding of ways to articulate coherence in what appears to be the chaotic occurrence of events that mark the passage of time in human society. We end up speaking of the “roaring twenties,” the “gilded age,” or most perniciously, sections of time with imposed beginnings and endpoints that are distilled through a descriptive characteristic: a Renaissance or an Enlightenment. Some such characterizations survive, but others such as the “Dark Ages,” have now been discarded because they represent an implausible, one-sided simplification of the past.

The reigning generalization about European art and culture after the First World War has, despite variations, remained tied to a focus on the development of new forms of expression in literature, painting, and music. The center of attention regarding the fin de siècle has remained modernism and, particularly after 1918, the call for the rejection of old pre-war traditions of art-making and canons of aesthetic beauty. World War I had exposed the hypocrisy of cultural and social norms (not to speak of the politics) that dominated before 1914. A new art for a new age, reflective of the power of modernity in all its mixture of brash optimism and harsh impersonality rooted in technological progress, was the clarion call of an avant-garde.

Memories, however, are selective. The focus by journalists on a certain group of artists, the preferences of the market place, the dynamics of fashion and fame in the age of mass communication and the propagandistic talents of a few darlings of elite taste-makers can all be adduced to explain how and why some artists, writers, and composers become heralded as emblematic of an historical moment or the prophetic voices of the age. In this sense the 1920s are said to belong to the move to twelve-tone composition by Arnold Schoenberg and his disciples, to the neoclassic innovations of Stravinsky and his imitators, to the operatic innovations pioneered in Germany by Kurt Weill and his contemporaries, the hard-edged, modernist functionalism of composers like Hindemith and, in their own way, Prokofiev and Shostakovich.

At the same time, however, our picture of the past is not only genuinely one-sided, but as a picture, it obliterates anything beyond its bordered field. Reality turns out to be far more complicated. During the 1920s, there was a vibrant musical life involving new composition by composers who were either opposed to or uninterested in modernist developments. These composers include individuals who believed that the claims of the avant-garde were fraudulent because they called for the violation of fundamentally true principles of musical composition and expression. They felt the innovations of the avant-garde were temporary aberrations of passing historical significance. Tradition, they argued, did not have to be jettisoned, and the vocabulary of classicism and romanticism needed only to be adjusted and given new voice. Those unconvinced by the avant-garde did not lack creativity. They were not mere imitators. They were not second-rate. Only some of them were self-styled and polemical conservatives. Yet only those anti-modernists to have earned a place in history have been arch-conservative (Hans Pfitzner is a case in point). Some individuals retained their place because they had already achieved fame when twentieth-century modernism broke on the scene. The most conspicuous example in this category of composer was Richard Strauss. An important figure who held the promise of potentially bridging the modernists and romantic traditions within the framework of tonality (therefore avoiding a radical break with the past) was Max Reger, but he died at a young age in 1916, before the serious and sustained onset of modernism.

Today’s program features three composers who are probably unknown to American audiences. Each was a composer of enormous distinction and originality, requiring no condescension or qualification. But they have been forgotten, because in our penchant for simplification in history they have been deemed out of step with the presumed dominant tendency of an historical epoch. In retrospect, we may in terms of art reconsider the twentieth century. In such a revision, these three composers may find a more prominent and deserved place in our account of the past.

Perhaps the most familiar name is Walter Braunfels. His most famous work, his opera The Birds (1919), is now being revived in Los Angeles. The conventional assessment of Braunfels work and career stems less from the reputation he achieved in his own day and more on the fact that he was one of the composers who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. His half-status allowed him to remain in Germany even though his music was banned. But the damage was done. Braunfels died in 1954. The period right after the war did not provide him a platform to regain his former reputation. His music represented an allegiance to a late-romantic post-Wagnerian tradition, and during the 1920s his orchestral and choral music earned him a place alongside Richard Strauss as a proponent of aesthetic continuity. His music was championed by conductors who favored a more conservative approach to new composition, notably Bruno Walter and Hermann Abendroth. For Braunfels, the challenge, as his work on today’s program shows, was to create new music by engaging tradition and the past in an overt manner, not by declaring fealty to a progressive ideology that rendered the surface of tradition irrelevant. It needs to be remembered that the most vilified of avant-gardists, Arnold Schoenberg, was himself a radical conservative, who believed that what he was doing was nothing less than restoring the musical principles championed by Mozart and Brahms—precisely the figures whose musical legacy can be discerned in Braunfels’ music. But it is the ethical impulse to investigate the fate of victims that has prompted a resurgence of interest in Braunfels’ music, rather than a generalized curiosity about the anti-modernist strain in the musical life of the 1920s.

This brings us to the context in which to consider the work of Herman Suter. Suter was a Swiss composer known also as a fine conductor and teacher. He was a profoundly self-critical man, which is why so little music of his received formal opus numbers. He was an extremely prominent and leading figure in Swiss musical life. His most famous work was an oratorio on the subject of Francis of Assisi. The oratorio was premiered in 1926 by Wilhelm Furtwängler, just five months before Suter’s death. Most of Suter’s music has drifted into obscurity even in his native Switzerland. One near exception is the Violin Concerto of 1924. The work was written for the legendary violinist Adolf Busch, a member of that remarkable family of anti-fascist, non-Jewish German artists. Adolf Busch was a disciple of Max Reger who exerted a profound influence on American music as a result of his emigration and his promoting of the quartet literature and the culture of chamber music. His legacy remains vital today in the form of the Marlboro Festival, whose guiding spirit was none other than Busch’s son-in-law Rudolf Serkin. Suter’s Violin Concerto is one of many unknown romantic concerti that deserve a regular place in the repertory. The work is intimate, elegant, and supremely beautiful without being derivative. Like much of Suter’s work it takes its inspiration from the composer’s conception of the relation between music and nature. The first movement reflects a dedication to lyricism that suggests the blossoming of the natural world. The second movement suggests the picture of a wanderer in the midst of a storm, and the last movement returns the listener to an open landscape of sunlit optimism. There is something distinctly poetic and noble about this concerto that justifies Suter’s allegiance to the inherent ideals of an earlier romantic artistic tradition.

The last work on this program is a symphony which also owes its existence to a pre-modernist compositional strategy for the orchestral essay: an expressionist appreciation of nature. The Autumn Symphony of Joseph Marx is acknowledged to be the composer’s masterpiece. It is of Mahlerian scope, and shares with Mahler a philosophical and spiritual ambition. Joseph Marx was a powerful figure in Austrian and Viennese musical life, yet his career presents somewhat of a paradox. He was born in 1882 and by the outbreak of World War I, he had risen to prominence primarily as a composer of Lieder. He was a committed man of letters who had studied literature, philosophy, and art at the University of Graz. His penchant for the theoretical and the intellectual led him to assume a post in 1918 as a professor of theory at the Music Academy in Vienna, where he became the rector during the 1920s. As his interest in pedagogy increased—his pupils included the conductor Artur Rodzinski, the pianist Friedrich Wührer among dozens of composers and performers—so did his interest in writing criticism. He became a leading journalist and critic in Vienna during the 1930s. Not surprisingly, his compositional output slowed considerably; most of his music dates from before 1933. Although Marx died in 1964, there is practically no music that dates from the last twenty years of his life. Perhaps his silence as a composer was a reflection of the extent to which his vocabulary seemed entirely out of step with post-World War II trends. The collection of his writings was entitled appropriately Reflections of a Romantic Realist. Nevertheless his music , especially that of the period of the Autumn Symphony, is of commanding quality.

Marx’s career and reputation, like Braunfels’s, suffered from politics—but for precisely opposite reasons. By the time the Nazis took power in Austria in 1938, Marx, who was not Jewish, exemplified the approach to music that the Nazis favored. A Joseph Marx Prize was established by the new regime, and Marx received financial support for his work. The Nazi’s ideologically inspired allegiance to tradition fit well with Marx’s tastes. In 1940 he wrote a quartet “in the classical mode,” and in 1941 he composed a four-movement “old Viennese” serenade for the Vienna Philharmonic to honor its centennial. When the Nazis created a category of officially sanctioned artists, Joseph Marx figured prominently on the list. Unlike his contemporary Franz Schmidt who died before World War II, Marx remained a well-known figure in Nazi Austria.

But there is little evidence that his participation with the Nazis was enthusiastic beyond his role as a recipient of the regime’s largesse. This sets him apart from Karl Böhm, Herbert von Karajan, the musicologist Erich Schenk, and that odd-man-out Nazi sympathizer Anton von Webern. Marx’s prominence in post-war Austria as a teacher and cultural figure can be viewed as less problematic than that of many of his colleagues. He held fast to an aesthetic perspective fashioned at the turn of the century and championed by him long before the rise of Nazism. But as in the case of Richard Strauss, candor about the political dimension of Marx’s career needs to be reconciled with appreciation of his gifts as a composer and the profound and authentic aesthetic commitments he brought to bear. His belief in the power of music and his aesthetic commitments make him more of a fellow traveler with Gustav Mahler (with whom he shared a comparable world view about art and nature). That he lived long enough to enjoy the enthusiasm afforded by Nazi cultural politics should not deter us from revisiting the bulk of his musical output, which was written before the intelligentsia and artistic elite of interwar Austria made their calculated pact with evil.

The Unsung Success of Live Classical Music

Ticket sales are up, orchestra revenues are growing and there are more concerts than ever. As the fall season gets under way, classical music is secretly thriving. By LEON BOTSTEIN

In Vienna this past June, I went to a thrilling production of Richard Strauss's "Capriccio." The next morning, in a 14th-century Gothic church, I was swept away by the reverberant beauty of a performance of a rarely heard Haydn mass. Both the opera house and church were filled to maximum capacity. The depth of the sound, its material sensuality and the allure of great music that has not been overplayed lent each listener an intimate sense of the human imagination that could be shared with hundreds of anonymous companions.

Nothing can reproduce the sonic and emotional power of live performance. But looking out at the audience at most classical music concerts in the United States, one sees a crowd that is largely middle-aged, verging on the geriatric. This has set off alarms within the music community, whose members are quick to blame the loss of a younger generation of listeners for the sorry state of classical music, waning ticket sales and a record market that has all but disappeared.

Memories are deceptive. Classical music has never been the passion of the young. It is an acquired taste that requires both encouragement and education, like voting or drinking Scotch. And in fact, more young people today are playing classical instruments than ever before, according to conservatory enrollments. More surprising, the classical music world has never been healthier; since the early 1970s the growth has been robust.

The heralding of the demise of classical music is based on flimsy evidence. The number of concert venues, summer festivals, performing ensembles and overall performances in classical music and opera has increased exponentially over the last four decades. There are currently nearly 400 professional orchestras in America, according to the League of American Orchestras, while 30 years ago there were 203. There are up to 500 youth orchestras, up from 63 in 1990. The number of orchestra concerts performed annually in the U.S. has risen 24% in the past decade, to 37,000. Ticket-sale income from orchestra performances grew almost 18%, to $608 million, between the 2004-'05 and 2005-'06 seasons.

The widening of interest in classical music isn't limited to our shores. The Asian embrace of Western musical traditions took off in earnest after World War II. It first rose in Japan, then spread to Korea, and is now making its way throughout China, following the path of economic progress. The result: There are more young Asian instrumentalists and audience members for classical music than anywhere else in the world. In Venezuela, classical music training has become a powerful tool in the improvement of primary and secondary school education. When a nation backs music education, as in Finland, a new cadre of world-class young performers emerges and audiences grow accordingly. We are in the midst of a global classical musical renaissance marked by a new vitality and higher standards of virtuosity and finesse.

So why all the hand-wringing? Much of it stems from another false assumption: that classical music was once profitable, but is now failing financially. This distorted expectation is rooted in the peculiar experience of the last decades of the 19th century, after the rapid extension of literacy in Europe and America. Before recording became commercially viable in 1902, when the Columbia and Victor companies joined forces and issued discs, sales of instruments (particularly the piano), concert tickets and sheet music were thriving businesses. With the advent of recorded music -- first the player piano, then the radio, the 78 rpm record, the long-playing record and the digital CD -- novel, albeit brief, opportunities for making money followed. These circumstances do not represent the broader historical norm. Classical music never held the promise that it could enlist a mass audience. From its birth as a secular and church-based art form, classical music has depended on patronage and philanthropy, not on income from sales either at the box office or in record stores.

The euphoria about the potential of recording and the electronic transmission of music reached a fever pitch during the mid-20th century. Glenn Gould, the legendary and eccentric Canadian pianist, was the most articulate proponent of a vision of the future in which recordings would replace live performance. He believed the only way to realize classical music's full potential was in the pristine and minutely controlled recording studio. Listeners would then enjoy the recording by using high-fidelity equipment in an isolated environment.

Mr. Gould was wrong. The success of the iPod has demonstrated that while some connoisseurs find its compression annoying, most classical music lovers value freedom and mobility over high fidelity. And thanks in large part to the pioneering strategy of the Naxos label, today's public is blessed with an inexhaustible archive of recorded performances. Each unit costs less than $10 to purchase or download, less than recordings from some better-known companies. And that's before considering the file-sharing, streaming and downloading that are all at hand.

Unprecedented easy access to the recorded treasures of classical music may have put an end to the commercial viability of recorded music, but there is a silver lining: It has inspired more people to go to live concerts. Recorded music now does what all reproductions should. It inspires the desire to experience the real thing, in real time and space.

The real attraction of classical music is the power and sensuality of the live sounds. The excitement that ensues from the unpredictability and drama of live performance is comparable to watching spectator sports. Following a game on television is enjoyable, but to be cheering at the stadium or sitting courtside is incomparable.

The world of classical music still faces serious challenges. The competition for patronage and philanthropy has become increasingly intense, as the private sector is now asked to shoulder responsibility not only for the arts but also for education and many social services once the exclusive province of government. There are few cost-saving measures at hand when operas and orchestras require over 100 professionals to realize a single performance of Mahler's Third Symphony or Verdi's "Aida."

The explosive world-wide growth of popular music has created a competitive tension between classical "art" music and popular music that performers and composers in that past would not recognize. With this new chasm come smug defenders who delude themselves that allegiance to classical music is a sign of some sort of superiority. Musicians of note have rarely held this view. Consider Haydn, Liszt, Copland and Stravinsky, composers who used popular and folk material -- or Leonard Bernstein, whose music bridged both worlds, and even the 20th-century violinist Jascha Heifetz, who wrote popular songs. Until recently classical musicians and their audiences have remained eclectic and catholic in their tastes.

Classical music has always appealed to older adults who, with the passing of years, tend to contemplate the kind of daily life conundrums that are freighted with ambiguity and complexity. The average classical listener has historically hovered around middle age. This is encouraging, as there is no shortage of baby boomers on the horizon. The challenge facing classical musicians is to persuade adults to listen, even those who have no experience with classical music. It would be swell if there were public investment in music education, but since that is unlikely, musicians and arts organizations have to assume leadership.

If classical music is in trouble, it is because its advocates are behaving as though it were terminally ill. To survive and flourish we need to stop playing the same repertoire in concert and in the opera. Would we run a movie theater by screening the same dozen films ad nauseam, never showing any new releases or reviving old classics? There is so much more to be listened to in the history of music; yet judging from the repertoire that has become standard, it is as if all but two rooms in a museum were closed.

And how to explain why some orchestras are getting into financial trouble and suspending operations, as appears to be the case in Columbus, Ohio? Because crises crop up when inertia and excessive caution set in. To thrive, managements need to innovate and learn from the enthusiastic embrace of Western classical music around the world. Success will be found by adapting better to local circumstances and by looking beyond our borders. Los Angeles, Atlanta and Minneapolis are promising examples where orchestras have become more important to civic life by making their programs challenging and relevant, reaching out -- particularly to schools and colleges -- beyond the confines of a concert hall. Above all, let's abandon politically correct notions about how ethnicity and class constitute barriers to the appreciation of classical music, a universally admired dimension of high culture and the human imagination.

Leon Botstein is the president of Bard College and the music director and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.

Le roi d’Ys

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Le roi d’Ys, performed on Oct 3, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys (1888) represents the latest foray in one of the American Symphony’s longstanding projects: to revive interest in the French operatic repertoire of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the past the orchestra has presented concert performances of Bizet’s Djamileh (1872); Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907); Chausson’s Le roi Arthus (1895); and Chabrier’s Le roi malgrè lui (1887). Our ambition is in response to the oversight one encounters regarding French opera beyond the operas of Gounod and Massenet, themselves the victims of critical snobbery. The assumption that there is little of note between Bizet’s Carmen (1875) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) is in our view groundless.

There are in fact a striking number of French operas from the turn of the last century that possess commanding musical and dramatic qualities. The cause of the short shrift given to late nineteenth-century dramatic French opera is itself complex. On one hand there is a sense that, however well-crafted they are, any of the works written between 1875 and 1900 reflected too deeply the overwhelming influence of Wagner. They do not seem, from a reductive point of view, French enough. The idea of an implacable rivalry between the German and the French in politics and culture became commonplace during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet in no other nation outside of German-speaking Europe were examples and aesthetic ambitions of Wagner so influential. Beginning with Charles Baudelaire’s famous embrace of Wagner after the notorious premiere of Tannhäuser (1845) in Paris in 1861, a large segment of the French intellectual community became perfect Wagnerites in their own way. But on the other hand, that way was not so much devotional as it was creative. Wagner inspired an outpouring of new operas that included Chabrier’s Gwendoline (1885), which bears a close resemblance to Tristan und Isolde (1859). Not surprisingly, the centrality of Wagnerism in France and its leading journal Le revue Wagnerienne sparked its own reaction. Chausson’s Le roi Arthus is filled with Wagner’s influence—it even contains moments of indirect citation. But Chausson also struggled to emancipate himself from the nearly narcotic attraction of Wagnerian harmony and use of musical time. The closing scene of Le roi Arthus is a choral apotheosis that has no parallel in Wagner. Although Debussy’s originality has its root in Wagner, particularly the Wagner of Parsifal (1882), Pelléas marked the beginning of a new modern, distinctly French musical idiom, seemingly free of Wagnerian rhetoric. Therefore, the French opera that preceded Pelléas seems neither original nor modern.

Despite French admiration for Wagner, the bitter political rivalry between Germany and France that resulted in three wars had its parallels in the formation of cultural stereotypes. The French never took to Brahms (or Mahler, for that matter), with the ironic exception of the composer of today’s opera, Lalo, and his frequently underrated contemporary Camille Saint-Saëns. German music was viewed as heavy, pedantic and distinctly non-theatrical or entertaining. French music by contrast was viewed by the Germans as light-hearted and frivolous, full of empty tunes and vacuous sentimentality. The French were specialists in style and perfumed formlessness, not substance. To the Germans, even Pelléas was unconvincing. It lacked not merely robustness from the German point of view, but musical substance. At a performance of Pelléas Richard Strauss is said to have turned to Romain Rolland (the Nobel Prize winning pacifist, writer, and distinguished musical authority) and asked, “Tell me, where is the music?”

The composers of serious French opera inspired by Wagner were well aware of the need to cultivate a distinctly French tradition and were in no sense slavish imitators. In fact many of them were fervently nationalist and indeed chauvinist in their attitude. Wagner had given them a means to create musical drama, which they wanted to appropriate for distinctly French purposes. The irony of Wagner’s influence was that the most chauvinist of composers outside of German-speaking Europe found in his ideas and strategies ways of writing music that could be detached from Wagner’s own nationalist ambitions and racist signifiers. Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern political Zionism, said that without his repeated encounters with Tannhäuser at the Paris Opera, he would not have had the inspiration during the Dreyfus trial to write his epoch-making declaration of Zionism, The Jewish State (1896).

It is in this context Le roi d’Ys, one of the great French operas of the nineteenth century, should be considered. Lalo chose a distinctly French subject, a myth closely tied to the landscape of his wife’s native Brittany. The work employs French folk material; indeed there seems to be nothing Germanic about this opera. Le roi d’Ys succeeds in presenting a highly charged psychological drama framed by a suspenseful plot. At the core of the opera is the juxtaposition of personalities: two male roles and two female roles. One might argue that it pulls some elements from Tannhäuser (the miracle of redemption through the salvation of the leading character, in this case Margared) and from Lohengrin (envy and treachery are defeated and order restored through self-sacrifice). Brabant is saved by Elsa despite her weakness, and so too is Ys rescued by Saint Corentin in response to Margared’s recognition of her own guilt. But although the story is mythic, unlike their Wagnerian counterparts these characters are sympathetically human. Their impulses of jealousy and rivalry are recognizable. There is none of the sort of disproportion in their characterization that one finds in the heroes Tannhäuser and Lohengrin. The music of the opera is distinctive and has an economy and clarity that provides the opera a compelling dramatic arc. Action and gesture are larger than life only when they need to be. Lalo’s characters are ordinary people dealing with human nature, with all the pettiness and weakness to which it is prone, in addition to the occasional capacity for heroism and transcendence.

Although inspired by Wagner, Lalo created what all commentators have observed as a French national drama. Lalo changes the original folktale with its Atlantis-like fate to one of triumph and miraculous intervention. For those who might have attended our performance last season of Dame Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers, you may recall another waterlogged ending in which the sea swept in over the hapless lovers. Here, however, the onrush of the ocean is stopped by greater forces, permitting a happy ending for the city and the more benign of the two couples, Mylio and Rozenn. Death is given meaning as the cause of the nation overtakes personal passion and interest. Perhaps this patriotic lesson is why the opera is entitled The King of Ys, even though as a character the King is a relatively minor presence. He puts the drama in motion, but like Sophocles’s Laius, his actions are only a catalyst for a story all about the children.

One of the circumstances that prevented this opera from remaining in the repertory, despite its acclaim in France, is that its composer wrote only four operas, and of those Le roi d’Ys was the most successful. Lalo is much better known for his instrumental music. His Symphonie espagnole (1874) has been a staple for star violinists for decades; his Cello Concerto (1876) has enjoyed similar popularity. But like Chausson’s Le roi Arthus, this is a French opera quite distinct from those of Gounod and Massenet. It has a dramatic and musical intensity, a sonic sweep and energy that lend it excitement and gravity. Its central theme is jealousy, and in that Le roi d’Ys way can be seen as a counterpart to Carmen, but cast in a mythological framework. It is hoped that the consistency and quality of the music and the drama will lead ultimately to more well-deserved revivals outside of France both in the concert hall and on the stage.

Finally, if one can be permitted a perhaps too facile but timely observation, given the Katrina disaster, the pervasive fear of global warming, and the idea that our own coastal cities could be engulfed by the oceans, perhaps the celebration of some sacrifice for the national common good is cause for reflection, particularly if it might help spare us the fate almost suffered by Ys.

Spatial Explorations

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Spacial Explorations, performed on June 1, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This final concert of our 2007-2008 season was inspired in part by the death of György Ligeti, who died two years ago on June 12. His biography can serve as a mirror of the course of twentieth-century history. Ligeti was born in Transylvania, a Jew in a multi-ethnic and polyglot region of what is now Romania but was once part of Hungary. Among Ligeti’s artistic ancestors was his great uncle Leopold Auer, the legendary violinist and pedagogue. Although his parents were sent to Auschwitz, the young Ligeti was condemned only to forced labor by the Nazis. After the war he studied composition and ethnomusicology in Budapest. Having grown up in the unstable and violent context of interwar Eastern Europe, dominated by competing nationalisms and anti-Semitism, Ligeti subsequently experienced the first decade of Hungarian communism in all its Stalinist rigidity. In the wake of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 Ligeti moved to the West and lived long enough to witness the fall of communism and the resurgence of provincial nationalism in Eastern Europe. By the end of his life, György Ligeti had secured a deserved reputation as a great composer and prophetic voice who was able to transform modernism in a way that allowed it to breathe more freely. His music is music of our time, entirely independent of the clichés of both modernism and post-modernism—a truly original voice.

Ligeti’s experience of the volatile twentieth century encapsulates the essential nature of modernity: the reconfiguring of the relationship of the individual to the world. Directly related to the politics and history of the period, and indeed a significant outgrowth of it, was the twentieth century’s transformation of our understanding of the universe and of space and time. It is no coincidence that the unprecedented disorder and destruction of the past that characterized the first half of the twentieth century was accompanied by utterly original thinking about physics and the relative universe, and that many groundbreaking technological achievements were made possible by advancements in modern warfare. Our realization of the enormity of the universe and the absence of any notion of absolute space and time reflected, at least in part, a reaction to our sense of the instability of the modern world, and a fundamental questioning of our place in it. Only the ages of Galileo and Newton witnessed similar fundamental intellectual sea-change in the way we perceive reality.

The twentieth century was marked by the consciousness of an expanding universe and the increasing recognition of the humble place occupied by the earth. Among the seminal events of the twentieth century was the onset of space travel—of satellites, interplanetary probes, and moon landings. These innovations were presented as advancements, and offered a sense of optimism and faith in scientific progress and human imagination that countered the memory of war-time devastation, and offered a sense of security during the Cold War. The conquering of space, the rise of technology, seemed to camouflage the instability of society with a vision of connectedness and collective human endeavor that promised to provide some sort of lucid justification of ourselves. Both optimism and ambiguity were promoted in science fiction: 2001: A Space Odyssey (in which may be heard Ligeti’s Atmosphères), Star Trek and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

But there was (and is) also a pervasive anxiety about the questions raised by our explorations of the universe and of physics. The pondering of our infinitesimally small occupation of space is an uncomfortable notion for many (which has helped inform a resurgence of religion among other forms of conservatism). In terms of popular culture, for all the wonderment of Star Trek, there are also xenophobic wars with the alien species, or the image of the mad scientist with his finger “on the button.” Our curiosity is tinged with a fear of leaving familiar understanding behind for the unknown, of having all our cherished conventions uprooted in favor of something that possibly, once proven, may not be ours to control. Instead of science offering us the comfort of knowing at last exactly what our position is in the cosmos, we are left with the same question that our earliest ancestors asked—just where are we?

This conflicted reaction to the modern world and its ever-changing philosophical and scientific premises deeply informed modern art and music. All of the composers on today’s program were interested in the idea of space—not just outer space but sonic space as well. Their breaking away from a unidirectional construction of sound, the conventional experience of the concert hall, reflects both the liberating spirit of experimentation that characterizes the modern, and an intense self-reflection regarding how we hear, the relativity of our position, and the accuracy of our perception. Their breathtaking parallel between the cosmos and the microcosm of our individual experience conjures the thrilling and disquieting relativity of the modern world. The very concept of space is scrutinized in these remarkable works, and the distance between performers and listeners becomes as speculative as the distance between planets.

If Ligeti’s achievement and originality framed the inspiration for this concert, he himself was inspired by an isolated, early twentieth-century innovator, almost the Charles Ives of Scandinavia, Rued Langgaard. As Peter Laki points out, Langgaard’s Symphony of the Spheres was an important influence on Ligeti. Andrzej Panufnik, like Ligeti, fled communist Eastern Europe (in Panufnik’s case, Poland) during the 1950s. Panufnik is one of the twentieth-century composers whose music should not be permitted in the midst of our anti-modernist enthusiasm, to fall into oblivion. Finally we thought it best to open this unique concert with a composer whose voice, in terms of originality, can be fairly compared to Ligeti. Born in the same generation, Tōru Takemitsu, who died in 1996, helped to reconceptualize sound. Like the other composers on this program, he was inspired by the lone, individual human fascination with space, time, and the universe of which the earth is part. The sonic response to existential contemplation is most brilliantly reflected in this work that bears the title of one of the more famous constellations. The structure of the work reflects the way the constellation appears to the naked eye—from the vantage point of our small planet.

All of these works turn to speculation about the universe, space, and time back into the human experience of music, so that the listener can experience sound on many different planes by restructuring the way sound is produced, where it comes from spatially, and how it is perceived and remembered. This is music that can only be heard acoustically and can never be accurately documented by recording. The multi-dimensional experience of space in the imagination is transformed into the multi-dimensional experience of sound in the concert hall. It is fitting to note that the heavens have long provided inspiration and a structural metaphor for composers. This concert is a modernist version of a tradition that dates to antiquity and the Renaissance: the notion of the harmony of the spheres as an aesthetic ideal for music.

A New Italian Renaissance

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert A New Italian Renaissance, performed on April 18, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Commenting on the death of Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936), Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) observed that despite the different musical paths they had taken, which led to a breach in their relationship, Respighi’s “point of departure was the same as that of our entire generation: the necessity to leave the outworn, sterile atmosphere of verismo as soon as possible, that is, to abandon the art of the preceding generation.” Indeed, all the composers on tonight’s program, with the exception of Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909) and Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), were represented on the first concert of a new Italian national music society on March 16, 1917. For Casella’s generation Martucci was considered a forerunner and the founder of a new resurgence of creativity in Italian music. He had taught Casella and Respighi and in 1895 advised the parents of the young Casella to send the talented boy abroad, for there was no one in Italy who could nurture his talent in a manner competitive with the progressive developments taking place in France, Germany, and Russia.

The notion that at the turn of the twentieth century many Italian musicians considered themselves in a relative backwater seems incredulous. Italy had long been regarded as a vibrant cultural alternative to the darker traditions of northern Europe. In the era of early Romanticism, during the first half of the nineteenth century, German intellectuals flocked to the south to gain new inspiration, following a path already charted by Winckelmann and Goethe. Italian opera dominated the European scene for generations before Wagner. The music of Chopin and Liszt is unimaginable without considering the influence of bel canto. Following Rossini, Bellini, and Donizetti came the towering figure of Giuseppe Verdi, represented tonight by arguably his best-known music from his best known opera Aida. Close on the heels of Verdi came the verismo style that Casella so despised.

Italy indeed was no nineteenth-century backwater. Nevertheless, despite the centrality of opera, its musical traditions—precisely because of their international currency—struggled to adapt to the rapidly changing political and social realities that overwhelmed the Italian peninsula after 1848. Under the adept leadership of the Piedmontese monarchy, war was waged against Austria (who controlled much of northern Italy, including Venice) and an alliance with France was consummated, leading to a nearly unified kingdom of Italy by 1860. A decade later, owing in part to the ability of Italian nationalism to create a united front between monarchists and republicans like Giuseppe Garibaldi, a new Italian nation came into being, almost simultaneously with the unification of Germany. Count Camillo Cavour, its architect, was born in 1810 and was just three years older than Verdi. He had been one of the founders of a newspaper dedicated to Italian nationalism in 1847 entitled Il risorgimento, the name of which became attached not only to a political ideal but a cultural one. Alessandro Manzoni’s epic novel The Betrothed was a jewel among that new cultural nationalism’s many literary achievements. But no one equaled Giuseppe Verdi as a symbol of the post-1848 spirit of a reborn Italy free of foreign political influence. The Triumphal March from Aida, which premiered in 1871, is a thinly veiled celebration of the political accomplishment of his generation: the bringing together of all the Italians.

But as late as 1913, younger Italian artists, intellectuals, and writers found fault with Verdi and his generation. Casella wrote an article that year (of which he was later ashamed) that was severely critical of Verdi. It was only decades later that Verdi’s greatness became apparent to him, as “the creator of new musical beauties. . .the man who strove, full of a sense of responsibility toward his art.” The problem for Casella’s generation was not so much with Verdi but with the artistic ideals that seemed compatible with the founding generation of national Italian political consciousness. The genre of opera and its overwhelming domination of the Italian scene were barriers to the engagement with modernity. Casella was fond of the following quote regarding Italian opera: “a special kind of artwork, built on the brink of an abyss of ridicule, which is upheld by the force of genius.” As Casella concluded, opera “demands of the spectator and the listener a real willingness to believe in that blind faith which is required by every heroic or religious act.”

For Martucci and those who followed in his path, the opportunity for a new contemporary Italian musical voice lay in the instrumental realm rather than the operatic. It is significant that Italy’s greatest conductor of the turn of the twentieth century, Arturo Toscanini, bridged the gulf between the operatic (including verismo) and the instrumental, finding reconciliation in an all-encompassing patriotism reminiscent of Verdi. Gian Francisco Malipiero (1882-1973) considered Martucci “a genius in every sense of the term.” The Second Symphony is his masterpiece, and despite the reservations expressed in the program note by Harvey Sachs, it calls for no apologies. It is astonishing that only the music of Respighi has managed to hold a place in the international repertory. Idlebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is an entirely forgotten figure, and Malipiero and Casella have both suffered in part because of indirect political associations with Italian fascism.

The failure of this group of Italian composers to sustain a wide following and international reputation is perhaps the result of the fact that none of the individuals on tonight’s program can claim to having originated a new or distinctive style in the manner of Debussy, Stravinsky, or Schoenberg. Casella, for example, radically varied his approach to composition during his career. Just as Martucci is accused of being derivative and too dependent on a Brahmsian model, Casella’s early dependence on French and Russian influences is held against him. Malipiero has emerged, in retrospect, as the most compelling and original composer of this generation. Unlike others, he sought to downplay his earliest work. Pizzetti in contrast represents almost the reverse case. His first period was his most original. He was, among other things, an early admirer of Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue. Pizzetti throughout his career exercised a powerful role in music education in Italy. But he was also one of the signatories of a notorious reactionary manifesto against modernism written in 1932.

The link between all the composers on tonight’s program is not merely generational. What binds them is the historical moment in which a new kind of nationalism and approach to life were in vogue that encompassed a rather Nietzsche-like ecstatic and immediate embrace of creative action, the mysticism of Gabriele D’Annunzio, the radical egalitarianism inherited from Garibaldi, and above all, a shared fascination and romance with Italy’s history. All these composers at one time or another looked backwards to two singular moments when the Italian peninsula dominated the world. In the political realm, as Mussolini’s brand of fascism revealed, it was the glory of Rome that held sway. In the arts, it was the overwhelming superiority of the Italian Renaissance in music, architecture, painting, and poetry that was revisited in the form of a distinct neo-classicism. Furthermore, this new cultural nationalism kept its distance from the Rome of the Catholic Church and continued the strong anti-clerical strain of the mid nineteenth-century Italian risorgimento.

Despite the accusation of eclecticism, each of these composers produced more fine music than is represented in this program or in orchestral repertoire generally. Once again, greatness in music ought not be reduced to a criterion of originality that is perceptible and audible only on the surface. The originality of Bach, Haydn, and Mozart cannot be located by looking for markers of a new style. Yet in the post-Wagnerian era we are prisoners of the privileging of a certain kind of stylistic originality. The heterogeneity of influence audible in these composers’ work should not be a barrier to responding to the beauty and power of their achievement. Insofar as the reputations of Pizzetti, Malipiero, Casella, and to a lesser extent Respighi, have been damaged by tacit and active endorsement of Mussolini, it should be remembered that much of Europe in the 1920s thought well of Mussolini. These individuals were not alone in failing to recognize the disastrous trajectory inherent in fascist nationalism, particularly when it was combined with dreams of renewed imperial grandeur. The time has come to rethink our relationship with the music of these early-twentieth century Italian masters of non-operatic composition who shared with Verdi and Martucci an enthusiasm for a new, unified political future and present for Italians—one that could put an end to the enmity and rivalry that dominated Italian politics before 1870 and still does today. They sought to fashion not only works of art but institutions of education and performance that would represent a new modern Italian renaissance that mirrored in culture the political emancipation from foreign domination. Their efforts were not in vain. Without the musical advances made by this generation, the nearly unrivaled creativity in the realm of new music in Italy after 1945 would be unthinkable.

The Destruction of Jerusalem

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Destruction of Jerusalem, performed on March 16, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Not all attempts to reconstruct our musical heritage—or redress the distortions in standard accounts of music history by rehabilitating works once popular and now forgotten—are self-explanatory. Simply dusting off a forgotten masterpiece in the hope that it will spontaneously recapture its former glory may not always be enough. We may want to believe that aesthetic criteria are somehow stable over time, and that a great work will appear great no matter when and where in history it came from and when and where it is performed. But aesthetic judgments are fluid; they change with generations and circumstances. Some works that once were marginal have become famous; others have moved from the periphery to the center (or the reverse) with ease, because new generations of observers forge new connections between these works and their own experience. In literature, for example, Virgil’s Aeneid was long admired as a poetic model. It became a staple of general education in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Then, in the last century, it fell victim to a revived enthusiasm for Homer and was relegated to a secondary position. Now we find it appearing once again in new translations and in course syllabi as current readers find salient analogies between Imperial Rome and contemporary America. Just last year, Beowulf became a familiar name once again to millions as the subject of the first full-length digitally generated non-cartoon film (though its resemblance to the ancient epic is hazy, to say the least). In music history, perhaps the most famous example of revival and restoration was the music of Bach in the 1820s in Germany, best symbolized by twenty-year-old Felix Mendelssohn’s 1829 Berlin performance of the St. Matthew Passion.

Closer to our own time, the rejection of the conceits of twentieth-century musical modernism and the renewed interest in Romantic musical expressiveness have led us back to many anti-modernist composers of the twentieth century and lesser-known composers of the nineteenth, who just a few decades ago were considered irrelevant in the elite world of art music. Some of these composers whose reputations now enjoy a new stature in the repertory include Zemlinsky, Dohnányi, Suk, Glazunov, Elgar, Rimsky-Korsakov, Chausson, Chabrier, and Szymanowski. Today’s renewed enthusiasm for Sibelius and Shostakovich is in part a consequence of the Mahler revival that began in the 1960s.

But there is a second category of music that also deserves a new hearing, but which has never benefited from a favorable turn in the historical tide after its initial success. Works like Ferdinand Hiller’s The Destruction of Jerusalem were once familiar, loved, and respected, but the attachment to them was grounded in a set of cultural assumptions and values we no longer seem to share and appreciate. The music may be of the highest quality, but our perception of its value in our altered historical circumstances denies us immediate access to it—except as an object of archeological interest. This is certainly the case with Hiller, and even more so with two of his older contemporaries, Ludwig Spohr (1784-1859) and Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791-1864). Hiller may have composed one truly great large-scale masterpiece, but Spohr and Meyerbeer both produced a large corpus of works that were consistently well-received in their lifetimes. Meyerbeer was the most successful and beloved opera composer before Wagner. Spohr was, in the opinion of Johannes Brahms, the greatest composer of his time, the last in a line of giants that began with Mozart and Haydn. Hiller was certainly very well known in his day, and the work on today’s program was championed by Robert Schumann (see his two reviews reprinted in this publication). That figures like Hiller, once formidable in their day, have become so unfamiliar now begs for an explanation of what could have happened, both to them and to us, to cause such a sharp disconnect between past and present. The quality of the music per se is not at issue, in view of the respect accorded to it by composers we still revere today. Then what happened?

Many of the assumptions that influence us today regarding what it is that constitutes musical genius and greatness evolved in the later part of the nineteenth century. They were most compellingly articulated and disseminated by Richard Wagner. In his legendary 1870 essay on Beethoven, Wagner posited that what was then considered the least accessible music of Beethoven—the Ninth Symphony, the late piano sonatas, and quartets—were in fact Beethoven’s greatest achievements. This idea represented a reversal of the way Beethoven’s genius and music had been understood before the mid-nineteenth century, when his middle “heroic” period was judged his most important work, and his late period often derided as the obscure efforts of a deaf, eccentric old man. Wagner (his own image not far from his mind) argued that the more removed the composer was from reigning tastes and fashions, the more alienated from his own age—even in Beethoven’s case, to the point of being insulated by deafness—the more visionary and original his music became; therefore, the more authentic it was as true art, and the more attuned to future generations. Ferdinand Hiller had the misfortune to come of age at a time before 1848 (the legendary watershed in nineteenth-century history), and then to survive well beyond it, dying at the age of nearly 75 in 1885, two years after Wagner’s death and at the height of the rage for Wagnerian modernity. Because Hiller was rooted in a fundamentally different conception of music and its relation to the public from that expressed in Wagner’s essay, Hiller was branded in his later career as an obsolete conservative.

Indeed, as Robert Schumann’s assessment demonstrates, Hiller shared with Felix Mendelssohn an idea of the composer that was diametrically opposed to Wagner’s glorification of the isolated and alienated artist, the artist as prophet of the future. For Mendelssohn and Hiller, large-scale musical composition needed to speak entirely to the present moment, communicating simply and without undue evidence of a narcissistic desire to shock the audience with startling originality and lay waste to the past. Hiller wanted to interact with a public, and in his case that public was a widely engaged one of literate, urban, middle-class, dedicated musical amateurs and connoisseurs.

Perhaps this eagerness to engage with the known public of their day (rather than with Wagnerian visions of future adoring crowds) was due in part to the fact that Mendelssohn and Hiller were members of the first full generation of affluent German-speaking Jews to enjoy the benefits of emancipation and tolerance. They enjoyed acceptance as serious contenders in secular European arts and letters. This was the generation of Heinrich Heine, when assimilation coincided with the opening of opportunity for leading talents of Jewish origin to assert themselves as cultural leaders. It was only after the revolution and reaction between the years 1848 and 1860 that rabid and populist nationalism, and its concomitant anti-Semitism (strongly advocated by those such as Wagner), that the brief age of tolerance that produced a Mendelssohn and a Hiller came to an end. After all, it was an important part of the Wagnerian ideology that no Jew could possess the kind of artistic genius that Wagner attributed to Beethoven.

The Destruction of Jerusalem therefore should remind us of the beauty that can result when the composer’s ambition is defined exclusively by his contemporary public and not by posterity. In Hiller’s world tolerance, optimism, and acceptance seemed dominant, as opposed to the fear, chauvinism, suspicion of religious and cultural difference, and paranoia of enemies within, that came to characterize Wagner’s generation. Ironically, the subject matter of Hiller’s oratorio itself is a parable of that very difference in sensibility.

But despite its religious connotations, Hiller’s oratorio is not a religious work. Rather, it represents a startling effort to define a new participatory cultural form: the secular oratorio based on religious subject matter. More so than Mendelssohn’s St. Paul (1836), to which this work is only partially indebted, Hiller’s oratorio is decidedly designed for public performance in a secular venue rather than a house of worship. Biblical texts and stories are stripped of their sectarian identification and turned into narratives designed for cultural edification. Unlike Mendelssohn, Hiller does not lean heavily on eighteenth-century models of Bach and Handel. Rather, he blends traditions of the eighteenth-century oratorio with techniques derived from contemporary opera, creating a form of musical drama that is theatrical but dispenses with the apparatus of the theater, relying instead on the sequential progression of music and text as vehicles of expression in a concert setting. As Hiller wrote to Mendelssohn, he wanted his oratorio to be played in a “noble concert hall” because its purpose was the generic “celebration of religious feeling.” The oratorio demanded that it be “dramatic” and be organized in a way that delivers to the audience sharp contrasts without the apparent devotional solemnity of, for example, the St. Matthew Passion. St. Paul offered an idealized and secularized religiosity. The Destruction of Jerusalem takes religious history as a source for epic storytelling. Hiller’s innovation led to a long tradition of secular oratorio writing that lasted well into the early twentieth century in England, France, and Germany. Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius; Dvořák’s St. Ludmila; the stunning oratorios of Max Bruch; César Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns, Anton Rubinstein; these are only part of the legacy of the nineteenth-century secular oratorio based on the experience and tradition of religion. In this continuum, The Destruction of Jerusalem was one of the earliest and among the most popular and influential.

The musical strategy Hiller employs is the very opposite of that which Wagner sought to praise in his singling out of late Beethoven. Hiller’s music is eminently accessible, straightforward, and direct in the best sense of the word. He presents us with one possible musical equivalent of the historical painting that flourished in Hiller’s day: a massive canvas of representation not dependent on mysticism, symbolism, and philosophical abstraction. Rather, transparent and powerful figures illuminate the essential elements of human emotion and expression.

We do not live in an age in which the work of Ferdinand Hiller can communicate to us so readily anymore. His music speaks to a rare and brief moment when several communities in Germany co-existed peacefully, an age soon to be shattered. But listening to Hiller again should at a minimum help us try to envision a moment in time when concert music had a central place in civic life and when there was still hope that the spread of culture and enlightenment could lead to a better world, and where the universality of experience was more important than national differences and distinctions of religion. But it is also hoped that this work, though highly prized by contemporary observers—not the least of whom was Schumann, whose own great oratorio Das Paradies und die Peri (1842; performed by ASO last season and previously at the Bard Music Festival) was in part inspired by Hiller’s success—will win among today’s audience new admirers because of its evident beauty. In an age that has seen a re-engagement with musical simplicity and accessibility, perhaps the time has come to set aside our Wagnerian inheritance in musical taste (and the politics it implies) and reexamine the elegant and moving legacy of pre-1848 musical works.

Russian Futurists

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Russian Futurists, performed on Jan 25, 2008 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The period from the mid-1890s to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, particularly its last years, has been termed the “Silver Age” in the history of Russian art and culture. This was an era that witnessed rapid economic development and, after the Revolution of 1905, the hesitant beginnings of political liberalization. But the First World War was a disaster for the czarist regime both at home and at the front. The success of the Bolshevik coup during the War led to years of internal strife, including a civil war and a war with the newly constituted Poland. Nevertheless, the 1917 Revolution created a sense of euphoria and optimism, particularly among Russian intellectuals and artists. From the beginning there was a group of younger but prominent figures such as Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and the violinists Nathan Milstein and Jascha Heifetz for whom the communist Revolution spelled disaster; but for many of their contemporaries—even those without direct sympathy for the new regime’s ideology—the sense of hope prevailed, particularly concerning the role of culture in the new Russia.

In the leadership cadre under Lenin, many such as Leon Trotsky saw in the great flourishing of artistic innovation in the years leading up to the Revolution an implicit support for the regime in terms of the spread of new ideas and new directions—particularly regarding the role of art in society. It was Trotsky who coined the word poputchik for artists and intellectuals who were not members of the communist party nor subscribed to the tenets of socialism, but who had clearly despised the czarist autocracy that had been overthrown. Indeed, from 1917 to 1934, when the communist party under Stalin formally adopted the doctrine of socialist realism in art, the Soviet government (albeit with warring factions and endless disputes) supported a rather eclectic range of artistic effort in all fields from literature to painting, theater, and music. The 1920s was therefore a time of exciting and explosive experimentation and innovation. The oversight of the arts was handed to Anatoly Vasilievitch Lunacharsky (1875-1933), a playwright and a Bolshevik, who described himself as “an intellectual among Bolsheviks, a Bolshevik among the intelligentsia.” His musical tastes ranged from the classical to the mysticism of the silver age, particularly the music of Scriabin. It was he who appointed Arthur Lourié to administer the field of music. Under Lunacharsky’s leadership, Russian constructivism in painting witnessed its heyday and the visionary and theatrical daring of Vesevolod Meyerhold was celebrated. These were also the years of the experimentalism of Marc Chagall and the Kafka-like absurdist drama of Vladimir Mayakovsky.

From the outset, however, there was an ironic continuation of the tradition of czarist censorship. Intervention by the state constituted a present danger. The poet Anna Akhmatova’s husband was executed in 1921 for anti-Soviet activity. One year later Akhmatova herself was criticized as a bourgeois holdover, and after 1925, her work was prevented from being published. Nevertheless, particularly in music, the opportunity for experimentation and innovation was real and apparently encouraged, even though Arthur Lourié was one of the first to see the handwriting on the wall, as it were, and precipitously left for Berlin in 1921.

The decisive influences in the Russian context on the composers represented on this evening’s program include Russian populist and nationalist tendencies evident in the work of Rimsky-Korsakov, the more traditional yet distinctly Russian romanticism of Glazunov, the ethereal spiritualism of Liadov, and the harmonic innovations of Scriabin. But the crucial inspiration of the 1917 Revolution was the idea that history had in some profound manner stopped or come to a definite end. With the Revolution there was the sense that an opportunity had been created for a new art that could accompany a socially just future, a new age radically different from the past. Despite all this innovation, however, there was no immediate need, as there would be later, for the regime to erase or revise history. Lunacharsky saw to it that there was some substantial continuity in the cultural institutions that had come into prominence during the silver age. There is perhaps no better image of this sense of a freely determined modernist future visible against a recognized past, than perhaps the well-known—albeit late—example of the Soviet aesthetic of the 1920s: the building that won the competition for the construction of a tomb for Lenin. Lenin’s tomb, a familiar image throughout the world, is a stark example of modernist architecture, bereft of all ornament and decoration and utterly rational in its geometry. This tribute to the great leader of the Revolution was placed right next to the Kremlin, a compound that contains powerful historical examples of Russian religious and secular architecture. It is located in Red Square, diagonally across from St. Basil’s, itself a source of Russian Orthodox faith. The tomb sits across from a nineteenth-century version of a European arcade, an ornate historicist building that would become GUM, now home to Russia’s high-end consumer culture, filled with boutiques selling unimaginably expensive luxury items from the West. What the tomb signifies is the notion that the art that accompanies a rational and true end of history in communism must itself be visibly rational and logical, without superfluous and arbitrary aesthetic individualism.

The equivalent in music to the formalist experiments in art and architecture, particularly the idea of a non-objective use of form, color, and line in a manner consciously departing from traditions of realism and abstraction, are most starkly audible in Mosolov’s legendary The Iron Foundry, part of a ballet written to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Revolution. The familiar aesthetic rhetoric of beauty and sentiment is set aside and modernity is embraced, as is the triumph of industrial progress. Just as social and industrial advancement are adopted as suitable subjects for art, ambient sounds of industry and progress move to the center of music itself, obliterating conventional distinctions between consonance and dissonance. This overtly radical departure into a new aesthetic was, of course, not quite as radical as it appeared. Lunacharsky and Trotsky understood the importance of supporting continuity between the explicit modernism within the silver age’s romance with symbolism, particularly its attendant forays into new kinds of harmony and sound. Mosolov would not be comprehensible without Scriabin, just as the new literature of the Soviet 1920s was a direct outgrowth of the great poetic achievements of Anna Akhmatova and Alexander Blok. This mixture of past and present elements informs the aesthetic of Shcherbachov’s Second Symphony and even his choice of Blok. Blok was the great Russian symbolist poet whose later work engaged the idea that Russia had a unique historical destiny. The Revolution, which Blok embraced, seemed proof of his apocalyptic sensibilities. Unlike Akhmatova, who suffered for decades under the Soviet regime until her death in 1966, Blok died in 1921. He was depressed and isolated from all factions, but was spared the radical disillusionment caused by the increasing tyranny of the Soviet state. Ironically, it was Blok’s death that inspired Akhmatova to write the verses that are set by Lourié on tonight’s program.

But from the outset, there was never unanimity about what new Soviet art and music was supposed to be like. All believed that the Bolshevik Revolution demanded art forms to which the masses and workers could immediately relate. Certain factions believed these forms required simplicity and tunefulness, accessible music that clearly rejected bourgeois claims of aesthetic judgment, refinement, and originality. The self-indulgent individualism and the sentimentality of late romanticism had to be purged in favor of a common aesthetic denominator. But others questioned if the role of the artist was not to educate the masses so that they could appreciate artistic creation of a higher order. Was there indeed a legacy of artistic creation that could be adapted to the new political and social ideals? If so, then the new art required a sharp leap forward into an austere, rational modernism. Or was the route to art that could serve the new state best connected more directly to transparent and recognizable folk and popular traditions?

Radical modernists like Mosolov believed their new approach to sound and music-making obliterated false refinement and created a common ground for solidarity within a radical new utopian vision, ennobling the experiences of everyday life such as working in factories. This is the ideology that also informs Gavriil Popov’s Symphonic Suite No. 1. This Suite derives from music for a film celebrating the Komsomol and the bringing of electricity to the masses. Film became a central medium in the Soviet 1920s, because it was at once modern, new, and utterly accessible. In its “silent” phase it presented an opportunity to combine the visual with musical accompaniment and literary narrative. Film quickly became an emblematic instrument of the new age, and Russian filmmakers like Sergei Eisenstein pioneered camera techniques that came to define the conventions of cinematic storytelling for the rest of the world.

The question of whether to make revolutionary art into a tool that could educate the masses in the sophisticated aesthetics of modernity, or to base musical art on a language of anti-bourgeois simplicity that the masses already understood, was never resolved in practical use. When Stalin (a fan of Western classical music and secretly of cowboy films) assumed power, many in the modernist camp would be accused of self-indulgent aesthetic narcissism and bourgeois individualism because their music was “formalist,” hard to comprehend and justified only in relation to the history of art, not the history of the proletariat. Stalin effectively ended the period of artistic freedom and experimentation in the 1930s. The conclusion of little over a decade of optimism after 1917 was abrupt and cruel. The silencing, imprisonment, internal exile, persecution, and execution of artists, writers, and composers ensured that this period would be largely forgotten in later years in the assessment of the history of the Soviet Union. Stalin’s deadly suppression of “non-revolutionary” art is well understood, but the irony of what he and his cohorts promoted is sometimes overlooked. Their intent was to appropriate pre-revolutionary forms of musical expression, popular and folk music, as an accessible form of realism. Aesthetically, their revolution was no revolution at all, but the co-opting of familiarity for propagandistic purposes. We may smile today at what seems to be the propagandistic subjects of Mosolov and Popov, but they are not very propagandistic after all because these composers really believed these subjects to be suitable for the advanced music they envisioned. It was not until after 1930 that musical methods were forced upon composers and their task defined as composing for a state that understood art as nothing but a means of mass indoctrination and manipulation.

The consequences of Stalin’s rise to power were devastating for both Mosolov and Popov. The 1920s were Popov’s finest years, but he was condemned publicly along with Shostakovich in the mid-1930s. Although he would later win several official prizes, Popov retreated into a much more conventional and safe mode of composition. He died in 1972, never having realized the enormous promise and brilliance evident not only in tonight’s work but also in the 1927 Septet and the 1934 Symphony No. 1 (premiered in the US by the American Symphony Orchestra in 2003). Mosolov died one year after Popov in 1973. In the early 1930s he took the brunt of the rising criticism against modernism by advocates of proletarian simplicity. He was arrested in 1938, and after his release he spent the remainder of his career in the study of folk traditions. Mosolov and Popov demonstrate how easy it is for terror and autocracy to crush artistic expression and free speech. Although Lourié escaped and moved from Berlin to Paris and then the United States, the act of emigration was sufficiently traumatic to prevent him from producing music of the quality suggested by his early work.

Shcherbachov was an important and influential figure, particularly as a teacher, in the years following 1917. Like Popov (one of Shcherbachov’s students), he had his finest moment during the 1920s. He helped develop the curriculum of the Leningrad Conservatory and was permitted to make frequent trips to the West, allowing him to keep abreast of contemporary developments. In 1930 he was forced out. He eventually returned but was again condemned in 1948 and died in official disfavor in 1952.

The most well-known and compelling figures who came of age before 1917 were Shostakovich and Prokofiev. Prokofiev emigrated to the West but ultimately returned in the 1930s. Shostakovich was eleven years old when the Revolution occurred, and never left Russia. His is the most interesting and controversial case. He was the new Soviet regime’s poster boy. He experienced enormous acclaim with his First Symphony in 1926, and became famous abroad as the most promising new modernist voice of Soviet Russia. But his love affair with the regime came to an abrupt end in the mid-1930s when his music was condemned, probably by Stalin himself—particularly his extremely popular opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (1934). Unlike Popov and Mosolov, Shostakovich rebounded and found a way to continue to compose in a manner that appeared to reconcile artistic individuality with the strictures placed on a state-sponsored composer. But Shostakovich’s output can only be understood as emerging from a desperate and dangerous crucible created by the Soviet state and its relation to the arts.

Shostakovich’s music for The Bedbug exemplifies the most experimental and courageous phase of his career. Meyerhold, the great director (imprisoned and executed by Stalin in 1940), discovered the young Shostakovich, and encouraged and collaborated with him. Meyerhold was among the most visible symbols for the possibilities of modernism in the new Soviet state. At his suggestion, Shostakovich agreed to write incidental music to the era’s most adventurous and well-known poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who committed suicide in 1930 (or was perhaps assassinated).

Here, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, we live in a time in which the accepted consensus regarding music written in the so-called classical tradition is that it has lost its relevance. The important cultural and political music of our time exists outside the confines of the concert hall and opera stage. It is therefore perhaps not so easy to understand what it meant to write the compelling and daring music of nearly a century ago at a time and in a nation where those in power believed orchestral and operatic music and the work of composers was not only important, but also potentially dangerous. The significance placed on the work of these composers and the pressure to which they were subjected are hard to imagine for us, who live in a time and place in which freedom is taken for granted, individualism prized, and “high art” music in the concert and operatic traditions is most often heard as background for commercials. It was incredibly difficult to be an artist or composer in the Soviet era, when the State listened to everything that was composed and written; but as an exiled Russian poet whom I met in the 1970s and who had been sent to prison for her work told me: although in Soviet Russia one could be arrested for writing love poetry, in the United States, writing poetry—even verses that condemn politicians and the government—goes entirely unnoticed and unread.

Human Elements

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Human Elements, performed on Nov 18, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is ironic that the four composers on today’s program, whose work ranges from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth, should be inspired by one of the most ancient theories of human nature. The concept of the four elements reaches back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. They believed all matter to be composed of fire, air, earth, and water. From that quartet, Hippocrates and Galen derived a theory of human psychology based on biology: fire corresponded to the preponderance of yellow bile in the human body, and produced a choleric temperament, passionate and energetic; air corresponded to blood, endowing a sanguine disposition of hope and cheerfulness; a connection to the earth through black bile meant a melancholy, depressed personality; and those who displayed a penchant for logic, serenity, and unemotional behavior could attribute their character to the dominance of phlegm and its association with the element of water. This theory held sway throughout the Middle Ages, and was a primary principle of alchemy.

But by the time the composers on today’s program were alive, the four temperaments had long ceased to be a scientific explanation of human nature. The onset of the scientific revolution based on empiricism and the Enlightenment had replaced that simple theory with more sophisticated hypotheses regarding the physical universe, biology, and the human mind. By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the humors were well on their way to becoming folklore, more appropriate for the poetry of Alexander Pope than the experiments of William Harvey. Today’s four composers knew they were choosing an antiquated notion for their inspiration, and they were conscious that their audience knew that too. What possible attraction, then, could this model have for them?

A look at both the recurrently alluring nature of the theory and at the context in which these artists lived might yield some clues. Although the humors are obsolete, they reflect a persistent impulse in human civilization: the need to describe the way we all are, and to provide a more intuitively coherent picture of the external world. This is not so far from the objective of modern science. The humors provide an elegant explanation for the makeup of human character with the additional bonus that the theory is remarkably reductive and therefore simple. It is a primitive precursor of the contemporary engagement with the structure of DNA and the human genome. The pattern of four temperaments has a populist symmetry to the four points of the compass, the four seasons, and the four winds. It has a common-sense appearance that eludes the arcane findings of modern science. And the humors theory also suggests claims that are still cogent today, particularly the idea that temperament may derive largely from biology and is therefore subject to an almost alchemical intervention (Prozac neutralizes black bile, presumably). This may be why, despite its reductiveness, the theory has continued in modern popular psychology, as in the work of David Keirsey. Even though the theory of temperaments and elements long ago lost its prestige in science, it continued to thrive in poetry and painting, and in the popular imagination.

The social transformations that occurred in the world from the era of Johann Strauss Sr. to that of Frank Martin reflect the triumph of modernity with all its complications and continuous, rapid change. Strauss’s industrializing-nineteenth century Europe was consumed by a debate over the nature of music as a significant activity of the human mind. The debate concerning music as a distinctly human activity had been sparked by another more fundamental debate regarding language and expression in general. Since the Enlightenment, political philosophy has privileged the notion that human society was ideally a social contract. If humans were considered capable of negotiating their differences, compromising, and organizing social and political structures in which equal participation and membership were essential elements, it was because of a universal capacity for language, as opposed to superior strength or aggression. The utopian ideal of democratic reform and social contract theory rested on the premise that language, precisely because it was available to everyone, could supplant violence and subjugation and instead operate on principles of civil liberty, consensus, and the self-imposed discipline of citizenship.

Inevitably, this focus on language as a universal characteristic influenced a parallel belief regarding art as a basic form of human expression. Music was particularly interesting in this regard, because it seemed at once universal and at the same time profoundly individual. What was it that touched the emotions of everyone, but in a thousand individual ways? The activity of music can be understood as connecting all the people of the world, but yet no two individuals have identical tastes and reactions. Nineteenth-century thinkers pondered whether music revealed something about humans that language could not, and whether and how it transcended ordinary linguistic communication. From Heinrich Helmholtz and Ernst Mach to Oliver Sacks, the question of how music works on the brain and body have fascinated scientists, psychologists, and therapists.

Amid the social and philosophical debates, and in the midst of the thrilling and terrifying advent of modern society, these composers turned back (as so many others would and still do) to a persistently compelling and useful framework. As Noga Arikha chronicles in her recent book Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours, the four temperaments continue to provide in their very obsolescence an effective and convenient metaphorical framework to understand human behavior. From a composer’s point of view their division of emotion into four discrete contrasts is as brilliant as it is convenient. The transformations that a composer creates with musical materials become audible through repetition, variation, and contrast. Unity and difference may be reconciled in a composition through a basic strategy that is capable of realizing seemingly limitless variety comparable to the human mind. And yet commonality remains. In the everyday world, we repeatedly reveal in the course of a single day all four temperaments, yet we sense (it is to be hoped) a continuity in our selves.

Musical variation and transformation work with similar flexibility and adaptability. The four movement structure of a symphony (particularly after Beethoven) for example, was understood to be an essay in both unity and contrast. It is fascinating, therefore, to borrow as a framework an eminently familiar and even comforting scheme of human nature, to insert it into our chaotic, unstable world, and use it to invoke the inexhaustible transformations of music.

In this context, the elder Johann Strauss takes full advantage of the venerable notion that music could profoundly impact the humors by manipulating moods and emotions. He was a pioneer in deepening musical response by pairing listening with physical motion through the waltz. The waltz represented a controversial arena of human interaction. On one hand it seemed provocative and obliquely sexual in the way the two partners interacted. On the other hand, the music displaced or sublimated the confrontation of the two individuals. It was an opportunity for subtle emotional communication within a context that tested but did not exceed notions of propriety. As the subject of a waltz, the four temperaments crystallize the psychological aspect of the physical conversation between the dancers.

Carl Nielsen uses the four temperaments to lend a self-conscious frame to symphonic form. Music, as all listeners know, transforms our perception of time. Just as the engrossed reader of a novel experiences imaginary chronologies that do not correspond to the actual time it takes to read the novel, so too listening to music expands and contracts our relationship with real time. A listener can become absorbed in an emotional or reflective state that is not contingent on an impression of the passing of time. That capacity for temporal transformation is partly located in the way we ascribe meaning to music. The four humors viewed as states of being therefore lend themselves well to musical characterization that seeks to concentrate our awareness of imagined time and our own personal states of mind, without the external influence of image or text.

Paul Hindemith’s connection to the subject is more akin to that of Strauss. It derives from a visual and choreographic impulse. Once again words are set aside and music becomes the medium of physical gesture in a manner that is appropriate not only to signaling emotion but expanding its experience so that the listeners, by the confrontation with music, deepen their sense of the character and quality of emotional states of being. Finally, with Frank Martin we return to the physical foundation of the theory of humors, the four elements of matter: earth, air, fire, and water. In a way, this work provides the best metaphor for the four elements and temperaments in music. As simple as the four elements seem, one of the triumphs of modern science has been the revelation of the dynamic atomic and sub-atomic structure they share. Beneath the deceptive surface that common sense shows us is a fantastic, multi-faceted reality. So it is with music: simple shared elements like pitch and rhythm are transformed by the human imagination into unique and differentiated works of art.

The Wreckers

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Wreckers, performed on Sep 30, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When a work the scope and magnitude of Ethel Smyth’s The Wreckers is brought back into the public arena (in America for the first time) over a hundred years after its first performance, inevitable questions come to mind. Why this long neglect? Is there some sort of flaw or inferiority that justifies its obscurity? Furthermore, even if the work possesses powerful qualities, will a revival in an entirely different historical context bring it back to life in a current sense, so that it might receive future performances?

All such cases are complex. Often, “masterpieces” survive the ages not only because of elements of excellence, but because historical circumstances favor their endurance. Perhaps they evoke the consummate achievement of a figure such as Wagner who seems to lend a sense of coherence and comprehensibility to the time in which he lived, or perhaps they succinctly exemplify a nation or sensibility, such as Elgar’s Cello Concerto (helped too by the advocacy of a famous artist). Conversely, if they do not fit the scheme properly, they can be set aside to be discovered at a later time, as was the case with late Beethoven.

Or, if they can claim none of the advantages that have traditionally marked success, such as, for instance, deriving from a culture with a dominant musical legacy, or even being composed by a white European man, they may never even come in for consideration as masterpieces. The neglect of The Wreckers has multiple sources. Before Benjamin Britten’s success as an opera composer, English opera was an object of disregard even inside England. The most famous composer of the English musical Renaissance, Edward Elgar, never wrote an opera, despite the enormous impression Wagner had made on him. Although many non-comic English operas were written, particularly during the first half of the twentieth century, (notably by Delius and Vaughn Williams), they never seemed to have taken hold. The public’s taste was clearly weighted towards the German, Italian, and French operatic repertoire. Ironically, the best known of English opera composers, Frederick Delius, experienced, like Ethel Smyth, whatever success he had in Germany and his stage works received their greatest response in productions in the German language.

The English lack of support for native opera was difficult enough, but added to that in Smyth’s case are the realities of being a Victorian woman. The often brutally restricted lifestyle of British women at that time is so well-known as to be a cliché, though it is just as certain that Victorian women of a certain class resembled the ladies of Upstairs, Downstairs about as much as twentieth-century American women resemble the idealized housewives of 1950s television. It was, after all, an age of repression but also the age of the suffragettes, women who risked social and physical danger for the sake of human rights. Of these Smyth was a notable member; indeed she was imprisoned for her activities along with her friend Emmeline Pankhurst. Even among the extraordinary women of the time, however, Smyth in her lifestyle and achievements stands out. Born to wealth, she lived a complicated and varied life. Among her remarkable circle of friends (some of whom were also her lovers), were Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, the wife of her teacher and one of Brahms’s closest friends and pupils and herself a musician of considerable talent. Smyth was also close friends with the wife of the archbishop of Canterbury, the wife of Queen Victoria’s private secretary, the former Empress of France Eugenie, the millionaire Mary Dodge, and most famously, Virginia Woolf. She was an accomplished sports enthusiast. She held her own in the company of the great English composers whom she befriended in her lifetime, and among the admirers of her music were Sir Thomas Beecham, Artur Nikisch, and Bruno Walter. Besides The Wreckers, there were the operas The Boatswain’s Mate, as well as the earlier Fantasio and Der Wald, both of which received their first performances in Germany (Der Wald was the first opera composed by a woman to be performed at the Metropolitan Opera). On her seventy-fifth birthday in 1934, under Beecham’s direction, her work was celebrated in a festival, the final event of which was held at the Royal Albert Hall in the presence of the Queen. Heartbreakingly, at this moment of long-overdue recognition, the composer was already completely deaf and could hear neither her own music nor the adulation of the crowds.

The greatest appeal of The Wreckers is not an overwhelming lyrical or melodic element, but the drama as manifested in the interaction of voices, orchestral sound, and storyline. The Wreckers’s libretto, unlike that of Delius’s A Village Romeo and Juliet (1907), is not based on the work of a great author such as Gottfried Keller; the text itself, by Smyth’s sometime lover Henry Brewster, possesses little in the way of redeeming poetry, especially in its somewhat awkward English-language version (it was originally to be produced in French). But the story is compelling in its personal and moral dimensions. It is the sonic canvas Smyth produces primarily through the use of orchestra and chorus that gives the opera its memorable moments. To contemporary audiences this was, as George Bernard Shaw observed, a matter of some irony. When many artists, including Elgar, called for a vigorous, muscular music indicative of the British character, these are precisely the qualities to be found in abundance in Smyth’s music, both in The Wreckers and throughout the corpus of her work.

The Wreckers, though not perfect, is perhaps the finest opera written in modern history by a woman before World War II. But it is not through a legitimate desire to rectify a long standing prejudice against female composers that one needs to take a second look at this opera. The story Smyth chose to set presents a tale that should be of intense interest to contemporary audiences. It concerns an isolated community in Cornwall that possesses a religiously based fanatical self-regard that leads it to justify theft and murder as God-given rights and virtues. Led by its own pastor who invokes Christianity, violence becomes the instrument of realizing God’s will. The opera depicts the consequences of mass hysteria and populist justice, Draconian in its nature against those who resist the imposition of a moral code based solely on perceived divine, not human, justice. The toxic roots of this fanaticism are ignorance, poverty, and economic despair.

Though the story is fictitious, the existence of wreckers on the British coast was a historical fact. In small, desperately poor villages, bands of villagers formed secret cadres that at critical moments extinguished the beacons established on the coast to guide ships, thus forcing them onto the rocks and then plundering the cargo and murdering the crews. The time period in which Smyth chooses to set the opera suggests that she knew of the great Methodist minister John Wesley’s unsuccessful attempt to stop the practice of wrecking. But Smyth’s minister, Pascoe, uses religious enthusiasm for a very different end. The potentially dangerous power of unquestioned religious faith and the twisting of a moral system to justify violence will resonate with audiences today even more than with the audiences of Smyth’s era, and yet, her prescient subject matter suggests the omnipresent shadow of religious extremism throughout history, and not only among societies different from our own.

The Wreckers is a work of many strengths and some flaws, but what it has to say is more than enough reason to warrant its return to the stage. The style, as many have observed, is both distinctive and eclectic. There are ballads and ensemble pieces of an affecting simplicity, and dramatic touches vaguely reminiscent of both German and Italian practices. There are moments, particularly in the prelude to the second act, when one can hear the influence of French modernism, notably Debussy. The entire opera is framed by a powerful display of orchestral writing, memorable motivic recurrence, and a brilliant use of chorus; the final scenes of Acts I and III are particularly on a par with the finest moments in the operatic repertory. Smyth’s treatment of the recitative-like moments that advance the storyline and link the larger musical moments are not always handled with the same assurance one might expect from an experienced opera composer, and that puts a burden on the protagonists to sustain the drama. But there is little point to asking whether this work stands up to the often arbitrary and inconsistent standards that have come to define the greatest operas of the repertoire. Regardless of the many evaluations it should and will provoke, The Wreckers stands as a significant achievement in the fin de siècle, and is distinguished for its casting of the perennial twin subjects of opera, love and death, into a commentary about community, social change, and the heavy weight of inherited tradition—especially religious—that is passively accepted. This is an opera that Smyth, in her political engagement, wanted to speak not only to her musical colleagues, but to the society at large in which she thrived, fought, and sought to improve.

One final curious note. If the subject matter (not the story) of The Wreckers seems vaguely familiar, perhaps it is because the topic was visited again more recently in an even more popular medium than opera: film. Alfred Hitchcock chose the subject (based on Daphne Du Maurier’s novel) for Jamaica Inn, his last film made in Britain. Whether Hitchcock was aware of The Wreckers is unknown, but his choice suggests that Smyth’s subject is one of enduring interest, and a compelling vehicle for what can legitimately be considered her masterpiece.

Uncommon Comrades

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Uncommon Comrades, performed on June 3, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The history of European Jewry is frequently written according to a narrative that suggests an inexorable logic leading to a tragic destiny. The persistence of anti-Semitism over centuries throughout Eastern and Western Europe is often understood to suggest the inevitability of the Holocaust and the imperative of Zionism particularly in its incarnation as a political movement dating from the early twentieth century. Whatever merits such an account may have, it tends to obscure those dimensions of European Jewish life that do not fit neatly into such a perspective. This comment is not a criticism, for few enterprises in modern history were so efficient and overwhelming as Hitler’s effort to exterminate the Jews, particularly in Eastern Europe. The community from which Mieczyslaw Weinberg came—that of Polish Jews—numbered over three million, of whom about ten percent survived. Of the six million Jews who died during the Second World War, the vast majority of the victims were Eastern European Jews. Unarmed, non-combatant civilians, they were murdered in concentration camps, or, like many of Weinberg’s relatives, in the ghettos created by the German occupation. Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, composed in 1962, deals with a third manner of mass murder: the shooting of civilians over open graves. On September 29-30, 1941, as many as 33,771 Jews were shot at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev in the Ukraine, one of the great urban centers of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish life.

The not-very-hidden secret of the Holocaust’s effectiveness is that, while the impetus came clearly from German Nazism, the campaign would not have been so successful had not local populations from France to Russia cooperated. The Catholic majority of Poland during the war may have been fiercely patriotic, courageous, and steadfastly anti-German, but on the issue of the persecution and extermination of the Jews, they largely either turned the proverbial blind eye or at worst, actively assisted. As Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem makes explicit, Ukrainian and Russian collaboration in the extermination of the Jews was equally prominent and essential.

Along with unimaginable masses of victims, a vital and variegated dimension of European culture was obliterated. The popular image of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before 1939 has been inadvertently simplified. To a limited extent, the image of the shtetl Jew, the devoutly religious inhabitant of small villages and towns, is accurate. Indeed, contrary to the perversely persistent logic of anti-Semitism, the vast majority of the Jews who died were in fact poor. But the cultural characteristics within the worlds that were destroyed were actually much broader than that. In large cities such as Warsaw, Vilnius, Budapest, and Kiev, a Jewish life flourished that was middle-class and acculturated (if not assimilated) into the dominant national and linguistic cultures as much as anti-Semitism would permit with or without conversion.

The Warsaw in which Weinberg grew up had many examples of this form of Jewish life. This was effectively depicted in Wladyslaw Szpilmann’s memoirs The Pianist, the basis of Roman Polanksi’s recent film. We recall this accommodation between Jewish identity and so-called mainstream European civilization most often in the case of Germany, but it flourished as well in Eastern Europe. More significantly, particularly in Eastern Europe, in pre-war Poland, and in Soviet Russia, there were forms of Jewish life grounded not in Zionism, in Hebrew, or even in religion. A vibrant Jewish culture centered on the Yiddish language helped to define Eastern European Jewry. Within that culture there was a strong socialist streak with its own form of utopianism. New Yorkers have perhaps a better opportunity to remember this Yiddish and socialist heritage, since so many of the Jewish immigrants to New York from the late nineteenth century on carried those traditions with them to the new world.

Today’s concert can be seen in a way as an homage to this dimension of European Jewish history. Weinberg’s Warsaw in the decades immediately preceding his birth was an urban center in the farthest western region of the Russian empire. An independent Poland came into existence only one year before he was born. After the non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin and the invasion of Poland in 1939, Weinberg made a decision that would save his life. He fled eastward, ultimately to find himself in Tashkent, where he met Dmitri Shostakovich.

Weinberg’s father had been a musician in the Yiddish theater, and Yiddish was to him and clearly to many of his fellow Jews the central language, the language of identity, of the home and of social intercourse with other Jews. Yiddish was the lingua franca of Central and Eastern Europe for Jews both in its quotidian and literary form. Weinberg married the daughter of Solomon Mikhoels (1890-1948), the legendary Yiddish actor and director who maintained his own lifelong allegiance to socialism.

For the Jews in Soviet Russia who survived the German invasion, the euphoria of the German defeat was short-lived. It is easy to lump Hitler and Stalin together in light of their terrifying similarities. Stalin’s impact on Soviet ideology and practice was in part to lend it a pronounced nationalist quality, and in so doing, he gave ample room to anti-Semitism. In theory, communism was designed both to eliminate nationalisms and render residual ethnic identities equal. Being a Jew in Soviet Russia was accorded the official status of a nationality, presumably in the context of multi-ethnic equality. In reality, this was not the case. Stalin’s anti-Semitism stemmed in part from his rivalry with and resentment of colleagues of Jewish origin from the Bolshevik Revolution—Leon Trotsky most prominently. It is a startling and tragic fact that not long after the end of the war Stalin sought to take up where Hitler had left off. Mikhoels used his prominence as an actor and visible representative of the Jews to assist survivors and those returning to their homes. But on January 13, 1948, Stalin had Mikhoels killed in a staged car accident in Minsk. The great Yiddish actor’s death marked the beginning of a process of suppression of Jewish cultural institutions and Jewish life, including whole scale removal of town populations into the Gulag. In Stalin’s final years, his obsession with anti-Semitism took the shape of the notorious Doctors’ Plot, the allegation of a conspiracy of Jewish doctors, among whom was an uncle of Weinberg’s wife, a physician attached to the Kremlin. In February 1953 Weinberg was arrested and jailed because of his connection to the Mikhoels family. It was his luck that a month later Stalin died. Weinberg was released after three months, and it is his release that holds the key to the connection between him and Shostakovich.

Shostakovich remained all his life a loyal citizen of Soviet Russia, a hero of the State and an “official” composer. That he believed in the ideals and premises of the Soviet system there can be little doubt. At the same time, through his music he gave voice to an undercurrent of expression in response to the suffering that the repressive regime generated. This dual function in his music lends it its intensity, sardonic wit, and irony. Although steadfastly loyal, he suffered humiliation at the hands of the Party twice, first in the 1930s and then in 1948. Toward the end of his life Shostakovich distanced himself from the dissidents of the Brezhnev era, much to the dismay of many of his admirers. Shostakovich seemed perpetually frightened for himself, his career, and his family, and was disinclined to put himself at risk.

There was, however, one exception, and that exception is itself powerful and striking. Anti-Semitism among Russian writers, artists, composers, and intellectuals was commonplace. It spans the eras of Gogol and Dostoevsky to Stravinsky. The absence of anti-Semitism in Shostakovich’s life and work is therefore remarkable. He became friendly with Weinberg during the war. Weinberg remained close to Shostakovich, performing and recording with him. When Weinberg was arrested, Shostakovich did something highly improbable. In the full knowledge that his every action private and public was being watched, he not only offered to help Weinberg’s family, but he wrote to the head of the secret police, Lavrenty Beriya, pleading for Weinberg’s release. When it came to resisting anti-Semitism and assisting his Jewish colleagues, Shostakovich displayed uncommon (and, one might judge, foolhardy) courage. He believed rightly that Mikhoels and Weinberg, like so many of his other colleagues of Jewish origin steeped in the Yiddish culture of Eastern Europe, were genuine patriots and citizens deserving of equality in the Soviet state.

1948, the year of Mikhoels’s assassination, was also an unpleasant one for Shostakovich and Weinberg as composers. It was the year of the famous Zhdanov resolution, condemning once again formalism and modernism. In 1948, albeit briefly, Shostakovich found himself shunned and ostracized. Weinberg too was out of favor as an ideologically rigid construct of true Soviet music was promulgated. It was in this period that Shostakovich wrote his famous song cycle On Jewish Folk Poetry, Op. 79. Although not published or performed until 1955, its composition was an eloquent act of artistic and ethical resistance.

By 1962, when Shostakovich wrote his Thirteenth Symphony, much had changed in the Soviet Union. Stalin had died, Khrushchev was in power, and there was an air of optimism in the wake of de-Stalinizaiton. But that apparent liberalism did not extend to telling the truth about the role of the Russian people and the Soviet state with respect to anti-Semitism and the facts of the extermination of the Jews. One of the most visible figures of the early 1960s was the young poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko who wrote a poem commemorating the killings at Babi Yar, an historical event that was suppressed by Soviet authorities. The poem came to Shostakovich’s attention through his friend Isaak Glikman (himself a Jew). Shostakovich immediately set the poem to music and began to work with the poet.

But because Soviet liberalization was only skin-deep, the authorities were none too pleased and put pressure on Shostakovich and Yevtushenko. It took considerable courage for the original performers to present this work, and in the end Yevtushenko, as Laurel Fay recounts, caved in and changed some lines—changes Shostakovich never accepted. Nevertheless, in December of 1962, despite official pressure, the work was premiered. But for years thereafter its performance was discouraged. The authorities could not intimidate Shostakovich, but the incident surrounding the poem and Symphony marked the end of the most liberal moment of Khrushchev’s tenure. Khrushchev is reported to have quipped that in matters of art he remained a “Stalinist.” Although the swarm of party officials had persuaded Yevtushenko to rewrite the poem to give the impression that Jews were not the only victims, that Russians and Ukrainians died at Babi Yar as well (which was not the fact), to place the Jewish plight more in the background, and to give way to expressions of gratitude to Russia’s war against fascism, Shostakovich would have none of it.

Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony exemplifies the composer’s ironic use of the musical attributes of marching songs, dance, humor, and macabre tone-painting in a manner designed to mock the official aesthetics of the Soviet state. As the last movement of the Symphony makes plain, there is also a dimension of self-mockery, of an almost cloying confessional. Shostakovich exploited Yevtushenko’s highly sentimentalized example of Galileo as a means by which to express his hope that despite the necessity to compromise, recant, and submit oneself to a repressive political authority, in the end “the truth in one’s art,” just like the truth of Galileo’s science, will prevail. The final section considers the price one must pay to continue to work. In his own engaging and populist manner, Shostakovich unabashedly seeks forgiveness through an ironic exercise at self-justification, mitigating his lifelong collaboration and abnegation before the authorities with the suggestion that he nevertheless was able to speak the truth. What better medium could there have been for this moment of self-revelation than Yevtushenko’s unmasking of the plight of Russian Jewry at the hands not only of the Nazis but of their fellow Soviet citizens?

The Thirteenth Symphony offered Shostakovich the opportunity to express a lifelong conviction that the fate of the Jew mirrored the fate of artists. Artists risked being branded as outsiders and destroyers of public order, as challengers to convention and uniformity. For Shostakovich, belief in the power of art even as a covert instrument of expression and the necessity for the individual artist to retain integrity and autonomy at least to some degree required the capacity within a society to accept Jews as Jews and as equals. The proverbial Jewish attribute audible in Weinberg’s music and central to the character of the Yiddish language of “laughter through tears,” was closely linked in Shostakovich’s mind to the function of art in a society without freedom.

Weinberg outlived Shostakovich for more than twenty years. His output was enormous, and the quality of his music, as evidenced by this Symphony and Concerto, has yet to be discovered fully by American audiences. In the shadow of Shostakovich are several powerful and important composers who worked in twentieth-century Russia, including Weinberg, Prokofiev’s friend Nicolai Miaskovsky, and Gavriil Popov. But in this concert, we celebrate something we take for granted but rarely understand fully: the perseverance of friendship as an act in defiance of repression. If being a friend is merely convenient and puts us at little risk, we can enjoy it just as an ornamental component of life. But loyalty and personal relations can become a matter of life and death, particularly in a society characterized by terror, surveillance, and lack of freedom. Today we hear the music of two friends who took risks to remain friends. They worked, as it were, in tandem. Weinberg’s Sixth Symphony would have been unthinkable without Shostakovich’s Thirteenth, particularly in Weinberg’s use of material from Jewish life and culture. Shostakovich had broken the taboo that lasted well after the Stalinist state anti-Semitism in 1948. In their separate and distinct ways, the works on today’s program help remind us not only of the richness and vitality of Jewish life in Eastern Europe—as well as its acute tragedies, particularly during the Soviet era—but also of the value of the genuine absence of prejudice and the commitment to friendship.

The Distant Sound

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Distant Sound, performed on April 15, 2007 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When the American symphony Orchestra decided some years ago to present a concert performance of Der ferne Klang in the spirit of the courageous and innovative mission bequeathed to it by the Orchestra’s founder Leopold Stokowski, neither I, nor the staff, nor the board of directors were aware that this performance would be not only the first performance in the United States, but in the western hemisphere. Stokowski consistently championed new and unusual repertoire. He gave the first American performances of Berg’s Wozzeck and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. But those performances took place in near proximity to the dates of composition and the premieres of those works. It is a sobering commentary on the programming habits of opera houses and orchestras in the United States that the premiere of a work of such historical importance as Der ferne Klang and by such a prominent figure as Franz Schreker should take place ninety-five years—nearly a century—after the work was first performed.

Of all the witnesses to the importance of Der ferne Klang, the most important may have been Alban Berg, who prepared the vocal score. What made Der ferne Klang so significant was not only the multiplicity of musical ideas and innovations, including the mixture of sonorities, the complexity and layering of musical materials, but Schreker’s almost prophetic concern with the connection between sight and sound. The emancipation of harmonic usage within tonality from short-term structure and the wide palette of orchestral sound suggests the influence of visual experiments at the turn of the century, particularly in Austrian and German painting. What we like to call expressionism, in which the illusion of realism is distorted by the counter-intuitive use of color, the variegation of the painterly surface, the focus on the subjective experience of the imagery as well as the imagination and fantasy of the viewer, needs to be remembered alongside the movement in the visual arts known as symbolism, in which the philosophical, the psychological, and the spiritual are evoked through the dramatic and often shocking departures from the traditions of nineteenth-century painting. Furthermore, as Christopher Hailey has persuasively argued, the music of Der ferne Klang, the way voices and language are treated, and the pacing of the drama all anticipate hallmarks of the emerging art of the cinema, particularly during the interwar years in Germany.

The fact that Franz Schreker’s name is not as well known as it ought to be is a tragic consequence of the intolerance and brutality of mid-twentieth-century politics. Schreker was born in Monaco in 1878. His father was of Jewish descent and a court photographer. His mother was a Catholic of aristocratic birth. Schreker was ten years old when his father died and the family moved to Vienna. He trained as a violinist at the Vienna Conservatory but later turned to composition. His graduation piece was Psalm 116 (performed by the ASO earlier this season). In the early part of the century his music enjoyed considerable success, and Schreker began to work in Vienna as a conductor. His first opera, Flammen, had its premiere in 1902 in a version with piano at the leading recital hall in the city of Vienna. He conducted at the Vienna Volksoper, and in 1907 he founded the Philharmonic chorus, with whom he premiered both Psalm 23 of his friend and colleague Alexander Zemlinsky (also performed by the ASO earlier this season), and most importantly, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder.

The connection between Schreker and the cultural foment of turn-of-the-century Vienna is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that his music for Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Birthday of the Infanta” accompanied a dance pantomime (whose staged premiere in America was also performed by the American Symphony), that was created for the 1908 Kunstschau, an exhibition which featured the second wave of Viennese modernist painting after the Secession of 1897. The Kunstschau featured such artists as Kokoschka and Schiele. What captivated Schreker and those artists was, as many observers have noted, the hidden psychology of the individual. Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), its brilliance notwithstanding, was an achievement that cannot be understood in isolation from contemporary literature and philosophical speculation. The exploration of dreams and the unconscious and of hidden meaning was an obsession. The discovery of a geography of the unconscious suggested not only a new way to understand overt behavior, but also to reconsider the essence of the human spirit, particularly the role of sexuality, childhood, and memory. This metaphorical exploration into unseen dimensions of the psyche lent the power of music, especially in its sensual and atmospheric use (so audible in Schreker), enormous prestige. From Wagner to Schreker, music assumed the role of a coded language of understanding and revelation.

If the making of art and music in the nineteenth century was grounded in John Ruskin’s concept of art as possessed of a moral and spiritual power, by the first decades of the twentieth century, the making of art was perceived as having a unique capacity as expressive of the psyche. The complexity of human behavior and motivation and the hidden reaches of the psyche and imagination found their proper medium through art. The shattering of the conventions of literary narration, visual representation, and therefore the parallel habits of musical realism in use of harmony, melody, and form, were justified not merely by aesthetic criteria. The quest by Schreker, and for that matter Schoenberg and Berg, for new modes of musical expression was not driven only by a search for originality or radical individualism. Rather, new ways of painting, literature, and music were valued for the extent to which they could tell the truth about the inner workings of perception and consciousness. Clearly those revelations had a distinctly rebellious character, attacking the inherited hypocrisies regarding love and sexuality. Schreker’s connection to the visual artists from his Viennese milieu extended to the choice of designer for the production of Der ferne Klang, Alfred Roller. Roller had been a member of the Vienna Secession and Mahler’s colleague during the latter’s tenure at the Vienna Opera, during which radical new productions in the visual sense were mounted of Mozart and Wagner. Roller was also the designer for Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier.

Schreker’s primary medium became the opera. By the time of his death in 1934, he completed nine operas. By 1920 he had become controversial but was also widely heralded as the most significant opera composer in the German-speaking world since the death of Wagner. A more logical choice might have been Strauss, which seems right from our perspective, but in the 1920s Strauss’s reputation was on the decline. He was considered old-fashioned, a holdover from the previous century and an enemy of modernism. What Schreker seemed to have that Strauss did not was the Wagnerian conceit of having created a new dramatic music for the future, with commitment to progressive musical innovation. For that reason, Schreker was singled out by the influential critic Paul Bekker and anointed—rather like Schumann’s anointing of Brahms—but this time as the true heir to Wagner. It was therefore no surprise when Schreker was appointed director of the Hochschule Fürmusik in Berlin in 1920. Under his tenure as director of that legendary school of music, he recruited not only Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Hindemith, but the pianist Artur Schnabel, the violinist Carl Flesch, and the cellist Emanuel Feurermann. To his lasting credit, Schreker was not only a great director; he was a great teacher. The list of his pupils is a veritable star chart of mid-twentieth century music, including the composers Berthold Goldschmidt, Alois Haba, Ernst Krenek, and Karol Rathaus. In an era where great performers were also composers, it is understandable that his pupils also included the pianists Victor Babin and the conductors Artur Rodzinski, Jascha Horenstein, and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, as well as long time collaborator and friend of Karol Szymanowski, Jerzy Fitelberg.

Schreker’s wide-ranging style did not always endear him to critics, Bekker’s advocacy notwithstanding. Schreker had more than his share of difficulties with negative responses to his work. In one of the rare instances when a composer is compelled to respond to his critics and is able to do so, Schreker simply took complete quotes from a host of critics and listed them one after another. Each of them said something completely contradictory and all the claims canceled one another out so as to appear ludicrous. In this humorous and biting amalgam in “Mein Charakterbild,” all Schreker did was respond to his critics by revealing their lack of logic, their hypocrisy, and their prejudices and ignorance.

The 1920s were a productive and largely rewarding decade in Schreker’s life. He was at the height of his fame and pioneered in collaborations with new technologies of recording and broadcasting. In the early 1930s he also engaged in the production of films of concerts in an effort to use the new medium. But politics intervened. Not only was Schreker not Aryan, but his music fit directly into the pseudo-moralistic category of “decadent.” Performances of Schreker’s operas were routinely interrupted in the years leading up to 1933 by Nazi hooligans. Schreker was forced to resign even before the Nazis seized power. He was officially removed from all his posts in September 1933. The shock of the success of the Nazis was for him particularly acute. His colleague Schoenberg, who was born of Jewish parents but converted to Protestantism, had the option of embracing Judaism; he reconverted and turned into an ardent Zionist. But Schreker had no reason to consider himself Jewish except by the most regressive standards of racial thinking. He had little reason to expect the fate that befell him. He had a stroke in December of 1933 and died in March the following year, at the age of 56.

What doubtlessly infuriated the right-wing anti-Semites of the early twentieth century was the sacrilegious claim that Franz Schreker was modernity’s Richard Wagner. Even though Schreker’s achievement is unthinkable without the example of Wagner—including the scale of his ambition and his role as his own librettist—not only in Der ferne Klang but also in all of his subsequent operas, the idea that this visionary composer could somehow inherit the mantle of the apostle of the myth of the Aryan race was too much to endure. Furthermore, the comparison with Wagner highlighted the enveloping and seductive experience of Schreker’s use of sound. Here was a new kind of “total” work of art, in which text, the visual, and the audible worked together as a magical unity. And it did not help that Schreker’s ardent apostle Paul Bekker, the leading critic of interwar Weimar, was himself a Jew. Schreker’s case only fueled the idea that not only aesthetic modernism but also modern psychology and science, (e.g., Freud and Einstein) were part of a massive Jewish conspiracy to corrupt the moral fabric of European culture. Bekker fled to New York and died in 1937, reduced to writing criticism a daily German-language newspaper.

Since Schreker died well before the war and never had the chance to emigrate, he was not among those survivors who at least had the opportunity to restart their careers after 1945. Also, he was not a direct victim of the war or Holocaust, and although identified by others as Jewish, he remained a Catholic his entire life, and therefore his cause never seemed unique nor lent itself to a sympathetic, posthumous revival. Furthermore, since his forte was music for the stage, and music for chorus and voice, there was not the depth of repertoire for orchestra and solo instruments or chamber music sufficient to jumpstart a revival of interest in his music. Operas, even on a concert stage, are expensive and complicated to mount. Finally, the taste of the decades immediately following the Second World War were directed toward a more astringent and less expansive modernism. Only with the explosion of interest in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the literature, art, and architecture of turn-of-the-century Vienna, did serious attention begin to return to the achievements of Franz Schreker. The revival of interest in Vienna of that period also corresponded with the decline in taste in the kind of radical musical modernism more closely associated with Webern and Schoenberg. The postmodernist romance with turn-of-the-century Vienna led rather to a renewed appreciation for the early Schoenberg, in Berg, and finally Schreker. For members of the audience interested in hearing more of Schreker’s music, I would recommend, in addition to his later operas, his Kammersymphonie (1916), and his settings from the 1920s of the poetry of Walt Whitman.

Many individuals have made this performance possible, including Christopher Hailey, who deserves the overwhelming credit for pioneering a revival of interest in Schreker’s music, particularly to the English-speaking world; Thurmond Smithgall, a long time advocate of this opera who has been instrumental in bringing it finally to the United States; our intrepid cast; and also the musicians of the American Symphony Orchestra, who have worked hard to make the best case for this music. It is our hope that this performance of Schreker’s best known and most influential work can help spark a Schreker renaissance in the United States, leading to long-overdue staged productions of the musically cogent, dramatically engaging, and psychologically penetrating operas that are the distinguished legacy of Franz Schreker.