Musical Expression and the Challenge of Twentieth Century History

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Truth or Truffles, performed on Feb 10, 2013 at Carnegie Hall.

19th-century Europe witnessed unprecedented social and economic transformations. Among the most lasting (albeit erratic) of these was the expansion of literacy, most noticeable in Europe’s rapidly growing cities. With the spread of literacy came the standardization of orthography, inexpensive books, lending libraries, public libraries and the emergence of journalism—daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and regular periodicals. A myriad of local and regional public spheres took shape, as did a world of public opinion. These in turn spawned movements and ideologies, not only concerning politics and social questions, but matters of taste and value—everything from fashion to religion.

Notably in German-speaking Europe, literacy in music developed rapidly in the wake of the expansion of reading and writing. That this historical development coincided with flowering of musical romanticism was perhaps more than a coincidence. By the 1830s, the musical culture that was taking hold was increasingly bound up with language. A shared musical rhetoric emerged that came to frame conversations and convictions. It was communicated through the medium of the song, opera, and novel forms of instrumental music, from short works for the solo piano expressive of sensibilities to larger scale instrumental works that assumed an illustrative story telling function.

Inevitably music became the object of philosophic speculation. Was music fundamentally different from language and meaningful in a manner that could not be expressed in language? Or was music inherently tied to linguistic meaning, suggesting what ultimately became a widespread assumption of a parallelism between music and language. Enthusiasm for dynamics between music and meaning was timely, for as the public for music increased so too did the belief that music was especially potent psychologically as a means of expression. Music became invested with a power to convey, in its own way, emotions, ideas, and sentiments we normally associate with language but seem unnaturally trapped by speech and reason.

It was this premium on music’s expressiveness, and on the intense intermingling of music with language against which many early 20th century modernist composers rebelled. Romanticism in music had degenerated into a species of vulgar realism. In an effort to reclaim the autonomy of music and rescue it from the status of sonic decoration, composers turned away from the inherited conventions of 19th century musical logic. Modernism rejected the idea that music was expressive of something other than itself, or that music could give voice to love, desire, regret, heroism, loss, solitude, and community.

What propelled this modernist rebellion most of all was the recognition, after the carnage of the First World War, that the clichés of musical romanticism had turned a noble art form into a handmaiden for a culture that much like the language of cheap journalism had succeeded in rendering inhumanity, cruelty, antipathy, and violence aesthetically pleasing.

This concert takes a candid and controversial look at the musical culture which developed during the 19th century and was bequeathed to the 20th. It sets in opposition to one another two master composers from different generations who died at mid-century. Richard Strauss is arguably the most facile and versatile master of musical traditions and musical thinking. There was nothing in musical composition he could not do. At the same time, he was accused by his contemporaries (rivals and admirers alike) of an excess of ironic detachment, a corrosive cynicism born out of his immense facility. Nothing seemed to matter to him. Everything was done for effect and too often his elegantly crafted and astonishingly appealing music descended into kitsch, an empty sentiment entirely different from the anguished profundity of his contemporary, Gustav Mahler.

In Strauss’s long career, only two moments have escaped critical derision: the period before 1911, during which the famous tone poems and Salome and Elektra were composed; and the so called “Indian Summer,” Strauss’s last years during the 1940s. Strauss’s music from the 1920s has long been regarded as tired, empty, and forgettable. Indeed, given Strauss’s collaboration with the Nazi regime, his music from the 1920s and 1930s came to represent the most corrupt and embarrassing (albeit skilled) example of music as an explicitly expressive medium that manipulated rather than elevated its audience.

To challenge this conventional view, this program features Strauss’s perhaps least-respected score, a piece that was excoriated at its premiere and has remained dismissed as a minor if not tasteless and uninspired venture by even the composer’s most ardent defenders. The work, Schlagobers, is a ballet score modeled after Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker. It was written in the midst of the worst economic circumstances in Central Europe in the 1920s. Strauss’s attempt at lightness, humor, delicacy, and charm fell flat. Nothing could have shed a worse light on Strauss the man and the composer.

But is this judgment fair? Perhaps the virtuosity of musical realism and narration that Strauss reveals in this score, the sensuality of the orchestration and the unabashed rehearsal of clichés and tricks tell a different story, one of fantasy, enthusiasm, delight, magical unreality, and the dream of that brief escape into another sense of time and space that the darkest of times call into being. Perhaps Strauss marshaled all the inherited conventions of musical communication to recapture, briefly, the innocent fleeting childlike beauty of the present moment in a manner unique to only to music. In this spirit, we revisit this score without apology and with admiration for its craftsmanship and possibly its outrageously cloaked and unrestrained idealism. It deserves a new look. Perhaps Schlagobers can take its place alongside The Nutcracker and offer some welcome relief from that overplayed score during Christmastime with a delightful ballet that can enchant children and distract their parents, however briefly.

The other work on today’s program dates from the post-World War II era. The ASO has championed the music of Karl Amadeus Hartmann over the past 20 years. I regard him as one of the great masters of the 20th century, whose stature and achievement rival that of Alban Berg and Dmitri Shostakovich. Hartmann inherited an ambition regarding the power of musical expression that sought to link ethics with art. He remained, however, a conservative modernist. Influenced by Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg, Hartmann understood his vocation as a composer as one of conscience and opposition to evil. He was committed to the redemption of musical expression and communication from the vulgar, the commonplace and the complicit. His music and his life were cut from one fabric—a fabric of impregnable integrity, humility, and courage in the face of radical evil. If Strauss was the master of ironic detachment and profound philosophic pessimism, Hartmann was the master of truth telling, and unabashed intensity in music marked by the tireless struggle against despair. The work heard today was Hartmann’s last and is an unforgettable masterpiece in the tradition of Mahler and Berg.

The encounter at this concert is therefore with two seemingly incompatible consequences of more than a century of European musical culture. Drawing on the very same traditions of musical form, shared conventions of musical development and sonority and using the same instrument—the modern orchestra—they both in separate ways seek to celebrate the human imagination through the inherent unreality of the musical experience as an antidote to the everyday experience of suffering, fear, and cruelty. In seemingly disparate ways they both sought to inspire us to realize that if human life matters and time is precious, then music matters too.

What Makes a Masterpiece

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert What Makes a Masterpiece, performed on Jan 25, 2013 at Carnegie Hall.

It is rare that one gets to match wits with a distinguished colleague before the public on a subject, and debate a matter of importance. As a reader of the program notes to tonight’s concert will discover, my good friend David Brodbeck and I do not quite see eye to eye. Therefore tonight may, in retrospect, have the feel of a public debate. It is a pleasure to be part of a controversy in an art form that often appears to be so staid.

After all, tonight’s concert was designed to challenge received wisdom about the merits of musical works, and the criteria by which we judge music. The premise of the concert is one that has been responsible for much of the ASO’s programming over the past two decades. We believe that inherited verdicts of quality are too readily accepted, and that we succumb uncritically to the so-called judgment of history. Is what has been handed down to us as canonical and superior really so, or is the standard concert repertory more of a biased and perhaps lax selection from the past? Could the standards that earn a historical work of music a regular place on today’s concert stage be narrow and even arbitrary, and perhaps reveal a distortion of history?

In order to pursue this challenge, highlight the inadequacy of today’s account of our musical heritage, and expose the poverty of the accepted selection of works from the past which are performed all too frequently in concert life, the ASO has chosen to organize a closely argued experiment in the form of a concert. We will perform three symphonies that exhibit common formal characteristics, share aesthetic premises, and are all in minor keys. All three were either composed or revised in the decade of the 1880s by composers who shared biographical connections and one language in common: German.

The three works on tonight’s program are all properly identified in the notes to this concert written by the eminent scholar, David Brodbeck. He acknowledges the program as being made up of an obscure symphony by and obscure composer, a neglected work by a famous composer, and a famous work by a famous composer.

But there is where the debate begins. Brodbeck offers the accepted judgment of history, and therefore the standard view. Herzogenberg’s symphony is judged the work of an epigone, and little more than a pale reflection of Brahms. Its presumed lack of originality has been the source of its obscurity. Brodbeck deems the work “workmanlike” and “cleanly executed” and therefore “from time to time” worthy of being heard. The Dvořák, even in its revision, is judged a failure, except for the two inner movements. The symphony’s merit seems to rest in the idea that these “better” movements prefigure the “mature” Dvořák we all know and love. In other words, the main reason to tolerate Dvořák’s Fourth Symphony is because of our longstanding attachment to the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symphonies (and possibly Nos. 5 and 6). But is this the best that can be said of the Fourth? What exactly is deficient about it?

Brahms’s Fourth is an acknowledged masterpiece the merit of which Brodbeck rightly knows requires no defense or argument. There is indeed no point or purpose in taking issue with the accepted view of Brahms’s E-minor symphony. But is Brodbeck’s comparative assessment of the weakness of the other two—the standard view in the critical and scholarly literature—justified? How can we locate and challenge the presumed objective criteria that render the account of the supposed shortcomings of the other works valid? That prescriptive notion is precisely what this program, in explicitly juxtaposing these three symphonies, attempts to explode.

For do we always listen, look, or read only in a comparative mode, thinking about experiences with works of art that strike us as better or worse? If that were the case, we could conceivably select one kind of novel, one painting, or one film to enjoy and then disregard all the rest. Rather, we enlarge our experience by understanding that, beyond issues of personal taste, what makes a worthy piece or even a masterpiece are not necessarily some immutable objective attributes, but the shifting discriminations within the passing eras of history. Is Dvořák’s Fourth somehow lesser or not worth hearing because we also have Brahms’s Fourth? Is Dvořák’s Fourth somehow “weak” or not deserving of performance because his Eighth and Ninth symphonies have become more popular?

How does Herzogenberg’s Symphony No. 1 hold up now, more than a century after it was written? Brahms was not generous in his assessment, but during his lifetime, Herzogenberg was considered by many to be a composer of stature, albeit in the orbit of Brahms. What caused the difference in the way we hear both of their symphonies? How do our reactions differ from the way their original audiences heard them? Perhaps we should not be guided by Brahms’s well-known harsh opinions. At the age of 60 he destroyed many of his own works, much to the dismay of his most ardent admirers, including Clara Schumann.

This concert exists because we welcome the opportunity for an audience to come to its own conclusions. Faced with these three comparable works, no one expects our collective opinion about Brahms to change. But perhaps the time has come to revisit a less familiar Dvořák symphony—a powerful and ambitious work—as well as to give the Herzogenberg symphony a second chance.

At issue are our reactions to the way musical time is framed by composers from this historical era. What is the character of their musical materials, what is the manner in which they elaborate them, and how do they choose to construct a musical argument? Given a shared musical grammar and vocabulary, what seems to be at stake for each of these composers? Absent an explicit program or narrative, what do these works tell us about musical meaning and communication at the end of the 19th century—the transaction between composer and listener? How have our expectations regarding tradition and innovation in music changed? What are the continuities and discontinuities in our musical culture? How does the meaning of music change over time?

Such reflections are hard for us to engage in if we only play and listen to a few works that have been repeated so often that they have lost all connection to their historical context. They stand, cut off from their roots, as revered relics burdened by their own extensive performance history and a daunting body of criticism.

By placing these three works side by side we invite audiences to find new ways of thinking about familiar subjects. Dvořák is still known primarily for a few works, and for his reputation as a Czech and quintessentially a voice within the concert repertory suggestive of a particular ethnic folk tradition. Placed alongside Brahms, Dvořák may appear to lack the gravitas we attribute to Brahms, even though Brahms would have recoiled at such a judgment and found it ludicrous. Brahms, after all, volunteered to proofread Dvořák’s works for publication, a singular gesture of respect.

And what shall we make of Heinrich von Herzogenberg, whom we now remember largely on account of his wife? Her famous correspondence and friendship with Brahms (who deeply admired her) provide essential clues to understanding that enigmatic composer. The music in this symphony suggests depth and eloquence. It possesses the capacity to reward both player and listener by offering a touching and memorable encounter with music. Is it possible to see Herzogenberg as an artist of distinction rather than a forgettable epigone?

“Such a conjecture does no harm to the belief that Brahms’s Fourth is an exceptional work. In fact, let us hope that hearing these infrequently performed works tonight alongside an acknowledged masterpiece might just stimulate our curiosity to search out other neglected works from the past, and to anticipate with pleasure the prospect of hearing Dvořák’s Fourth and the music of Herzogenberg again soon.

John Cage at 100

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Cage Concert, performed on Dec 13, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

This ASO tribute to John Cage comes barely three months after what would have been the composer’s 100th birthday, and at the end of a year of Cage celebrations all over the world. John Cage fits perfectly into the ASO’s ongoing exploration of the achievement of American composers from the 20th century, which during the past three seasons has featured Henry Cowell, George Crumb, and Walter Piston. But there is a special reason for the ASO to focus on Cage, and it stems from the relationship between the ASO and Bard College, where the orchestra is in residence each year as part of Summerscape.

In 2007, Cage’s longtime collaborator and friend, the late Merce Cunningham, decided that it would be better for the John Cage Trust, which oversees Cage’s archives and performance materials, to be placed in residence at Bard. The director of the archives, Dr. Laura Kuhn, who authored the notes for today’s concert, is now a member of the Bard faculty, and helped curate this program. Three of Bard’s faculty members have linkages to Cage and his legacy: the composer Richard Teitelbaum (who has also been a staunch advocate of the music of Henry Cowell); Kyle Gann, the composer and music historian, whose recent book on Cage was met with critical acclaim; and Joan Retallack, the poet, who has written extensively on Cage. Cage paid a visit to Bard in the late 1970s. One of the most memorable events I have performed in at Bard was the concert marking the installation of the Cage Trust at Bard that included a performance of Cage’s “Lecture on the Weather” with Merce Cunningham, John Ashbery, Jasper Johns, and myself.

The presence of a poet, a painter, and choreographer in a performance of a Cage work succinctly expresses the extraordinary influence that John Cage exerted on all of the arts during the second half of the 20th century. Cage continues to fascinate composers, poets, and visual artists. Perhaps no composer since Richard Wagner has had as great a following outside of music, particularly in the arts and in the realm of ideas, owing to the power of his writings. It is ironic that many more people have read John Cage than have sought to, or managed to listen to his music. And even a larger number (as in the case of Wagner) believe they understand Cage and his meaning and impact without having read Cage or heard Cage’s music.

In its own way, Cage’s approach to music emerges out of a Wagnerian conceit that all of the arts are interrelated. But Cage traveled from that premise along his own path toward exploding the traditional boundaries and distinctions between art and life. He did so in a manner inextricably linked to the events of the 20th century, particularly its challenges to inherited notions of space and time.

Much nonsense has been written about the intellectual and aesthetic consequences of the discoveries of modern physics, beginning with Einstein’s articulation of the special theory of relativity. But at its core, the revolution in modern physics debunked notions of absolute time and space and the privileging of a single universal frame of reference. No frame of reference had priority as a point of observation and measurement. Much like the deleterious translation of Darwinian thought into popular culture and social theory that has haunted everyday conversations and prejudices about human nature, the dynamics of competition, the emergence of social elites, and invidious distinctions between so-called “races,” the transporting of the precise language of physics into the realm of aesthetics (and more gravely, ethics) has resulted in many soft-headed notions about there being no truth in the world and no criteria for making distinctions or comparisons, just a myriad of subjective perspectives.

Nonetheless, the post-Newtonian science of Einstein and his contemporaries contributed to a cultural climate that emboldened a new generation of composers in the first half of the 20th century to contest what was once held as the natural objective validity of tonality and musical form. It inspired among European and American composers a renewed non-condescending respect for other systems of music outside of the West. This cultural climate of the mid-20th century in which Cage came of age inspired him to think in a shatteringly original way about sound and silence, about the artificiality of the barriers between constructed musical space and ambient sound. His writings rendered the question of what constitutes music into a never-ending, complex, ambiguous, and exciting exploratory enterprise. The same cultural context fueled the opposite tendency—the effort by composers to control musical time more precisely. Stravinsky was attracted, for example, to the pianola by the idea that the intentionality of a work of music could be rendered objectively.

Cage contested the claim that there is a marked difference between our efforts to locate and place every sound in relation to other sounds in a musical composition—which became a near obsession among certain composers of the mid-20th century—and the manipulation of sound using chance, indeterminacy, randomness, or unpredictability. Modernists following in the path of Schoenberg, with whom Cage briefly studied, sought to protect their compositions from the sloppy inaccuracy and romantic expressiveness of performers by using precise metronome markings and elaborate performance indications. Cage charted a different strategy, embracing a more fluid and permeable sense of the perception of time and the creation of musical communication.

The issues and challenges that Cage raised remain alive and actual in our own time. His writings and works have an increasing and not declining following all over the world. No American composer with the possible exception of Duke Ellington and George Gershwin has exerted such a powerful international influence. There is something uncannily American—in the sense of Walt Whitman—about John Cage, his thought, his music, his engagement with other media, and the conduct of his life. His career has shaped our sense of what we mean when we call an artist “original.”

At his core, however, John Cage was a musician and a composer. It is as a composer of larger scale works that we remember him at this concert. His most famous work, 4’33’’ was performed first by one instrumentalist. Furthermore, rather than represent Cage with an evening of all his own music taken from several periods, we decided to honor Cage by placing him, despite his startling individuality, squarely within the history of 20^th-century music. For that reason, the program features a work by Erik Satie, whom Cage admired and who can be seen as a direct inspiration. Satie, alongside Alfred Jarry (the author of Ubu Roi), was perhaps modernism’s genuinely avant-garde composer, whose music, with its veneer of simplicity, took on the historicist cultural traditions of the late 19th century. Indeed, in his notes for the performance of Cheap Imitation, Cage connects his imitation of Satie’s Socrate to the I Ching, a text central to Cage’s thought and career.

The Webern on this program links Cage to the one composer out of the second Viennese School who pioneered in the distillation of sound and the explicit use of silence, and the decaying spaces between types of sound and timbres as compositional elements. The Webern points to the common biographical ground between Cage and Morton Feldman, whose work on this program pursues, in a manner somewhat different from Cage, notions of indeterminacy and the varieties of the perception of the musical experience as resistant to standardization. And Feldman shared with Cage a deep interest in the visual experience and the connection between the aural and visual experiences. Framed by one contemporary, Feldman, and two predecessors, the program features a rare performance of the two sets of Etcetera, which date from the last phase of Cage’s career.

Just in case the traditional concert audience harbors the commonplace belief that playing music that is not notated in the traditional manner and which leaves many decisions and choices to each individual player is somehow an undisciplined form of music-making requiring less rehearsal and practice than the rendering of a Tchaikovsky symphony, it should be noted that Cage and Feldman are extraordinarily precise in their instructions. Indeed performing one of these works requires more rather than less rehearsal, because the possibilities of what can be realized are that much greater.

The prejudices against what was regarded as Cage’s form of radical modernism have never been quite erased. It would be foolish to dismiss them as mere philistinism, just as it would be offensive to assume that just because an approach to music represents itself as a radical departure from tradition it is superior owing to its novelty. One can get a succinct notion of how disciplined and serious Cage’s enterprise as a composer was from the closing paragraphs of his notes to the performers for Cheap Imitation:

Not less than two weeks before a projected performance each musician shall be given his part.

During the first week he will learn the melody, at least those phrases of it in which he participates. He is to learn, among other matters, to play double sharps and double flats without writing in simpler “equivalent” notes.

During the second week there will be orchestra rehearsals on each day, each rehearsal lasting 1 ½ hours. If, at anytime, it appears that any member of the orchestra does not know his part, he is to be dismissed. If as a result one of the essential 24 parts is missing, the projected performance is to be cancelled.

John Cage’s legacy will continue to command attention during the 21st century. His stature within the world of performance art, the visual arts, and aesthetic thought is nearly unrivaled. But Cage the composer and his music still require advocacy.

El Sistema Discovery Day at Carnegie Hall 2012

I would like this event to be useful to you. We are celebrating not only now months of activity by the groups of El Sistema here in the United States, but also nearly 40 years of accomplishment of El Sistema in Venezuela and its consequences worldwide.  I want to begin by acknowledging the profound accomplishment of Maestro Abreu in nearly 40 years of music making, and in making music a central dimension of social policy for his nation. This is an incredible achievement. There are no comparable examples of the way Abreu has used of music as an instrument of social change while at the same time rendering the experience of music itself persuasive to participants and listeners.  In general aesthetic judgment and pleasure (our notion of great music and great performance of very high standards, and our conversations about art and judgment) seem divorced from issues of politics and issues of societal inspiration. Maestro Abreu has managed to merge the two by creating a very effective instrument--over hundreds of thousands of people all over the nation--and using music with children and young people as a transformative instrument. In doing so, he has vindicated as well the misconception that we in the United States (and, to some extent, in Europe) have always worried about, (especially since the cultural wars in the United States in the ‘70s and ‘80s): the idea that classical music (which is a misnomer to begin with--there’s nothing classical about it), the traditions of orchestral music, chamber music and choral music, are solely the output of a privileged, aristocratic, white, European, male class and irrelevant outside of the cultural context of their origin.  This notion doesn't make this kind of music particularly endearing to communities viewed as “outside”. But as Maestro Abreu's efforts have shown, the belief that this tradition of music is a thing of the past, a historical artifact that is atrophying, turns out to be wrong.  Equally misguided is the notion that its value is a dimension of colonial and imperial imposition.

For complex reasons the traditions of notated Western music from the 16^th century to today that are associated with concert music turn out to be transferrable culturally. They are being reinvented by new communities in new places that have nothing to do with the dead white males that had a hand in creating them. This is happening in the Far East (in China, Korea, Japan, Malaysia) and South America (particularly Mexico, Brazil and Venezuela). This musical tradition is now reinvented anew, by new generations and in new cultural contexts. That said, it has shown a potential transferability comparable to matters of science and mathematics, which know no cultural boundaries.

Therefore, Maestro Abreu’s achievement is not only for the country of Venezuela and its citizens, but also on behalf of the capacity of any nation’s power to place music making into the center of its culture. And, of course, the most famous result of this, on the international concert scene is Maestro Dudamel, particularly with his continuing commitment to maestro Abreu's principles, the creation in Los Angeles of YOLA (the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles) and the programs which have created in Los Angeles the largest nucleo in the United States.

I start out with this praise because what I would like to talk about is not so much El Sistema as a model; rather we should regard it as an inspiration. It would be a mistake to look at what has been accomplished in Venezuela and conclude, “We can do this in the United States.” There is a certain tendency, given the power of the accomplishment, to follow the imitative route, to think that El Sistema is to music what Weight Watchers is to weight loss: that it’s a product you can package, wrap, and carry with you anywhere you go. But it's not so simple. The problems of Venezuela are not the problems of the United States. There are certain things in common, but there are many things that are very different. There are fundamental aspects El Sistema from which we can learn, that allow us to say we are inspired by El Sistema, but without merely imitating it. To truly honor the achievement of Maestro Abreu is not to imitate it, but to think in the same transformative way about our own circumstances in the United States and find a means, though probably those means may look very different from what has worked in Venezuela, to realize some of the same objectives.

Let me concentrate first on what we can take from the Venezuelan experience that looks transferable. Translation can be either literal (that is to say, very exact), which makes it ugly. Or it can be poetic, which means you are trying to get to the underlying meaning of words in another language and translate it in a way that expresses its moral equivalent in your own language.  It may end up being, on the surface, quite a departure from the literal meaning.

The first principle of El Sistema we see that could impact the United States is to define music education and the function of music not in terms of some threshold and standard of quality in music making, but rather in terms of the activity itself. In the United States, we have a tendency to look at music as a function of something we call talent. Parents (wherever they are but also in poor and underserved communities), think that being musical is an exceptional quality. We love child prodigies, and we love to exploit them. This is a profound error based in this pervasive misconception. Music is an inbred, human activity, which every individual possesses, and the level of “natural” ability is not connected to what makes it meaningful, either to the individual or to the society. Prodigies do not define what is musical, and in our educational system we should not segregate by ability. The ability to make music should be encouraged democratically in every child without a prior prejudice of their so-called ability, because we do not know enough either about human psychology or human mechanisms of learning to make a reliable prediction of who in the end will be a good musician, who will not be one. Music making is developing a mode of expression apart from language and of encouraging a different dimension of sensibility. It is therefore not about the exceptional child; it is about every child. Once we accept that position, our whole attitude to music education must necessarily adjust, and that’s what El Sistema has done.

The second lesson to be learned from El Sistema is to regard music as a group activity and not as a divisive, individual activity, to understand that the learning of music is not only (or even primarily) a solo activity isolated from the community. In American popular culture we are familiar with the image of the bespectacled nerd carrying a violin case, someone who is laughed at by all the other kids on the baseball field, and perhaps even beaten up. (This is an autobiographical statement.) The centrality of the group experience in this case has everything to do with not making music. Later, rock music assumed the social collaborative and group function as an amateur activity that once defined classical music, in American society, at the expense of chamber and orchestral music. Snobs and defenders of classical music held rock and popular music in contempt, particularly after World War II. My point is that the perception of making music as a singular activity based in some exceptional talent must be changed. It is a group activity in which everyone at all levels of proficiency must be a participant. And this is perhaps easiest in choral groups.

The third important concept that El Sistema has successfully realized is that learning music and teaching it is a unified, simultaneous process.  The moment the young person begins to play they also have an opportunity to pass the knowledge and experience on. The process of having to explain and articulate what you are learning to someone else, only intensifies your own learning. One of El Sistema's greatest triumphs is the integration of mentoring, which sharpens and accelerates the skill at every level, and informs the sense of communal activity. Older players sit with younger ones; the moment you can do something, you share it.

The fourth principle of El Sistema that is universally applicable is that of simplification without reduction. In traditional teaching methods, the core experience is the individual lesson in which music is simplified and reduced to the point of robbing it of its interest. (This is true even in the very successful Suzuki method.) A child encountering a simplified version of a complex piece may fail to perceive what makes it a great piece of music.  This is why composers like Bartok and Schumann tried to write music for children with actually intrinsically interesting content; it is preferable to watered down music. Imagine telling child, “I want you to learn Shakespeare’s Hamlet, so I’m going to simplify it. It’s all about an unhappy young guy who dies.”  The child might say, “What’s so interesting about an unhappy young guy? I can just look at my older brother. Why should I spend the time worrying about Hamlet?” It is essential to find a way to make the power and mystery and wonder of Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler palpable to the child as something they can experience by doing.  One way is through repertoire that’s specifically written for children, as Bartok and Schumann recognized. Then there is El Sistema's way, which is to have the beginner be a part of the orchestra as it performs the repertoire in its full complexity but to play parts that are suitable to the beginner's level; the parts will gradually become more complex as the student becomes more accomplished.  Therefore a student can take part in a full performance of a Shostakovich symphony, hearing and seeing how his or her companions play it, and participate according to the appropriate skill level.

These are the pedagogical achievements that we can take from El Sistema and try to transfer to the American circumstance. This would need to be done, of course, in a context that does not separate public music making from the community. The orchestras, the chorus, the musical activity from the beginning must be public and collective.  The primary objective is to put the orchestra to the service of social unification by fostering those qualities that make an orchestra great: its collaboration and mutual understanding.  Thus, for example, instead of badgering an orchestra to play in tune, we encourage the members to learn how to play together and find their own way to intonation through the exercise of discipline, social cohesion, and a sense of community. Is it possible to build through music a sense of self worth and a sense of solidarity and a sense of investment in wellbeing? Indeed yes, if it is done publicly with children; parents, neighbors and friends are the spectators so that they become integral parts of the children's experience. That process of education, of intervention into children’s lives, cannot be limited to the school time. It has to be done within school and, as well, after school. It has to be integrated into the whole life of the children and community, seven days a week, of a child and community. And as El Sistema has shown, in this way music ceases to be a function of privilege and wealth, and that group music making can be a deeply successful intervention in communities that are largely excluded from many economic and social privileges.

These are the ideals of the achievement that we must find a way to transfer to the United States. We at the Longy School of Music and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, in a program called Take a Stand, are at the beginning stages of trying to figure out what is it that we can learn from the El Sistema experience. So let me turn now to the question of the American circumstance and how it relates to El Sistema. We are fortunate that the idea that music is a democratic social activity and crucial for children, particularly in creating a sense of community and belonging, has an independent American philosophical heritage, and that heritage rests in the Transcendentalists in 19th-century New England. The most articulate heir of that tradition is the American composer Charles Ives, whose father was a bandleader. Ives was fond of saying that in a church choir, the most enthusiastic singer who could not sing in tune was, to his father, the most musical person.  To correct that person in a way that dampened his or her enthusiasm for singing was to inhibit their music making.  Ives felt that the activity rather than the end product was the most important part of music making.  The group activities in the 19th century America in which Ives grew up associated with music (the marching bands, choruses, church choirs), performed social functions essential to developing a sense of American citizenship, of being part of a community, and of having democratic respect for your neighbor.  We therefore don’t have to reach outside of our own intellectual heritage to find inspiration to adapt what El Sistema has achieved.

One major difference, of course, is that the United States has a genuine problem of scale--the size and pluralism of the nation. We are a nation of immigrants, a huge, disparate population with entirely different circumstances. We are, without question, a more affluent nation, and the nature of our poverty and of our prejudices and exclusions is peculiar to us. It exists in rural America and also in urban America. It overlaps with race, but not entirely.

A second difference is that we have a highly developed and internationally competitive popular culture of our own that has, over the last 50 to 75 years, marginalized classical music. This has resulted in classical music being damaged by those who resisted its democratization; defenders who cherished their presumed superiority, snobs and connoisseurs who have tried to make music seem like a luxury or fine wine that the average person can’t afford. It has become tainted by the impression that learning it is hard and motivated by trying to make an individual look socially better and more elite. Because it has been wiped out by American enthusiasm for sports and popular culture, it has been confined to a narrow sphere of admiration by those who want to consider themselves better than popular culture; classical has therefore lost the prestige that it once carried as a relevant and shared art form somehow representative of the values and aspirations of freedom and a democratic society.

The Venezuela in which Abreu invented El Sistema might be provocatively compared to America before the First World War, when the dominant German and Italian and Eastern European immigrants to America brought with them a high sense of the value of classical music, and created schools and choral societies. All the settlement houses in New York City have music programs: Henry Street, Third Street, Greenwich House. They were a crucial part of the settlement house movement in America (in Pittsburgh and in New York), because music education then was viewed as it is now in Venezuela, as a social instrument of real value. That movement died out, partly due to the closing of America to immigrants between 1920 and 1965. It is actually possible to track from that point the decline of audience interest in classical music with the loss of immigration and the aging of the population that believed in musical culture enough to put it in the school system beginning in the 1930s.  We have a bit of catch up to do to redeem the significance of classical music. The last president of the United States who loved classical music was probably Jimmy Carter, and he was less of an enthusiast than Richard Nixon. Now, that may not recommend classical music to us. But Mrs. Roosevelt loved classical music, and Harry Truman (who was not rich or privileged and an autodidact) liked it too. I don’t want to speak about the Bush family. I’ll leave them out for the moment. Again, I don’t want to comment on Bill Clinton’s saxophone playing, and I’ll fall silent about our current president. But classical music is not high on the national agenda, and in the culture in general the instrument of the orchestra and the choral society (except, perhaps, in the Midwest) is now an instrument that requires some revival in the United States in terms of its place and purpose.

It is not news that America is in the throes of a tremendous sense of crisis about its educational system, particularly among the underserved populations. We have an embarrassingly low high school completion rate. Of the people who complete high school, what they accomplish for the number of years they spend in school is an embarrassment. Our funding of the school system is completely antiquated, and if there is a movement that has resonated with many political factions, it is for the dismantling of public education through privatization--though given how little we invest in public education, which is not considered a federal constitutional obligation in the United States, there is less to dismantle than we might wish. This is tragic. It is completely different from the Venezuelan situation, where in fact Abreu’s achievement has been to convince the state, despite regime changes, to invest in El Sistema as a national program. I defy any of you, as we stand on the so-called fiscal cliff, to persuade anybody right, left, or center to invest in music education. The person who did would be considered a candidate for a psychiatric evaluation. And that is not only because the right wing doesn’t want big government, but also because the left considers high culture to be a peripheral decoration.

The suspicion of the American left to any form of culture that is not mass entertainment indicates a problem we have, which does not seem to exist in Mexico or the Latin American countries. The problem is a peculiar American egalitarian suspicion that the arts are not vital to democracy. Most Americans will not distinguish between art and entertainment. They think that freedom of expression is absolutely and satisfactorily fulfilled by what you can see in the commercial arena: movie theaters and television. If people want to hear Beethoven and Mahler, or John Cage or John Adams, pay for it without public help. As we all know, the tickets to our concerts in this hall and to the Metropolitan Opera or any American orchestra are hardly cheap. But even given this expense, the ticket price still does not pass on the cost of this activity to the average consumer. If you actually took an orchestra concert by the New York Philharmonic and made all the seats of Avery Fisher Hall pay in full for the orchestra's expense, the price would be over a thousand dollars a seat. Even I wouldn’t pay that, and I wouldn’t expect anybody else to do so. Therefore these must be subsidized activities. Not surprisingly, the American public says, “Why should the taxpayer subsidize what you like? I’m perfectly happy listening to the music I like. Why should I have to learn about your music?” This, in a pluralist democracy, is an extremely hard argument to answer. The arts in America are hostages to the whims of the wealthy and private philanthropy.

When we actually try to transfer the insights of El Sistema to the United States, we therefore have to address these issues: funding, the prestige of the activity, the nature of the American educational system (which is not national but local), the intermittent and very complex structure of American poverty, and the essential diversity of the population. So what should we do? First, it seems to me that we actually have a tremendous advantage given the educational crisis. There is no doubt that the biological and neurological evidence increasingly makes the case that musical activity, especially collective musical activity that inspires individual discipline, is a correlative (not a cause, but a correlative) to educational achievement.  This is in part because classical music in our tradition is a notated system that has logic, grammar, syntax and meaning without being a language. What’s peculiar about music is that it is coherent, it coveys meaning, and transforms the experience of time.  It therefore requires the use of memory and the skill to identify and manipulate comparisons, relationships, similarities, and variations. In other words, it has a cognitive function.  It also develops the ability to locate and negotiate multiple activities in the same time frame. (A simple example, of course, would be harmony and counterpoint.) There is no doubt that being able train people to do these things and to listen and observe, has correlative benefits, and that is an argument in the United States to which people are willing to listen. We are concerned about our competitiveness and about the future, and there is no doubt that one could argue that in creating a widespread system of participatory music education among young people, it would improve their schooling and their achievement and cognitive ability. Those are potential claims that could make some headway in obtaining public support.

The second issue, of course, is the concern for the embarrassing unemployment rates measured by class and race in the United States, especially in urban centers. Work, which sustains life, occupies time and offers meaning to people, is something that fills an abyss of loneliness no matter what class you come from. The erosion of work has aggravated the absence of meaning in our lives. This is a shared problem along class lines: isolation, a sense of loss of value in one’s life. One common remedy in the United States from the sense of superfluity, and uselessness is religion. We seek refuge in the idea that God made us for a reason and therefore we are unique in some way that we don’t fully grasp. But apart from that religious belief, what else reminds us of our own need to exist? What keeps us going? That sense of meaning is increasingly hard to find, especially as technology presumably advances our society. The fear a century ago was once that we would all become factory robots, but now we've invented robots better than humans. There are no more toll collectors. There are no more elevator operators. Even in factories computers run the robots. We have only come to the beginning of the technological revolution of work. Most of us employed in simple physical tasks are going to be put out of business. We don’t have a bank teller to talk to anymore. We don’t have someone to sell us a subway token. Many of the things that once required human interaction have been mechanized in the name of efficiency. All the people in the world may not be able to be rendered useful in some old fashioned sense. They’re not needed to make food. They’re not needed to make drugs. What are they needed for? The question is of course a practical one of employment and economics, as we see all around us, but it is also one of internal value and sense of the human condition.

In the search for value, the role of the arts becomes that much more important. What can we do that is meaningful, if our work is no longer essential? It is the capacity for unpredictable activity of the imagination. The ATM machine may be more efficient than a bank teller, but no one can predict what expressive capacity any human, bank teller or otherwise, might reveal in the use of language, the use of visual imagination, and in the capacity to make music.

Our ability to use language is hard-wired, and so is our ability to make music. It is through the work of the imagination and our appreciation of others’ work of imagination that we begin to develop a sense of value in life that isn't about economics, not about our paycheck, and not about our social function at work. It’s about our social function as members of a community. And that is where El Sistema comes in, to provide ambition for the young person, and a real joy of life apart from economic utility. Not to put it too simply, but the fear and intolerance exhibited by those who are capable of taking the lives of others in the name of radical causes, either religious or political, derives from a lack of their sense of the sanctity of life, and their feeling of existential emptiness that must be filled with purpose.  That will to fill the vacuum of purpose is a fundamental human need, easily perverted by the will of powerful leaders. How do you dissipate that?  The arts are not an answer (the Nazis were great lovers of art), but in the right circumstances, the arts can offer a different humanist option based in respect and empathy.

But to realize this humanist view, one cannot merely be a spectator.  Classical music can't be experienced like a movie in which one sits in a dark place and vicariously experiences emotion through fantastic scenarios that, once we emerge from the cinema, only serve to remind us how drab real life is. Going to most movies (except for horror movies, which are popular precisely because of the sense of relief one feels after watching people get killed, and know we are only watching a movie) offers a passive, illusory use of imagination, a further development of the vicarious experience first provided by novels and plays at the end of the 18th century.  Romance genres are the worst.  Offering a vision of love and relationships that can't be met in the real world foster a sense not of fulfillment but of discontent. The same thing is true of Wagner's heroes. We can identify with Lohengrin for a few hours, before we go home to do the laundry and reflect on the certainty that we will never have the chance to play a heroic role or feel the passion of Tristan and Isolde. We compare everyone we meet to movie stars until we develop the same problem that Flaubert described in Madame Bovary, in which Emma Bovary looks at her life through the lens of the romantic sentimental novels she has read, and finds terminal unhappiness.

That escapist and disheartening relation to art can be avoided by changing the spectator into the participant. Art as an activity is play: playing in a group, in a community, hearing the feedback of the audience, are all thrilling. It needn't be done with the objective of getting a job with the Berlin Philharmonic (and being told to give up playing if your teacher determines you can't get such a job), but of being a participant in the imaginative activity of a community, anywhere. That is what El Sistema has proven can be done, and can be done with positive impact for both participant individuals and the spectator community.

Can we do this in the United States? The answer is unequivocally yes. But in our case it will have to be done without the national government, and only indirectly with the government on the local level. It needs to be a truly grass roots project. It has to be developed from within the community, and the community has to be part of its definition, which means the nucleos in different parts of the country will do different kinds of things according to their local context. But there also should be some national interchangeability. As in El Sistema, the nucleos should be nationally coordinated. Additionally, we must under these circumstances be very mindful of the catholicity of taste, so that what we do with the groups (particularly in what may be called the crossover) ranges from the standard classical repertory to the improvisatory to genres that are not necessarily within everyone’s training. And for that, we have to retrain all our classical musicians to be teachers not of individuals but of groups, to be group leaders. We also have to also train them to do transcription and arrangement. In one of Longy and Bard’s first nucleos, for example, in the Central Valley of California, we have a mariachi group. And that’s an excellent point to begin, developing outward from local tradition into other kinds of music, and also to exchange with other nucleos so that they can encounter mariachi as a new musical experience for themselves. The building of different kinds of ensembles and different kinds of repertoire facilitates a constructive national conversation.

There’s so much from which to draw outside the standard European repertoire, that these groups can make a contribution in bringing music to life.  We're not only getting a youth orchestra or an orchestra to come through the system to play Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Brahms, but also the treasures that other orchestras might not dare to touch that are from the classical tradition that has been neglected and from the heritage of the nucleo's community, whether it’s Mexican composers such as Chavez or Revueltas, or the Argentinian Ginastera, or in the United States the long, rich repository of repertory of American composers such as Copland, Still, Ellington, Harris and Beach.

In the organizing of this monumental project, the first step in every community is to create an alliance between the school system, the local government, the specific political and business leadership of the region, and the performing arts organizations (whether they be orchestras or choral societies), to involve the varying churches (both Protestant and Catholic) and the non-Christian religious communities. The core tenet is that this must done in a way that is collaborative and which reinforces a sense of a democratic pluralism. It also has to be defined in a way that does not slip into segregation, so we will have to find ways in which the actual constituencies of kids are not all of one neighborhood. That's relatively easy to do in the bigger cities; it’s a little more complicated in rural areas.

In conclusion, what we learn from the success of Maestro Abreu and El Sistema is that music can be made to matter. Music can be placed at the center of a nation’s social and political agenda. It can be placed at the center of a nation’s desire to recreate a fabric of patriotism and community, to give a chance to people who are excluded from proper education and opportunity to develop the skills through music that will make them competitive. It also shows that really honoring musical expression is a way of redeeming a sense of personal value and can have practical impact on the success of a generation and of a community.  It's a priority, not a luxury, and the emphasis has to be on participation. El Sistems's example is an enormous encouragement, and therefore it is absolutely proper that we take a very good look at how and what is done in Venezuela, as we attempt to create in the United States versions of what they’ve achieved that will work for us. This is what we have tried to do at Longy and at Bard, in the creation of a national network through Take a Stand in partnership with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.  Our work isn't about owning a franchise or a product, but it is about paying the greatest compliment we can to El Sistema, which is to imitate and to honor its principles rather than any specific practice. Thank you very much.

Questions

We’ll take a few moments for questions, if there are any.  I hate giving talks about without giving someone else a chance to speak, so I would be happy to take a few questions before we run out of time. Go ahead.

-You were going through the obstacles and the differences in American society versus in Venezuela. It makes me think that one of the biggest is the role of the individual in each of our societies. The role of the individual in our society is paramount (deified) which is, from my understanding, diametrically opposite to what El Sistema has been able to build on. So I’m thinking about all those parents who haul their kids to afterschool activities that are for their individual development, and how would we ever make the shift to afterschool activities for social development, especially since socialism is an anathema.

I think it’s a very good question. First, I can’t speak for Venezuela. I speak to the American experience. The focus on individual competitiveness and achievement is not irreconcilable with group activity, because you have to achieve in a group. An orchestra is a very peculiar instrument. It’s an instrument that could be an instrument of subordination (that is to say, everybody has to subordinate his or her artistic individuality to the conductor, and you hope the conductor is good, because if the subordination is obnoxious it breeds rage). However, the orchestra doesn’t necessarily have to be that, and that’s where the mentoring is very helpful. Much depends on the way a conductor treats an orchestra. For example, in an orchestra you have to have a sense of rhythmic cohesion and ensemble. Ensemble is not only created by hawk-like watching of the conductor, but it is formed by listening to the people around you in the acoustic space, so that the back of the orchestra plays a little early so it can line up with the front of the orchestra. In that, you have to rely on the orchestral musicians’ sense of their own ability to control the situation. So you can train an orchestra and a chorus to feel that the sum is greater than the parts but the parts are crucial.  I don’t accept the notion that individual instruction is at odds with the group, especially in music, because the amount of repertoire for solo tuba is limited, and the amount of repertoire even for solo violin is limited (without accompanist), so the moment you make music you’re talking about a social activity and social communication. Second, in America the premium on the individual is hypocritical, because we have freedom and the chance to attain individuality we never use. We use it to look like our neighbor. Actually, all this talk about individuality drives me nuts, because where are truly distinctive individuals? The moment we see the individual, we ostracize her, shun him, hurl epithets and even lock him up. We don’t tolerate a sense of individuality in America (not at all). The American school is all too much about conformity. You know, when we came to this country, the school called my mother, a professor of pediatrics (they made a mistake in calling her), and said that my sister failed to join the group and they were concerned. My mother said, “What was the group doing?” And when she heard what they were doing she said, “I’m on my daughter’s side.”

So Americans use freedom actually to voluntarily suppress real dissent and individuality. I’m being overly cynical. I wouldn’t be too concerned about individuality, because I think that in the training of musicians your point is very important. The training of musicians has to involve several things. One is not only playing together in an ensemble but also finding means of personal expression, being able to write music and improvise. All classical musicians need to be trained to improvise. So the experience of being in the group, and having the same technical capacity are crucial, and that’s why teaching the reading of music and the writing of music are so important. Therefore, then, the same individual who may spend three or four hours being part of an ensemble can use those very same skills for something that is her or his own. So I think this is not a problem. And the way you sell this to the public is that, unlike some group activities, musical achievement can’t be taken away from you. In fact, that’s something you can sustain individually. One  reason I never was interested in doing sports is I realized that even if I were good at it (which was implausible), I would be finished at 21. I mean, who are the tennis stars? This is a youth-related activity. But when you watch films of Artur Rubinstein or Casals going out onstage (let alone Mieczyslaw Horszowski, who gave a concert at 99), I thought, “Now, that’s worthwhile. I can amortize my youthful effort over my entire life. So it’s a much more attractive investment, if you want to put it in American terms, an investment that keeps giving.

-I’m aware of El Sistema having been replicated in, for example, Glasgow in Scotland, which is an incredibly deprived community, and where they had a considerable degree of success. My question is, have you had the opportunity to observe other examples of El Sistema being replicated with success, and what are their main points?

The questioner speaks of a replication of El Sistema in Scotland. Let me say something, which for those of you who are real El Sistema devotes may be a little bit heretical, but I’m just by nature a bit heretical, so I apologize ahead of time. I don’t know the details of the Glasgow program, but I would suggest that Scotland and Venezuela in many respects (both by scale and by the nature of the population) may have similarities that would make a direct transference more plausible. El Sistema, like all good ideas, has a history of its own that precedes it. What we are all talking about—music as a participant activity-- is something that was second nature in the 19^th century with the development of the first urban communities, Vienna of the 1820s or London in the mid-19^th century. In this city alone (New York) there were at the turn of the century maybe 200 choral societies and hundreds of musical ensembles in the community that did exactly what El Sistema is trying to do, and that represented a tradition that got eroded by the advent of mechanical reproduction of sound. Our life was silent if we didn’t make the music ourselves. We stopped singing when you could just drop first the needle on a disc, and earlier when we had the first player pianos. The death of the piano as a consumer item was when the first rolls were introduced. So we actually mechanized our own entertainment. What you’re reviving has a human history before El Sistema, and El Sistema is just a way of organizing it so that it’s more connected to modern life and concerns. The other difference, of course, is that when music as practice is targeted at poverty or underserved populations it is undermining privilege, where in the 19^th century access to real music education was a function of wealth. And that’s where the radical democratic potential exists. But you were asking, have I observed other examples? There are many examples in the world where this kind of musical activity has still sustained, primarily in choral music where traditions of choral singing (particularly church related) have passed on from generation to generation unbroken.

-You made the point that training in music adds all kinds of important skills: focus, social skills, listening, and then the transference of those to other academic aspects. You discount them to some extent by referring to them only as correlational. The question is whether we could do, or there has been done, something more akin to what one would call a closed experiment, if for no better reason than to drive a more compelling argument.

The questioner asked a very seductive question. I made the argument about the transferability, which is (in my judgment) not a matter of scholarship but a matter of intuition. I would prefer to ride a train with a musical individual than someone who’s tone deaf. It’s just intuitive. Now, it doesn’t make musical people better. Stalin was musical, and Hitler was a great music lover, and the Nazis were notoriously enthusiastic about music. So the link between music and ethics is a very tortured subject. I would like to think that musical activity has some relationship to ethical judgment (I would hope so), but I’m dissuaded from thinking that is the case. So the question is better narrowly focused on the cognitive and social skills. There have been some controlled experiments. There was a cognitive study (a long-range, longitudinal study) of the young people who were in the choir in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. That’s the same boys’ choir from Bach’s time that is still in existence, a great boys’ choir, and they showed real correlative results. A similar finding occurred (the same longitudinal study, I think) with the Sängerknaben in Vienna, where children in a boys’ choir were followed to see how well they do in school. And there are a lot of neurologists and neuroscientists working on this. But that’s not my field. I’m a little cautious because I don't think we yet know enough about mental function.  I’m reluctant to suggest a causal argument. But a social adaptation argument, which isn’t totally causal but simply experiential, seems very worthwhile. And I think there’s a lot of anecdotal evidence that can’t be dismissed. For example, Csikszentmihalyi, a tremendous social psychologist wrote a very interesting book called Flow, and he did a longitudinal study of adolescents in Chicago and showed that adult performance is correlated with the amount of time the person was able to concentrate on something without being connected to clock time. You know what happens when you practice.  Rehearsal’s really boring. Time just creeps, and you think an hour has gone by but only ten minutes have gone by. The other experience is the opposite: it’s so engrossing that you wake up and you realize, “Oh my god, I’m late. An hour has passed and I just thought it was ten minutes.” So the distortion of concentration of time through the process of concentration on music is correlative to discipline. The ability to do that in adolescents is correlative to adult achievement. That’s what we musicians train people to do: to concentrate intelligently. So there is some social psychological evidence that we are on solid ground here, and because music is analogous to a language, it breeds good habits. And unlike painting, it’s social. It’s not about creating an object and someone else buying it. You have to do music in real time as we live in real time. (We have to work together in real time. We have to travel on the subway in real time. We have to do everything in real time.) Music is done in real time. It’s not about connecting to recordings. It’s about musical experience in real life and time. So there’s so much correlation (parallelism) to other facets of life and work that the argument for music is very persuasive. And what Venezuela shows is that they have real results in this way with El Sistema alumni over 40 years. There’s no reason we can’t have real results her in the US, and Lord knows, we need to have them. Thank you very much.

The ASO at Fifty

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Fiftieth Birthday Celebration, performed on Oct 26, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

Tonight’s concert is not just a season opener; it marks fifty years of concerts by the American Symphony Orchestra.

The founding of the ASO was an act of vision by the great conductor and charismatic personality, Leopold Stokowski. In 1962, the New York Philharmonic moved to the new Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, leaving Carnegie Hall, New York’ s historic, endangered, and magnificent concert venue without a resident orchestra. The ASO was formed to fill that gap.

But Stokowski sought to do more than compensate for the loss of the New York Philharmonic. He realized that a period of European hegemony in the training of classical musicians in America had come to an end. In 1962, America resembled the China we see today in terms of classical music. The talent born and raised in the United States was outstripping that within Europe and the rest of the world. But most American orchestras still defined themselves in terms of musicians from Europe and European traditions. Stokowski created the ASO to give young American musicians a chance to launch their professional careers and be part of a new American venture that celebrated American traditions (as well as others) in classical music.

Stokowski also recognized an opportunity to return to his own singular artistic vision as a music director. He had been a pioneer in orchestral programming and created a distinctive orchestral sound during his tenure at the Philadelphia Orchestra before World War II. His international reputation was based in part on his courage with respect to repertoire, not just his ear for sound and his theatrical gifts. He envisioned the ASO as a new beginning.

Stokowski had just turned 80 and he wished to impart to a young orchestra his irreverent sense of adventure and innovation. He wanted the ASO to reach well beyond the standard repertory. The American Symphony Orchestra in its first seasons premiered and recorded many works other conductors rejected. We have continued this practice and gone further by making most of our live performances available for download on the internet. Stokowski made history in 1965. He singled out a work by America’s most controversial and original composer of the early twentieth century, one that had been deemed un-performable: Charles Ives’ Fourth Symphony, a work you will hear tonight. Tonight we link that ASO world premiere with one from Stokowski’s Philadelphia years, his celebrated first American performance in 1916 of Mahler’s massive Eighth Symphony (which he repeated in New York at the Metropolitan Opera), a work, despite its monumental architecture, that remains controversial even within the now highly popular canon of Mahler’s symphonies.

In addition to assembling a young American membership and offering cutting-edge concert programming, Stokowski introduced a third dimension into the mission of the ASO. This idea was to offer concerts at prices that could be afforded by all citizens in a democratic society. New York had witnessed many similar attempts at this ideal. But by the 1960s most had disappeared. Only in the summer months were there still wonderful and inexpensive regular outdoor concerts at Lewisohn Stadium at City College. Stokowski’s founding of the ASO was indeed prescient, for the summer series at Lewisohn Stadium would come to an end by the close of the decade. The AS0, with considerable effort, has struggled to remain true to this mission. We honor Stokowski’s intention tonight precisely by offering this concert at the same ticket price as at the opening concert of the American Symphony in October 1962.

Stokowski’s idealism seemed in tune with history. The 1950s and 1960s were years of unprecedented prosperity in the United States. The general economic and cultural optimism (including President Kennedy’s creation of the National Endowment for the Arts) was felt with particular intensity in the business of classical music. With the advent of the long-playing record, advances in radio and broadcasting, and the arrival of television, it appeared as if the traditions of concert music could be extended to a wider audience than ever before in a practical fashion, and that an enthusiastic and sufficient consumer market for it could emerge.

During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain countries had made live concert music affordable to anyone through state subsidy. Concert life thrived throughout the Soviet Empire, though with oppressive state control. By the early 1960s in the United States and the rest of what was deemed the “free world,” it was thought that economic prosperity might produce a similar result in a free market environment. In America, symphonic music had always been an extremely expensive art form requiring patronage from the social and financial elite. But in the decades following World War II, multiple income sources from performances, recordings, and broadcasting seemed profitable enough to carry this expense in a more commercial manner and more independent of philanthropic largesse. That the ASO opened with strikingly inexpensive tickets reflected a widespread belief that orchestral music could be emancipated from dependence on patronage, whether by a monarchy, an aristocracy, or direct subvention from the modern nation state, democratic or authoritarian. In other words, a symphony orchestra could thrive as an open-market commodity in a democratic society.

In the fifty years that have passed since 1962, these premises and ideals upon which Stokowski modeled the ASO’s mission have only partly been realized. The United States continues to produce first-class musicians, but that is because of the excellence of its institutions, its conservatories and universities. The largest source of talent for these American institutions, however, comes now not from North America, but from Asia. Nevertheless, from a global perspective, his instinct was on the mark. There is no question that the quality and number of musicians prepared to play in first-class orchestras today are unprecedented. As in sports, the technical standards of performance have reached the highest levels in history.

Furthermore, Stokowski was prophetic in identifying the need to diversify and expand the repertory. That need, if anything, has become more urgent since 1962. When Stokowski founded the ASO, Leonard Bernstein was the music director of the New York Philharmonic. The New York Philharmonic programs Bernstein presided over reveal a range and enterprise that were exceptional. The same can be said of Bernstein’s immediate successor, Pierre Boulez. Yet the trend from the 1970s on has been increasingly conservative. For many reasons, orchestral programming around the world has become far more risk-averse and conventional than it was in 1962.

But the hope that has most distressingly failed to materialize is the expectation regarding the economic conditions of the orchestra. The changes in technology and communication that were supposed to expand the economic viability and commercial market for orchestra music have, it turns out, undermined it by producing an overwhelming competition in alternative media—cinema, television, video games, internet, mobile devices—in a way that Stokowski’s audiences could never have imagined. Today, technology has altered the very concept of audience, as well as the phenomena of fame, popular demand, dissemination, and critical influence. Instead of developing a wider market for orchestral music, the sea-change in media has put many orchestras in danger of becoming fossilized in a reactionary construct of tradition and a standard repertory, a powerful but distorted representation of the history of music.

Hector Berlioz once lamented that composing symphonic music was an irrational activity because it inevitably required the largesse of a very few people in order to be heard. In the immediate post-World War II years it was thought this circumstance could be changed. But Berlioz has turned out to be right. Already in 1966, William Baumol and William Bowen published their now legendary study on the inherent unsustainability of the orchestra in a market economy. A recent study, economist Robert J. Flanagan’s The Perilous Life of Symphony Orchestras, gives a compelling account of the probable fate of orchestras if forced to operate solely on a commercial earned-income basis. Flanagan makes it abundantly clear that if orchestras are to survive (and many will not), there can be no expectation that they will survive on the basis of ticket sales or standard models of business efficiency. The legitimate requirements of a living wage among musicians have driven the cost of orchestras well beyond what can be reasonably passed on to ticket buyers. If orchestral music is to be made available at reasonable prices to a diverse public in a democratic society today, then orchestral music and opera once again will require, as Berlioz observed, massive patronage, philanthropic largesse from the wealthy, the state, or alliances with not-for-profit institutions that serve the public good.

The challenge facing classical music today is not a depletion of audience or potential audience, or the aging of the audience. The real problem is that the very wealthy no longer consider it their civic responsibility to contribute to the traditions of the symphony orchestra. Their attentions have turned elsewhere. The great patrons of orchestral music, especially in the twentieth century, were often lovers of music and amateurs, but even those who were not felt it their duty to enhance the quality of life in the cities in which they lived. Civic leadership meant the creation of great artistic institutions that would make the city great. It is ironic that one single donor—Samuel Rubin—made the ASO possible in 1962, just as one single donor made Carnegie Hall possible in 1891. When Rubin died, the ASO almost died with him. The tradition of philanthropy that Rubin represented is fading. If orchestras are to survive this century, they will have to build innovative partnerships with like-minded institutions such as universities and foundations, which function to preserve and promote the non-commercial pursuits, discoveries, and accomplishments that define our cultural heritage.

In the face of crushing constraints, the ASO during the last twenty years has sought to perpetuate Stokowski’s vision. The ASO owes a debt to its loyal audience, to its donors, and to those institutions that have partnered with it, particularly Bard College. In the past twenty years we have focused mainly on two objectives. The first is a reconsideration of the rich history of orchestral music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We have brought back unjustly forgotten repertoire. Precisely owing to the changing character of culture and education, the ASO has tried to expand the audience for symphonic music by programming in a new way, highlighting the enormous diversity of all that is out there, rather than simply repeating the works that audiences seem to know best.

In a universe of such wide-ranging repertory, it becomes more difficult to dismiss orchestral music as a remote, arcane field. We believe that rejecting orchestral music because one may not like Beethoven is akin to rejecting reading because Shakespeare seems obscure, or deciding all cinema is useless because one saw a few ghastly movies. The ASO does not passively accept the idea that concert music can be represented by just a few works, or that it is an activity detached from the conduct of ordinary life. Even the greatest music will not be interesting if listeners see no connection between it and their own experience. Therefore the second objective has been to reinstate the link between music and other aspects of culture such as the visual arts, politics, literature, and history itself. ASO subscribers will have a better perspective on the Pussy Riot incident (which, incidentally, took place in the Church for whose dedication Tchaikovsky composed the 1812 Overture) if they saw the several programs we presented on music under Soviet rule. Fans of The Twilight Saga might be fascinated to know that an opera written back in the nineteenth century (Marschner’s Der Vampyr, which will be performed this season) was based on one of the original great vampire stories.

ASO’s aim during the past two decades has been a variation on Stokowski’s original purpose. Our intent has been to show that orchestral music is still connected to many concepts and issues that continue to engage us today. Listeners can get unique insights on such matters (including their favorite standard works) from listening to music framed in its proper and varied historical contexts. There has been, thankfully, a growth in the number of ensembles devoted to new music. Therefore, the ASO has focused on music from the past, with a view that the way we represent history is as much a part of the present as the performance of new music.

At the same time, the ASO has stayed true to Stokowski’s vision of moderate ticket prices to ensure wide accessibility. The ASO also continues to explore new ways of linking performing arts organizations with the university community, particularly by integrating the worlds of scholarship in music with traditions of performance. That kind of relationship has characterized the “early” music field for some time, but only recently has it begun to establish itself in music of later periods. And ASO has actively established award-winning educational programs, collaborations with high schools and middle schools.

As we look back over the last fifty years, it becomes clear that the period of enormous expansion in the number of performances, orchestras, summer festivals, and concert venues is coming to an end. Particularly since the financial crisis of 2008, the prospect of contraction for any orchestra is real and inevitable. These circumstances have given rise to a general sense of fear and pessimism regarding the future of orchestral concert performances. There is a lively, burgeoning world of new music, particularly for smaller ensembles, and to a limited extent in theater and opera. But the daunting scale and cost of orchestral concerts has placed the symphony orchestra and its work on a precarious path. ASO has tried to resist the natural tendency to respond to such fear and uncertainty with increased conservatism and risk-avoidance. Instead, with the enthusiastic support of its musicians, the ASO has continued to pursue the new and the unexplored, in keeping with the spirit of Stokowski. We try to design every concert to be enjoyable for the novice, for the connoisseur, and for everyone in between.

To mark our fiftieth anniversary we are performing Ives and Mahler because both had a unique relationship with Stokowski and therefore the history of this orchestra. But there is more. Ives and Mahler were contemporaries. There has always been a suspicion that on his last trip home to Vienna from New York in 1911, Mahler carried with him a manuscript of Ives’ music. Both composers experimented with music as an instrument of memory and the perception of time. Both evoked memories of childhood and reflected on modernity through the lens of a critical nostalgia. They were concerned with the idea that the past was refracted by missing and distorted memory. Both had a self-conscious reaction to the conceits of late Romanticism and the notion that music should be understood along the lines of a narrative, realistic novel. Both experimented with instrumental sound and symphonic form. That the ASO has been a New York City-based orchestra makes the pairing of these two composers a natural act of remembrance. Charles Ives lived and worked in the city of New York during the years that Gustav Mahler conducted at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. It was during Mahler’s New York years, in 1910, that his Eighth Symphony had its premiere in Munich. Whether Mahler and Ives actually ever met, no one will ever know, but it is certain that these two historic figures—one a central European Jew, the other a Yale graduate and son of a Connecticut bandleader—intersected on a level of influence and memory, just as we hope that by pairing them in performance they will intersect in your memory and experience tonight in a new way.

What is Art?

George Crumb

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Crumb, performed on April 19, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

We have become accustomed to assuming that composers who are employed by universities deserved the designation “academic.” Indeed, with the exception of John Adams and Philip Glass, since the 1960s composers who were not also performers (e.g. Bernstein and Foss) and who did not have the good fortune of independent means, relied on employment by colleges and universities for their livelihood. The expansion of university activity to include the teaching of composition (which began quite late with John Knowles Paine’s formal appointment at Harvard in 1875) has indeed been a great gift to music. The list of composers who have taught in the halls of academe rather than conservatories since the 1940s is extensive and impressive.

At the same time, the rift between the audience and modernist music during the mid-20th century has led to some suspicion about music fostered within the university. On the one hand, commercial and popular music of all kinds has flourished since 1945. On the other hand, seemingly impenetrable and abstruse music has been written under the non-commercial (if not anti-commercial) aegis of the university. Consequently, the use of the term “academic” to describe music or a composer does not connote flattery or praise. The idea of the “academic” has been hijacked and misleadingly turned into a pejorative. What has made that possible is the fact that serious scholarship and expertise often defy common sense. They are hard to understand and made even more daunting by the use of jargon. Music is no exception. Furthermore, some of the composers we readily associate with the American university during the second half of the 20th century include quite complex, brilliant, and rather forbidding personalities whose music is equally complex, brilliant, and forbidding. One thinks of Milton Babbitt, Roger Sessions, and Leon Kirchner.

It is therefore refreshing and delightful to realize that George Crumb, whose music burst on the scene in the late 1960s, was for his entire career a distinguished member of a university faculty. He taught in Virginia, Colorado, and for most of his career at the University of Pennsylvania. His compositions, however, marked a powerful shift in the history of 20th-century music. It reached the public at first hearing. Crumb can be compared in this regard to Ligeti and Kurtag. Crumb’s music, economical and elegant from the start, has mesmerized and enchanted broad audiences as well as fellow composers and musicians. He has made us think about time and sonority in new ways and has forged contemporary links between music, sentiment, and ideas, without the off-putting philosophical and conceptual verbiage in which many fine composers have sought justification and refuge.

Yet some of Crumb’s greatest contributions have come from his teaching. The fact that so many of his students have become the leading composers of their generation is a tribute to his generosity of spirit, and his kind and disarmingly modest manner. His students include Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, and Christopher Rouse. Crumb has also, not surprisingly, been a generous colleague. David Burge and the late Jan DeGaetani are two remarkable performers who worked closely with Crumb. Crumb offered a welcome alternative to the tense and testy relationships between performer and composer that came to dominate the new music scene, first after World War I (one thinks of Schoenberg) and after World War II (one thinks of Babbitt). Finally, Crumb as a person and in his demeanor is one of the few composers and indeed professors on our campuses (in any subject) entirely lacking in pretension and a sense of self-importance. There is a directness, grace, wit, and down-to-earth quality to George Crumb that is unforgettable. In Crumb, these attributes are not without their mischievous and subtle aspects. But meeting George Crumb for the first time, one might not guess that one was meeting one of the most original, profound, and important composers in all of 20th-century music, whose influence on the music of today has been historic. Crumb, working with the impetus provided by his encounter with the music of Schoenberg, Webern, and Dallapiccola (especially Webern’s approach to pitch, sonority, silence, and the economy of form) made something uniquely American out of a European tradition in an entirely novel way.

If I may be permitted a personal note, this concert is the realization of a dream I have harbored for a long time. I will never forget the impact Crumb’s Echoes of Time and the River made on me when I first heard it. It was 1967, and I was 19 years old and an undergraduate student at the University of Chicago. We were lucky to have a terrific music department, with Easley Blackwood, Ralph Shapey, and Richard Wernick on the faculty, alongside a group of music historians (including Howard Mayer Brown, Leo Treitler, and H. Colin Slim), many of whom were active performers.

I was the assistant conductor and concertmaster of the University Orchestra and a student of Richard Wernick’s. Through him, I was invited to the rehearsals taking place in Mandel Hall in 1967 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a special series devoted to contemporary music. The piece in rehearsal was Crumb’s Echoes, and the performance was to be a premiere. The members of the orchestra refused to do the processionals, as I recall, and only reluctantly agreed to play the antique cymbals. I do remember Victor Aitay, the great concertmaster, gingerly putting down his violin to play an antique cymbal when called for in the piece. I still possess and cherish the score of Echoes I was given to study.

I got to sit behind Crumb as he followed along, with his friend Richard Wernick beside him. I met Crumb again a few years later when I was in graduate school while visiting the Wernicks, who had moved to Media, Pennsylvania, where the Crumbs also lived. Wernick had joined the Penn faculty. I recall playing the Schubert “Trout” Quintet with Crumb playing the double bass part on a second piano. For several years, Jan DeGaetani and her husband Phil West were artists in residence in New Hampshire at Franconia College while I served as president there in the early 1970s. I recall many memorable evenings with George Crumb who came several times for concerts and visits. Among the most unforgettable was a long evening séance at the Franconia Inn, during which a table—at which sat Jan deGaetani, George Crumb, Joel Thome, Phil West, and I—was said to have “levitated.”

When I moved to Bard College in 1975, George Crumb and Richard Wernick kindly came to do a mini-residency at the college. I was once again reminded of the grace, humor, reserve, and intelligence of George Crumb. It is so refreshing to encounter a genuinely great gift for writing music that means something, engages the audience and fellow professionals, and says something new but is neither imitative nor manipulative. That rare gift resides in Crumb, an individual without airs and affectation. It is indeed a miracle when an artist exists who does not relish appearing as one.

George Crumb has taken his place alongside the greatest of American composers. His unmistakable American voice and intuition for innovation, all in a manner immune from commerce and the politics of fame, has earned him international renown. The American Symphony Orchestra is truly proud to honor George Crumb by presenting three of his greatest works in its ongoing tribute to great American composers, which has recently included Henry Cowell, Walter Piston, and will continue next season with John Cage.

Trapped in the Web of History

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Hunchback of Notre Dame, performed on March 8, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

Today’s performance of Franz Schmidt’s opera Notre Dame, which he completed in 1906 and which was premiered in 1914, is perhaps the first effort to present this work on a major stage in North America. The opera had some notable success before World War II, but only in German-speaking Europe. After 1945, its presence in the repertory was restricted essentially to Vienna, where the work has been produced both on the stage of the Vienna Sate Opera and the Volksoper. Notre Dame has taken its place, alongside Max von Schillings Mona Lisa (1915) and most of the operas of Zemlinsky and Schreker, in the virtual storage bins of the repertory.

Opera is one of the most recalcitrant of art forms. Unlike some other musical genres, new operas are still being written and performed. But perhaps an adverse consequence of opera’s currency is that its rich history, especially during the 19th and 20th centuries in France and German-speaking Europe, is being buried by neglect, much to the detriment of the audience and the future of the art form. The situation is so dire that when one seeks to revive a work, one is bound to encounter the perennial ill-informed suspicion that if a work is not as popular as La bohème, La traviata or (however implausibly) Götterdammerung, it can’t be any good. The fact is that opera houses are risk averse, and they fear, without reason, that the public won’t attend anything from music history that is not already a hit. The richness of the historic repertoire from after 1815 and before 1970 is a potential bonanza; this conservatism is an unnecessary impediment to enlarging the audience for opera.

The meager attention still paid to Notre Dame, since it is restricted essentially to Vienna (although there was a 2010 revival in Dresden) might lead one to think that the work, and indeed all of Schmidt’s music, has something peculiarly Austrian or even Viennese about it. Could Schmidt’s music be a “local” phenomenon, which, unlike the music of Johann Strauss, is not susceptible to international export?

Nothing could be further from the truth. If there ever was a cosmopolitan and versatile musician who commanded the full range of compositional techniques transcending any local tradition, it was Franz Schmidt. If there indeed was anything “local” about him, it was the extent to which he mirrored the polyglot diversity of the Habsburg Empire and its culture, itself—as Franz Werfel never tired of asserting—the embodiment of the cosmopolitan: an anti-nationalist, multi-ethnic, political conglomerate. It is worth some nostalgia, particularly today as we witness the struggling provincialism among the Central European nations that emerged from the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 and the demise of the Soviet Empire in 1989.

Schmidt came to an anti-provincial culture naturally. He was born in 1874 (the same year as Schoenberg and 14 years after Mahler) in today’s Bratislava, now the capital of the Slovak Republic. It was formerly known as Poszony and was an important Hungarian city governed by Budapest after the Compromise of 1867. Before that it was Pressburg, a crossroads of the Habsburg Empire where German was spoken (alongside Slovakian and Hungarian and Yiddish). Schmidt was part Hungarian and part German and spoke both languages. Bela Bartók grew up in the same city, as did Ernő Dohnanyi—two of Hungary’s 20th-century cultural icons. Schmidt’s Hungarian heritage left its mark, as listeners will discover easily from the music in Notre Dame.

But Schmidt’s musical training took place in Vienna, where Dohnanyi had also gone to study, as opposed to Budapest, where Bartok had chosen to enter the conservatory. Schmidt was a fine pianist. He was also a very accomplished cellist who played solo parts in the Vienna Philharmonic, where he was a member for almost 20 years. In addition, he was a virtuoso organist, and of course a composer. He eventually became the head of the Vienna Conservatory and taught a fantastic array of distinguished musicians, just as Franz Schreker did in Berlin. Schmidt’s pupils included not only composers, however, but also pianists and cellists. In the midst of all this, Schmidt wrote four symphonies, a variety of concerti, operas, and one major choral work (performed twice by the ASO), the towering and magisterial The Book with the Seven Seals (1937).

Despite the admiration both of those who were in opposing camps in terms of music and culture such as Schoenberg, and of others including key protagonists of modernism in England and America such as Hans Keller, Schmidt today is performed, if at all, mostly by Austrians (e.g. Franz Wesler-Most) and a few who were trained in Vienna (e.g. Zubin Mehta). Why is a composer of such craftsmanship and versatility, who stuck stubbornly to the still-appealing rhetoric and style of late 19th century romanticism, consistently ignored? Why does Schmidt still suffer in the shadows, even more strikingly than do his Viennese contemporaries Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker?

Predictably, the answer is complex. First, Schmidt was not only poor at self-promotion (a necessary attribute for a composer), but he seems to have been his own worst enemy. He quarreled openly with Mahler and Mahler’s brother-in-law, Arnold Rose, the concertmaster of the Vienna Opera and Philharmonic. Schmidt always felt put upon by someone or something. He was prone to hypochondria. His self-image as victim was not quite as offensive as that cultivated by Hans Pfitzner, but Schmidt was nonetheless of that ilk, quick to believe that he had been overlooked or snubbed. Unlike Pfitzner, however, Schmidt was improbably and uncommonly generous to students and colleagues in need.

Second, there is some discomfort with how Schmidt, who was not Jewish, allowed his music to be appropriated. Despite vigorous dissents in the posthumous Schmidt literature (there is an active and fiercely loyal group of admirers still in existence) and testimonies by his loyal pupils and colleagues (many of them Jewish), Schmidt’s politics veered to the right and adhered to the local Viennese traditions of political anti-Semitism, which during the 1890s became embedded in a Christian-Social framework. In this sense, Schmidt followed in the footsteps of Bruckner before him in the cultural politics of fin-de-siècle Vienna. Although as a composer Schmidt reveals an affinity to Brahms, his politics were the opposite of Brahms’s. By the mid-1930s Schmidt allowed himself to be linked to Austro-Fascism, and after 1938 and the Anschluss, to the Nazis. He died in 1939 before completing a Nazi-inspired cantata he agreed to write with the unfortunate title The German Resurrection. During the war, Schmidt’s music was played frequently in Vienna in order to demonstrate great “Aryan” modern music blessed with spiritual meaning, a powerful corrective and alternative to the “degenerate” grandiosity of Mahler and the abstract cacophony of Schoenberg.

Third, Schmidt had the misfortune of writing music at the peak of music’s history as a cultural form. There were too many good composers around. Schmidt came of age while Brahms and Bruckner were still writing. As an aspiring composer he competed with Max Reger, Gustav Mahler, Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss, Alexander Zemlinsky, Dohnanyi, and Franz Schreker, and one could add Edward Elgar as well. Each of these composers wrote music with a continuing allegiance to 19th-century post-Wagnerian practices. If that was not sufficiently daunting, Schmidt by 1918 faced an entirely new source of competition—the modernist and nationalist musical movements that emerged after World War I. Schmidt’s work as a composer appeared contemporaneously with music of Bartók, Szymanowski, Enescu, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Hindemith, Weill, Martinů, and Janáček, just to name a few. And then one needs to consider the impact of composers from North America and Russia on the concert and opera repertoire after 1918. There seemed to be little place in the international scene for an old-fashioned-sounding Schmidt.

All this would be enough to daunt anyone, no matter how talented. But Schmidt remained productive and disciplined, impervious to fashion. It is ironic that Notre Dame, like Schreker’s Der Ferne Klang (1910), anticipates Berg’s Lulu (1935), not only in the treatment of the central female character, but in Schmidt’s use of classical strategies associated with instrumental music—sonata and counterpoint—and the orchestra as protagonist to frame the musical structure within opera. Dramatic action and an independent musical structure and logic, without reference to illustration or allusion, are integrated in Notre Dame, as in Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu. Schmidt was not a bland conservative—he was a reactionary revolutionary who sought to resist the decline in musical culture that had started in the late 19th century with the indiscriminating popular rage for Wagner.

The theme of Notre Dame has less to do with Victor Hugo then it does with Frank Wedekind and Otto Weininger: the fin-de-siècle obsession with the feminine and its role in inspiring aesthetic creativity and defining (and corrupting) the masculine. If anything, Schmidt and his librettist invert Hugo’s narrative and turn his politics upside down, framing the audience against the mob. Schmidt’s Notre Dame is an early example of 20th-century conservative cultural skepticism regarding the prospects of progress and mass democracy. It tacitly laments the collapse of the cultural legacy of aristocracy and monarchy, hardly Hugo’s intent. Indeed, Schmidt was one of many who never recovered from the end of Habsburg rule and the splintering of the Empire into warring little nations, essentially destroying the multi-ethnic and national character of Europe, including his birthplace.

The final remarkable aspect of Schmidt is the extent to which his music, despite its superficial debts and affinities to others, including Wagner, Brahms and Strauss, is really original. Despite his personality, Schmidt has a Gershwin- and Richard Rodgers-like gift for tunes, melodies, and lightness that routinely eluded Schoenberg and Reger. The melodic instinct and ear for a popular style (more associated with the operetta) resulted in the fact that Schmidt’s music is never quite as bombastic as that of Strauss and Mahler. Schmidt also carries on Bruckner’s adept lyrical use of the chorus. Furthermore, Schmidt retains an uncanny sense of proportion in structure and the use of time, as two previous works performed by the ASO, the 1934 Piano Concerto (with Leon Fleisher) and the 1923 Beethoven Variations for Piano and Orchestra, also reveal.

Notre Dame was Schmidt’s greatest single career success. Yet he remained bitter. Its premiere was delayed. Schmidt blamed Mahler and openly accused him of jealousy (clearly a bad idea). The first performance took place in the first year of World War I. By the time the war was over, the work seemed out of date and out of touch with the times—if not the music, then certainly the plot and libretto. During the 1920s and the early 1930s, Schmidt felt unfairly and increasingly dismissed and overlooked, even in Vienna (when in the 1920s Strauss briefly co-directed the Vienna Opera with Franz Schalk).

At the same time, Notre Dame, although in the shadow of other works, garnered considerable respect, as it deserved. Hugo von Hofmannsthal was impressed enough by the music to write Strauss about it. The orchestral music and vocal writing were widely admired and the finest opera singers from 1914 on wanted to be cast in Notre Dame.

This opera, along with practically all of Schmidt’s music, deserves to be in the repertoire as more than a rare curiosity. The excellence, refinement, elegance, and inspiration of Schmidt’s work are qualities eagerly embraced by audiences. Now that the conflicts of history have receded, we could use a breather from more of the same: Mahler, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner. Franz Schmidt’s music can provide a welcome change, if only it were performed in contexts that emancipate it from its undeserved identification as provincially Austrian.

Orientalism in France

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Orientalism in France, performed on Feb 10, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

The term Orientalism does not refer to characteristics or ethnicities located in a massive geographical region that spread from northern Africa, through the Middle East all the way to Asia, termed indiscriminately in 19th-century Europe as the “Orient.” Rather, it refers to a European fascination and obsession with distant cultures based on an historic accumulation of preconceptions and stereotypes. These developed in the European imagination before the Crusades. They lasted for centuries, with residues still visible in contemporary European and American representations of Islam and Asia. Their currency was enhanced by the experience of colonial and imperial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Not all these stereotypes were condescending or hostile. Some seemed benign, such as the colorful stories in One Thousand and One Nights. Others were sublimated European fantasies that expressed criticisms and desires otherwise not easily articulated in European societies. And many were used to justify European superiority. All, however, were products and distortions of European imaginations that actual travels and encounters to the lands in question were not capable of dislodging. Consider the two great Orientalist painters of France: the East portrayed by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), who traveled throughout North Africa, was just as idealized and influenced by European preconceptions as those of Jean August Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) who never traveled further than Rome. When Gustav Mahler sought inspiration in Chinese poetry in Das Lied von der Erde, its German translation and musical adaptation rendered it powerfully European.

A particularly intense locus for Orientalism in the 19th century (but hardly the only one) was France. The French fascination with the non-Western world began in earnest with the triumph of Napoleon Bonaparte. It was he who brought the Rosetta Stone to Europe. Champollion used it to unravel the key to Egyptian hieroglyphics. Napoleon brought the glory of the East to France and made France the modern equivalent of ancient Rome, with all the grandeur, glory, and arrogance of that conceit.

Napoleon centralized and modernized France and strengthened Paris’s status as the cosmopolitan crossroads of Europe and the arbiter of international taste and style. The world was judged and characterized in the Parisian press. Fashions were set for the rest of Europe. Individual European nations were not exempt during the 19th century from the imposition of stereotypes any more than Eastern cultures (though the difference between Europeans was pale in comparison to the difference between the European and non-European). The French, for example, considered the English to be cold and calculating, too steeped in the Old Testament, and thoroughly unmusical. They thought the Germans turgid and given to abstruse abstractions. German philosophers, according to the French, were schoolmasters and either rigid idealists or materialists. The German people were considered aggressive and unrefined. But the French celebrated themselves for their quick intelligence, their wit, elegance, and graceful style.

But although France experienced industrialization and urbanization in the 19th century, the dominance of a pre-modern rural ideal was never shattered. It was the countryside and the provincial life that helped sustain a national self-identity tied to nature and landscape in a manner quite different from the English experience. In the 19th century, France uniquely experienced a population decline. There was, by the end of the 19th century, a fear that France was deteriorating and that its greatest days were in the past. This insecurity was inspired first by the Napoleonic defeat in 1815 and then reinforced in 1870 when the Prussians vanquished the French with astonishing speed. France found itself in an odd position, in which its increasing powerlessness both economically and politically was compensated by its conceit as home—in Paris—to a culture emblematic of the highest aristocratic and bourgeois refinement and sophisticated mores. At the same time, under Napoleon III and the Third Republic, France pursued its colonial and imperial ambitions, sustaining and fueling the symbiosis between Orientalism and the French conceits of aesthetic clarity, elegance, and taste.

Therefore, beneath the mask of French cultural smugness lay a profound insecurity. In terms of 19th-century musical culture, one response to that insecurity was to grab hold of the German classical and romantic musical traditions of Beethoven, Schumann, and most significantly Wagner, and make them instruments of a French national cultural revival. To this unexpected form of cultural appropriation we owe the achievements of Chausson, Chabrier, D’Indy, and ultimately Debussy. The role played by César Franck can be linked to the impetus provided by Wagnerism. The goal, after 1870, was to create a new and distinct French musical tradition.

A parallel response, evident already at mid-century, was to enhance French distinctiveness by instilling music with elements of the exotic and Orientalism. Bizet’s Djamileh can be seen as the musical equivalent of the paintings of Henri Regnault (1843–71), whose Salome and Summary Execution evoke the kind of Orientalist exoticism that became wildly popular at mid-century. The exoticism in French art and music derived from Moorish Spain (North Africa) and the entire Ottoman Empire, as well as Asia (note Debussy’s use of a Japanese print for the publication of La mer) and sub-Saharan Africa. Ultimately, it was the Indian subcontinent and the Middle and Far East that seemed to offer the most fertile ground for French Orientalism. This is because, unlike southern Africa or Polynesia, these areas contained civilizations that could be made as complex or reductive as the European artist required. And furthermore, they were seen as decayed and deteriorated, which meant they appeared not competitive with Europe. Although the “primitive” regions of the Pacific might satisfy a Gauguin who tried to escape occidental civilization, a French artist could easily to turn to the East if he or she wanted to say something important about France. At the core of much of the appropriation of the “oriental” in 19th-century music was the intent to critique and explore all things Western, notably familiar romantic mores regarding sexuality and sensuality.

In the case of music, the appropriation of Orientalist elements commented particularly on the French self-definition and self-image in terms of musical materials, sonorities, and forms. What passed for melody, harmony, and form in music were redefined by the inspirations that appropriated or imagined “oriental” practices provided. They were used to challenge the dominance of German classical rule-makers and form-givers, the patrons of sonata-form, fugues, and traditional four-part harmony in the style of J.S. Bach.

Not surprisingly, though all of the composers on tonight’s program appropriate “oriental” musical elements, only one of these composers actually spent a considerable amount of time outside of France. This was Saint-Saëns, who had a real explorer’s personality. He traveled extensively and adored North Africa. He composed a work entitled Africa, as well as an “Egyptian” Piano Concerto. Yet this Orientalist aspect was integrated into his outspoken allegiance to the task of transcending the perceived differences between the German and the French. His most successful opera, Samson and Delilah (1877), bears witness to how the use of Orientalism permitted him to do this. Orientalist gestures are integrated with perfectly-constructed counterpoint and fugal writing. For all his romance with the non-Western, Saint-Saëns remained an eclectic defender of the traditions of Mozart and Beethoven. Franck, who was arguably the decisive original voice in 19th-century French musical cultural (although a Belgian), also found his particular affinity in Les Djinns (a subject to which Gabriel Faure would later return) with the mysteries in the legends of the Middle East.

Djamileh suggests that Bizet, like Ravel, was captivated by what was perhaps the most influential fictional work of Orientalism in France, One Thousand and One Nights. This collection, still popular today, was originally collated and translated into French in 1717 by Antoine Galland. There is still debate about how much of it was translated from original sources and how much of it was made up by Galland. Ravel was one in a long line of musicians taken by that collection. Alfred de Musset’s story, Namouna, on which Djamileh is based, is in the tradition of Galland. The harem is located in Cairo. Bizet, arguably the most talented composer of the mid-19th century in France, whose death at the age of 37 was a shock to his contemporaries, wrote many of his most successful scores exploiting a self-conscious exoticism, not only derived from nearby Spain (as in Carmen), but elsewhere, as in his early neglected symphonic ode, Vasco da Gama.

The youngest of the composers on this program, Maurice Delage, a student of Ravel, represents a later stage of the French fascination with the non-Western. His near contemporary, the critic, novelist, and activist Romain Rolland, authored a biography of Gandhi and Tagore and was attracted to Vedanta philosophy. India became a key focus for that generation. It is in Delage’s music, however, that we see most clearly the impact on modernism of two centuries of the French and Western effort to define its cultures with and against a construct of the East and the “other.” Indeed, as the Ravel and Delage works suggest, the character of 20th-century music, particularly that portion of it that emerges from France and especially Paris, cannot be fully understood without considering the patterns and legacy of 19th-century orientalism.

Stravinsky Outside Russia

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Stravinsky Outside Russia, performed on Jan 20, 2012 at Carnegie Hall.

It has become all too commonplace to negotiate the complex and tangled fabric of artistic life in history by constructing an artificial hierarchy—lists of the “best” or “most famous” personages—as if painting, writing, or composing were Olympic contests, adequately judged by a single objective criterion. In reality, at any given time there are many inspired and imposing figures who, despite their ambitions, jealousies, and rivalries, themselves never worried about any top ten or top fifty rankings. And the nature of art-making resists such blunt instruments of evaluation. Nevertheless, for most of the 20th century (if there were indeed to be a contender for the status of the “greatest” 20th-century composer) the honor, as a matter of public perception both in the general public and among professional musicians, would most likely have fallen on Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky, who, unlike Paul Dukas or Felix Mendelssohn, seems not to have suffered from modesty, self-doubt, or excessive generosity to others, would have been only too pleased. Perhaps the best way to think of Stravinsky’s standing during his lifetime and for several decades after his death in 1971 is to compare him to the place his contemporary, Pablo Picasso, came to occupy in the visual arts as emblematic of the 20th century.

The reasons for Stravinsky’s prominence and dominance are many. First and foremost are the range and quality of Stravinsky’s output, sustained over a very long and productive life. Second, Stravinsky was a shrewd and effective promoter of his own music and career. Third is the variety of styles and genres in which the composer worked, from the stage to small chamber music works. Fourth—and perhaps most intriguing—are the prominence and influence he managed to achieve in three very disparate and discrete public spheres and contexts. The first was his native pre-revolutionary Russia, into which he was born in 1882. The second was French-speaking Europe, in France and Switzerland, where the composer lived and worked for nearly three decades before World War II. Stravinsky started his career outside of Russia as a Russian working abroad, and then as an exile. But he ended up as an exponent of contemporary “French” music. Stravinsky spent his final three decades (from 1939 on) based in the United States, where he was regarded initially as partially Russian, but equally French as an exile. Ultimately, by the early 1960s, he came to represent American music, at home in the United States and abroad.

Stravinsky’s career began in Russia, where he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov and where he formed a deep and lifelong artistic and spiritual attachment to Russian folk traditions, the Orthodox religion, the Russian language, and the Russian cultural heritage in music, the visual arts, and literature. The “Volga Boatmen” arrangement for Chaliapin gives evidence of this. In Paris, where he befriended Claude Debussy, Stravinsky exploited the rage for presumed exoticism of all things Russian, and rose to international fame through the success and notoriety of his ballet scores written for the Ballets Russes.

One single date has come to serve as an historic marker for the explosion of modernism onto the cultural scene—a moment in time that seemed to bring the 19th century to a close and usher in the 20th: the May 29, 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring (which the ASO will be performing next month in our Classics Declassified series). In his years in France, Stravinsky came to dominate the musical and cultural scene, taking his place alongside Valery, Gide, and Cocteau (forgetting Coco Chanel in this context) as a luminary. Through Nadia Boulanger, arguably the most important single teacher of a younger generation of composers, many of them Americans, Stravinsky influenced the course of American concert music. In his American years, Stravinsky’s fame and reputation continued to grow, not as an outsider (the way other émigrés, such as Schoenberg, saw themselves), but as an insider in the American scene. In part through his association with Robert Craft, who would become his chronicler and assistant, in his last years Stravinsky was astonishingly productive, writing in a new way, adapting modernist techniques developed by Schoenberg and Webern.

All in all, therefore, one can locate roughly three distinct stylistic periods in Stravinsky’s career. The first was an unmistakable “Russian” phase; Russian influences are obviously audible in the Firebird, for example. This gave way to a form of self-consciously international neo-classicism, not dissimilar from a parallel development in architecture, particularly the work of Le Corbusier. The high point of that period was reached during the late 1920s and early 1930s in Paris. In the years of transition from Russia, great works that mirror the trajectories forwards and backwards in time were written, such as Les Noces (1914/1917) and The Soldier’s Tale (1918). The legacy of neo-classicism formed the basis for the third period (the most audibly modernist period, that of the 1950s and 1960s) when the composer was in the United States, where he wrote among other things, together with W.H. Auden, his operatic masterpiece The Rake’s Progress (1951) and an opera for television, The Flood(1962).

At the same time, just as in the case of Picasso, the shifting stylistic surfaces in each period never masked a consistent distinctive character and quality to Stravinsky’s music. A set of proverbial fingerprints, revealing a unique musical imagination and personality, can be located in all of Stravinsky’s music. Central to Stravinsky’s aesthetic was the belief that in the end music was separate from language, and demanded a formal economy, a structure, and rigorous logic all its own. At the same time, Stravinsky understood his audience and the public. He had an uncanny sense of the theatrical in music and an elegant sense of humor and irony. There was a clarity, transparency, and lightness to his music reflecting a deeply felt aversion to Wagnerian grandiosity and Mahlerian metaphysical pomposity. A lucid rhythmic originality, vitality, and complexity inhabit many of his scores, but the asymmetries and surprises all seem seamless and natural. The discipline of writing for the dance taught the composer that the overarching architecture of a work, its musical flow and narrative, could not be obscure. Stravinsky used musical time with uncanny effectiveness, rarely if ever wearing out his welcome with his audience or his fellow musicians. His command of instrumental and vocal sonorities was equally impressive, as was his capacity to make his material memorable. Stravinsky’s extensive output was startling in its consistency in terms of rigor, invention and quality.

Yet, like Picasso, although Stravinsky’s name and reputation remain in tact, the interest of the public has shifted away from much of his work. The three great ballet scores, The Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911/47) and The Rite of Spring, are cornerstones of the orchestral repertoire. Many later scores are still heard, but far fewer than one might think or wish. This is especially the case with Stravinsky’s later works. Indeed, many of his mid-career and later works survive on the public stage as a result of his friend Balanchine’s choreography, including pieces not intended for the dance, such as the Violin Concerto (1931).

If there is tendency to simplify how we approach the history of music by constructing lists of the “top ten,” there is a parallel allure to the idea that there is some “essential” identity to each composer in terms of his historical roots, so to speak. Bartók becomes quintessentially “Hungarian,” Copland “American,” Debussy and Ravel “French,” and Sibelius “Finnish.” As a result, we turn to Americans for the “best” performances of Copland, Hungarians for Bartók, the French for Debussy and Ravel, and the Finns for Sibelius. This makes marketing easy and lends some hint of authenticity to our experience as listeners, as if there might be some secret spiritual or national bond, framed by blood, language and soil, between a composer and his music, requiring decoding by someone who shares that bond.

Even when this might plausibly apply to a composer (e.g. Musorgsky as Russian or Smetana as Czech), it assumes some fixed generalized category—Russianness and Czechness that seem to transcend historical change. But what do we make of Stravinsky? Despite his evident identity as a Russian émigré after 1917, this reductive assessment violates not only his own views about the nature of music, but the facts of his career and the range and variety of his compositions. Recourse to the notion of exile, in the case of Stravinsky, only complicates the problem. Rachmaninov was also an exile after 1917. For him the experience of being separated from his homeland was traumatic. He sought to insulate himself in an environment marked by nostalgia. He tried to recreate the atmosphere of his native land when he was in America, England, and Switzerland. Prokofiev, who like Stravinsky found himself abroad when the October Revolution happened, and like Stravinsky sought to make a career in America and France, in part because he felt always in Stravinsky’s shadow, returned to Russia in the mid 1930s. But Prokofiev, unlike Stravinsky, had no spiritual ties to the Orthodox Church and was never a virulent anti-Communist.

Stravinsky fit in, in France and America, as a leading and successful participant at the center of musical and cultural life, and never at its margins.

Vladimir Nabokov reinvented himself and became one of the greatest writers in English and one of the most trenchant observers of post-War America. Stravinsky managed to reinvent himself too, not once, but twice: first in France and then in America. Like Nabokov, he used the position of exile to forge a synthesis with his new circumstances and reach in new ways various new publics. The link to the past was never hidden or disavowed (as Kurt Weill attempted). Unlike the Jewish and politically-active anti-Fascists, Stravinsky had not been rejected, betrayed, or expelled by Russia, but by the Communists. And Stravinsky, fortunately for him, unsuccessfully tried to keep his music in circulation in Germany after 1933. Displacement and the necessity to adjust may have been unwelcome but they could still be understood as acts of practicality, not fear or conscience. Exile provided Stravinsky with new remarkable sources of inspiration.

This concert seeks to highlight the consequences of Stravinsky’s life after 1910 and particularly after 1917, when the plausibility of a return to Russia disappeared. Some works foreground aspects of Stravinsky’s lifelong connection to Russia. In others, particularly the later choral works, the “Russian” element, if present, is quite remote. What this concert suggests is that in Stravinsky’s case, we have a composer’s composer, for whom music can function in the world in a manner that resists facile typecasting, and whose character reflects a dialogue with the composer’s immediate environment.

Furthermore, the music on this concert, with the exception of the Symphony of Psalms, appears rather infrequently. It is therefore a reminder of the range and variety of the music of one of the consummate masters of musical composition whose ambitions, craft, and influence were international and whose identity shifted, at different phases in his career, to transfigure distinct milieus and contexts.

Bauhaus Bach

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bauhaus Bach, performed on Oct 21, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

Modernism in the arts during the 20th century can be said to have had two distinct (albeit related) and contradictory impulses: first, rejection, resistance, and rebellion on the part of the younger generation, born after 1860, directed at a perceived arrogance and smugness regarding the state of culture and the arts in Europe during the late 19th century—a sense of triumphant superiority buttressed by the startling progress of industry, science, and technology, and the development of cities and a prosperous urban middle class; and second, at the same time, a pervasive pessimism about the standards of contemporary culture, the absence of normative principles, the detachment of ethics from aesthetics, and a sense of decline and subservience to commerce and fashion. This required a change in the foundations and forms of art and the restoration of perceived true and genuine standards of ethics and aesthetics characteristic of a classical past, ones that advanced the good and the beautiful.

Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg became identified as expressive of the first impulse. Matthew Arnold was among the first to articulate the second impulse, only to be followed by many lesser imitators who decried the philistinism of modern times.

In music, the rejectionist modernist challenge to the musical practices of the 19th century can be located in Debussy, Mahler, and the early Schoenberg, and in the Stravinsky of the 1913 The Rite of Spring. The heyday of the modernist rebellion was at the turn of the 19th century, before 1914. In the chaos and disillusionment that followed World War I, in the face of apparent political and moral bankruptcy, this rejectionist strain in aesthetic modernism, particularly in painting and literature, flourished. It is visible most clearly in the eccentric and radical character of Dada and Surrealism. Yet at the same time, already before 1914 there was a call to “return to Mozart.” This restorative impulse in modernism gained momentum after 1918 and had its strongest impact in an ascetic formalism that was particularly dominant in music and architecture.

Music and architecture have been long considered kindred art forms, particularly during the 19th century. Friedrich Schelling famously dubbed architecture “petrified” or “frozen” music. However, in no era would this be more evident, in practice as well as theory, than in the 20th century. No doubt, the connection between the visual and the musical was made more plausible by the post-Wagnerian enthusiasm for the integration of all of the arts, as well as the practical encounter between visual symbolism in design and sonority in music in the construction of halls for music—a burgeoning business between 1870 and 1914. Architecture’s link to music rested in part on the fascination with connections among sight, color, and sound—pioneered by composers Scriabin, Ciurlionis, and Schoenberg, and advocated by the painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), one of the founders of the Bauhaus. With respect to architecture, it was held that there was a perceived special common debt, shared by music, to formal structures that shape the subjective experience of space and time, including proportion and perspective. Both architecture and music, in their formal realizations, deal directly with indispensable structural elements, variation and repetition.

The connection between 20th-century modernist movements in the visual arts—particularly (but not exclusively) architecture and design—and music was most impressive in the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus—both a school and movement—flourished in Weimar, Germany from 1919 to 1933, when it was shut down by the new Nazi regime. Started first in Weimar and then transferred to Dessau (until 1932), the Bauhaus was led, for most of its life, by architects: first Walter Gropius (1883–1969; Alma Mahler’s second husband) and then Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969). The artists associated with the Bauhaus included Paul Klee (1879–1940), an avid musician with a passion for Bach; Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943), who shared an interest in music and theatre; Kandinsky, once a close friend of Schoenberg’s who even tried his hand at composition and considered music a model for non-objective painting; and last but not least Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956).

As Barbara Haskell, the curator of this fall’s brilliant and long-overdue retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum (with which this concert is linked) has noted, Feininger was sent by his father to Germany from New York to study music. Feininger’s parents were both musicians. His father, a violinist and teacher, also composed music that came to the attention of Franz Liszt. The musical traditions of the Feininger family were continued even though Lyonel abandoned music as a career. Lyonel’s son Lawrence became one of the leading musicologists of the post-World War II era. Just as Schoenberg painted and took lessons (fatefully) from Richard Gerstl (1883–1908), the brilliant Austrian expressionist painter who took his life when his affair with Schoenberg’s wife ended, Feininger throughout his adult life continued to dabble in music. Schoenberg had one major period when he produced most of his paintings, the decade before 1914. Feininger had a comparable short span when he composed. It took place during his years at the Bauhaus.

For many visual artists and architects in the 1920s (including Klee), the composer who best exemplified the musical—music’s formal logic, its autonomy, its abstract nature, its pure aesthetic economy, its resistance to kitsch and sentimentality, its stature as representative of some normative criteria of beauty and the “classical”—was J.S. Bach. Bach’s command of counterpoint and polyphony—witnessed by his many astonishing forays in the fugue—rendered him not only the greatest composer of all time, but an historic aesthetic model for an “objective” modernism. The international style of architecture abjured the dishonesty of facades, decoration, and ornament. It called for a disciplined honesty about the materials of construction and a visible and transparent synthesis of form and function. Klee and Feininger emulated Bach in their paintings. Feininger’s obsession with Bach led him to try his hand at writing fugues.

Schoenberg’s development, during the early 1920s, of a new method of composition with twelve tones, specific to each piece but standard to all works, was designed to replace tonal relationships between individual pitches. This would therefore emancipate music from its dependence on learned inherited traditional links between music and expression and emotion. This was a radical effort to restore a classical purity to the art of music Schoenberg believed flourished in the age of Mozart and Haydn, the classical era.

This explicit anti-romantic strategy paralleled modern architecture’s effort to distance itself from 19th-century historicism in design. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the Bauhaus. Bauhaus furniture designs emulated the sleek elegance and simplicity of the early 19th-century Biedermeier era just as Schoenberg, with new materials, sought to spark a renewal of the pre-Romantic 18th-century ideals of musical thinking and composition.

The widespread neo-classical restorative impulse of the 1920s fueled and sustained a resurgence of public interest in Bach. There was no more poignant an example of this 20^th-century Bach revival than Wolfgang Graeser’s remarkable edition of Bach’s last and uncompleted work, The Art of Fugue, which Graeser also orchestrated. His orchestration was performed in Bach’s own Thomaskirche at the 1928 Bach festival in Leipzig. That performance left an indelible impression on Alban Berg, who wrote enthusiastically to his wife about the event. Graeser, a brilliant and multi-talented Swiss artist and scholar in his early 20s, committed suicide shortly thereafter. His orchestration was largely forgotten, except for the loyalty shown it by the great conductor Hermann Scherchen.

For his edition, Graeser chose to add a Bach organ chorale prelude, following the example set by Bach’s son, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach. The chorale prelude was finished by the blind J. S. Bach shortly before his death, and was the last completed work by the composer. Graeser included it in his performing edition so that The Art of Fugue, left unfinished, would not trail off.

As Stephen Hinton points out, Bach revivals have not been rare. The most notable ones were exactly a century apart. The earlier one, in which Mendelssohn played a pivotal role, occurred in the 1820s in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The later one, the Bach revival that frames this program, took place in the aftermath of World War I. In point of fact, Bach was never really forgotten. Bach’s music may have disappeared for periods of time from public performance, but composers after Bach, from Bach’s sons and Mozart to Webern and Boulez, studied his works. Composers have consistently been in awe of Bach’s command of the materials of music, and the purity of form in his compositions.

Indeed, Bach’s profundity and emotional power—whether audible in original form or in modernized orchestrations—derive from the rigorous discipline and intensity of the musical logic he employed. Music, in Bach’s hands, became a sacred art, the highest expression of the divinity in human nature—the imaginative capacity to create a true aesthetic realm emancipated from the compromises of everyday existence. No wonder that in moments when human nature reveals its darkest side, its uncanny attraction to violence, cruelty, and death, all camouflaged by the use of rhetoric and language and the use of reason and argument to justify war and destruction, artists have turned to Bach for inspiration.

Leon Botstein’s Musical Education

Passover in Exile

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Passover in Exile, performed on April 21, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

It is not unusual for us to view the making of art as somehow discretionary and perhaps even decorative, distant from what is truly important in life. Our construction of what is of value in life, what is truly important, has for complex historical and cultural reasons been influenced by definitions of what is useful, profitable, necessary, efficient, popular, and practical. And the arts are really none of these things, it seems, except as a venue of ambition for a few and an arena of entertainment for the many.

But this utilitarian definition of value trivializes the human imagination. The making of art, the aesthetic impulse, particularly in the case of music—an art form that exists within time and transforms our experience of time—reveals itself to be at the very core of the value of life and the sanctity of life. That revelation too often occurs, however, in times of suffering and hopelessness. Of all the arts, music, because of its essential character as non-representational, is rightly privileged in our Abrahamic traditions as a form of life that brings us closer to the divine. After the high priests in the Old Testament comes, in order of status, the tribe of musicians whose noise transcends the limits of human language. Music reaches beyond words and reflects a presence beyond the human sphere.

Whether feared as subversive (in some theologies and philosophies) or celebrated as the spark of the divine, music is necessary. It is not a discretionary form of life. And in no time in history was that felt more acutely than in the 1930s by the Jews of Europe. For German-speaking Jews, the triumph of political anti-Semitism in the rise to power of the Nazis in 1933 deprived them of their language and their sense of belonging. For generations German had been the language not only of their professional and public lives, but also of their intimate experiences. It framed their relationships with friends, family, and strangers, and their dialogue with themselves. After 1933, German language and culture was not only in the hands of enemies but entirely redefined to exclude all Jews, no matter how many generations of Jews had lived as part of a German speaking world. German Jewish writers lost their public and their purpose.

The passage of time—especially since 1945—has led us increasingly to focus on the Holocaust when we think of the fate of European Jewry. Too often, faced with the images of concentration camps, torture, and death, we understandably underestimate and overlook the pain and suffering of exclusion, segregation, disenfranchisement, and exile that took place between 1933 and 1941. But that experience was the norm for all German Jews between 1933 and 1939. The librettist of the work on today’s program, Max Brod (1884–1968) was in fact a Czech Jew, but a central figure in the German Jewish culture of Prague. Even though his direct encounter with Nazi rule came only in 1939 (he left Prague on the last train before the Nazis occupied the city), from 1933 on, he too essentially lost his language and vocation—his public voice and space. Brod, although an early convert to Zionism, was a German writer, writing for a German reading public. His world was the same as that of his friend Franz Kafka. It was shaped within a bilingual city that prided its literary German as being of a higher standard than that practiced in Germany. Prague’s German literary tradition had in large measure been sustained and cultivated by its Jews. Its luminaries included Brod; Fritz Mauthner, the philosopher of language; Franz Werfel; and Egon Erwin Kisch, the great journalist.

Brod was a polymath who wrote music, poetry, and fiction as well as music criticism. After emigrating to Palestine in 1939 he became a major figure in the history of Israel’s cultural life and a force in the great Hebrew theatre Habimah. Before his emigration, Brod famously put Leoš Janáček on the map, as it were, late in the composer’s life, following the Prague premiere of Jenůfa. He translated Janáček’s operas into German, thereby permitting them wide distribution throughout Europe. Brod also helped propel the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Schweik) to fame. Music was central to Brod throughout his entire life. In 1951, he wrote the first book on music in Israel, and wrote on many musical subjects, including Mahler. But if there ever had been a moment in his life when music mattered most as a medium of communication, it was after 1933. The Nazis and their evident popularity could effectively appropriate the German language, but hard as the Nazis tried, music seemed more resistant. If anything, the significance and power of the musical culture of Europe, with which post-emancipation Jewry had forged an intimate connection, only grew in importance among German Jews, both those trapped at home and those in exile.

The trajectory of Max Brod’s life followed a path that began with a high level of acculturation and assimilation into cosmopolitan life in Prague. As a young man, Brod was forced to confront the challenge of Czech nationalism, an encounter that led ultimately to Zionism and Brod’s emigration, not to America but to Palestine, before the outbreak of World War II. The life of Paul Dessau (1894–1979), Brod’s younger collaborator on the Haggadah setting, offers an example of a familiar alternative pattern quite common to Dessau and Brod’s generation. Dessau’s grandfather was a cantor. Through music, the talented young Dessau moved from the more insular world of Jewish life into the center of cosmopolitan culture. He rose to prominence as a conductor and composer for films in the 1920s. In 1933 he was forced into exile and moved to Paris where he continued to write music for the film medium and experimented with modernism in the direction of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone strategy.

Faced with the reality of fascism, Dessau turned not to Zionism but to Communism. The Spanish Civil War inspired him to write political music consistent with his radical sympathies, emulating the example of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler. Dessau ended up, along with a host of German émigrés, in Hollywood, where he began a famous and long-standing collaboration with Bertolt Brecht, writing music for Brecht’s plays, including a large oratorio-scale work, Deutsches Miserere. (The ASO performed Dessau’s 1957 In memoriam Bertolt Brecht two seasons ago). Hollywood seemed the right place to go. Dessau had written the music for a 1928 film directed by Walt Disney, Alice and the Fleas.

But Jewish themes did not vanish entirely from his output during Dessau’s American years. Dessau did not remain in America or end up in Israel. He followed Brecht to East Germany, where he remained until his death. There he continued to find a way to reconcile his radical egalitarian politics with musical modernism, teaching and composing two operas in his later years, one based on Büchner, Leonce und Lena (1978) and Einstein (1973). He was consistently the object of suspicion on the part of party officials and ideologues.

The collaboration between Brod and Dessau was exactly contemporaneous with another remarkable collaboration between a German Jewish composer and descendant of a cantor, Kurt Weill, and a Prague German Jewish writer, Franz Werfel, that resulted in The Eternal Road. This massive work (also performed by the ASO in its English-language version), similar in scale and intent to the Haggadah, was also originally conceived in German in the 1930s. It was translated into English and found its way to New York in a production directed by Max Reinhardt. In contrast, the Haggadah found no outlet for performance and was finally premiered in Jerusalem in 1962 in a Hebrew translation by Georg Mordechai Langer. Like The Eternal Road, also a work originally developed in German, the Haggadah was ultimately given its voice in Hebrew, in Israel. Both The Eternal Road and the Haggadah placed in the foreground the history of the Jewish nation as an oppressed people seeking freedom. One found its public voice in America, a hospitable and stable diaspora, and the other in the Jewish state, both nations where the pariah status of the Jews, their exclusion from citizenship in politics, was no longer the defining aspect of modern Jewish identity.

The Eternal Road has had some currency and been revived on occasion, largely as a result of the fame and popularity of Weill. But Dessau and Brod’s Haggadah has not been so fortunate, in part because Dessau’s reputation has diminished. The composer’s politics did him no favors during the Cold War. He had advocates neither in America, where he was derided as a Communist, or in Israel, where his distance from Zionism (rather than his left-wing politics) did not help his cause. And Europe before 1989, west and east of the Iron Curtain, was no place for this setting of the Passover text and story. The 1962 Jerusalem premiere was followed in 1994 by a concert performance in Hamburg, not in Hebrew but in German. The work has not been performed since then.

But the moment for this massive and eloquent oratorio may have finally arrived. The Cold War has become a dim memory and religion is in the midst of a world-wide renascence. Yet the power of this work resides not in its link to religion but in the intersection between tradition and modernity, in its faith in the power of music, and the undiminished universal resonance of the story of Passover, the liberation of slaves and their journey to freedom. Dessau and Brod’s Haggadah is at once heartbreaking and arresting. We need to imagine Brod and Dessau, two displaced artists, either threatened or stripped of their vocations, their homes, their communities, and their language, each struggling to make sense of a world that had come to an abrupt end. Exiled and isolated, both turned to their indelible identities as Jews—an identity that may once have been residual or secondary but had become dominant involuntarily through the events of history.

The authors’ personal identification with their mythic ancestors, the slaves in Egypt, their plight, their pride, and their hope, has an intensity that is hard for those of us privileged to live in freedom and comfort, in homes of our choosing, to imagine. The inspiration they put into this work does not stem from ambition for success and fame, for they had no prospect of performance, particularly at the historical apex of anti-Semitism, during the 1930s, an anti-Semitism spearheaded by the Nazis but openly and tacitly endorsed by the whole world. They gave voice to their own people, a nation abandoned and alone, and to its tradition of suffering and its hope of liberation, all at an historical moment of utter darkness. Working with a language they barely commanded (Hebrew) but that represented the continuity of Jewish identity, they celebrated the shared culture that was inspired by Hebrew. As in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s 1925 translation into German of the Old Testament, German was subordinated through the synthesis of music and language.

Brod and Dessau transposed the most intimate, constant, universal, and memorable marker of Jewish identity—the Passover Seder— and its rituals that take place each year in every Jewish home, into the public sphere, onto the stage in a unique European cultural form, the sacred oratorio. The Haggadah is a touching epitaph to the cultural contribution of European Jewry. It offers a synthesis between distinctly Jewish elements, the legacy of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, Handel’s Messiah, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and the now-forgotten oratorios on biblical themes by Bruch, Anton Rubinstein, and Elgar. Written in a moment of hopelessness, fear, and oppression, Dessau and Brod’s Haggadah is a moving tribute to the resilience of human spirit and imagination and the power of art to sustain the will to live and the courage to fight against oppression on behalf of freedom and justice.

American Harmonies: The Music of Walter Piston

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert American Harmonies: The Music of Walter Piston, performed on March 29, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

The contrast between Walter Piston’s career and his posthumous reputation and place in the repertory exposes the ironies and shortcomings in the way the history of music often gets told. We are led to believe that there are great figures who are overlooked and misunderstood in their own times, but who are posthumously revered. But often, the opposite is the case. Many composers who were well-regarded and successful during and immediately after their lifetimes, are sometimes altogether forgotten today. Furthermore, we are led to believe that great composers, like painters and writers, suffered in their lives, and were more often than not poor, lonely, unhappy in love, and perhaps unstable. This too is a groundless post-Romantic assumption, as the examples of Bach, Mendelssohn, and dozens of others amply testify.

Walter Piston was not overlooked in his own time, and his reputation as a major American composer was well deserved. This bodes well for a revival of his music in the future. He seems to have been quite stable, happily married, and prosperous. By all accounts he was generous in spirit, a good citizen, and blessed with two rare gifts: humor and wit. Howard Pollack, in his fine 1992 volume on Piston’s students entitled Harvard Composers, tells the following story. When one of Piston’s students, Harold Shapero, went to study with Hindemith (whom Piston admired) he discovered that Hindemith was ruthless in criticism and regularly rewrote Shapero’s drafts of melodies. Frustrated, Shapero handed in the ‘cello theme from the Concertino being performed on tonight’s concert as his own. Hindemith was pleased and much less critical, describing the tune condescendingly as “Frenchy.” But then Hindemith proceeded to rewrite it. When Shapero later told the story to Piston, Piston mused, “Well, I could change one of his, too.”

Piston, in his lifetime, was best known and prominent as the dominant figure in music at Harvard who, among other things, brought Stravinsky for the lectures that turned into the 1947 Poetics of Music. For 34 years Piston taught music at Harvard. Yet he himself was largely self-taught as a musician before entering college. His first interests were engineering and painting. But he went on to teach himself to play the piano, the violin, and the saxophone. Piston’s hands-on familiarity playing a vast array of instruments explains the persuasive economy and practicality of his 1955 textbook Orchestration and his unerring skill in handling instruments, from the flute (Piston’s 1930 Sonata for Flute and Piano helped establish his reputation) to the harp (consider the late “Souvenir” for harp, viola and flute from 1967) and harpsichord (the 1945 Sonatina for Violin and Harpsichord). Piston’s ear was incisive and in symphonic music he orchestrated as he wrote.

Returning from Paris, where he studied not only with Boulanger (whom he brought later to Cambridge) but also with Paul Dukas, in 1926, Piston settled into a comfortable routine, producing steadily an impressive array of works. As a celebrated and revered teacher at Harvard, Piston enjoyed, for years, the patronage of the Boston Symphony and the loyalty of many generations of students from Leroy Anderson and Leonard Bernstein to Elliott Carter and John Harbison. However, Piston’s prominence as a teacher and the success of his textbooks, particularly the 1941 text entitled Harmony, would eventually become liabilities. There is perhaps no more damning phrase among critics and in self-consciously artistic circles than the word “academic.” It has recently become fashionable for composers, writers, and painters to do some teaching, but only on and off. To hold a regular responsible position in an institution smacks of a bureaucratic disposition and a yen for respectability that is incompatible with spontaneity, inspiration, originality, risk taking, and eccentricity—all hallmarks according to the popular imagination of true artistic temperament. In the argument for a strict separation of teaching and doing, however, the examples of Fauré and Rimsky-Korsakov are conveniently forgotten.

Apart from his consummate musical skills and judgment there was nothing visibly flamboyant about Piston in mid-career and he seems never to have harbored an ambition to write for the theatre or make a career as a conductor, despite his considerable skill on the podium. Piston was too much the ultimate insider, and a generous one at that. Nothing outside of his music and writings seemed memorable by the ever-more-dominant criteria of stardom the world of classical music adopted from Hollywood after World War II. Piston was not a “personality.” He courted no controversy, even in the McCarthy era. He was not a natural subject of publicity.

Furthermore, Piston’s music exhibited no obvious markers of radical innovation. Piston was a composer who excelled at strategies others had pioneered, an artist capable of synthesis. Piston’s music was influenced certainly by the example of Stravinsky, in manner reminiscent of but also distinguished from Copland. Piston, a lifelong Francophile, admired Debussy, but in the end he developed his own eclectic and distinct American voice. His models from the 19th century were Chopin and Brahms. His America was not Copland’s vision of the West and the “frontier,” but one closer to Ives (despite the differences in their music): New England.

Piston has a distinct voice, but it demands the capacity to appreciate the consummate command of musical materials. Piston’s music is beautifully crafted. That should not be held against it. There is nothing academic about Piston’s music. Its range and quality—in contrast to that of Roy Harris, for example—justify Elliott Carter’s view that Piston’s music reveals a rare combination of elegance, wit, sparkle, craftsmanship, and a fluid and persuasive flexibility in its emotional range and authenticity.

Walter Piston may not have been an original in the sense of Ives, Cowell, or Varése, or a composer intent on exploiting mere contrast and effect, but, as Carter put it, he excelled at the “most durable and most satisfying aspects of the art of music,” giving us hope that the “qualities of integrity and reason” in our culture are still with us.

American music in the 20th century had its share of brilliant new voices such as George Antheil and Leo Ornstein, where the promise of early success was never realized. There are other composers in history known in retrospect for just a few works (e.g. Carl Ruggles), or one period, or even a single work (e,g, Leoncavallo). Piston represents a different case: a career marked by consistency and growth over time. His music has the substance, sophistication, variety, and unpretentious candor of feeling sufficient to sustain interest over time.

In contrast to one of Piston’s contemporaries, Roger Sessions, whose music shares with Piston’s an extraordinarily high level of craftsmanship and integrity, Piston’s music was always intentionally accessible (or “realist” as Pollack argues) and transparent (if a bit “ironic,” as Pollack suggests) in intent, even in his more explicitly modernist works from the late 1950s and early 1960s. Let us continue to hope that musicians and audiences have the capacity to respond to and become attached to music that stands back from spectacle and flash and explores more deeply, as Piston’s does, the unique qualities of musical form as a means of expression in response to contemporary life. The refinement and the dialogue with tradition in Piston’s music permit it to transcend its historical context and engage new generations of performers and listeners.

The Context of Music: The Spanish Civil War

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Music of Spain: Composers of the Civil War, performed on Feb 25, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

The modern political history of Spain began formally with the declaration of the Second Republic of Spain (the so-called “first” republic was a short-lived affair in 1873–4) at the end of 1931 after the departure of King Alfonso XIII (who did not abdicate but was declared guilty of treason) and the adoption of a constitution. The 1931 constitution may have had hallmarks of a modern democracy, including the election of a president by parliament and an electoral college based on the popular vote, freedom of religion, and the civilian control of the military. But it also outlined a radical and perhaps even noble agenda that was divisive and suggested the possible influence of communists. The new republic sought in its fundamental laws to sharply reduce the role not only of the military (no professional soldier could become president), but also of the Catholic Church. The radical secular vision of the new political order was perhaps best expressed by nationalization of church property and the dissolution of the Jesuit order.

The extreme and historic social inequality that dominated in Spain justified legal provisions to expropriate private property, engage in land reform, and nationalize public utilities. Popular as these measures were, particularly in the midst of a terrifying and worldwide downward economic spiral, they were undoubtedly starkly progressive and profoundly influenced by socialism. They alarmed the vested interests of the past, the landed aristocracy, the army, and the clergy. The nation that would face this swift turn to republicanism was itself not cohesive enough as to make the shift from monarchy to an egalitarian republic smooth. And for all the ills of the church, it had its adherents throughout all social classes.

The new republic also faced a major issue central to all twentieth century (and twenty-first century) Spanish politics: the bedeviling tension between regional and national identity. Catalonia, the home of Pablo Casals, was by far the region most determined to achieve autonomy. It had its own language and culture and its own political elite. But Andalusia (where Picasso was born) and the Basque region were also places with distinct cultures and proud traditions. Regional pride may have survived in competition with more modern constructions of national identity in all major European nations (France, Great Britain, Germany, and Italy), but regional identity remained far more competitive in Spain. Spain entered the twentieth century more as a fragile dynastic entity akin to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Spain was an amalgam of not always compatible peoples, despite a shared common language and a seemingly coherent geographical and historical profile. It was far less an incipient centralized modern state of the sort fashioned over centuries in France and rather more rapidly out of large sections of nineteenth-century German-speaking Europe.

If regionalism was not enough of a challenge to the republic, religion—in the form of the Catholic Church—had provided a powerful common ground in the Iberian Peninsula. The republic sought to weaken the Church’s influence. A deep religiosity pervaded Spain for centuries. It cut across class divisions. Ignatius Loyola was Spaniard and the Spanish monarchy helped define the Counter-Reformation. Spain carried the banner of the dream of universal Christendom, expelling Islam and its own Jews by the end of the fifteenth century and bringing Catholicism with an equally chilling brutality to South and Central America. Monarchy and Church were closely aligned and both were associated with the towering and impressive colonial expansion that had made Spain legendary before the 18th century throughout the world. The heritage bequeathed by these two powers, secular and sacred, sustained a national sensibility in the era after Spain’s fall from economic and political preeminence between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, regional and social divisions notwithstanding.

Spain’s relative economic backwardness and political impotence during the nineteenth century did not diminish its place in the European imagination. Weakness lent its culture a romantic allure, particularly among intellectuals and artists in France, England, and Germany. Spain, in part owing to the Moorish influence in its history, its proximity to North Africa, its distinctive regions, and the residues of its colonial reach, came to represent something exotic and unsullied by modern rational commerce and industry. The French in particular saw in Spain a thriving, magical, and genuine musical and visual culture. By 1900, Spain had taken its place in the romantic imagination in the more industrially advanced countries of Europe in a sympathetic albeit condescending manner; Spain was both sufficiently similar and distinctly “other” as to offer European artists powerful sources of inspiration that could fuel resistance to the worst spiritual and aesthetic consequences of modernization. From Bizet to Ravel, the Spanish element offered an inspiring antidote to the overwhelming dominance of German and Italian musical traditions.

Nevertheless, despite its historical drift into relative powerlessness and decline in the late nineteenth century, a renascence of Spanish culture in literature and the arts took place, culminating in a vibrant modern outpouring of music, painting, and literature in the twentieth century. But in no other part of Europe was culture so intertwined with and affected by politics. The Spanish Republic struggled to achieve stability. The contradictions between a noble effort to create a modern nation marked by freedom and equality by eliminating the last residues of influence on the part of the twin pillars of feudalism-church and crown and the reactionary will to restore monarchical and Church power became violent. As the Civil War took shape, Spain’s artists and intellectuals could not stand aside.

In 1936, a coalition—a popular front of left wing parties—defeated their conservative opponents at the ballot box, including supporters of the church and monarchists. A revolt ensued that turned into the civil war. It broke out first in July, initially in Spanish Morocco. As the legitimate elected government proceeded to further confiscate church property, the conservative rebellion gathered momentum and the fighting spread to the mainland. At the head of the insurgents was Francisco Franco.

For three years Spain was torn by a Civil War fueled not only by divisions in the country itself, but by the intervention and non-intervention of the rest of the world. Germany and Italy, both in Fascist hands, recognized and supported Franco generously with military and economic support. The republican side, known as the Loyalist cause, received support from Stalin that was limited, expensive, and highly compromised. The Loyalists were abandoned by those nations that should have been their natural allies—the democracies of France and England, as well as by the United States. The republic’s most steadfast ally was Mexico. Fear of communism and a lingering post-World War I romance with disarmament and pacifism resulted in a nearly deliberate international effort to prevent the Republic from defending itself. Many have speculated about how different the rest of the twentieth century might have turned out had the world stood up to Hitler and Mussolini in Spain and defended the Republic against Franco.

Ironically, it was Catalonia that put up the most heroic effort on behalf of the Spanish Republic. The Loyalist cause could not prevail against Franco’s military superiority. The fall of Barcelona in January 1939 marked the true collapse of the Republic. But before the end, the cause of the Loyalists managed to electrify an entire generation. Americans, as private individuals, mobilized into the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, aptly named to underscore the ideal of democracy, legitimacy, and unity. The list of volunteers who went to Spain to fight in what came to be known as the “last great cause,” in defiance of the failure of democracies to match the power and brutality of dictatorships, is a veritable who’s who of celebrities, ranging from George Orwell to Ernest Hemingway. All told, over 30,000 individuals volunteered to fight on the side of the Republic.

The collapse of republican Spain foreshadowed the tragedy of World War II and has become, as a subject of history itself, an ideological battleground of interpretation about propaganda, dictatorship, the role of communism and Stalin, the place of intellectuals, and the nature of justice and democracy.

The composers on this program all emerged from the flowering of Spanish culture before the onset of the Civil War. Each took a different path once it began. De Falla went into voluntary exile. Turina sided with Franco and benefited from his allegiance to the victors, and Gerhard, like his better known countryman Casals, fled in the wake of defeat and lived with a life-long sense of defiance towards Franco, the revolt, and the forces that brought the Republic down.

Each composer, through music, expresses a distinct construct of and debt to a modern Spanish identity. All three help explode the distinction between a “center” to Europe and a “periphery.” In this music one encounters an engagement with one’s heritage—the distinctly local, so to speak—in a manner that does not trivialize it or render it an object of fetishism or reductive simplification. The music is no longer “provincial” but an integral part of a pan-European dynamic that sought to engage the issue of the proper nature of art in modernity. These composers stand alongside Bartók and Janáček in utilizing the familiar and seemingly more-authentic roots of concert music in a formal manner possessed of a universal reach. In particular, Roberto Gerhard (whose magnificent Violin Concerto was performed by ASO in New York some years back) is one of the twentieth century’s finest and most distinctive composers. Although his career flourished in England, his music is today very underrepresented in the repertory.

The trauma and tragedy of the Spanish Civil War receded very slowly into history. It is ironic that Spain, despite its significant current economic difficulties and continued tensions between regions and the central government, has flourished since the death of Franco. Under Juan Carlos, Spain is a constitutional monarchy that has managed to negotiate the competing pressures within Spain without substituting dictatorship for democracy.

On Behalf of Albéric Magnard

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bérénice, performed on Jan 20, 2011 at Carnegie Hall.

The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler defended his tendency to play particular works from the past over and over again, stating that as a musician he was not “a curious wanderer” or driven by “a scholarly interest” but rather by a “love” of music; he performed repeatedly those “great works” he “loved” because they consistently awakened in him a sense of “enthusiasm, warmth, sweetness, beauty, and greatness.” The contrast between Furtwängler’s approach and that of the American Symphony Orchestra rests not in any disagreement over the need to love the music one performs or expect that its impact survive repeated performance and hearing. It lies rather in the our conviction that a wide ranging curiosity about the repertoire of the past and scholarly interest both can result in the restoration of music to the stage that is not already well known, music that we can fall in love with and listen to more than once.

Albéric Magnard guided his career as a composer in a manner that seems in retrospect to have intentionally restricted any chance that his works would gain adherents and enter as part of the active repertory. Born to relative wealth and social prominence in 1865, the son of the editor of Le Figaro, Magnard pursued a musical career after training in the law. Following a trip to Bayreuth in 1886, Magnard decided to devote himself exclusively to music. He was determined not to exploit his family’s standing and influence on his own behalf. Although he studied with Massenet and later with Vincent d’Indy, he did little to cultivate the support of fellow composers or the leading performers of the day.

He spent his time quite apart, composing, except for some teaching at d’Indy’s Schola Cantorum, the rival institution to the Paris Conservatoire. Periodically, Magnard would self-finance a concert of his own music. In this manner, Magnard maintained a principled distance from all of the rival factions and byzantine politics within the Parisian musical establishment. He published his own music with a small radical socialist publishing house and he had his last symphony, No. 4 (1913), performed not by a major institution but by a nearly all-women’s orchestra (unfortunately with disastrous results). Magnard’s politics were profoundly idealistic and he stood steadfast on the side of Dreyfus, writing a powerful “Hymn to Justice” in 1902 for the cause. That alone set him apart from d’Indy and many colleagues who sought to remain distant from the controversy that divided and obsessed French society for generations. For Magnard, writing music was at all times an ethical act. Beauty and justice, in his view, were aligned. Art needed to serve the cause of rectifying social injustice and promoting the truth.

Magnard struggled not only with a sense of inferiority vis-à-vis his contemporaries (largely because of his late start and the unfair accusation that he was little more than a dilettante, despite his exemplary record as a student of harmony and counterpoint) and the residual guilt of having been born to wealth and privilege, making him an object of envy. He also battled deafness. As a result, Magnard was aloof and became somewhat of a recluse whose manner was marked by an ascetic sense of moral superiority and disdain for public opinion. He is perhaps remembered most for his startling death in 1914. He defended his rural mansion against the advancing German troops, killing one soldier and causing his home to be burned to ground. Magnard perished in the fire, along with the manuscripts of his last compositions and much of his second opera, Guercoeur (1901).

Magnard, a perfectionist, completed fewer than 30 compositions. Among them are four symphonies, now widely regarded as among the finest examples of late nineteenth-century French symphonic writing. ASO has performed No. 3 (1902), the most famous of the symphonies, as well as the orchestral poem “Hymn to Venus” (1904). Since Magnard’s death, his music has periodically found defenders, including the conductor Ernest Ansermet. Several chamber works have entered the repertory, including the remarkable wind piano quintet from 1894 and the string quartet from 1903. The most recent biography and reconsideration of his life and work appeared in 2001, written by an avid Magnard enthusiast, the French cardiologist Simon-Pierre Perret, and the distinguished French music critic and scholar Harry Halbreich. Nonetheless, when I located the vocal score to Bérénice in the Harvard University Music library in 2003, I think I may have been the first person to check it out.

Bérénice, Magnard’s third and last opera, completed in 1909 and premiered in 1911, has long been regarded as his finest and most characteristic work. Its musical qualities complement the idealism of the libretto in which feminine love triumphs over male political ambition and power. It is Bérénice and not the Roman Emperor Titus who is Magnard’s protagonist and is vindicated in the opera. It is she who delivers Magnard’s message of truth. As the composer wrote in the preface to the score in 1909, Titus, who died young, cried at the end of his life, asking why he deserved such a cruel fate. After all, he had only one action in his life for which he needed to repent. That single act was, for Magnard, the decision, without an absolutely firm reason, to turn away from a sacred moment, from an “adorable” lover and from her genuine love for him. Magnard’s preference for the character of the feminine was explicit. In the preface to Bérénice, he confessed “I understand better with every passing day how much superior a woman is to any man.”

Although the occasion for choosing Bérénice as a subject can be linked to Jean Racine’s play, it was a familiar and well-established operatic and theatrical subject. The most famous treatments of the story were a play by Corneille (also from 1670, rivaling Racine) based on the love between Titus and Bérénice, and of course Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito. Magnard wrote his own libretto. By streamlining the story, he only accentuated what he certainly knew was the obvious political symbolism of the subject in 1909. Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery officer, had been unjustly convicted of treason for passing military secrets to the Germans, and though in 1906 he had been exonerated, reinstated, and decorated by the government, much of the French public remained unconvinced. In the crucible of 12 years of conflict over the issue, a new racialist, anti-Semitic reactionary French nationalism came into being, led by the newspaper Action Française and key figures to whom Magnard was opposed, such as Charles Maurras, Léon Daudet, and Maurice Barrès. Magnard’s sympathetic foregrounding of a Jewish queen who is hounded away by the mob of Roman citizens—a circumstance in which the political leadership bends to ethnic prejudice and fails to do the right thing (to the detriment of justice and the state, as well as to personal happiness)— was not an accident. The opera is more than a reworking of Racine. The fate of the Jewish (but highly assimilated and acculturated, vis-à-vis Rome—as was Dreyfus to France) daughter of Herod Agrippa, the nominal queen, was turned into a morality play about the symmetry between the happiness of intimacy and love and the pursuit of truth and justice in the public sphere. Magnard’s Bérénice is Captain Dreyfus after 1906. Titus represents France, which is left at its peril by a failure to truly embrace the truth and accept the proven loyalty of Jewish officer (who was framed) as a model of patriotism and what it might mean to be a true Frenchman. In short, Magnard’s Bérénice is more than an intimate love story.

For most of the twentieth century, Magnard was remembered at best as a marginal, respected but conservative figure in French musical history during a pre-World War I period that included Massenet, Saint-Saens, Chausson, Debussy, Dukas (with whom Magnard shared a profound self-critical sensibility and a limited output), Fauré, and d’Indy. After 1918, the French musical scene became dominated by a new generation that included not only Frenchmen such as Ravel and Les Six, but émigrés including Stravinsky and Prokoviev. After 1945, the post-World War II avant-garde was no more interested in rediscovering Magnard that its predecessor after 1918 had been.

However, Magnard’s music ought to encounter a better fate today. It is not imitative of any other composer. It is eclectic, taking inspiration from Wagner, Debussy, and d’Indy, but entirely distinctive, elegant, economical, and accessible. It has an authenticity, directness, color, and intense purpose that are memorable. The eloquence and beauty of Bérénice make it a work, in Furtwängler’s sense, deserving of deep affection, a major achievement and more than the passing result of idle scholarly curiosity.

Music and the Bible

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music and the Bible, performed on Nov 2, 2010 at Carnegie Hall.

If there ever was a composer in the history of music whose posthumous reputation was entirely and shockingly at odds with the reputation he developed in his lifetime, it is Ludwig Spohr, or Louis Spohr as he came to be known. The ASO is honored to have the outstanding scholar and expert on Spohr, Clive Brown, as a contributor to tonight’s program notes. Professor Brown’s indefatigable efforts on behalf of Louis Spohr are responsible for helping to keep a small part of Spohr’s output alive in the modern imagination. When Spohr died in 1859 at the age of 75 (a venerable age in those days), Johannes Brahms was reported to have lamented that the last of the great masters had died. For Brahms, who painfully aware of the humbling legacy of music history, to place Spohr beside Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven was high praise indeed. Brahms’s mentor and friend Robert Schumann shared a similarly deep admiration for Spohr’s accomplishment and importance.

Spohr’s career as a musician began early despite family pressure against music as a career; he was born into a distinguished line of physicians and clergymen. However his precocity on the violin was not to be ignored. Already as a young virtuoso he began to compose. In 1812, he found himself concertmaster of the orchestra of the Theater-on-der-Wien, which brought him into direct contact with Beethoven. Spohr then moved to London and finally, at the age of 37, to Kassel, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Spohr’s achievements are daunting indeed. He was a fabulous violinist, the Paganini of the north, and founder of a school of violin-playing. His music for the instrument has never lost its following. Prominent in the violin repertory are the many series of duets and the violin concertos. Spohr is reputed to have been the first conductor to use a baton, which suggests the growing importance of public concerts in his time. But Spohr’s reputation as a composer during his lifetime rested in the first instance on operas, two of which had a considerable following: Faust 

(1823–52) and Jessonda (1824). He was also a symphonist; at least half of the ten he wrote deserve regular modern performances. There is an impressive body of chamber music, not only string quartets, but four double string quartets, and octet, and a nonet. Not surprisingly, Spohr also wrote many songs. But it was his contribution to the sacred and secular choral literature that ensured his reputation among contemporaries.

The nineteenth-century oratorio was the crossroads between public and private music-making. It demanded the participation of amateurs, which was provided through the large number of choral societies that sprang up in German-speaking Europe after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815. These choral societies were the musical equivalent of the reading clubs that the sociologist Jürgen Habermas identified as evidence of the development of a public sphere, a realm in which public opinion could be expressed in a manner that would influence the course of politics. Europe between 1815 and 1848 was in the midst of a political reaction that sought to reverse the spread of democracy and civil liberties. Tight censorship and the control of public gatherings were the rule. But censorship was less stringent with respect to music. Music-making became an important part of the growth of domestic and public entertainments. In particular, singing became popular because the standard of training for amateur participation was inevitably lower than might be required for an amateur orchestra. Spohr’s first major secular cantata, entitled Germany Liberated, was written on a text by Caroline Pichler, a prominent Viennese personality whose memoirs are a major historical document, and who was herself an amateur choral singer.

Both of the works you hear tonight were written in a period of religious revival. With the onset of the terror of the 1790s and the transformation of the French Revolution under Napoleon, the secular, anti-clerical universalist dreams of the Enlightenment seemed increasingly irrelevant and implausible to intellectuals and artists throughout Europe. The trajectory of the French Revolution gave birth to nationalism, not only in France but in the rest of Europe all the way to Poland and Russia. The early nineteenth century was a period of anti-Enlightenment ferment in literature and philosophy. Both in Protestant and Catholic Europe there was a revival of spirituality and a renewed curiosity in periods before the eighteenth century, particularly the Middle Ages. A fascination developed with the mystical, unknowable, and ineffable, ranging from the Gothic fairy tale to medieval romance. An anti-rationalism flourished which was entirely compatible with the renewal of Christian idealism. The oratorios of Spohr and Fanny Mendelssohn mirror this turn away from rationalism towards an inner sensibility and religious subjectivity. The religious fervor of the age had two important consequences for music. First, the vocabulary of expression expanded to invite greater color and freedom of form, though at the same time, composers were motivated to look back in history to models from before the classical era, to Bach and Handel. Second, because of its abstract and indeterminate meaning, music became prized as an instrument of faith, a vehicle for each individual to express his or her connection to God. The popularity of choral singing was not only rooted in social and political circumstances. Enthusiasm for participating and listening to choral music was grounded in the belief that the language of music and the act of singing were means to forge a closer connection to the divine, and to the divine qualities of the human individual.

Singing in a large chorus with a professional orchestra in oratorios became a passionate pastime for thousands of middle-class citizens in German-speaking Europe and England. Of all of Spohr’s oratorios, The Last Judgment (as tonight’s oratorio came to be known in English) was his most popular and remains the most persuasive. If for some it lacks the dramatic effects of his contemporary competitors, it reveals what Clive Brown has eloquently identified as Spohr’s achievement. Spohr “accepted the substance of received classical forms but filled them with music that, employing a highly distinctive melodic and harmonic idiom, proved wonderfully apt to depict the fluctuating emotions of the human soul.” Spohr was in fact the musical equivalent of early romantic literature. There is a sensitivity, elegance, and intensity to Spohr’s music that remains compelling to our post-modern sensibilities.

If Spohr was born to a family of learning and respectability, Fanny Mendelssohn was born into a family of even greater intellectual distinction and substantial wealth. She was the beloved sister of the world-famous Felix, granddaughter of the great philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, and she married a distinguished painter, Wilhelm Hensel. Only in the last quarter-century has scholarly attention turned to Fanny Mendelssohn as a musical figure in her own right, not merely the sister of one great man and the wife of a prominent husband. Fanny’s father was reputed to have said that he grew up the son of a famous man (Moses Mendelssohn), only to find himself the father of a famous son. Today he would have to modify that to being the father of a famous daughter as well. R. Larry Todd, author of the finest biography of Felix Mendelssohn, has recently published a companion biography of Fanny.

Fanny Mendelssohn was given the same education as Felix, her brother, but not the same encouragement. Despite the enormous prejudice at the time against women as professional artists (consider the case of George Sand), Fanny never gave up her commitment to music. She continued to write both for solo piano and small ensembles. As the work on tonight’s program suggests, she also wrote large-scale works in genres such as those in which her brother excelled. Many of these works were designed for semi-public concert venues. Fanny herself maintained a Sunday afternoon concert series which accommodated large groups: choruses and orchestras.

There is a fair amount of controversy surrounding Fanny’s relationship to her brother. There is no doubt that Felix was devoted to her and believed in her talent. Her death shattered her brother, who died in an identical manner less than a year later. Felix was also dubious about her publishing music in her own name. But he was as critical of himself as he was of his sister. His notoriety as a child prodigy made him increasingly gun-shy of publishing his music as he became older. Many of his greatest works from his maturity were performed to acclaim but never published. As he gained experience as a composer, Felix Mendelssohn became obsessed with revision and improvement, fearing the criticism that might come to him through the premature publication of his works. The interesting question, then, is to what should we ascribe Fanny’s failure to be published and therefore recognized as a composer in her own lifetime. Her obscurity as a public figure extended well beyond her death. It is only the modern re-evaluation of the prejudice against women that has caused the rediscovery of Fanny Mendelssohn in her own right.

It may very well be that the bias against Fanny may not have been limited to issues of gender. Felix’s hypersensitivity to publishing his own music may equally have been related to his status as a Jew, despite his conversion and genuine commitment to Protestant Christianity. Felix and Fanny were converted as children by their parents after their grandmother, the widow of Moses Mendelssohn, died. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, although Mendelssohn’s fame continued to grow, his visibility as a Jew in the climate of increasing political and racial anti-Semitism also flourished. Therefore Felix Mendelssohn was not sympathetic to modern nationalism.

The early nineteenth century, before modern nationalism, represented a heyday of great cultural salons, particularly in Berlin and Vienna, maintained by charismatic and dynamic Jewish women of great wealth. Fanny Mendelssohn maintained such a salon primarily devoted to music. Her brother’s anxieties and her own uncertainly about assuming a public role as a composer were driven not only by the prejudice against her gender but against her Jewish origins. Although through marriage she assumed a name that hid her origins and although she became like her brother a believing Christian, in the hearts and minds of those intent on prejudice she remained a Jew. In the most positive sense, she was a great figure among several of her day and age, like Fanny Arnstein, and Rachel Levin von Varnhagen, eminent Jewish women who played an extraordinary role in the urban high culture of the first half of the nineteenth century.

In the decades following her death, in the wake of modern political anti-Semitism pioneered in part by Richard Wagner, any hope that Fanny Mendelssohn would get her proper due as a composer was certainly slim. It is poignant and ironic that her reappearance as a composer of large-scale music should come in the form of choral music based on religious texts and located within the traditions of Protestant Christianity. This fact forces us to confront the ease with which we carry forward prejudice with respect to religious affiliation on the basis of race and not confessional membership or conviction.

James Joyce

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert James Joyce, performed on Oct 6, 2010 at Carnegie Hall.

Three giants of twentieth-century literary modernism in the English-speaking world revealed, in their own distinct manner, a close affinity to music: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce. Eliot inspired a few composers, notably Igor Stravinsky and Michael Tippett. Pound was far more invested in music. He considered himself somewhat more than an amateur in matters musical. He wrote two idiosyncratic operas. One of them—Le Testament, based on the poetry of Francois Villon—was composed in 1923 together with a composer on today’s program, George Antheil. Pound considered Antheil the most promising composer of his generation and actively promoted Antheil’s reputation. Pound wrote music criticism for a few years. He also wrote a book on music that dealt with the theory of music, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony, in 1927. Pound’s primary interests were sonority and rhythm, an emphasis that listeners to Antheil’s Ballet mécanique (which turned out to be the composer’s most famous piece) will readily appreciate.

Pound believed in asymmetry in rhythm and the need to avoid the use of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. Freedom from regularity was one of his goals so that poetry would be “in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.” Pound, with Antheil’s help, created patterns of speech of extreme complexity that defied conventional musical notation. Harmony, the prime tool of romanticism, was the enemy. He sought to “tear up the whole bloomin’ era of harmony and do the thing if necessary on two tins and a wash board,” he wrote. But the main objective was to unravel how we speak, the larger forms of literary convention, and the linguistic rhetoric of meaning, all in order to restore the power of the spoken word.

As Paul Griffiths has eloquently argued in his essay for tonight’s concert, Joyce was deeply invested in music. He was a musician’s writer in that, as Griffiths has argued elsewhere, “musical” was a term of high praise. As with Pound, sound and rhythm play a key role. Joyce toyed with collaborating with Antheil as well, also on an opera, this time based on Ulysses, Mr. Bloom and the Cyclops. Antheil set only one sentence, using different meters for every bar in order to match the prose. As Daniel Albright has noted, if Joyce and Antheil had completed the work, Pound’s theories of how to match language and music would have been realized.

At the same time, Joyce (and to a greater extent Eliot) was rather conservative in his musical tastes. Joyce loved Irish popular songs, liturgical music, and opera. Modernism in literature intersected less prominently with contemporaneous musical modernism in the early twentieth century than avant-garde developments in the visual arts did, where collaborations between composers and painters were frequent and produced memorable results.

The connections between James Joyce and music represented in this concert are of three different types. First, there is the personal link between Joyce and Antheil. Joyce shared Pound’s extravagant opinion of Antheil as a promising force in modernism. Second, there is a biographical connection, namely Joyce’s extraordinary response to a chance hearing of Schoeck’s song cycle. Third, in Seibert’s choral and orchestral work we encounter the magnitude of Joyce’s influence on subsequent generations in a powerful musical approach to Joyce’s best known and most influential book, Ulysses.

George Antheil (1900–1959) was one of the most elusive and articulate figures in twentieth-century music history. Born in Trenton, New Jersey, Antheil studied piano and composition in Philadelphia and at age 19 became a pupil of Ernest Bloch in New York. He earned the patronage of Mary Louise Curtis Bok and went in the spring of 1922 to Europe, settling in Berlin. In 1923 he moved to Paris, where he met Joyce and Pound and all the luminaries of modernism from Picasso to Yeats. He formed a duo with the violinist Olga Rudge, for whom he wrote several sonatas (paid for by Pound). Antheil experienced considerable success in the mid 1920s, but by the early 1930s his reputation had begun to suffer. By the 1930s Antheil had begun to shift his focus back to America, first writing for theatre and dance in New York (working with Martha Graham, Ben Hecht, and George Balanchine), and then by 1936 for the film industry in Hollywood, notably with Cecil B. DeMille. Antheil turned out to be a superb writer, whose autobiography Bad Boy of Music is a gem, marked by wit and charm. In the last period of his career Antheil wrote in a more conventional late romantic style and focused on opera, writing the libretti for two of them himself. The most successful of these late works, however, was a version of Ben Jonson’s Volpone. He died more of a legend than a well-known composer, someone who was reputed to have given piano concerts with a gun on the piano, held a patent together with Hedy Lamarr (for a torpedo guidance system), and wrote Ann Landers-style columns.

In the end, however, most of Antheil’s music has descended into obscurity with the exception of the music from the 1920s, particularly the Ballet mécanique, a work that has become legendary, and A Jazz Symphony from 1925, an exuberant and spectacular piece. The 1920s was Antheil’s most original period, when he focused on spatial juxtapositions, using blocks of sound as if in an assemblage framed by an overarching concept of elapsed time. Antheil’s concept from the start was cinematic and visual. He described his work in terms of musical “pictures” and time as “a musical canvas.” He compared his use of time to Picasso’s use of blank spaces, in service of “the most abstract of the abstract.” Antheil, never guilty of excessive modesty, claimed to have preceded the innovations of a rival who became more famous: Erik Satie. In the late 1920s, Antheil’s eventual turn away from radicalism can be anticipated by his confession that he had written Ballet mécanique with “some madness within myself.” But Beethoven also mused about his own work in similar ways. Antheil’s versatility and eclecticism should not be held against him. More of his later music deserves revival for its consistent craftsmanship and ingenuity. Antheil the composer should be remembered for more than one moment. Unlike the one other American from the same period who also had a meteoric start to his career as a composer and pianist, Leo Ornstein, Antheil did not fall silent and disappear. He produced a substantial body of work to be contended with. In retrospect, Joyce and Pound’s advocacy may not have been misplaced.

Othmar Schoeck (1886–1957) presents altogether a different picture. His primary achievement as a composer rests in his massive output of songs, rivaling in extent Franz Schubert. There are in addition five fantastic song cycles; one glorious work with string quartet, Notturno (1933); and four with orchestra: Elegie (1915–1922), Nachhall (1955) [performed by the ASO several seasons back], Befreite Sehnsucht (1952), and the most famous, the one on today’s program written in 1926. He also wrote eight impressive operas and a fine violin concerto, performed more than a decade ago by the ASO. Schoeck was a dour personality with an original voice. But he, a pupil of Max Reger’s, consistently felt himself unappreciated and in the shadow on the one hand of Richard Strauss, the era’s most successful opera composer, and after 1925, Alban Berg, whose triumph with Wozzeck he believed damaged the critical reception of his finest opera, Penthesilea.

But Schoeck crafted his own distinct voice and modernist style, albeit one rooted in a neo-romantic logic that he developed under Reger’s tutelage. Schoeck’s reputation has suffered in part because of his political allegiances. He became an avid proponent of the Nazis, not an altogether uncommon characteristic for German Swiss intellectuals and politicians of the time. But his enthusiasm was so pronounced and his eagerness to curry favor with the Third Reich so blatant that in his last years he became somewhat of a pariah. Nonetheless, Schoeck was clearly Switzerland’s finest twentieth-century composer. Few composers have matched the intensity, integrity, and power of the combination of poetic text and musical expression that he produced.

In January 1935 James Joyce was in Zurich to consult his eye doctor and went to a concert conducted by Schoeck. On the program was Lebendig begraben. Joyce was so impressed that a few days later he paid an unannounced visit to Schoeck’s home in search of the composer. After hearing the concert, Joyce went out to get a copy of the piano vocal score. He wrote his daughter-in-law in a letter, “If I can judge by last night he [Schoeck] stands head and shoulders above Stravinsky and Antheil as a composer for orchestra and voice anyhow.” Joyce also sought out the Keller poems with the intent to translate them. Joyce observed that “Schoeck is a type rather like Beckett who gets up at 2:30 P.M. his wife says. But I hope to catch him before he falls asleep again. But he can write music all right.” As Schoeck’s biographer Chris Walton noted, Joyce indeed did, but not until after inviting the composer to dinner and giving him a copy of Ulysses in the French translation with the dedication “in homage from your admirer, James Joyce.”

Mátyás Seiber (1905–1960) is the least known of the impressive number of composers—from Dohnanyi and Bartok to Ligeti and Kurtag—who make up the great musical renaissance of twentieth-century Hungary. Seiber was born in Budapest and studied with Kodaly. When Seiber submitted a wind Serenade for six instruments in 1925 for a prize in a competition and did not win, one of the judges, Bela Bartok, resigned in protest. Seiber went on to teach in Frankfurt where he met Theodor Adorno and worked intensively on and with jazz. He in fact gave the first course on the theory and practice of jazz, certainly in Europe. He emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1935 to England. He was immensely productive and was recruited by Michael Tippett to teach at Morely College, an adult college in South London founded in the 1880s. Seiber was killed in a car crash on a visit to South Africa in 1960. Ligeti dedicated his 1961 Atmospheres to Seiber’s memory. Like his Hungarian mentors and models. Seiber maintained a life-long interest in folk materials. Like Antheil, he also tried his hand at film and radio music, writing a score in 1955 for Orwell’s Animal Farm in its animated film version, and for a radio version of Goethe’s Faust in the 1940s. He also has one successful popular song to his name, “By the Fountains of Rome.” Seiber’s best known work, however, remains his 1947 setting of Joyce, Ulysses, the piece which ends today’s program. Yet there is more music waiting to be revived, including piano works, string quartets, songs, chamber works for a variety of instruments (many using jazz and improvisation), shorter orchestral works, and various settings of folk song materials.

We at the American Symphony are once again proud, at the opening of this new season that marks the orchestra’s return to Carnegie Hall (where the orchestra was founded in 1962), to showcase stellar works by unfairly neglected composers in a concert framed by a common thread, in this case a daunting and imposing one, the life and work of James Joyce. It is both fitting and ironic that so well-known and towering a figure should provide posterity with the unexpected opportunity to mine treasures of music history buried by oversight and a habit of forgetting driven not by judgment but by carelessness and thoughtlessness.

Apollo and Dionysus

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Apollo and Dionysus, performed on May 9, 2010 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is difficult to imagine a history of Western art that does not begin with the legacy of the classical world. Indeed the entire notion of “Western,” the idea of a coherent cultural tradition which in fact is anything but coherent, is largely the result of a conceit first developed in earnest during the nineteenth century. The core of that idea was the notion that modern European culture is a direct descendent of ancient Greece and Rome. The Swiss historian Jakob Burckhardt (1818–1897), whose epoch-making book The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) pioneered the idea of defining history as a succession of related periods, identified the “rediscovery” of classical antiquity as the impetus for the civic humanism that was the hallmark of the Renaissance. The Renaissance became the defining era of modern Western culture. (Of course, the irony is that Europe before the Reformation spent several centuries selectively refuting the learning of the ancient world and effectively obliterating the artifacts of a classical heritage. The “rediscovery” came about largely because of European forays into Egypt and Arabia, where much of the learning of ancient Greece had been preserved by the great Arab scholars.) The Renaissance desire for continuity with the classical world is most strikingly evident in Dante’s choice of Virgil as the guide of the Christian soul in the Inferno. Virgil, a symbol of humanity’s highest possible achievement before Christian revelation, holds for Dante the beginning of the thread of history. Dante presumed his readers would have an intimate acquaintance with the Aeneid, which itself dramatizes the continuity between ancient Troy and Virgil’s Rome.

Burckhardt was a bit like Virgil with his thesis that the Italian Renaissance was the result of a rediscovery of classical heritage. The idea was as constructive as a guide to self definition for the nineteenth century as Virgil’s epic was for Augustan Rome. Burckhardt’s Renaissance was considered to be the beginning of early modern culture. The notion rested on the presumption that before the Renaissance, a period existed which could conveniently be called the “Dark Ages” or the “Middle Ages,” that is, an amorphous period between the classical and the modern. This idea gave a fine pedigree to the current age, a sense that fit in very well with nineteenth-century European aspirations with respect to secular culture. Burckhardt was an enormous influence on his contemporaries. The most important contemporary was Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a classicist as well as a philosopher. Nietzsche, also an amateur composer and pianist, famously cultivated the friendship of Richard Wagner. He eventually turned on Wagner’s art and personality in an equally memorable fashion with trenchant and perceptive sarcasm. Nietzsche and Burckhardt had considerable regard for one another and overlapped as resident academics in Basel.

For both of these thinkers, the transition from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance represented a decline in the dominance of ignorance, superstition, and the irrational, and the revival of reason. The identification of the Renaissance as the beginning of modernity was itself a revisionist idea that challenged the previous preeminence of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as the first modern age. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment was an age of great progress that began with the English Restoration in 1660, and saw the accomplishments of Newton, Locke, Lessing, and Goethe. The period (not the century) ended in 1789 with the French Revolution. The Enlightenment was an age of rapid industrialization and scientific progress, the development of democratic social contract theory, and the flowering of letters. It represented the erosion of the power of the Church in political affairs, and the strengthening of the secular nation space. The founding fathers in the United States and the Jacobins in France cherished a vision of themselves as heirs to the great leaders and orators of classical Greece and Rome. Indeed one group of great poets and writers of Britain were often referred as the “Augustans” and the era in Britain and on the Continent has been called the Neoclassical Age. In German-speaking Europe there was no more articulate defender of the priority of the ancients than Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), who had a tremendous influence on writers and artists, and who developed the false impression of ancient Greek monuments and buildings as smooth, white, and pristine. This idealized image is still evident in the buildings of our own nation’s capital and our Greek temple-inspired banks and libraries.

As an age which put itself at the apex of historical progress, the nineteenth century—once it had established the Renaissance as the beginning of modernity and the Enlightenment as its adolescence, as it were—developed its own version of the meaning of its classical inheritance, of this look backwards on behalf of the present. The writing of history is inevitably as revealing about the era of the writer as it is of the writer’s subject matter. In the nineteenth century, Romantic writers developed their own fascination with the ancient world. But it was a fascination tinged with urgency, because the modern inhabitants of the ancient lands, the Greeks, Turks, and Arabs, were seen as an object of compassion and condescension. Byron died defending his beloved Greece from the Ottomans. Elgin transported the legendary Parthenon Marbles to the British Museum for safekeeping from the Greeks who did not value what they had. Schliemann did the same for the artifacts of Troy, which ended up in Berlin (albeit allegedly with some selective alterations to make them look more idealistically “Trojan”).

But by the mid nineteenth century the intent had become to challenge the smug assumption about reason and progress inherited from the Enlightenment. In contrast to the earlier century, the nineteenth century shifted the focus away from the Roman era of Cicero, Livy, Virgil, and Horace to the earlier classical iterations of the Greek worlds of Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles. If Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88) was the most eloquent expression of the appropriation of the classical past for the eighteenth century, then Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) might be counted as the single most significant mirror of the later nineteenth century’s view of the classical past.

Consequently, this shift also brought about a shift in interest from politics to mythology, from a benign consideration of Roman religion as an aspect of civic life (comparable perhaps to the restrained Christianity of Thomas Jefferson’s deism), to a fascination with mythic archetypes in pre-Christian classical thought that might offer a glimpse into the innate nature of humanity. This notion was of course loaded with the disillusionment with and suspicion of modern progress and industrialization, which by the end of the nineteenth century, was fairly apparent in the face of unprecedented poverty and discontent caused by commerce and industry. Could the Greeks, the birthplace of civilization, tell us through their mythic archetypes something about the nature of the human before it became disfigured by modern progress?

Nietzsche thought so. He initially identified the power of Greek tragedy as an act connected to religious ritual. Within that ritual lay a vision of the world not defined by Christianity. Using Greek myth and dramatic ritual as his basis, Nietzsche concluded that there are two fundamental but contradictory characteristics in the human spirit, and therefore in the way art both comes into being and is received. The Greeks were well aware of this duality. They personified it into two gods in the Olympian pantheon. The first of these gods is Apollo, god of light, learning, and music. As a characterological impulse that informs art, the Apollonian is that which imposes discipline of form, finds beauty in symmetry and proportion, expresses refined sentiment, grace, and reason. It is the Apollonian that raised humanity above the beast and controls action through thought in order to create order and promote civilization. The second god is Dionysus, god of wine and ecstasy. Dionysus represents the irrational, the erotic, the physical, the uninhibited, and the boundless. Dionysus is undirected energy, frenzied joy, and absolute freedom with all the consequent destructiveness. The Dionysian impulse is pure instinct, that which connects humanity to the natural and animal world. Nietzsche used these two warring archetypes, neither of which can exist without the other, to depict the human factors that inform art with both its beauty and its psychic power. It is not at all surprising that Nietzsche’s reflections on aesthetics and history of ancient culture emerged in a transformed manner in the writings of Freud, who found in the eternal struggle of the Dionysian, which in Freud’s language became the id, the seat of the mind’s violent and sexual impulses (and also its truth),and the Apollonian, or the rational, controlling ego, the basis for human civilization.

Among artists of Nietzsche’s generation and after, this powerful explanation of human nature proved irresistible. How fascinating to suggest that we all have a primal force lurking in our psyche, from which we are protected by conscious discipline and the learned art of civilization, whose true value cannot deny that force’s inevitable legitimacy. Robert Louis Stevenson claimed that his masterful portrayal of what can happen when the balance of the Apollonian and Dionysian is upset, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was inspired by a dream, a message from his own subconscious. Music was an even more fertile arena for an exploration of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Apollo was the god of music, after all, and his lyre formed sound into disciplined patterns of beauty and symmetry. But Dionysus also had his sacred aulus or pipe which drove his followers, the Maenads, to frenzied orgies. For Nietzsche, both impulses constituted the essential elements of music: the beauty of its form, and its ability to touch primal emotion. When he admired Wagner, Nietzsche saw in Tristan und Isolde a reconciliation of the Apollonian and Dionysian, and in Wagner’s music in general a rebirth of the Greek spirit, which was in turn a rejection of moralistic Christianity. He later changed his mind about Wagner, but not Christianity. It should not surprise us that the generation of composers that was caught in this intellectual framework popularized by Nietzsche, and struggled with the overpowering legacy of Wagner, returned again and again to these archetypes as a source of inspiration and innovation.

In the end, however, it was Nietzsche’s use of the idea of the Apollonian and Dionysian, and its absorption into modern psychoanalytic theory that helped solidify the significance of this version of the classical heritage for the twentieth century. In the closing section of his classic essay on the relationship between Protestanism and capitalism, the great social scientist Max Weber (an avid music lover) described the predicament of the individual in modernity as an “iron cage.” There was no escape in life from the tyranny of rational action. The horrors of the First and Second World Wars vindicated this skeptical criticism of modern life. Music remained an art form potentially immune from such controlling rationality. It had the Apollonian virtues of form and beauty and at the same time could give expression to the joyous irrationalism symbolized by Dionysus. Tonight’s program provides a cross section of how twentieth century European composers integrated a Nietzschean-inspired sense of the crisis of modernity into their artistic vision, seeking in classical symbols a route around the bland and oppressive utilitarianism of a tradition of reason Nietzsche himself located not in Apollo or Dionysus but in a later legacy of classical antiquity, the influence of Socrates.

Robert Schumann (1810-56)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Robert Schumann: Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1853), performed on April 9, 2010 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Robert Schumann was perhaps the first in a long line of great nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers whose ambitions were as much literary as they were musical. One might count in that group such diverse personalities as Wagner, Berlioz, and Prokofiev. Indeed Schumann’s ambition to become a writer, fueled in part by his father’s status as a bookseller, publisher, and translator of Sir Walter Scott, was influenced by the work of Jean-Paul Richter and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The influence of Jean-Paul lasted throughout Schumann’s life; Schumann was alleged to have said that he learned as much about musical composition from Jean-Paul as he had from any formal musical training.

The literary in Schumann’s musical imagination first took shape as an attachment to the miniature piano piece. Schumann’s early reputation was based on short, characteristic piano pieces that took literary figures and scenes as their inspiration. Schumann was able to translate not only the poetic impulse into music, but also the effect of prose. For the solitary pianist and the listener, the relation between the literary text and music became one of reminiscence, an act of nostalgia. Music stimulated the imagination just as reading did. This indirect connection between the literary and instrumental music led Schumann to experiment with the formal structure of music, the logic of musical narration. Consider “Träumerei” from the cycle Scenes of Childhood (1838). As famously analyzed by Alban Berg, this brief, beautiful piece has asymmetrical phrase lengths and harmonic surprises motivated by the sensibilities created by Romantic prose and poetry. Schumann’s innovation was to create a new expressive vocabulary for instrumental forms including extended musical fantasy that utilized a rhetoric that exceeded the conventions of sonata writing and other classical forms.

Schumann’s reputation as a pioneer was confined, however, to the varieties of domestic music making, including chamber music and the writing of Lieder that set texts, particularly those by Heine, brilliantly. Schumann solidified his position in the musical world before 1840 not only by such musical compositions but by the use of his literary talents to master the art of criticism. He set the terms of the long nineteenth-century critical debate that sought to separate the superficial from the profound and distinguish between true art and philistinism in music. He was an early advocate of Chopin and Berlioz. He took on the fashions of the day including the taste for athletic virtuosity and ear-catching sentimentality characteristic of French opera. For Schumann, Beethoven was the ideal and terrifying genius in whose shadow all future generation of composers seemed condemned to remain.

It was through the friendship and support of Felix Mendelssohn that Schumann developed the courage to challenge Beethoven in the arena of large-scale musical works. Although Schumann wrote four symphonies, it was not a form with which he was entirely comfortable. Instead Schumann followed the example of Mendelssohn and indeed the fashion of the times by turning his attention to the oratorio form. Once again Schumann’s literary gifts served him well. His first great success in the larger public arena was with his masterpiece Das Paradies und die Peri (1843). An immensely popular poem, Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817), was at the core of the oratorio, and the composer’s skill in the setting of text and the evocation of ideas gave him the tools to construct a persuasive dramatic argument.

Schumann’s work habits were always hampered by his psychological fragility and his tendency to waver between manic and depressed moods. The early and mid-1840s were a good period for him. With his confidence bolstered by success in using secular literary texts for large-scale compositions, Schumann turned to an area in which Mendelssohn never succeeded: opera. Ultimately he would complete one opera that truly deserves a regular presence on the stage, Genoveva (1847). Ironically, although based on works by such notables as Ludwig Tieck and Friedrich Hebbel, it is hampered by a relatively unpersuasive libretto by the composer and Robert Reinick.

But in 1844 Schumann’s ambition focused on tackling the most significant German literary text not only of his own time but in all of German history: Goethe’s drama, Faust. This monumental play was written in two parts, distant from each other both in years and in form. The first part was published in 1808 and already had attracted the attention of composers in the generation before Schumann. Beethoven toyed with the idea of setting Part I to music, but that project faltered. For all Beethoven’s admiration for Schiller, the figure of Goethe presented an even more daunting challenge, even though the two once came together in a much-anticipated meeting and supposedly had little to say to each other. Goethe was without question the most prominent cultural personage of his time, and would remain, through the age of Thomas Mann, the equivalent of Shakespeare in the German literary tradition. Ludwig Spohr was another who set Faust to music, one of many subsequent efforts to capture the poetry and dramatic spirit of Part I in music.

Goethe took a long time to complete Part II, which he finally finished in 1832, the year of his death. If Part I became an icon of early Romantic sensibility, Part II became its polar opposite. The first part of Goethe’s treatment follows, with interpolation, the traditional story of the man who signs a pact with the devil in order to learn the secrets of the universe, and destroys the first woman he learns to love in the process. It is an iconic Romantic conceit. But after 1809 Goethe became increasingly suspicious of literary Romanticism, and in Part II he invented a new kind of neoclassicism in diction and the use of the theater to explore the spiritual and mystical with a disciplined formal approach, using a somewhat elaborate adherence to classical models. Part II moves into deeply symbolic and philosophical territory in its allegorical depiction of Faust’s redemption as representing the fundamental struggle of the human soul. For all his evident betrayal of Romantic precepts, the older Goethe (not the Goethe of 1774’s The Sorrows of Young Werther) became an object of derision for younger Romantic writers including Schumann’s beloved Jean-Paul. But the literary controversies of the 1820s subsided after Goethe’s death as veneration for the great man rose above all partisanship. In comparison to Part I, Part II seems resistant to the conventions of the theater, and therefore an unlikely subject for opera. At the same time, however, the conclusion of Part II suggests that music is possibly the only language to express properly the profound truths encountered by the soul in its final encounter with mortality. The tempting challenge to composers of setting Part II to music, despite its lack of a conventional narrative, is understandable. But throughout the nineteenth century, composers would have only fragmentary success in rendering Part II in music. For most concert-goers the most memorable attempt is that of Gustav Mahler, who chose the same text that Schumann did as the basis of the second part of his Eighth Symphony.

Schumann’s courage and ambition in taking on this formidable challenge may have had personal resonance for him. In Part II Goethe, despite his apparent rejection of Romantic principles, actually expands on one of the most enduring conceits of Romanticism: the obsession with the feminine personality. In Part I, Gretchen is the innocent beauty responsive to and corrupted by sensuality. She dies as the ideal object of desire. In Part II she becomes the ethereal instrument of redemptive love. Part II ends with a celebration of what Goethe calls the Eternal Feminine, the highest expression of the human capacity for love and forgiveness. This idea also expresses Schumann’s own life-long personal, philosophical, and ultimately ambivalent relationship to women and love.

No doubt, Schumann’s initial ambition was to write a successful operatic treatment of both parts of Faust. Ultimately, he retreated, perhaps out of respect for Goethe’s text, towards the form of an oratorio. This accounts for the very selective structure of Schumann’s work. In fact it is not clear that this work was ever completed. Like so many after him, Schumann found Faust just too daunting, perhaps because of the implied music of Part II. Goethe’s poetry is its own music. Schumann was sensitive to this on account of his own literary instincts. These instincts that explain why in his setting of Byron’s Manfred, he left a good deal of the text unset, to be spoken, not sung. Byron’s poetry was simply too beautiful in its own right to require music. Music might seem superfluous. The results in Scenes from Goethe’s Faust is consequently a remarkable act of editing by Schumann, resulting in a mix of songwriting, dramatic scene painting, and choral grandeur. At every moment Schumann never gets in the way of the drama and lyricism of the text. As Paul Griffiths points out, Schumann selected from both Parts I and II in order to highlight in the complex drama the centrality of the lead female character, the object of love.

In the long history of musical settings of Goethe’s Faust, including the best known example, Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust and Liszt’s Faust Symphony (which also uses the end of Part II) Schumann’s effort is certainly among the most compelling. The nineteenth-century obsession with Faust never resulted in a work that combined popularity with profundity. The only one that became a staple of the repertoire was Gounod’s opera, which most German critics and opera lovers have held in contempt. Although Schumann succeeded, this work has undeservedly remained a rarity.

Ironically, the friend and supporter who encouraged Schumann to widen his musical ambitions, Mendelssohn, had a privilege that Schumann never did—the opportunity to spend time with the great poet himself. Goethe adored the young prodigy, a protégé of Goethe’s closest musician friend, Zelter. Richard Wagner (who was also obsessed with the idea of setting Faust) helped to popularize the view that it was Mendelssohn who ruined Schumann by encouraging him to abandon his experiments in combining the literary with the musical in shorter forms. But as was often the case with Wagner’s criticism, his motivations for making this claim were suspect. It was after all Mendelssohn’s influence that led Schumann to set as much of Faust as he did. Through Mendelssohn’s influence, Schumann succeeded where Wagner himself failed. Schumann gave much of Goethe’s masterpiece its most eloquent, intense, and profound musical incarnation.