The Stolen Smile

  This concert performance of Max von Schillings 1915 Mona Lisa is the latest installment of a series of concert performances of rare operas the ASO has pioneered since the mid 1990s. The list of operas performed by the ASO in New York City includes French works: Bizet’s Djamileh, Lalo’s Le Roi D’Ys, Magnard’s Bérénice, Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus, Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe Bleu, Chabrier’s Le Roi malgré lui, and D’Indy’s Fervaal. The ASO also has featured Russian works: Rimsky Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri and Dargomizhsky’s The Stone Guest. The German works in the list include four one act operas by Hindemith (Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen, Sancta Susanna, Nusch-Nuschi and The Long Christmas Dinner), Marschner’s Der Vampyr, Schreker’s Der Ferne Klang, Schmidt’s Notre Dame, Strauss’s Feuersnot, Die Liebe der Danae, and Die ägyptische Helena, Weill’s Der Protagonist, and two full acts of The Eternal Road, and Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg and Eine florentinische Tragödie. We have also offered Ethyl Smyth’s The Wreckers (which will have a full staged production this summer at Bard’s Summerscape), and Dallapicola’s Il Prigioniero and Volo di Notte.

Mona Lisa fits this series. It is the second “Renaissance” opera from the early twentieth century, a work that can be placed in the same category as Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie. What defines the ASO’s long list is the judgment that there are dozens and dozens of great operas from the 19th and 20th centuries that deserve to be heard live, not merely on old or new recordings, or DVDs or pirated videos. Opera is the one medium from the past that resists technological reproduction. A concert version still represents properly the sonority and the multi-dimensional aspect crucial to the operatic experience. One ought not judge an opera from sound or video documents any more than one can judge a work of architecture from photographs or even a sophisticated computer simulation and video tour.

The plain fact is that the opera, which thankfully is experiencing some vitality as a medium for contemporary composers, possesses an enormous treasure trove of great works that are condemned to silence. Not all may be “original” in style. Many can be regarded as “eclectic.” But greatness and power in any art form, particularly opera, are not contingent on “originality.” Consult any guidebook to opera published before 1950 and one will be astonished at how many operas are described, with plots, as presumed constituents of an active repertoire. Then check on the active repertoire today. Look at what we are missing and how distorted our connection to the history of opera has become. One will be dismayed to find that most operas worthy of performance have vanished from view, except for a small community of cognoscenti. No opera the ASO has performed so far is unworthy of a staged production; and not one could ever be considered “obscure” or second rate. And there is a list of works that remain be done that could take us another half-century to perform at the rate of one each year.

Schillings’s Mona Lisa falls squarely in the group of deserving operas. Its obscurity dates from 1933. Schillings died in July of that year, just months after the Nazis took power. Furthermore he was an ardent nationalist who signed on to the Nazi cause. His leadership of the Prussian Academy of the Arts under the Nazis permitted him to dismiss, with some relish, Jews, socialists and communists from their posts, including Schreker and Schoenberg. Schillings had earned respect before 1933 as a composer but even more as an administrator. He served as head of the State Opera in Berlin, and had been active as a conductor. He was, by all accounts, a martinet, stiff, unpleasant and nasty. But he was nonetheless an accomplished composer of several operas. His early works showed a high degree of craft and were successful, although viewed as too explicitly derivative and neo-Wagnerian.

A bit like Leoncavallo, Schillings however managed to write one operatic “hit”: Mona Lisa, in 1915. It was a runaway success and experienced in the successive decade and a half well over 1200 performances, including a production at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and in St. Petersburg in the 1920s, alongside Wozzeck and Der Ferne Klang. The international rage for Mona Lisa came to an abrupt halt in 1933; Schillings’s death placed the work on the periphery in Germany, and a revival there after 1933 was unthinkable.

Bad people and anti-Semites have written great operas, as the case of Wagner amply illustrates. Despite the bad odor surrounding its composer (who died well before the onset of the most heinous atrocities) Mona Lisa is a terrific piece of music and theatre. Its style is far less Wagnerian than Schillings’s other operas and in fact it reveals a shift toward the Italian style of verismo, befitting not only its subject matter, but the taste of the public in 1915. It is not “original” in the sense of Strauss or Puccini. It is simply inspired—beautiful, effective and engaging—much like the best works of Korngold and Zemlinsky.

Part of the allure and potential of the work as more than a rarity and period piece rests in the subject. Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait, known mostly as “La Gioconda” (a title that bears no relationship with the plot or subject matter of the opera of the same name by Giordano) was a well known small portrait by Leonardo that hung unobtrusively in the Louvre alongside many other Renaissance Italian paintings, a work purchased by Francis I of France from the painter himself. What turned the “Mona Lisa” into the most famous painting in the world was an event that occurred in August 1911. The painting was stolen. The thief was an obscure Italian workman. He simply walked out with it at 7 am on a Monday. The crime was a sensation and captivated the entire world. Picasso was accused, briefly, of the theft, as was Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet, who was held in custody for a week. The case remained unsolved for two and a half years baffling the police around the world.

The notoriety of the theft was enhanced two and a half years later when the thief reappeared and clumsily attempted to sell it to an art dealer in Florence. The dealer contacted the Uffizi in Florence, and together they retrieved the painting and apprehended the thief. Its recovery, its display in Italy, its return to the Louvre and the trial of the thief were headline news. The story of the theft, the analysis of the culprit and his motives have remained the subject of articles and books ever since.

After its recovery it was put on temporary display in Florence. Over 30 thousand people showed up to view it, creating a riot. From the moment of its return, the portrait has remained the most reproduced and visited work of art in the Western world. More startling is the fact that between 1911 and 1913 more people went to the Louvre to gaze at the empty spot from which it had been stolen than had ever visited the painting when it was there. It has inspired painters, poets, and pretentious mystery writers. The Mona Lisa remains far and away the main reason tourists go to the Louvre today. It was always a masterpiece, but it became the most famous painting in history only after the 1911 theft and its miraculous return in 1913.

The sensation surrounding the theft of the “Mona Lisa” was the reason Schillings had the idea of writing an opera about the painting. He saw an opportunity that could not be missed. The extensive journalistic coverage of the whole affair included an extensive account of the painting’s merit and substance particularly the enigmatic smile of the subject, and of course, her beauty. The intense scrutiny of the painting invited fiction: who was the subject? What sort of personality was she? And, above all, what is it with that smile?

The librettist Schillings chose was an Austrian poet, actress and writer of children’s literature, Beatrice von Dovsky (1870-1925). She acted in the Raimund Theater, playing soubrette roles—the ingénue, the mischievous flirt. She went on to write specifically Viennese character pieces marked by humor and sentimentality. Her most lasting achievement (apart from having a small street named after her in Vienna’s 13th district) is the libretto of Mona Lisa.

Dovsky’s genius was to invent a somewhat mystical and supernatural framework. The lot concerns a contemporary couple. They are visiting, on their honeymoon, the palace of the “real” La Gioconda, Mona Lisa, in Florence. The opening scene—which parallels the close of the opera—makes brilliant use of the familiar discourse about Mona Lisa’s smile and sexuality. Dvosky’s opening text is suffused with contemporary notions concerning desire and marriage. The tourist couple is a young beautiful woman and a bored rich older husband, now on his third marriage. She is sad and introspective. She cares not for pearls and jewels, but for happiness. He is bored; she is mesmerized by the visit to the home of a legendary enigmatic beauty where the unusual events took place in, of all years, 1492—the year the Spanish expelled the Moors from Europe and Columbus made his voyage to the New World.

In a brilliant theatrical gesture, their guide, a friar, begins to recount the events in 1492 that unfold scenically to the audience. A tale of an unhappy marriage and jealousy, of greed, cruelty and romance unfolds, framed by the competing claims of the Dionysian—revelry and abandon—and the Apollonian—reserve and ascetic religiosity (represented by the followers of Savonarola). The clue to the husband’s jealousy and Mona Lisa’s adultery is her smile—that rare sign of her desire and happiness that periodically shatters her otherwise icy exterior. Lover and husband in the tale die, but Mona Lisa survives.

The story explains the painting’s subject and the painter’s representation of Mona Lisa. When the story ends, we are returned to the present. The audience is left alone with the visiting couple and the friar. As the curtain falls, it becomes apparent that the young bride is herself Mona Lisa, a reincarnation, or perhaps the immortal living person of the original Mona Lisa.

This fabulous and utterly operatic plot brought the very best out of Schillings. The opera boasts crowd scenes, affecting melodies, a colorful and not overwhelming orchestral texture and high drama. Mona Lisa possesses a great, timeless and an accessible story and beautiful music. So why should it not regain a place in the operatic repertory, alongside the warhorses from that same era that are so overexposed that the music that initially made them famous is diminished in favor of bizarre productions and lame attempts at modernization? The warhorses now function best as vehicles for succeeding generations of divas and divos. This opera, ironically in part because it is entirely forgotten, makes its case directly as music and drama; it requires no gratuitous directorial ingenuity to captivate today’s audience. After all, everyone knows the “Mona Lisa.” We are still entranced by her smile and under the spell of the unique aura of the painting and the painter.

WQXR's 30 Pieces in 30 Days

WQXR asked Leon Botstein what work one should hear as a follow-up to Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, "New World."  Here's his answer.

Marriage Actually

by Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Marriage Actually, performed on October 15, 2014 at Carnegie Hall.

The musical language of late Romanticism, its rhetoric and vocabulary, were inspired in part by the 19th century’s fascination with what music as an art form could accomplish relative to other art forms. The 19th century witnessed the development of the realist novel and of historical and genre painting; art was being used to evoke idealized versions of an imagined past, a threatened present, and real and familiar objects and events. It was inevitable that the nature of music would be interrogated with a view to finding out whether music too could weave its own illusions of realism, tell a story, and communicate emotions. Could music be used as a form of narrative, or were its beauty and content simply formal in character? Could music actually illustrate or portray something, or was it purely an abstract art form?

These philosophical musings occupied the first generation of Romantic composers, particularly Mendelssohn and Schumann. Mendelssohn famously argued counter-intuitively that music was more “precise” than language. These issues became contentious in the 1850s and 1860s as a rift grew between the defenders of the formalist traditions of the 18th century and the practitioners of “program” music, composers who rejected forms such as the quartet and traditional symphony in favor of instrumental “tone poems” with literary titles, and, predictably, music with words, notably opera. Liszt and Wagner, the leaders of the “New German” school, were characterized by the formalists as debasers of the high art of music, apostates who abandoned the unique formal possibilities of music and turned it into a cheapened illustrative medium.

But this division was more ambiguous than it appears. Wagner’s grandiose theatrical ambitions inspired him to use repetition and musical signature motives to generate a clear narrative arc in his music. But at the same time, Wagner’s love of myth and philosophical pretentions led him to ascribe a metaphysical dimension to his music, idealist properties beyond its purely descriptive function. In this sense he was much closer to Mendelssohn and Brahms in his recognition of the special power of music than the surface of the conflict suggests. And Mendelssohn and Brahms, for their part, may have worked within the traditional framework of forms such as chamber music and symphony, but they had no doubt as to the collective emotional power of music, which worked by evoking musings and memories, sensations and experiences, just as poetry and painting did.

Of the composers of the generation after Wagner and Brahms, Richard Strauss was the most representative of a synthesis of the two opposing camps. Strauss was, for a composer, among the most sophisticated of readers and the keenest of observers. Influenced by Nietzsche, he had little use for religion. As much as he admired Wagner, he eventually became disenchanted by Wagner’s mythic and philosophical claims on behalf of music. Strauss was suspicious of grandiose metaphysical and political dreams, in which music was required to play a role, though at the same time, he was never in doubt about the power of the Classical and Romantic traditions to depict and illuminate the human experience.

Strauss began his career as a young composer sympathetic to Brahms. He then turned to opera and embraced the Wagnerian. But ultimately the composer he most revered throughout his career was Mozart. Of Strauss’ contemporaries, the most distinguished was Gustav Mahler, who was, for much of his career, an avowedly confessional composer whose symphonies had specific programs, some drawn from his personal life. Tonight’s program reveals how Strauss used the personal, but, in contrast to Mahler, not in a confessional, psychological sense. The “characters” in Symphonia Domestica may be his own wife and child, but in Strauss’ hands the experience of daily life, from the quarreling to the lovemaking, are rendered believable but accessible and familiar through music to the audience; they are human archetypes built out of the detail of Strauss’ everyday life. In this sense, the predicaments that unfold in Symphonia Domestica resemble, as a source, the universal sensibilities that are evoked by Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

Using a huge and highly differentiated orchestra, Strauss manipulates every sonority and technique available to a symphonic composer. A Liszt-like illustrative strategy is integrated with traditional formal procedures of thematic development, as was the case in many of Strauss’ famous tone poems. But in Symphonia Domestica Strauss reveals his sense of humor. He pokes fun at all those who seek to elevate music as an abstract, profound experience “above” the mundane. What he desires to show instead is that music, like all great art, must (in the late Arthur Danto’s words) “transfigure the commonplace” in its own way. The ordinary life of people can be the basis of art, because real human life is the only subject worth examining through art. The work contains triumph, heartbreak, love, remembrance, aspiration, and suffering within its epic proportions. Strauss makes it plain that a composer does not have to resort to gods and heroes to ascend to the height of meaning. No wonder the radical realism of Strauss’ writing in Symphonia Domestica infuriated Charles Ives, among others, who found it brash and vulgar.

Symphonia Domestica premiered in 1904 in New York during Strauss’ tour of the United States (which also permitted the photographer Edward Steichen to make a stunning portrait of the composer). It also received two performances a month later in Wanamaker’s department store in New York, which somehow seems fitting, given its domestic subject matter.

This work, one of Strauss’ last major orchestral compositions, forms the basis of tonight’s concert. When it was written, Strauss and his wife were still a youngish couple with an infant son; thus the narrative draws its episodes from the daily life of a young family. The Intermezzo interludes and the parergon were written much later, in the 1920s. By then Strauss was already regarded as an old master and possibly an outdated one. He resented this bitterly. He was shunned by a new generation of modernists because he never lost faith in tonality and in the possibilities of the grand musical tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries. Like Brahms before him, Strauss developed a bittersweet nostalgia about the world in which he lived. He thought of himself as a witness to a dying golden age. He came to suspect that he was the last exponent of a grand tradition.

Strauss was unusually consistent, productive and disciplined as a composer. He hated the social delusions and pretensions of “artsy” bohemian artists. He portrayed himself explicitly as an unapologetic bourgeois who was shamelessly absorbed with making money, copyrights, card playing, and his comfortable life at Garmisch. He made no apologies for his egotism and had no doubt about his own superior talent.

One aspect of his domestic life that never ceased to puzzle his friends and followers was his deep devotion to his wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna, whom very few people seemed to have liked. She badgered and criticized him, was imperious and thought herself socially superior to her husband, the descendent of a brewer. She was offended by Intermezzo. But something worked between them; Strauss and Pauline were married for 55 years, and she survived him by only 8 months. That Strauss was truly a family man, devoted to Pauline and to his son and daughter-in-law, there can be no doubt.

But behind this veneer of unremarkable middle class respectability—Strauss’ mask—was a perceptive and deeply solitary man whose happiest moments were not playing cards but when he was composing or reading. Strauss was the heir to Mozart, who also displayed wide contrast between his visible social self-presentation and the complexity, subtlety, and humanity audible in his music. There are indeed few composers who have written instrumental music that illuminates and penetrates the contradictions, shortcomings, and sufferings of the human condition as consistently and persuasively as the music of Strauss and Mozart.

In this concert we hear Strauss’ reflections over a twenty-year period on marriage, love, family, human frailty, and jealousy, as well as the fear of death. The music is personal and becomes personal for the listener. But it betrays no intimacies. Rather, Strauss’ personal experience inspired him to create a musical commentary on life. Through music Strauss transcends his mask by using it and pays tribute to the woman he loved and the relationship that gave him the stability to realize his genius to the fullest extent.

Speech to the American Academy in Berlin on its 20th Anniversary

Ladies and Gentlemen! Please understand that if I were prone to nightmares, one would certainly be an invitation to follow Max Raabe on a public stage. I cannot imagine a more daunting circumstance in which to give any kind of talk of any length.

I have long been a fan of Max Raabe.  Not only is his capacity to perform so utterly elegant and he so innately and fabulously musical, but he has unearthed an entire repertoire that has vanished.  For those of you who can’t get to sleep and have a good Internet connection I recommend all the Max Raabe material that is available on YouTube. Max Raabe, in my experience, has redeemed insomnia.  Among the items most worth seeing is a documentary of Max Raabe on his first trip to Israel. It is a remarkable documentary, one in which elderly survivors are in tears as they hear music they have not heard in decades but they know by heart.  Many—if not most—of the creators of the music that he sings, both the lyrics and the music, were Jews, and when the Nazis came to power this genre disappeared. He has reconstructed it with the Palast Orchester in a fantastic way. His is a great achievement not only as performance, but as authentic musical archaeology, one that brings something forgotten back to life.

And if one was ever in search of a witness to the transatlantic partnership between Germany and the United States, it can be located in the music of the 1920s and early 1930s that Raabe performs. The style is unthinkable without the American influence. Consider Walter Jurman (1903-1971), the Viennese Jewish songwriter who appropriated American models and whose career took off in Berlin during the 1920s. After fleeing to America after 1933, he went on to compose for Hollywood (as you just heard)—including for the Marx Brothers. Max Raabe has provided us a multi-layered example of the transatlantic symbiosis that sustains the American Academy. It was worth the entire trip to Berlin.

In 1907 the German economist Werner Sombart wrote an article comparing Berlin and Vienna. He wrote it because during that period Berlin had become quite arrogant about itself and looked down on its rival Vienna. Sombart took aim at all the anti-Viennese Berliners. He described Berlin as essentially a soulless place that was completely mechanistic, where people were only interested in time, power and money.  The worst insult he could hurl at it was that it was rapidly becoming New York—the symbol of materialist modernity.

In contrast, Vienna was a place of culture and Kultur, and the jokes Berliners made about the Viennese and Austrian habits—their Gemütlichkeit and their Schlampigkeit, all of this familiar stuff, were simply evidence of the stupidity, the arrogance, the dangerous blindness and material greed of Berliners. Kultur was the distinct essence of all good things German.

It is fascinating that when Sombart insulted New York as the historical destination point of Berlin’s culture, what he didn’t fully realize is the extent of the history of interaction between Germany and America. That experience constitutes the pre-history of the Academy. The Academy has a Vorgeschichte, if you will, because, as many of you know, in late nineteenth century America, Germany was the most important cultural influence on what became America. Our universities, originally somewhat imitative of the British, were completely transformed after the Civil War by an American embrace of the model of the German university.  In New York City in 1900, there were probably 150 German newspapers and periodicals; one could survive in the City of New York speaking German.  If you went to the Metropolitan Opera you had no need to speak English.  When Anton Seidl conducted there he needed no English, and when Gustav Mahler came to take over the New York Philharmonic in 1907, the year of Sombart’s essay, there was likewise no necessity for him or for Alma to learn a word of English.

Apart from the German-speaking religious communities in the Midwest and the South that came into being after 1848, there were choral societies all over the country, as far as San Francisco-- Liedertafel, and Männergesangvereine.  They were all directly imitative of a German tradition initially liberal and later virulently nationalistic--

constituents of the Deutsche Sängerbund that first developed in the 1840s here in German-speaking Europe.

This all came to a very abrupt end in 1917. Yet when we think of this city in the 1920s,—the Berlin that one can see clearly and candidly through the Russian novels of Vladimir Nabokov who lived here at that time—the influence of America, and the migration of Americans to Berlin, continued not only in science and music but in painting, architecture and popular culture.  The transatlantic exchange and communication for which the Academy stands have indeed a very long history.

Ironically, the most important pre-history for the American Academy in Berlin is the rise to power of Nazism, and the emigration of a whole cadre of German intellectuals, scientists and artists to America, some of whom returned after 1945.  For those of us who grew up in the United States after the Second World War, the American university would be unrecognizable without figures such as Karl Löwith, Leo Strauss, and Werner Jaeger the classicist; Hans Morgenthau in politics, at Columbia Franz Neumann, and, of course, all the Frankfurt School members, including T.W.Adorno (who returned), and Max Horkheimer. And of course one cannot forget the obvious: the emigration of scientists, among whom Einstein was by far the most prominent.  In the visual arts, Hans Hoffman, Josef Albers and Max Beckmann come to mind, (as well as Lyonel Feininger, American born of a German musician, who moved to Germany only to return after the Nazis came to power) and in my own field, in music, young talents including Lukas Foss and Andre Previn, and Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler, for whom the Music Academy right here is named, who was actually forced out of the United States together with Bertolt Brecht in the late 1940s.  And there was of course Arnold Schoenberg whose uncontrollable arrogance was a parody of an unquestioned sense of German superiority in matters of high culture that came along with the post 1933 emigration.

As a Jewish child émigré myself who was not from German stock, I grew up with the well-known joke about the encounter of two dachshunds in Central Park.  They meet and sniff one another, and both figure out that they are German-speaking. One asks the other where he’s from. Vienna, he says, and the first one replies, “I’m from Berlin”.  The Berliner asks, “how do you like it here?” They both end up complaining about the Wurst, the apartments, and the fact that Central Park isn’t quite the Tiergarten or the Volksgarten. After this bemoaning, the Viennese concedes that it is after all not too bad, considering the alternative.  The Berliner agrees but adds: “yes, all that isn’t really important, but what really bothers me is that in Berlin I was a St. Bernard”. We grew up in the shadow of this tremendous cultural German emigration—particularly of writers, (consider Heinrich and Thomas Mann and Carl Zuckmayer)—and the radical transformation of the American university.

The end of the war revealed the extent of Germany’s cultural loss. What is interesting is that German intellectuals after 1945 tried to figure out why the German universities and German cultural institutions, from museums to opera houses and orchestras (particularly in Berlin) and indeed the German intellectual and artistic community, in many different ways both heinous and utterly thoughtless, collaborated with the Nazi regime. The result was a sense that perhaps there needed to be an effort to reform the German university.  Jürgen Habermas, in the later 1940s, argued that what the German university ought to do is imitate the American, and institute something that we would recognize as the liberal arts or the college experience in the United States, and try to reform the way in which the professors were appointed and courses of study organized. Inspired by the American philosophical tradition of pragmatism he suggested that the hierarchical, authoritarian system, the kind of education of extreme obedience that Walther Rathenau described experiencing as a young man, in a critique of the German educational system that he wrote before World War I, be abandoned.  If one could find a way, Habermas argued, to reform the German school system and university so they would be more like the American (on the assumption that the American common school and university, in its hybrid form of English and German, were somehow contributors to the sustaining of democracy), there might be a chance for democracy in post-war West Germany. Although this did not come to pass, in the midst of the Cold War, clearly in West Germany, the transatlantic dialogue continued, partly motivated by the extreme fear and danger represented by the Cold War and by the Soviet Union.

To turn now to Germany after the fall of the Berlin wall: what is astonishing, as I stand here in the garden of this house, is that the most important post-unification effort to renew and sustain the transatlantic dialogue, the American Academy, is the creature of a very unusual nostalgia, a sentimental echo of the nostalgia we heard so wonderfully evoked by Max Raabe, and that is the nostalgia of the German Jewish émigrés of the 1930s and 1940s.  The Arnhold family, the Kellen family, Richard Holbrooke himself, Henry Kissinger, Gary Smith’s parents, like so many American émigrés of German Jewish origin, unlike their fellow Jewish European refugees, retained a tremendously deep affection for the place from which they were expelled. Despite everything, they remained attached to the image of Germany.  No equivalent of the American Academy in Berlin funded by survivors and descendants of Polish Jewry, is imaginable in Poland, and nothing like it is remotely thinkable for Russia or the Ukraine, at least certainly not sponsored by the Jewish emigration from those places.

Gershom (or rather Gerhard) Scholem used to claim that there was no “symbiosis” between Germans and Jews in the years between the 1780s and 1933.  I am not quite sure he was right.  Why did these German Jews who were forced out actually return in the 1990s with the idea of putting an institution into place that would sustain, after the end of the Cold War and German unification, the transatlantic dialogue and exchange of ideas and of people between their new welcoming Heimat America and the old one, Germany? The answer goes back to Sombart’s critique of Berlin’s conceits and his privileging of culture as a major aspect of what Berlin needed but lacked.

The German Jewish emigres held fast to the belief that Bildung and cultural attainment, including an aesthetic sensibility, were instruments of civilizing people and the world. This ideal was an extension of a late nineteenth-century and very widespread belief that Germany was a kind of pinnacle of true humanistic civilization placed in the middle between the raw barbarism of the Russian to the East, the effete superficiality of the French, and the crass materialism of the American to the West.

The dachshund and St Bernard exchange implicitly reveals this conceit. For example, all of us who studied music with émigrés constantly heard about how terrific it all had been in the old country, and we, as Americans, were considered simply unwashed and kulturlos, and hopelessly resistant to true cultivation.  Even my parents—Ostjuden who never lived in Germany—looked at America with a kind of horror at America’s vulgarity, as if such vulgarity had not existed here in Germany. Germany before 1914 put itself forward politically and culturally as a kind of a broker between East and West as a cultural ideal.  Friedrich Naumann’s concept of Mitteleuropa, which was a serious idea for many a great social scientist and keen mind, was rooted in Germany’s pride in its cultural and scholarly pre-eminence.  It revealed the glib conviction that Germany and particularly Berlin would become the cultural capital of the world, perched between these two extremes, America and Russia. Sombart’s critique of Berlin was fueled by his frustration at Berlin’s failure to grasp its proper destiny.

Ironically, after unification Germany has indeed re-emerged as unusually powerful and the essential instrument of Europe, economically, politically and culturally. Placed between America and Russia, Berlin is and will doubtlessly remain for decades to come the cultural capital of Europe, a cosmopolitan destination point for artists, young people, students, and the place of dominant cultural institutions. But in this political context, one might ask, to what end?

The American Academy was built through German Jewish philanthropy and enthusiasm on the premise that the answer lies in some connection between culture and civility, between art and culture and the way we conduct our lives in the public space of everyday life.  The irony of this belief is that it has survived not only among the victims of the failure of that connection, but despite the complete disproving of the link between culture and civility. It was during the Nazi era that culture, and its attributes among its devotees—Geschmack, Bildung—offered no barriers to barbarism and no barriers to hate and to the unthinkable.  Indeed, the elites of culture and scholarship collaborated. So, why did the survivors of this colossal failure return to the premise that culture mattered in politics?

I think the American Academy was created explicitly to give the role of culture and the arts in politics a second chance. The work that Gary Smith has done with the Academy initially may appear on the surface be about politics, (including the hobnobbing, if I may say so, with foreign ministers and ambassadors and other power brokers), but it is not; that is really not what the Academy has been about.  The fellowships at the Academy represent the core belief that through the arts, education, scholarship, literature and research, through what we call the humanities, the development of the Geisteswissenschaften, the development of sensibilities and thought processes that are speculative and are imaginative, that somehow there will emerge a connection between the flourishing of those activities and the way we conduct our political and personal lives. At its core the Academy under Gary’s tenure stands for the proposition that there is a link between democracy and freedom and learning, a link between learning and art making and the defense of freedom, especially in the contemporary world and particularly in the public space that has changed very dramatically with modern technology.

The Internet is, after all a large, undifferentiated sewer of self-expression, in which it is impossible to distinguish what’s true from what’s false. In it all sort of items look alike. And we, the users ever more addicted to it, rather than having a dialogue with others, end up, with the help of Google’s algorithms and Amazon’s manipulation, just confirming what we already believe, and visiting sites with which we are already comfortable.  So the massive technological expansion of freedom, communication and self-expression has actually led to a kind of incrustation of conformity. The more we have access to more information and data, can say anything we want, and blog to our heart’s content, the more we become predictable, ordinary and imitative.

And it is not enough to have inner freedom, just as inner emigration was helpless during the Third Reich. To assert that one is immune to the constant assault from the web of technology (I won’t buy a product because I’ve seen a blip ad while trying to navigate my way from Dahlem back to Berlin using Google, because of the belief that I can resist it) is unconvincing. Since inner freedom is not enough, the Academy has become devoted, in my view, to the proposition that precisely in the modern, technological world the face-to-face encounters, the work of artists, and the expression of ideas by individuals in real time and real space will actually emerge as the last vital bastion of dissent.

We may talk a lot about freedom but very few of us use it.  We say we like dissent but we really don’t like to hear somebody say something we don’t already believe.  I have not met or seen a politician whose mind was changed by evidence. In our country we talk a lot about democracy and we have candidates debate one another in a mockery of what is a debate.  I would vote—no matter what her political position might be—for any candidate who in a debate, faced with a set of arguments and evidence, said, “you know, now that I have listened, I concede that I might be wrong.”

Inspired by the highly sentimental and idealized hopes of Americans of German Jewish origin, the American Academy has become a kind of crucible, a meeting place, where people can figure out how to resist what’s happening in the world beyond the forms of inner emigration that flourished under Stalin and Hitler.  That technique of inner emigration, using the imaginative capacities of poets, particularly musicians, kept some measure of freedom intact, and survived under the radar screen of censors and tyrants. But after 1989 we know that this is not enough.  The purposes of dissent, dialogue, scholarship, finding that things which have been held to be true may not be true, whether in history or in the natural sciences, but for this Academy particularly in areas of philosophy, and politics, require and demand an intrusive public presence. Thought and expression are vital in ways that cannot be only interior; they must be exterior and in the public discourse. This Academy is devoted, in an idealistic and nostalgic way, spurred on by a generation that saw the death of the dream that Kultur and Bildung would lead to a civilized world, to restart that process.

The German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, herself an émigré to America, challenged the conventional distinction between the word (speech) and the idea of action. She argued, idealistically, that speech is and must be a form of action.  What this Academy is dedicated to, in a generous and eclectic definition of speech, including making of visual art, of music, performance, and of course literature and scholarship in the fields that Fellows come to work in, is the proposition that speech is indeed a form of action and should be politically engaged.

The tremendous irony and beauty of the music you heard from Max Raabe, with its tremendous twists on the classical tradition, and its inner jokes, is that it is part of a long tradition of using music and comic theater as modes of dissent and social and self-criticism. Its challenge to the conceits about romance and sexuality, and its undermining of the clichés of self-important individuality and notions about what is morally right and wrong, help show the way forward. The goal of the Academy can only be approached in a transatlantic way within the patterns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of an exchange back and forth, not forced by emigration or by tyranny, but exchange encouraged voluntarily.  Two societies, German and American, that are democratic, and pluralistic, might actually come to believe that Berlin, particularly because of its history and its immensely bright future, can become a place in which the connection between culture and freedom, and culture and justice, can be reshaped in a way that does not render all that we do in the arts and humanities irrelevant and merely private.

That is the future of the American Academy, in my view. It is also the legacy that Gary Smith so ably has left us with. I want to thank Gary, all the Trustees of the American Academy, all its benefactors, and its Fellows for making this place possible, and for redeeming the cherished hopes of those who fled from this very place, not willingly but who nonetheless have now come back, some only in spirit, to finally, we hope, make possible a dream brutally destroyed in 1933.

Thank you.

A Missionary for Liberal Arts

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — From an early age, Leon Botstein’s life was shaped by two powerful forces: fascism and education. His parents fled Nazi persecution in Poland and, after World War II, settled in the United States. Mr. Botstein’s mother and father eventually joined the faculty of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New York, leaving an indelible impression on their young son. “My family owes everything to the dynamism of American universities,” he says.

Today, Mr. Botstein is president of Bard College, and his past has influenced the liberal-arts institution’s singular approach to international engagement.

Mr. Botstein is quick to say that the college’s overseas projects are very much an institutional effort. But under his leadership, Bard, whose bucolic campus hugs the Hudson River some 90 miles north of New York City, has championed liberal education in countries in the midst of societal shifts, like post-apartheid South Africa. In parts of the world that make headlines for their strife and volatility, such as Russia and the Palestinian West Bank, Bard has helped found new colleges and programs rooted in the liberal arts.

Its ambitions and efforts at institution building set it apart from most of its small-college brethren, which have ventured abroad in more modest ways, like faculty exchanges or study abroad programs. And unlike higher profile globalization pushes, such as New York University’s, Bard has eschewed multi-campus international-education hubs in the Persian Gulf and East Asia.

Though Mr. Botstein and the other architects of Bard’s strategy would be likely to protest this characterization, it is, in a word, missionary.

The mission — the set of values that directs the college’s international work — is the conviction that education and the liberal arts, with an emphasis on critical thinking and the open exchange of ideas, in particular, can be a force for freedom and democracy.

“Education isn’t an insurance policy for democracy,” says Bard’s president. “But it’s hard to create democracy without it.”

Bard’s first international foray — running a 1980s-era program that found short-term posts at American colleges for dissident scholars from then-Communist Eastern Europe — was born out of a similar impulse.

Not long after the Iron Curtain fell, the college was approached by a group of so-called perestroika professors at St. Petersburg State University who were interested in reforming Russian education. What started as a collection of interdisciplinary courses open to St. Petersburg State students and faculty members became a full-fledged liberal-arts college within the university: Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. The first such institution in Russia, it started admitting students in 1999.

Smolny, which today is the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State, set the template for the partnerships that followed.

Bard would not act as a consultant-for-hire, giving advice and leaving town. Nor would it follow a franchise model, replicating itself abroad. Instead, it would work with its partner to develop a curriculum largely from scratch. Unlike graduates of another high-profile joint project, the liberal-arts college started by Yale University and the National University of Singapore, Smolny students would receive an American degree. But the new program would also seek home-country accreditation.

 “It’s not the standard U.S.-university approach,” says Andrew Wachtel, president of the American University of Central Asia, in Kyrgyzstan, another Bard partner. Mr. Wachtel knows something of the standard model— before coming to AUCA he was dean of the graduate school at Northwestern University, which has an outpost of its journalism school in Qatar.

“It’s not about parachuting the American version of education into another place,” Mr. Wachtel says of Bard’s style. “It’s not, ‘You should do this, you should do that.’ We are not the junior partner.”

Jonathan Becker, Bard’s vice president for international affairs and civic engagement, compares the approach to a marriage. “You’ve got to have compromise,” he says. “It’s not like dating. You can’t just walk away.”

In practice, what does that mean? If each partnership is a marriage and the resulting program a child, just how much Bard DNA is in it?

The answer is, quite a bit, but sometimes in ways not readily obvious.

You won’t see, for instance, many courses from Bard’s home campus in course catalogs in Bishkek or East Jerusalem. While each partnership has a joint faculty oversight committee, Bard professors aren’t saying yea or nay to specific courses or signing off on syllabi. In most cases, the two partners have to reach agreement on hiring decisions. Though Bard sets guidelines, admissions is done locally.

Bard does sometimes say no, declining, for example, to award its degree to business students at Central Asia on the ground that the major is too applied. But its style is not to micromanage.

Rather, Bard’s influence is in the pedagogy — a commitment to interdisciplinarity, critical thinking and discussion-based learning. But lest that seem too abstract, Bard insists that the partnerships adopt what it calls the “four pillars,” an educational structure that is distinctively of the liberal arts and unique to Bard. The pillars include a Great Books-style first-year seminar and a senior project, as well as “moderation,” Bard’s unusually intensive process for choosing a major.

New students, both at Bard and its partner campuses, must also complete “Language and Thinking,” a three-week crash course on writing and critical thinking. The course is a demanding one for all students, but it can be especially challenging for those educated outside the United States, says Rebecca Granato, a Bard alumna and assistant dean at Al Quds Bard Honors College, Bard’s Palestinian project. Her students come from high schools that emphasize rote learning and, she points out, are being asked to tackle complex subject matter in a second language, English.

It is not just students who must adjust to an unfamiliar approach to education. Faculty members, too, have a learning curve. Consequently, much of Bard’s work focuses on rewiring the teaching style of professors overseas. The director of Bard’s Institute for Writing and Thinking actually spent two years at American University of Central Asia, training the faculty there.

Robert W. McGrail, an assistant professor of computer science and mathematics, sits on the advisory committee for the AUCA partnership. Much of the committee’s monthly meeting time is devoted to troubleshooting problems his Kyrgyz counterparts encounter in the classroom. “They want to know,” he says, “‘What do you do at Bard to deal with this?”’

As American higher education has increased its international footprint, accreditors in this country have signaled that they will be taking a closer look at overseas projects, particularly when college credit is awarded. So far, however, Bard’s relatively nonprescriptive approach has been approved by its accreditor; the Middle States Commission on Higher Education reaccredited Bard, along with all of its current partners, in 2012. And Bard trustees have been among some of the biggest supporters of its global ventures.

The seeming lack of extra scrutiny strikes even some supporters as unexpected. “I’m surprised,” says Mr. Wachtel, the AUCA president, “that Bard hasn’t had to defend giving out its degree.”

Though Bard now trumpets its international network, it didn’t set out to create one. Instead, its relationships were opportunistic and often built on personal connections. Bard’s work with Al Quds University, for instance, came about when Mr. Botstein, who has a second career as a conductor, was in Israel to lead the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra and was introduced to Sari Nusseibeh, then president of the Palestinian university. Mr. Nusseibeh, Mr. Botstein recalls, was initially cool to working with Bard, preferring a more name-brand American partner.

Visibility is less of an issue these days. As Bard’s global reputation grows, it is increasingly being approached by potential partners.

With greater prominence, Bard has become choosier. While it is exploring doing work in Myanmar, it has thus far resisted joining the rush of American colleges setting up programs in China.

As it moves beyond what Mr. Becker, the international vice president, terms its “crazy start-up phase,” Bard is focusing on building stronger linkages between its partners. It hopes to encourage more collaborative research and this fall will offer a joint class, on the theme of hate, at four of its five campuses.

And the college is trying to emphasize that all connections need not run through New York. St. Petersburg State, for example, has taken on more of an advisory role with the American University of Central Asia, with which it shares a common language as well as an educational culture inherited from the Soviet Union.

While Bard is seeking to build stronger bonds between its partners, perhaps even more important are the links each program develops within its own educational system and society. After all, a central goal of Bard’s work is to effect just that change.

Too often, efforts to root the liberal arts in foreign soil can result in “island” programs, disconnected from the rest of higher education, says Patti McGill Peterson, presidential adviser for global initiatives at the American Council on Education.

 “The question is,” says Ms. Peterson, the editor of a book on liberal education in developing countries, “can it become more than an extra appendage on the countries’ educational system?”

Bard administrators say they have taken pains to avoid such pitfalls. The college has limited the number of Bard professors who teach at its partners so that local faculty members will feel ownership of the curriculum. Likewise, it was slow to allow its students to study within the network because it wanted the programs to be seen as native institutions, not study-abroad sites.

Bard’s early decision to pursue a dual-degree strategy, however, may have had the most impact. While the Bard degree has given the college leverage in shaping the curriculum, the local degree has given the academic approach legitimacy. The ministries of education in Kyrgyzstan, the Palestinian territories and Russia have all officially recognized the liberal-arts curriculum, meaning that other institutions, unconnected to Bard, can adopt it.

So far, this has happened only in Russia, but there are signs of the liberal arts’ ripple effect. Al Quds University is adding “Language and Thinking” for all of its students, not only those in the honors college, and with Bard now offers a master’s degree in teaching, exposing West Bank schoolteachers to liberal learning.

In Russia, Aleksei L. Kudrin, a well-connected former finance minister who is dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State, has started an association for liberal-arts colleges, as well as a foundation to support new programs. “Critical thinking is important to grow in Russia,” he says. “It’s important to Russia’s advancement.”

Still, recent events in Ukraine and growing authoritarianism in Russia only serve as a reminder about how very difficult it is to bring about change.

Mr. Botstein is sanguine. “This is not a vaccination program,” he says of Bard’s work. “It’s very long-term transformation.”

But working in unpredictable parts of the world can come with controversy.

Last fall, for example, students at Al Quds University staged a campus rally in which demonstrators toted fake automatic weapons, raised a traditional Nazi salute, and honored “martyred” suicide bombers. Two other American universities, Brandeis and Syracuse, severed ties with the Palestinian institution after they said top administrators there failed to condemn the protests. Despite criticism, Bard officials say they never considered ending the relationship.

Bard’s ties with the financier George Soros have also drawn scrutiny. The sometimes divisive hedge-fund manager’s Open Society Foundations have supported the college’s work in Kyrgyzstan as well as at the European Humanities University, in Lithuania, where Bard is helping rethink the curriculum.

Critics have called the college the education arm of the Open Society Foundations. But Mr. Becker says it was actually Bard that interested the nonprofit group in liberal education. And on campus the issue has had little traction.

Indeed, unlike such institutions as Duke, Yale, and New York University, which have had furious disputes, Bard has been notable for the lack of controversy its global work has generated among faculty members. Some professors even say they came to Bard because they didn’t want just another ivy-covered campus but an institution with a clear sense of its place in the world.

For Mr. Botstein, going abroad has reinforced Bard’s core liberal-arts mission. “Being international has had a boomerang effect,” he says, “of developing institutional self-awareness of what we stand for.”

www.bard.edu

Botstein and the ASO Exhilarate at 20

By Sedgwick Clark

Leon Botstein just ended his 20th season as music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, during which he led an opera-in-concert performance of Richard Strauss’s Feuersnot, Bruch’s oratorio Moses, a concert of English music that included Walton’s Symphony No. 2, which Botstein called “one of the great symphonies of the twentieth century” (I’d say that about his First, myself), an impressively conducted retrospective of the late Elliott Carter’s music, and an equally impressively conducted program of 1920s avant-garde music by Antheil, Griffes (hardly modern, but a lovely respite in a challenging evening), Ruggles, Copland, and Varèse. The latter two’s Organ Symphony and Amériques, respectively, were masterful. Need one add “rarely played” to modify any of these works?

His final concert of this season, on May 30, was downright exhilarating. The ASO is shipshape these days, the program featured neglected works by Reger, Bloch, Ives, and Szymanowski during World War I, and performances were largely successful. As always, Botstein’s program essay was enlightening. He still resists taking the bull by the horns and interpreting the music, apparently believing that an accurate presentation of the notes is sufficient. Max Reger’s hymn to German supremacy, A Patriotic Overture(1914), complete with nods to Bach, Haydn, Bruckner, and Brahms, was properly broad in tempo and solemn in demeanor. I might have welcomed a touch more vigor and variation, but for all I know the performance was right on the metronome mark.

Whatever happened to the music of Ernest Bloch? Perhaps his attempt to capture what Botstein calls “Jewish national aspirations” in his music has caused conductors to think that it lacks universal appeal. Not even the once-popular cello concerto,Schelomo, gets played with any frequency these days. Well, I’m as W.A.S.P. as they come, and I enjoyed Bloch’s seldom-played IsraelSymphony (1912-16)—and Botstein’s performance—immensely. Okay, the second movement (Allegro agitato, “Yom Kippur”) lacked atonement to my goyish ears. But in the outer movements, Botstein proved the Israel a moving experience.

Charles Ives composed his knotty Orchestral Set No. 2 in horrified response to the sinking of the British liner Lusitania by a German U-boat on May 7, 1915, which resulted in the deaths of nearly 1,200 passengers and led to the U.S. entrance into World War I. However noble its aspirations, I’ve always found it less engaging than the sensuous, pictorial First Orchestral Set, better known as Three Places in New England, or the wild mish-mash of the Fourth Symphony. Botstein calls No. 2 “a startlingly courageous essay in musical form, one that in its third movement highlights America’s exceptional status and dramatic entrance into a transformative historical event.” This Ives fan remains unconvinced, but not even Stokowski made much sense out of the piece.

Szymanowski’s steamy Symphony No. 3 (“The Song of the Night”) made for a resounding finale. Suffused with Scriabin, Ravel’sDaphnis et Chloé, and Szymanowski’s own personal brand of sensual orientalism, the Third is one of his most alluring works. The composer’s advocates have been predicting imminent acceptance for decades. Performances of this caliber are certainly in the right direction.