Bruckner and 20th –Century Politics

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner and 20^th –Century Politics performed on Jan 13, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert is designed to invite the audience to think about how we come to appreciate and hear the music of the past. It would be nice simply to be able to answer that it is all a matter of the “music itself.” It would seem logical that music that was written down can be considered a constant, much the way we might regard a fixed distance or a monument. We might argue that Mozart wrote such and such a piece, published it, and there it is. When we read about how past generations loved that piece, we hum the very same bars of music to ourselves that they must have. Likewise, the Statue of Liberty, although it may have been cleaned and refurbished periodically, remains much the same thing. It is unchanging, relatively speaking. Generations of school children who have been taken to see it would recognize it, identify it, and never think there was much to contemplate in terms of difference.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes pose a more daunting problem. They recently have been “cleaned,’ apparently to restore them to the condition they were in when they were done. We now can see them, scholars claim, as Michelangelo “intended” them to look, and as they did when he was finished. However, the reputation of these paintings, as well as most of the powerful interpretations of them and the posthumous fame of the artist, was based on the darker and entirely different appearance that these “same” works acquired since they were completed. The whole nineteenth-century cult of Michelangelo, all the millions of treasured reproductions, and our understanding of Renaissance art history were based on quite different-looking images.

The same holds true, perhaps on a more extreme scale, for our view of Greek classical architecture. For more than a century we have prized the white, austere surfaces of classicism that are now tourist attractions and have been reproduced in our finest neo-classical public buildings. It turns out, however, that the Parthenon might have looked quite colorful, decorated in bright pastel and other brash pigments. Over time, the gaudy color disappeared, leaving the white surface, which the Greeks who built the Parthenon might have thought naked and ugly. The sober dignity of classical architecture–an ideal to which we have been committed for so long- may now vanish as something “authentic.” In its place we have the unsettling notion that what the ancients built and treasured was, in terms of its colors and combined effect, more akin to the aesthetics of our brightly colored suburban malls and the worst of post-modern architecture than to the Lincoln Memorial.

In music, this kind of unsettling change has been accomplished most dramatically for Baroque and Classical. Efforts to utilize the instruments and performance styles in use at the time the composers were alive have altered the surface of what was once seemingly unchanging and familiar music. The Mozart we accept today just is not quite the same as the Mozart Bruno Walter was accustomed to thinking about and performing. We rarely, if ever, will hear Bach, Handel, Mozart, or Haydn performed in a manner resembling the approach Mendelssohn, Wagner, Brahms, or Bartók took in performing the works of these composers.

The balance between what remains the same and what is different can be exaggerated, of course. There is possibly more sameness than difference, but the differences are constant and play a decisive role. Perhaps the fetish of so-called “authentic” performances has run its course. The obsession with “historical authenticity” has a tendency to obscure the competing and equally valid questions regarding the range of possible meanings and interpretations that can be associated with any text, irrespective of what the composer may have “intended” (if one could ever really establish what that was in terms of a musical performance).

The case of Bruckner, as Paul Hawkshaw has so elegantly argued in the essay that accompanies this program, is even more daunting. The texts themselves have been, from the beginning, in disarray. The kind of certainty about what the Fifth Symphony of Bruckner “is”–by comparison with the Beethoven Fifth, the Mahler Fifth, or the Shostakovich Fifth–simply eludes us. There are, no doubt, passionate and close-minded advocates of this or that version, but an inflexible claim to certainty and expertise in Bruckner must always remain suspect. Richard Osborne wrote in Gramophone in August 1991 that in the case of the Bruckner 5th, the matter is “simple”; and that “once we have scotched the validity of Franz Schalk’s 1893 version. it is relatively plain sailing”.

Unfortunately, the Schalk version, which dates from 1896, not 1893 (the first orchestral premiere was in 1894) has, as the work of Ben Korstvedt and other scholars suggests, more claims to authenticity, respectability, and to reflecting Bruckner’s wishes than heretofore suspected. Bruckner actually may have approved of the version of the symphony whose printing took place in 1896, the year of his death. Not only was the Fifth known for the first third of this century in the version being performed today, but that version may have reflected the composer’s own revisions, even though some of the suggestions may have come from a loyal disciple.

Bruckner was not the only composer to reconsider aspects of a work after the first performance and at the urging of trusted colleagues and students. Korstvedt has shown that the revisions of Symphony Nos. 2 and 4 and of the Quintet did reflect Bruckner’s wishes. We do not know what version he heard in the first four-hand piano performance of the Fifth. Schalk maintained that Bruckner explicitly approved of the additional brass at the end of the work. The 1896 edition may be a perfectly valid representation of the Fifth.

We are so accustomed to respecting “true” painstaking scholarship that we fail to retain a healthy skepticism. Every music student has had the experience of looking for the “Urtext” edition-the uncorrupted “real” unedited and distorted text. In Bruckner’s case the motivation and the procedures behind the creation of the “Urtext”–the meticulous scholarship begun in the 1930s, particularly on the Fifth Symphony–was National Socialist ideology, masquerading as “neutral” scholarship. “Facts” simply did not speak for themselves. Even anti-fascists and Jews of that era were unwittingly influenced by a view of Bruckner encouraged by the Nazis. After all, the tainted “critical edition” of the Fifth was published in 1935, deceptively, as a “neutral” scholarly achievement.

For the listener, however, there is a larger question at stake. We have fallen into the habit, in the United States, of thinking about Bruckner too much in terms of the Nazi appropriation of him and his music. No doubt, in his lifetime and afterwards Bruckner was the darling of those who championed the worst form of reactionary and intolerant politics, particularly anti-Semitism. But the popularity of Bruckner during the Nazi era was not an obvious legacy for the composer or the music.

Most important, the Nazi embrace took its toll on the way the music was played. The spirit, tempos, and timbres of practically all Bruckner performances–especially those praised by critics and Bruckner enthusiasts–are based on models that date from before 1945. Contemporary conductors thoughtlessly turn to Karajan or Furtwängler or examples set by other German and Austrian contemporaries between 1930 and 1945 to find the true approach to Bruckner. But Karajan and Furtwängler–and too many of their colleagues–were more a part of the world of Nazism and its ambitions to present Bruckner as essential and true Aryan culture than should make us comfortable.

The easy disclaimers (interpretation is just a matter of looking at the “same” music, and doing what somehow is “objectively” in it) won’t work. Given the importance of Bruckner to the Nazis, why do we assume that the “German” performance tradition of the mid-twentieth century is the place to begin? After all, Bruckner’s music has never quite achieved the popularity it deserves. In the United States, the Fifth–perhaps because it was Hitler’s favorite Bruckner symphony–is one of the lesser known symphonies. Perhaps a fresh approach to the texts and a distancing from received performance traditions will help.

This concert therefore tries to present Bruckner anew. We start with his early and strikingly patriotic Germanenzug. Bruckner’s sympathies were perhaps more congruent with his unattractive reactionary pan-German patrons in Vienna than many scholars are willing to admit. But the distance between mid-nineteenth century patriotism and Nazism should not be passed over lightly. We move to some lighter material, the Abendzauber, written for the same male chorus for which Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube was written a decade earlier in 1867; an organization that, as Hawkshaw correctly points out, was feared in the 1840s by Metternich because its leaders were in the forefront of liberalism and the movement to democratize the Habsburg Monarchy. Among those who lost their lives in the 1848 Vienna revolution were organizers of the Vienna Men’s Choral Society.

We then turn, in Psalm 146, to the most powerful aspect of Bruckner’s personality: his devout Catholicism. Bruckner was an unassuming, provincial Austrian genius with few pretensions. He was loved by his students. His use of dialect, his simple mode of dress, and his manners were the source of much humor and may have offended some of his more cosmopolitan colleagues. But above all he was truly a man of God. Today’s performance of this youthful work is a world premiere.

This brings us to the Fifth. It may not be the stirring, warlike work that was performed in 1937 to illustrate Aryan masculinity, spirituality, power, and grandeur. The cruelest fate has been the extent to which Bruckner, the devout and brilliant organist, counterpoint teacher, and composer was tarnished posthumously by the Nazis. Unlike Wagner, Bruckner was not a rabble-rousing anti-Semitic polemicist. What in his works can be interpreted plausibly as politically nefarious, as might be done in the case of Wagner? The Fifth may be about theology and faith as music, as are other works.

The question posed by this concert, therefore, is: Can we listen to and appreciate Bruckner in a way that puts the Nazi era behind us? To do so not only requires that we play repertoire and use editions that are less laden with the Nazi legacy. It also demands that we perform Bruckner differently: independently of the suspect traditions that have come down to us.

Berlin 1894: A Concert Recreated

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Berlin 1894: A Concert Recreated performed on Dec 11, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert was designed by Richard Strauss, who, at thirty years of age, was already world famous as a composer and the leading exponent of the New German compositional tradition of Liszt and Wagner.

The purpose of recreating a concert from exactly one hundred years ago is to offer contemporary audiences a better sense of the musical culture of the past. In terms of its relationship to music and the live concert, the audience of a century ago was quite different from the one gathered today. Many of the concert-goers in the past played a musical instrument and sang as amateurs. The music of the home, whether popular or so-called serious music, was more closely related to the music of the concert stage. Consequently, there was a far less strained relationship between the past and the present. Audiences expected to hear the new as well as the old. A sense of continuity with the past was sustained despite an evident and even exciting tension between the ambitions of a new generation of composers at the fin de siècle and the aesthetic tastes of an audience that considered itself musically literate and steeped in good taste formed through an intimate engagement with music history.

By 1894 the beginnings of a rift between the tastes of the audience and the claims of modernism were audible. The audience was increasingly wedded to expectations based on past repertoire. The 1980s became the decade of secessionist movements in both the visual arts and music; of closely knit groups of artists and composers bound together by the explicit aspiration to chart new paths. Strauss was clearly a leader in this regard, and the Berlin audience knew that. Following the well-known pattern validated by Richard Wagner, resistance to the new by a supposedly smug middle-class urban audience was itself a badge of honor. At the same time, composers expected that after a reasonable period of time the new would become accepted. In 1894 the key to that process remained the dissemination of new music through the printing of music and its repetition in the home on the piano and within amateur circles. The concert functioned as the indispensable and periodic public showcase. As with the theater and the exhibition of paintings and sculpture, public display would lead to private consumption and the progressive transformation of taste.

On the eve of World War I this pattern broke down in the world of music. Unlike painting and literature, modernism in music after the fin de siècle failed to claim the affection of the audience to the extent new music had during the nineteenth century. Part of the explanation rests in the most striking change in the access to music-through novel technology of sound reproduction-that developed during the twentieth century but was barely predictable in the 1890s.

The most serious difference between today’s audience and that of a century ago is the presence of high quality recorded sound. Most of today’s concert-goers know music through radio, records, and CDs. One can become entirely familiar with the standard repertoire in music without ever attending a concert. Indeed, often concerts are successful because they come on the heels of recordings. Or, as in the case of the three tenors, concerts exist as a prelude to the mass marketing of videos and records.

Consequently, the concert, particularly the orchestral concert, is less striking. The sound heard at any concert has become comparatively banal. We can hear more volume and the same apparent richness of sound at home and in the movie theater daily. In 1894 the orchestral concert presented a welcome, rare, and stirring contrast to the aural environment of daily life. That fact, combined with the different relationship to making music within the audience, made the concert simply more memorable. For that reason, the integration of non-orchestral items was not unusual. It gave the artists a unique chance to perform for an audience. There were no records or CDs one could buy of the same artists performing other repertoire.

What makes today’s event remarkable, therefore, is that most of the repertoire on it has remained relatively unknown. It is either not recorded or, if it is, it’s available on obscure labels. Therefore, the sounds will be as novel today as they were one hundred years ago. One will have to listen, not in comparison to a familiar recording of a well known work, but in response to how the music strikes one for the first time. The two exceptions are the works by Mozart and Wagner.

These exceptions, in part, justify the selection of this particular Berlin Philharmonic concert from the past. The conductor became, after all, one of the great figures in music history and one of the last composers to gain world-wide popularity. Richard Strauss’s musical evolution can be understood, to a great extent, in terms of the creative interplay between the rival aesthetics of Wagner and Mozart that marked Strauss’s development. The young Strauss was nurtured by his father in a love for the classical tradition understood as starting with Mozart and ending with Brahms. At the time of this concert Strauss had gone through a major crisis and shift in his life and work. He had been profoundly influenced by a second father-like mentor, one of Wagner’s disciples, Alexander Ritter. This Wagnerian phase would last until the second decade of the twentieth century. From 1910 on, particularly during his collaborations with Hugo von Hofmannsthal after Elektra, Strauss turned increasingly back to Mozart and to classical ideas. In 1930 he even made his own version of Idomeneo. Even in the last decade of his work, during the 1940s, Mozart and Wagner remained at the center of Strauss’s concerns. His affection for their work and his search for modes of reconciliation, elaboration, and combination never diminished. If critics point correctly to the Mozartian aspects of Strauss’s last works, one need only to listen to Strauss’s last opera, Die Liebe Der Danae from 1940, to sense the continuing lure of Wagner. The Mozart concert aria Strauss chose was written in 1786, around the time Mozart was working on The Marriage of Figaro. The work was written for Anna Selina Storace, who premiered the role of Susanna. She was, according to Alfred Einstein, “beautiful, attractive, an artist and a finished singer” of whom Constanze might very well have been jealous. The piece was written for Storace and Mozart himself, hence the role assigned to the piano. It is appropriate to note that Strauss himself married an accomplished singer and wrote music for her. The use of music as a language of personal communication evident in the Mozart was a lifelong habit of Strauss.

Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, which premiered in 1868, was not only among Wagner’s most popular and accessible works; it was Wagner’s only attempt at comedy. Strauss’s attraction to the music and character of this Wagnerian drama–including its explicit inclusion of musical aesthetic controversy as a central theme and subject of the drama itself–would be reflected in much of his later work for the theater. during his career as an opera conductor in Berlin, Strauss conducted Die Meistersinger seventy-three times, more than any other Wagner work and more than any work by another composer. This 1894 Berlin concert, therefore, takes on a special significance as a revealing biographical and aesthetic metaphor for the development of Richard Strauss’s career.

Schubert Orchestrated

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Schubert Orchestrated performed on Nov 18, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Posterity has always felt somewhat cheated with respect to the symphonic music of Franz Schubert. There simply is not enough of it. Unlike Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, the greatest of Schubert’s symphonies were not performed in the composer’s lifetime. The B-minor, so-called “Unfinished” Symphony, was first performed by the elegant and dashing choral conductor Johann Herbeck in Vienna more than thirty years after the composer’s death. It quickly became a sort of signature work representing all of the popular myths about Schubert’s life and character as well, offering a fine case for Schubert’s genius with melody and form. The so called “Great” C-Major Symphony was premiered by Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig in 1839, more than a decade after Schubert’s death.

Despite his untimely death at 31 in 1828, contrary to the many versions of the romanticized biography of the composer, Franz Schubert was, in his lifetime, neither obscure nor destitute. But his fame and reputation, in published form and within the immediate environs of Vienna was as a composer of songs, piano music, and chamber music. The composer’s own ambitions were concentrated on the theatre.

It is, however, nevertheless true that Schubert’s posthumous reputation far outstripped that which he gained in his lifetime, a fact which distinguishes him from either Mozart or Beethoven who were internationally respected during their lifetimes as truly great historical figures, or Mendelssohn whose posthumous reputation, unfairly, has suffered in comparison to the stature he attained during his career.

Subsequent generations have embraced Schubert and have taken as their starting point the repertoire written for amateur and domestic use. However, as the public concert (particularly the orchestra concert) assumed a larger place in the musical life of the nineteenth century, especially after 1848, and as listening took on more of a role in musical culture than playing, the demand for the “orchestral” Schubert grew. The early symphonies did not entirely suffice. One wanted to hear the mature and really distinctive Schubert.

Therefore, although the works on this program are not ordered chronologically, this concert program does offer, inadvertently, a capsule history of nineteenth-century musical tastes and habits. Chronologically speaking, the first of the orchestrations and arrangements on this program, the Liszt version of the Wanderer Fantasy mirrors the era of virtuosity – of Liszt, Thalberg and Paganini – of the 1830s and 1840s. It stems from the heyday of early Romanticism – the generation of Schumann and Mendelssohn, for whom Schubert was not the last classical master, but the first protagonist of a new era. Liszt clearly saw in Schubert a new and different aesthetic.

The Joachim version of the Grand Duo and the Brahms orchestrations of three songs, (particularly when placed alongside the Mottl transcription of the F minor Fantasy) mirror a mid-nineteenth century struggle over the soul of Schubert. By the mid- 1850s a kind of cultural political war within European music had erupted. On one side stood the so called New German School of Liszt and Richard Wagner, and on the other Joachim, Brahms and others who saw themselves as the legitimate descendants of a classical tradition which included early romanticism, particularly Mendelssohn and Schumann. Beethoven was claimed by both sides. So was Schubert.

Luckily, and perhaps significantly, Wagner was relatively silent on the matter of Schubert, leaving Schubert to the Brahms-Joachim axis. Brahms and Joachim viewed Schubert in the way Schumann had, as the soul of a wholly original and intimate expressive extension of classical traditions. Brahms edited the Schubert Symphonies for the first critical edition. The Joachim Quartet helped establish the chamber music of Schubert as an essential part of the quartet concert repertoire. Joachim, Brahms’ closest friend, believed that the Grand Duo was in fact a version of a “lost’ Schubert symphony. This idea had already been put forward by Schumann. Perhaps the sound of piano music for four hands, particularly when played on more modern instruments than the ones Schubert knew, is inherently orchestral sounding.

By the time Joachim completed his orchestration, however, there was a secondary consideration. The popularity of four hand music was in decline. Unlike the solo piano or the quartet, the genre of two people sharing one bench and playing together seemed resistant to any concert stage adaptation. Both in sound and as a theatrical event, piano for four hands has never become much of a spectator event. As in the case of the Mottl transcription, the orchestration of piano music for four hands by the mid-nineteenth century was tantamount to protecting great music from possible neglect. Joachim’s version was a great success and was frequently performed. Even Toscanini had it in his repertoire.

Brahms’ love of Schubert was matched only by that of his own antipode in Vienna, Anton Bruckner. From the 1860s on, a veritable local Schubert cult developed in Vienna, spurred on by members of the many male choral societies in the city. By the centennial of Schubert’s birth, 1897, the composer had become a political symbol, appropriated by warring factions. On the one side were the liberals, including Brahms and his supporters who saw in Schubert a classical master whose cosmopolitan humanism extended to the most simple and unpretentious citizen; on the other side were the radical Christian Socialists, led by Karl Lueger and their allies, who included right wing German nationalists and anti-Semites, many of whom were avid supporters of Bruckner. To them Schubert – the only native born Viennese composer in the international classical canon – was an example of true, unadulterated Austro-German spirituality; a symbol of echt local anti-modern values, uncorrupted by Jews and foreigners.

In the midst of this controversy, Felix Mottl, the Wagnerian conductor and protégé of Hans Richter, the long time conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic (who also had a brief career in the United States), orchestrated the F-Minor Fantasy. It was, so to speak, a neo-Wagnerian tribute to Schubert for the centennial by Mottl, himself a native born Viennese. It was admired and performed by none other than Richard Strauss.

So much for politics. This concert should, above all, remind the listener how much music adapts to different formats. We have become so puritanical about which instruments to use and which historical evidence to marshal to defend performance practices that we have forgotten that a century ago, in the name of the love of music, our predecessors appropriated the past and rendered it modern. By so doing they extended the reach of Schubert’s music and made it speak in new ways to new audiences. Listening to the works on this program we are not only reminded of Schubert’s greatness, but of the aural imaginations and insights of two great and two distinguished nineteenth century musicians.

Paris in the 1860s The Origins of Impressionism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Paris in the 1860s performed on Sep 25, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Understanding art and culture as functions of seemingly unique, easily described national character traits has become a convenient and deceptive habit. There is irony, consequently, in the realization that the most significant event in the modern history of French music was the Paris premiere of Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser (in a revised version) on March 13, 1861. The work caused a near riot, prompting Wagner to withdraw it after the third performance. From the publication that spring of Charles Baudelaire’s two-part essay “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” to the death of Claude Debussy in 1918, the debate over whether one ought to succumb to or resist Wagner’s ideas defined the character of French music and aesthetics.

The curious interplay between the French and the German might well be regarded as a fascinating underlying theme to this concert. No doubt our accepted notion of the history of modern painting affirms that, from Impressionism on, European modernism in the visual arts took its primary inspiration from the French. Insofar as the painters, poets, and musicians of Paris in the 1860s and after worked side by side, it can be said that not only French music but French poetry (e.g. symbolism) and French painting owed much to Wagner.

On the other side, Friedrich Nietzsche, once Wagner’s ardent champion who later crafted a compelling and penetrating critique, embraced Georges Bizet’s masterpiece Carmen as the quintessential anti-Wagnerian model of operatic greatness. Indeed, of all French nineteenth-century music, it was Bizet’s oeuvre that captivated turn-of-the century German-speaking composers and audiences. This generation was in search of some route out of the maze of imitative neo-Wagnerism. With Bizet, particularly in his one-act opera Djamileh, one could detect the disarming lightness of Offenbach and the lyric elegance and economy of Mozart–all without any loss of the seriousness and emotional power in which Wagner specialized. Bizet commanded the twin musical languages of humor and passion with equal skill and invention.

Djamileh has been unfairly neglected for most of its existence. The libretto was written during the Second Empire, in the later 1860s, and mirrors that decade’s spirit. But the collapse of the Empire, the defeat at the hands of the Prussians, and the experience of the Paris Commune intervened before the music was composed. Bizet’s decision to set a text that could easily have seemed anachronistic by 1872 reflects his attraction to an opportunity within the story that those recent historical events only enhanced: the chance to interweave the comic and the tragic. It was precisely the subtle shifts from the frivolous to the intensely romantic in Djamileh that attracted the attention and admiration of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.

If Djamileh is at all familiar to today’s music lovers, it is probably because Mahler’s biographers have mentioned in passing that in 1898, during his tenure at the Vienna Opera, he revived Djamileh and conducted all of its nineteen performances between 1898 and 1903. Mahler evidently loved this obscure masterpiece. The same can be said for his friend and rival Richard Strauss. In 1945, in a letter to Karl Boehm, Strauss penned what he dubbed his “artistic testament.” He wanted to outline what should be done to revive culture after the “catastrophe” of the war. Strauss recommended that Vienna establish a permanent “opera comique” in the Theater an der Wien where the greatest of all comic operas, The Magic Flute, had been premiered. In his brief list of essential works for its repertoire, Strauss included Djamileh, which can be viewed as a source of inspiration for Ariadne auf Naxos, in which Strauss brings about a Bizet-like synthesis of Mozartian lyricism and Wagnerian drama.

Paris was a remarkable crucible of creativity in the 1860s. The aesthetic debates of that decade were central not only to the formal direction modern painting, literature, and music would take; the manner in which art and culture either influenced or mirrored national identity became a near obsession. The world from which Impressionism came also gave birth to a modern politics marked by sharp nationalist pride, conflict, and hatred. Sewn into the fabric of French controversies surrounding Wagner and the direction of modern art from the 1860s and 1870s were strands of chauvinism, racialist thinking, and anti-Semitism. The Jewish librettist of La Vie Parisienne and many other Offenbach works, Ludovic Halévy, was for years among the closest of Edgar Degas’s friends. That friendship would end in the wake of the Dreyfus Affair: Degas was a staunch believer in Dreyfus’s guilt.

In more ways than one, Offenbach, also a Jew, deserves the last word on the Paris of the 1860s and its significance. Like many “outsiders” before and since, Offenbach was able to define, distill, and parody the main currents of Parisian culture and its values and communicate them back to the majority of Parisians. This outsider created the very definition of the “cultural center” in relation to which, ironically, he remained marginal. Offenbach’s achievement went still further. In the midst of the craze for Wagner (who was among the most significant of modern anti-Semites), this German Jew, like Heinrich Heine (who also had immigrated to Paris), used wit and insight to expose and blunt aesthetic pretentiousness, smugness, hypocrisy, conceit, and the terrifying self-importance of modern wealth and political power. High on the explicit and implicit list of Offenbach’s targets for ridicule were Wagner and his Parisian followers.

That his music has been held in such high esteem by many original minds of the twentieth century is testimony to Offenbach’s understanding that comedy provides an opportunity to communicate a unique ethical critique. Amidst the laughter and irreverence, his stage works demonstrate how music and language can become instruments to combat the inflated rhetoric, fanaticism, and self-importance of everyday life that lead humans into conflict and enmity. As one laughs at oneself, one gains a precious moment of recognition that can inspire modesty, compromise, and compassion. Offenbach was the master of this cleansing kind of theater. To achieve such a result, the music had to be non-trivial (as it indeed is in La Vie Parisienne and Offenbach’s many other master-works) and every bit as compelling, memorable, and alluring as one would expect in great serious opera. Every age, especially ours, needs an Offenbach of its own.

The American 1980’s

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The American 1980’s performed on May 22, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When Leopold Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra over thirty years ago, one of his ambitions was to create a showcase for American musicians – including American composers. It may be hard to believe, but in 1962 the prejudice that Americans were somehow inferior to their European colleagues possessed considerable currency. Impresarios, critics, and public alike seemed to feel more confident with individuals with Slavic names, a German heritage, or French provenance. The notion was that they exemplified aesthetic “traditions” that were magically passed on from generation to generation. Within the realm of concert music, an American insecurity vis-à-vis Europe dates from the nineteenth century. Indeed, in the early twentieth century, a startling percentage of the members of major orchestras in the United States were from Europe. To this day we undervalue the American music written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There still seems to be some sense of surprise, for example, when a work by John Knowles Paine or George Chadwick is played and turns out to be very good.

In the post-World War II era, matters began to change, helped no doubt by the European fascination with American jazz. Leonard Bernstein and Van Cliburn are perhaps the best-known American classical musicians from the mid-century to have successfully overcome the prejudice. American composers, however, have had a somewhat tougher task than American performers, since the blossoming of American compositional talent in the mid-century coincided with an accelerating decline of interest on the part of the public in contemporary music in general. Too much of a remarkable repository of fine twentieth-century American music remains unplayed. Leopold Stokowski, like his counterpart Serge Koussevitzky, worked to bring American composers out of their second-place status. Both of them commissioned and performed a staggering array of new American works. In his later years, Stokowski turned his attention to assisting American players and conductors. The American Symphony Orchestra is the legacy of that effort.

In 1992 the American Symphony Orchestra invited Richard Wilson to become its first Composer-in-Residence. In this capacity he has planned a concert devoted to American composers that fits within the larger artistic mission of the ASO. Earlier this year we played a concert of two works by composers from the former Soviet Union. We believed that, beyond their compelling musical properties, these works could be understood in the context of the momentous decade of the 1980s, which witnessed the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In some ways, the present concert can be considered something of a parallel. The 1980s, the era of Reagan and Bush, had a coherence made up of such diverse phenomena as neoconservatism, the explosion of interest in minimalism, and junk bonds. Behind these obviously journalistic phrases, however, was considerable activity and exploration by American composers. This concert highlights music from that decade by focusing on the work of four composers at mid-career, all of whom remain active and are currently at work on new projects. It is a particular pleasure for us to break the habit that is commonplace in most orchestras: the nearly exclusive focus on first performances and world premieres.

There is a terrifying incongruity between the effort and energy required to write a piece of music and the reality that, if the work is heard at all, chances are it will be heard only once. Months and years mirror themselves in a few brief moments on stage. Works of visual art don’t disappear, and books can be forever. But pieces of music need to be performed more than once for them to have even a fighting chance to gain the attention and affection of listeners. We hope that we have the opportunity once again in the future to give works from the recent past their much-needed second, third, fourth, or fifth hearing and to continue the tradition, started by Stokowski, of supporting and encouraging living American composers.

Harlem Rhapsody, Op. 62 (1963)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Common Ground performed on April 15, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is astonishing that the music of such a good and historically significant American composer as Louis Gruenberg (1884-1964) has drifted into obscurity. Credit must be given to Gunther Schuller and Gruenberg’s daughter Joan Cominos who have worked to revive interest in Gruenberg’s work. They were both enormously helpful to the American Symphony Orchestra in the process of realizing the project to complete the orchestral of Harlem Rhapsody.

The facts of Gruenberg’s life and career include a brilliant early phase as a pianist, including a tour accompanying Enrico Caruso and performances under Arnold Schoenberg’s direction. Gruenberg was a protégé of Ferrucio Busoni, with whom Gruenberg studied and collaborated on a variety of projects. Gruenberg’s opera The Emperor Jones starred Lawrence Tibbett and ran successfully at the Metropolitan Opera for more than one season. It can be considered one of the landmarks of American twentieth-century opera repertoire. It even made the cover of Time Magazine. Gruenberg wrote a number of acclaimed film scores (several of which received Academy Award nominations) and a violin concerto for Jascha Heifetz. As David Noble has written recently, perhaps “a generation now making its own quest for musical romanticism” will rediscover Gruenberg’s music.

Gruenberg was born in Russia. His father became a musician in the Yiddish Theatre in New York. Gruenberg’s family was beset by poverty. Gruenberg supported his family by playing in hotel orchestras before he went to Europe to study with Busoni. Apart from Busoni, as Noble has correctly pointed out, it was the example of Dvorák that most influenced Gruenberg. The main tenet of Dvorák ’s approach to music in American was the advocacy of the use of African-American and Native American musical materials. This was the authentic route to a truly American music; one that would be more than a pale imitation of European models.

Most of Gruenberg’s most acclaimed compositions utilized African-American materials. His setting of James Welles Johnson’s sermon God’s Trombones, and his Creation, Jazz Suite, and The Emperor Jones from the 1920s and 1930s all testify to this fact. Harlem Rhapsody was written in 1953, relatively late in Gruenberg’s career. He realized that his work had already fallen out of favor with critics. He refused to bow to fashion and returned to his aesthetic and political commitments from earlier decades. In 1924 Gruenberg, in an almost exact echo of sentiments written by Dvorák thirty years earlier, wrote, “It becomes my firm conviction that the American composer can only achieve individual expression by developing his own resources…these resources are vital and manifold, for we have at least three veins indigenous to America alone: jazz, Negro spirituals, and Indian themes.”

Thirty years later, with Harlem Rhapsody, brilliantly orchestrated by the distinguished American musician Jonathan Tunick, Gruenberg made this point once again. The score was complete in a piano reduction with specific but incomprehensible indications of the intended instrumentation.

The central dimension of Gruenberg’s politics with respect to art and culture was faith and the idea of America as a nation which could create a shared identity out of the many streams of cultures which made up its history. The domination, either subtle or overt, of one stream was not at issue. Crucial to Gruenberg was a fierce commitment to social justice and a respect for the African-American tradition without condescension or exploitative instinct. At the end of his life Gruenberg wrote, “Since the blood lines of all nations have created this nation, I still visualize the day that this stream will eventually crystallize in an American expression of all the arts…”

Gruenberg shed the Yiddish and Jewish cultural heritage not out of any sense of shame but rather on account of an enthusiasm for the possibilities of creating something new and particularly American. Faith in the future as opposed to an allegiance to a romanticized past governed Gruenberg’s aesthetic quest. He grew up within a poverty-stricken Jewish ghetto. From the perspective of his politics, African Americans were allies whose experience most nearly resembled the European context from which his parents had fled.

As Harlem Rhapsody makes plain, Gruenberg’s affinity, respect, and creative embrace (within the context of European and American concert music strategies of the twentieth century) of the music of the African-American community of his day were singular expressions of solidarity and homage.

Common Ground: African-American & Jewish-American Composers, 1930-1955

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Common Ground performed on April 15, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In our day and age it is rare that any single “classical music” concert event can find itself caught in the web of a contemporary cultural and political crisis. We have come to regard concert life and the music of the concert hall as essentially matters of entertainment and aesthetic taste, entirely divorced from the nasty world of politics and social conflict. Even though there are some who welcome this sort of distance in terms of history, this has not always been the case. Musical life has been a significant part of political life. Chopin, Verdi, and Wagner are perhaps the most obvious examples of composers who regarded their work as vital to a community defined precisely in terms of its politics.

This concert was planned in the knowledge that over the past quarter-century a painful strain in the relations between Jewish Americans and African Americans has developed. However, the extent of the hate and deception exhibited in recent months was not anticipated.

It is hoped that this concert can contribute to the current political debate by presenting a moment of history when matters were different. Not nostalgia, but rather the exploration of different models from which to draw inspiration for the present and future is at issue here.

The composers on this program born into Jewish families who integrated African-American materials in their work–Gershwin, Gruenberg and Gould–did so in ways which earned the respect and admiration of their African-American contemporaries and colleagues. The composers of African-American descent–Price, Ellington and Kay–who integrated European traditions with African-American traditions, did so in ways which earned the respect and admiration of their non-African-American contemporaries and colleagues. There is perhaps no better indication of these reciprocal relationships than the use made by Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Duke Ellington and others, of Gershwin’s theme, “I Got Rhythm.”

At mid-century, Jewish Americans tended to regard their African-American contemporaries as allies. Both communities experienced in recent and distant history oppression, discrimination, prejudice and the brutality of violence. The African-American community did not regard the Jew as the quintessential example of the American white oppressor. The facts of slavery and the disappointments stemming from the era of reconstruction were more recent than they are today. The idea that the poor and disenfranchised immigrant Jewish population that fled to America at the turn of the century and their descendants were at the root of white racism in America, was decidedly implausible.

The fact that European Jews were white enabled them to assimilate–to escape poverty and the ghetto and experience a security and prosperity without parallel in the history of the Jewish Diaspora. This has made the adoption within segments of the African-American community of the distorted rhetoric and lies of European anti-Semitism, seem reasonable today. Old fashioned anti-Semitism might serve as an easy way to explain to new generations the inexplicable and inexcusable: the failure of American society in the second half of this century to bring social and economic equality and justice to the African-American community.

The credo shared by all the composers on this program included: 1) faith in the social and economic potential of democracy and 2) the hope that neither a distinct white nor black identity would emerge, but instead a unique amalgam. More to the point, the Jewish-American composers represented here rejected the idea that they were prisoners of a heritage of something that was truly “Jewish.” In fact, they turned to the music of the African-American experience because it seemed to be at the heart of what they dreamed they would be part of: an America in which they could feel comfortable and celebrate. They had less interest in the New England cultural tradition with which Charles Ives was obsessed.

Furthermore, the notion that ethnic identity can be essentialized –defined as this or that in some seemingly authentic manner – and its ownership restricted to a single group, was foreign. A universalism, perhaps naive from our point of view (but blissfully so), prevailed. Jews did not resent the fact that Max Bruch’s Kol Nidre, played on the eve of Yom Kippur in many Reform synagogues, was written by a German-Christian. George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess was not regarded as somehow invalid – as an example of humiliating exploitation. Florence Price’s overt adoption of the example of Dvorák’s New World Symphony was not seen as a betrayal of her identity as an African-American. Neither was Ellington’s music for the screen and concert stage seen as a concession to a dominant “white” culture. In this sense it is a poignant matter of irony that Ulysses Kay’s piece on this program won the Gershwin prize.

The works by Gruenberg, Gershwin and Gould reflect their conviction that the African-American experience was at the root of American cultural identity. There was no separate “white” alternative; no shred of white supremacist ideology can be found. Florence Price believed that the European symphonic tradition needed, for its own sake, the materials of the African-American experience. What is now sometimes belittled as a “male dominated” purely “European” expressive art was seen as a vehicle for the powerful expression of the ideas and sentiments of an African-American woman composer. Duke Ellington, one of the greatest composers of this century, sought to reach the concert hall public with his music without thinking that the concert hall was “Eurocentric” and thus subject to avoidance because it was not multi-cultural.

We need to be reminded that in our current way of thinking about these issues we have stripped both the past and the present of individuality and diversity. Just as there is no single definition of the “Jewish” neither is there of the “African-American.” There never has been. We have obliterated the true details of the past and turned the past into a self-serving caricature by which we measure the present falsely in the name of history.

It is hoped that in the encounter with the wonderful and partly unfamiliar music on this program we can be reminded of how things might be different. The idea of cultural diversity based on discrete units which are somehow ethnically “authentic” and unsullied by “the other” is a fraud. We are each predictable and unpredictable amalgams of many diverse influences. The seemingly scholarly claims on behalf of preserving one or another tradition are invalid because the traditions to which they refer are our own constructions.

If the art of music can play, as it has, a salutatory role in politics then let us acknowledge that it constitutes a creative common ground which mirrors the essential equality of each individual creator, player and listener; an arena where affection and respect (as evident in each piece of music on this program) can be achieved so that it can be broadened beyond the reach of notes played and heard.

Affection, honesty, curiosity and respect –reflected in the composer’s conceit that everything is at the disposal of the creator, and that nothing is off limits –are shown amply by two living composers who are deans of our concert hall tradition: Morton Gould and Ulysses Kay; two less well known composers from the past: Florence Price and Louis Gruenberg; and two of the greatest figures of our art: Duke Ellington and George Gershwin. May their music drown out the hate and violence with which we live and inspire us to create a new common American ground of our own making.

On behalf of all the musicians, staff and supporters of the ASO, may I express the hope that this will be more than “just” a concert; but an inspiration to all of how we might better deal and communicate with one another to make this city and our nation as truly human as the music heard tonight makes us realize is possible.

Brahms, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Raff, & Reger

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert An Italian Journey through German Romanticism performed on March 11, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Brahms, Nänie

One of Johannes Brahms’s friends was the painter Anselm Feuerbach. Feuerbach’s biographer and closest friend, Julius Allgeyer, introduced Brahms to Feuerbach in 1871. Not a particularly adept politician, Feuerbach finally secured a position in Vienna but ran afoul of the local Viennese politics of painting. He was seen as an unwelcome rival to the lionized Hans Makart. Feuerbach’s troubles in Vienna were a source of concern for Brahms. Anselm Feuerbach died in 1880. Brahms was inspired to write this work in his memory. The work is dedicated to Feuerbach’s mother, who devoted her life to sustaining the reputations and memory of her son. What attracted Brahms to Feuerbach was the unerring elegance and beauty of Feuerbach’s self-consciously neoclassic painting. If Hans Makart’s grandiose and historicist tendencies made him the painterly equivalent of Richard Wagner, Feuerbach’s self-conscious restraint, spirituality, luminosity, and refinement might be compared to Brahms’s nearly neoclassic compositional strategies. Indeed, Makart, Feuerbach’s rival, was deeply admired by Richard and Cosima Wagner. It is not surprising that when Brahms decided to write something in Feuerbach’s memory, he chose a text by Schiller. The poem is explicitly neoclassical in its references. Within the eloquent Greek mythological framework, Schiller speaks of death and beauty in a way that Brahms found a fitting tribute to Feuerbach’s painting. This work is among Brahms’s most intimate and intense in spirit. The composer brought to bear his extensive experience as a choral conductor and a writer of choral music. few pieces have achieved as adequate a linkage between text and music, and in this case the shared aesthetics of music, poetry, and painting. The work was first performed in 1881 by Brahms in Zurich.

Beethoven, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

Mendelssohn, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

These works have been chosen and placed together because they were both inspired by a well-known Goethe poem. The Beethoven is among the least known of the composer’s works. There is an enormous amount of mythology surrounding the relationship between the two best-known figures of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century German-speaking culture, Beethoven and Goethe. They met once, and according to various accounts, the encounter was not entirely successful. Beethoven long had harbored hopes of writing music to Goethe’s Faust. Goethe, whose musical tastes were not always reliable, seems not to have understood Beethoven’s greatness and was put off by the composer’s less than refined self-presentation. Beethoven’s setting was written in 1822 and is dedicated to the poet. In contrast, the work of the same name by Felix Mendelssohn was written by a composer who was a decided favorite of Goethe. Felix Mendelssohn’s teacher was Karl Friedrich Zelter, who was close to Goethe. Zelter was also Goethe’s musical adviser. Their three-volume correspondence is among the most interesting and revealing documents of musical culture at the turn of the nineteenth century. Zelter was so impressed by the young Felix Mendelssohn that he introduced the boy to the great poet. Despite his not inconsiderable prejudice against Jews, Goethe was enchanted by Mendelssohn’s talent and intellectual brilliance. Few encounters were as important to the young composer as his friendship with the great Goethe. Mendelssohn visited Goethe’s house frequently and played for the poet and corresponded with him. Therefore it comes as no surprise that among Mendelssohn’s finest works is a setting of Goethe, the cantata Die erste Walpurgisnacht. This overture, like the better know Fingal’s Cave, was designed as a free-standing work. The name “overture” therefore is somewhat of a misnomer. It was written in 1828, when Mendelssohn was nineteen years old. Unlike Beethoven, Mendelssohn displays the new agenda of Romanticism in music. He chose to express the poem exclusively through instrumental sounds. He did not set Goethe’s text; rather he provided a mixture of evocation and illustration. This overture is a magnificent example of a synthesis of neoclassical and Romantic sensibilities. The musical strategies of thematic development and variation are placed in the service of a rather novel sense of the relationship between music and narration and representation with respect to nature and emotion.

Raff, Italian Suite

Joachim Raff is the composer on this program whose life and work are least known. He was born near Zurich in 1822 and dies in 1882. His early work attracted the attention of Mendelssohn. Later on in his career he became more allied with the so-called New German School of Liszt and Wagner. In his own day he was extraordinarily famous and well respected. Among his pupils was the American composer Edward MacDowell. In more recent times Raff is remembered mostly through his association with Franz Liszt. Among his compositional work are eleven symphonies, seven of which bear subtitles relating to nature and landscape. In addition, Raff wrote a series of shorter works inspired by places and nature. The “Italian” Suite later served as a model for Strauss. It ends as does Aus Italien with Neapolitan material. The work is in six movements. The “Italian” Suite is one of four works bearing the name “suite”; the second is subtitled “In the Hungarian Manner,” and the fourth is a musical essay “From Thuringia.”

Reger, Four Tone Poems after A. Böcklin

Most concertgoers today will associate the name Max Reger with that of Rudolf Serkin. The great pianist and the family of Adolf Busch, into which Serkin married, were ardent advocates of Reger’s music. Reger was born in 1873 and died in 1916. His work is marked by an intense and virtuosic command of counterpoint and a harmonic ingenuity reminiscent of Spohr, but in a modern form. Reger was an organist and a tireless composer. Hew saw himself as continuing a tradition exemplified by Schumann and Brahms. He was also the conductor of the court orchestra in Meiningen, a post made famous by the tenure of Hans von Bülow. These tone poems are among Reger’s most lasting works. They were written in 1913. The work of Arnold Böcklin inspired many composers. In his time, Böcklin was the most sought-after and famous painter in German-speaking Europe. Perhaps the best-known piece of music inspired by Böcklin is Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead. The painting by that name is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Another admirer of Böcklin’s was Johannes Brahms. In this work, Reger, using the vast resources of the orchestra, attempts, like Mendelssohn, an orchestral instrumental equivalent to the canvases of Böcklin. Reger’s strategy is not narrowly illustrative.

Each of the four movements is tied explicitly to a single canvas: “Der Einsliedler” (called by Reger “The Hermit Playing the Violin”); “In the Play of the Wave”: “The Isle of the Dead” and “Bacchanale.” These four paintings show only part of the iconographical range of Böcklin’s work. These are based on mythology. They were chosen by Reger in part because as a sequence of four they suggested a formal pattern which struck him as a variation of the traditional four-movement symphony–a welcome compromise between the symphonic form and the Lisztean and Straussian tone poem.

An Italian Journey through German Romanticism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert An Italian Journey through German Romanticism performed on March 11, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The fascination for Italy among German writers, artists, and musicians can be traced back at least to the mid-eighteenth century. In the renaissance of German letters during that time there was a distinct and eloquent neoclassical strain. J. J. Winckelmann (1717-1768) wrote his famous tract in 1755, “Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks.” The German rediscovery of classical antiquity extended to the field of architecture. Among the most influential aesthetic forces in German nineteenth- century culture was the achievement of the Berlin architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose neoclassic buildings were regarded as an embodiment of the rebirth of true beauty through the style of antiquity.

The glorification of a Greco-Roman ideal found an analogue in the German romance with the Italian landscape. The lure of Italy was not merely historical. Italy represented the world of light and warmth, an oasis of nature infused in a curious manner with the remnants of a great historical past. All this stood in contrast to the cold, dark, forbidding landscape of the North. If one thinks of the stage set of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischutz and the early nineteenth-century German romantic canvases of Caspar David Friedrich, one can think of few more evident counterpoints than the sunlight of Florence, Rome, or Naples. The German fascination for Italy as well was shared by the Swiss and the Austrians, who were in a position to forge an ideal synthesis between the best virtues of the German and the Italian. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can be conjured up as evidence of this conceit. The Italian influence from as early as the time of J. S. Bach was never far from the minds of the leading composers of German-speaking Europe.

The most important literary reflection of the German obsession with Italy was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italian Journey. Goethe’s sojourn in Italy from 1786 to 1788 offered a model that was followed by generations of young aspiring, musicians and writers from the North. Mendelssohn spent considerable time in Rome during the 1830s. Brahms was an inveterate traveler whose favorite place was Italy. Among his most treasured books was Jacob Burckhardt’s Cicerone, a descriptive guide to the art treasures of Italy. However, the most well-known Germans with an Italian obsession were the painters of the nineteenth century who lived for long stretches of time in Italy. Unfortunately, the names of these painters are not well-known among Americans. German nineteenth-century painting in general has never won much of an audience in the English-speaking world. Those Americans familiar with the Hudson River School and with the great monumental landscape painting of the American nineteenth century will appreciate readily the magnificent creations of the German nineteenth- century tradition of painting. There was a group of painters loosely called “The German Romans.” Among the best-known are Arnold Böcklin and Anselm Feuerbach. Both these painters are indirectly represented in this concert by the works of Brahms and Reger. Music lovers and concert-goers, however, will recognize immediately one of the last incarnations of the nineteenth-century German fascination with Italy in Richard Strauss’s tone poem Aus Italien. The suite by Joachim Raff from 1871 on this program, although less well-known, is a wonderful earlier example of that tradition of music inspired by the Italian landscape. It is therefore more than an accident that that quintessential figure of nineteenth-century German culture, Richard Wagner, died in Venice, where he had chosen to live.

What began in the eighteenth century as a celebration of the universal ideals of beauty, which recognized no national differences, ended in the late nineteenth century as a distortion of universal national self-aggrandizement. The self-proclaimed superiority of modern nineteenth-century German culture seemed to be vindicated by the idea that it had successfully integrated the surviving remnants of the classical past into itself through the movements of Neoclassicism and Romanticism. The absorption of the Italian strengthened and deepened the German self-definition of its own culture. From the perspective of the late twentieth century, the music and the art represented by the Reinhart collection at the Metropolitan Museum and the works on this ASO program bear testimony to the authentic inspiration generated by the strange and complex symbiosis between North and South evident in the German relationship to Italy during the nineteenth century.

The Breakup of the Soviet Union: A Musical Mirror

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Breakup of the Soviet Union: A Musical Mirror performed on Feb 18, 1994 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The relationship between music and politics has been both ambiguous and enigmatic. Strictly speaking, music neither describes nor illustrates in the way that pictures and language seem to do. Therefore, a facile identification of political ideas with music appears problematic. However, within a particular historical context, the sound and function of music in society can assume a highly charged political meaning.

This is particularly the case in moments of history when political censorship has been severe. The Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer, whose work was subjected persistently to censorship, once commented wryly that he envied composers. With music, the censors were at a loss. If there was political meaning, it might be found, at best, in any words that were being set–as in the case of opera and vocal and choral music–but not in the music itself.

The oppressive world of the 1830s under Metternich ought not be compared to the political repression and dictatorship experienced in Europe during the twentieth century. In the Soviet Union music became politicized by the state to an astonishing degree from the mid 1920s to the late 1980s. Joseph Stalin created a world in which artists and writers were murdered, tortured, imprisoned, and humiliated. Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich both struggled to find ways to survive in the basic sense of the word and yet remain true to the notion of art as the free expression of the individual. Although musicians had an easier time under Stalinism than contemporaries who were writers (one thinks of Mandelstam and Akhmatova) the life of a composer in the Soviet Union during the twentieth century was not easy. The category of official music existed and with it a powerful central official hierarchy. Certain styles of music were suppressed.

Some quite talented composers paid direct and regular homage to the often arbitrary tastes of the ruling elite. Others sought to speak in a double voice, to escape direct censorship and reprisal and yet communicate anger, despair, and hope covertly within the textures of the music they wrote. By the 1980s, in a post-Stalinist Soviet Union, particularly under Perestroika, matters had improved. But the 1970s under Brezhnev were not so open and lenient. To the end, the fundamental structure developed under Stalin for the control of the arts by the state remained in place.

Today’s concert offers the American listener two glimpses into how two of the most important composers from the former Soviet Union (both born in the 1930s) struggled with the political context of their art. The American writer Mary McCarthy once noted with some degree of irony that it was only in conditions of “unfreedom” that art, particularly music, really mattered. Only in the darkest days of the Brezhnev era could a poet (e.g. Ratushinskaya) be imprisoned for writing about love. An underground of writing and concert life in Moscow and Leningrad mirrored an intensity of interest in artistic expression wholly foreign to ourselves. In the context of repression and censorship, music and poetry remained arenas in which free expression could more readily be realized.

Given the restricted choice of how to spend one’s time, the limitations of personal movement, and an absence of consumer economy, reading and listening were vital experiences. When a composer or writer put his or her pen to the page, the significance of what he or she was doing went well beyond issues of career, income, and fame. As Ms. McCarthy noted, in our free and open society the making of art seems too often to make no difference at all.

Alfred Schnittke’s and Sofia Gubaidulina’s music conveys, with a nearly unmatched intensity, the sense of urgency and importance that the making of and listening to music possessed for them and their publics during the 1980s. Schnittke and Gubaidulina are perhaps the most significant composers of their generation. Both occupied the tense and amorphous space in the Soviet world that can be termed “unofficial.” Both sought refuge abroad before the collapse of communism.

This concert presents contrasting works which frame the decade of the 1980s. The earlier work, the Schnittke cantata, mirrors, through the use of the Faust legend, with considerable irony, even sarcasm, the problems of the individual conscience when it is faced with the temptations of power. The cantata can be heard as a parable which warns against accepting the offer of the devil, who in Schnittke’s setting unmistakably can be associated with the blandishments and seductions offered by officialdom. It is not surprising that this work never pleased the Soviet establishment. It has the brilliance and angularity weassociate with much of Dimitri Shostakovich’s music.

If Schnittke’s work evokes the struggle between the idea that art depends on principled inner integrity (particularly when one is faced with overwhelming power) on the one hand and the corrupt traditions of the Stalinist legacy on the other, Sofia Gubaidulina’s work demonstrates the explosive energy and passion that the promise of freedom made possible at the end of the decade. Gubaidulina has long sustained artistic autonomy through her embrace of spirituality and religious faith. However, the Allelujia is not merely the culmination of a series of works by the composer with religious and spiritual content. It reflects the energy that political freedom can give to religious expression. What was once personal and private can be embraced, without restraint, in the public sphere. One can think of no more a moving and decidedly Russian expression of the possibilities presented by the long-awaited arrival of political freedom. Hope, joy, harmony, as well as the return of innocence and opportunity are communicated along with affection and a fundamental belief in the sanctity of life-sentiments wholly uncharacteristic of Stalinism and its successors.

For those concert-goers familiar with Russian history, one might suggest that in this concert we are presented with a continuation of two strains in Russian culture. The Gubaidulina work reminds one of the uniquely Russian spiritual and mystical tradition of Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900) and Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) and even the religious strain in the late work of Leo Tolstoy. The Schnittke is perhaps an extension into the twentieth century of qualities we associate with Gogol and Dostoevsky. The character and power of the two works on this concert, and indeed much of Russian music, literature, and painting from the early nineteenth century to the present, may indeed derive (albeit indirectly) from the bitter struggle between the imperatives of art and the almost unbroken history of political repression in Russia from Czarism to Communism.

As we listen to these two works, we might well reflect on what is happening today in 1994. As a result of recent political and economic events, Gubaidulina’s optimism about the post communist world might end up appearing premature and even naive. We all must work to avoid such an outcome. Even though we cherish the great works of art that were produced under political repression, we cannot glorify the past merely because we lament a certain philistinism and irrelevancy that art and music have attained in the so-called free post-Communist world. Let us hope that in the former Soviet Union and also in the West, the traditions so magnificently sustained by Schnittke and Gubaidulina remain vital without the terrifying presence of necessity in the form of oppression, censorship, and the absence of freedom.

Der Rosenkavalier: The Silent Film

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Der Rosenkavalier: The Silent Film performed on Dec 19, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This performance of the reconstructed film Der Rosenkavalier is a tribute to the tenacity and enthusiasm of many individuals, both here and in Germany. Credit goes to Berndt Heller for doing the painstaking work of putting together the most complete version of the film possible. I am grateful for the efforts of Mark Loftin of the Bard Music Festival two years ago, when an unsuccessful attempt was made to bring the film to the United States. Most of all, I thank my colleagues at the American Symphony Orchestra, Eugene Carr and Lorna Dolci, who stopped at nothing to make this complicated project a reality.

The silent film Der Rosenkavalier presents a unique opportunity to reflect on the continuities and discontinuities between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century cultural traditions. The film also offers us an opportunity to see how two great artists, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, reinvented their own work when confronted with a new theatrical medium. Their decision to make a silent film of Der Rosenkavalier almost fifteen years after the premiere of the opera in 1911 was, no doubt, a tribute to the opera’s unbelievable commercial and critical popularity.

In terms of Strauss’s music, the opera Der Rosenkavalier occupies a special place. After the powerful and seemingly modernist Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier appeared to be a retreat to a more conventional, if not neo-Romantic and historicist, style. Strauss’s virtual disappearance after Der Rosenkavalier from the official story of twentieth-century music –a story that charts the progress of music from the rich, tonal, romantic vocabulary of the late nineteenth century (e.g. Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler) to the astringent modernism of the 1960′s (e.g. Pierre Boulez and Milton Babbitt)–is a consequence of Strauss’s music in Der Rosenkavalier. At the same time, Der Rosenkavalier marked the beginning of a rich period of collaboration with the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Too often, modern audiences think of opera as being exclusively the work of a composer. For example, the name Lorenzo DaPonte is remembered only because of Mozart. However unfair this is in all cases, it is entirely wrong in the case of the Strauss/Hofmannsthal collaboration. After Der Rosenkavalier they completed four great operas and worked together on several smaller projects. Critics have belittled Strauss’s music from the 1920s and 1930s, but in recent years, owing in part to our so-called “post-modernist” sensibilities, we now listen to the mature Strauss–the work from the period in which this film was made-with new appreciation.

The re-making of Der Rosenkavalier, therefore, was an act of exploitation of a smash hit, much the way a best-selling novel today is turned into a movie. The particular “hit” in question, the 1911 opera, was a symbol of the special problems facing art and music in the twentieth century. Der Rosenkavalier became a battleground for competing critical viewpoints. Supporters hailed Strauss’s so-called conservatism. Others, using the modernist claims of Schoenberg and his followers, trashed it. At stake was the question of how to reach an audience and which audience to reach with the musical and theatrical conventions of the past. By 1925 this debate included the question of whether the film medium would become an instrument of the elevation of mass taste or a new means of expression that would spark an aesthetic conflict with traditional nineteenth-century practices.

Given this context, what we see and hear in this film from the 1920s is astonishing. First of all, Hofmannsthal rethought the opera. In the film version he allied himself even more powerfully with Mozart than he had in 1911. That allegiance was implied by the opera version. In the heat of the debate about modernism in the 1920s, Hofmannsthal took further refuge in the world of the eighteenth century. If modernism in the twentieth century can be understood as a reaction to the romanticism of the late nineteenth century, then one plausible route to take was neo-classicism, a retreat beyond the nineteenth century back to the seemingly pure, graceful, and light, but at the same time profound, achievement of the late eighteenth century. Mozart was regarded as having achieved the most powerful synthesis of words and music. The power of opera was realized in a way sufficiently intimate and transparent so that the listener could follow language and music together. The sheer scale of the Wagnerian music drama and the particular character of Wagner’s language seemed to demand for Hofmannsthal a radical reconsideration, which took the form of a return to the eighteenth century.

Many listeners may be familiar with the Strauss/Hofmannsthal collaboration Ariadne auf Naxos in which the commedia dell arte and the example of Moliere are present. The entire end of Der Rosenkavalier was changed by Hofmannsthal for this film. The indoor ending of the opera is transformed here into a direct evocation of the last scene of The Marriage of Figaro, tempered by the last scene of Don Giovanni. The technique of a play within a play is utilized in the use of theatrical reenactment of the presentation of the rose.

But at the same time, Hofmannsthal was fascinated by the unique properties of the cinema. In the absence of words delivered by the voice, Hofmannsthal utilized flashbacks and cinematic means of silently communicating the emotional essence that sung words had communicated so powerfully in the opera. This silent film project inspired Hofmannsthal to approach in a new way an issue that had plagued his entire life and career. In his adolescence he had become lionized and world-famous as a lyric poet. Then he experienced a severe crisis about writing. For the remainder of his career Hofmannsthal struggled with the question of how language might function in the modern world. His enthusiastic collaboration with Strauss was in part an admission of the insufficiency of language alone. In the Rosenkavalier film, language retreats even further as a medium of modernity, leaving musical sound, pantomime, and image alone to work together.

Richard Strauss’s view of this film version has long been a matter of debate. Conventional wisdom has it that he undertook this film merely to mollify Hofmannsthal and to earn some money. But the mid-1920s was not an easy time for Strauss. From 1919 to 1924 he had served as co-Director of the Vienna Opera. He also was engaged in a variety of projects that turned his attention, like Hofmannsthal, to the eighteenth century. He arranged Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens. Later, in the 1920s, he began to re-write Mozart’s Idomeneo. In both his composing and his art collecting, he demonstrated a deepening respect for the French eighteenth century. Strauss was worried about his own creative energies. In the midst of the ferment of the 1920s, he already had taken on the aura of a figure from the past. His most-well-known works dated from between the mid-1880′s and 1911. It was said all too frequently that Strauss was beyond his prime. Furthermore, new developments in both high art and popular culture seemed to make him irrelevant.

The opportunity to achieve success in the most modern medium-film-therefore, was not lost on Strauss. Like Hofmannsthal, he was not content merely to make a film version of the opera. He included new music and followed Hofmannsthal’s lead in recasting the story. Strauss was possessed of a sense of humor, and both he and Hofmannsthal used the film version to respond to quirky elements of the well-known opera plot. They knew that many film-goers would know the opera and smile at how the Marshallin knew that Octavian had fallen in love with Sophie. Could better sense be made of Annina and Valzacchi? The famous handkerchief at the end of the opera becomes Octavian’s cuff in the first of the film.

Like Hofmannsthal, Strauss used the opportunity of writing for the film version to explore questions central to his work. First, as the scores of Ariadne and particularly Intermezzo and later Capriccio reveal, Strauss was in search of an economy and lightness and transparency uncharacteristic of, for example, Death and Transfiguration and Elektra. Here in the film medium, the utility of the eighteenth century as an aesthetic model for the twentieth again could be tested. Second, the relationship between words and music, or the competition between theater and opera, was never far from the composer’s mind. In the film the question becomes not only about the relationship between words and music (as in opera) but also between the visual and the musical. We too often forget that among Strauss’s passions was narrative and landscape painting. The cinematic virtues of this film version provoked Strauss as both composer and conductor to think about the visual and the musical together and how music functions without words with a visual dimension. Could music and pictures achieve the impact of opera?

The visual dimension of opera was a significant issue for Strauss. The cinematic version of Der Rosenkavalier gave him an opportunity to explore the relationship between music and modern techniques of visualization, particularly those that trade in the illusions of visual realism. The cinema offered new opportunities to experiment with time and memory as mediated through pictures and sound.

Strauss conducted two performances of the work, one in Dresden and one in London. One ought not exaggerate the claims of his disappointment. The director of the film was among the most famous Directors of his time. The actors included the leading film stars and one of the great figures of the Viennese Burgtheater and therefore the classical stage, as well as personalities from the operatic world. The film offers us a nearly comic amalgam of different acting styles.

When one watches the film, one thinks about the transition the great figures of the nineteenth century had to make when faced with modern technology. The great Austrian Director Max Reinhardt, a friend and colleague of both Strauss and Hofmannsthal (whose production of the play Elektra inspired Strauss to write the opera and who worked with Strauss in the production of Der Rosenkavalier and later Ariadne), also made a transition to film. Reinhardt produced many Hofmannsthal plays and, together with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, founded the Salzburg Festival. Reinhardt made a film version of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the 1930s. In both that Reinhardt effort and this Rosenkavalier film, the desire to make the artistic legacy of the past vital and render it effectively to modern audiences through a distinctly contemporary medium and therefore create an audience of otherwise inconceivable breadth should be viewed as having triumphed.

Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Concert-goers in today’s world are unaccustomed to imagining a time when there was no access to moving images graced with the power and illusion possessed by contemporary video and celluloid. The cliché that characterizes contemporary culture as dominated by television and film contains, after all, more than a grain of truth. The nineteenth-century audiences for whom the works on this program were written depended on the acts of reading and listening–particularly that of listening–to provide a sense of the imagined landscape and the visual sense of the passage of time along with its various events. The one arena that offered the audience a visual narrative was, of course, the theater. It will come as no surprise that during the nineteenth century, in many of the centers of Europe known to music lovers for their respective musical traditions (e.g. St. Petersburg, Vienna, Munich, Prague, London), the power, lure, and significance of the theater exceeded that of music.

The relationship between theater and music in the nineteenth century was an intimate one well beyond the realm of opera. In part, this was the result of the special affinity between listening to music, the inherent theatricality of performing and experiencing music (visible today less in classical concerts and more so in pop and rock concerts) and the world of the theater. Both writers and musicians have long been fascinated by the differences, the similarities, and the nearly competitive interplay displayed by sound and words as theatrical mediums. In nineteenth-century European culture, the theater was a crucial public forum in which covert and overt political discussion, satire, a sense of cultural tradition, and sheer entertainment and diversion could be found.

During the nineteenth century, it was customary to embellish theatrical performances, particularly of the classics, with incidental music and overtures. The experimental ideas of the 1850s regarding the use of literary programs in orchestral music encouraged composers to use fully the illustrative potential of the array of instruments in the orchestra. An alternative formal strategy, one different from the classical symphony, was argued for. These innovations, most frequently associated with Franz Liszt, inspired composers to use the orchestra to help evoke and depict the poetic and the dramatic in music without the help of words. The ambition was to try to convey in music something about character, events, and landscape within a dramatic and literary context–something evoked by a playwright through words and gesture. The essence and emotional allure of a play could be added to and communicated in a special manner through instrumental music.

Throughout the nineteenth century, in the era historians have become too content to describe with the term romanticism, in the intellectual and cultural life of continental Europe, no single author rivaled the place held by Shakespeare. For German-speaking Europe, Shakespeare had achieved the status of a German classic. The translations of Schlegel and Tieck were so successful that the idea that Shakespeare was actually “better” in German became a view only partially considered a joke. This nineteenth-century German cultural arrogance was not lost on German-speaking Europe’s Slavic neighbors. For Russians and Czechs, the translation of the English-language Shakespeare into their own language and the stage productions of Shakespeare in the Russian and Czech languages during the nineteenth century became overt acts of national self-assertion. It was not only the symbolic content and unmatched greatness of Shakespeare that kept interest in his work so high. By showing that Shakespeare in Czech and Russian was every bit as good as Shakespeare in German, the Czech and the Russian languages-as carriers of truth and beauty-demonstrated their equality with English and German. The presence of the American composer John Knowles Paine on this program (a composer very admiring of the continental European musical tradition) is indirectly a reminder of how important it was to nineteenth-century America to develop its own tradition of Shakespeare performance in order to show the equality of Americans with respect to the British in matters aesthetic, literary, and philosophical.

In the act of writing music to Shakespeare, all the composers on this program engaged three challenges characteristic of the nineteenth century. First, they grappled with the question of how to reconcile the classical expectations of musical logic with the opportunities suggested by the language and the dramatic structure of a play. Second, by setting Shakespeare to music in their own cultural contexts, they participated in a distinctly nationalist political project. Third and perhaps most important, by tackling the emotional power and unrivaled greatness of Shakespeare, they put themselves to the ultimate test with respect to the power of music. Could music, unaided by words, evoke in the listener an experience comparable to what Shakespeare inspired in the hearts and minds of theater audiences and those many nineteenth-century individuals who read Shakespeare in their homes with a close and intense affection? Both the theatergoer and the reader were asked implicitly by these composers to listen to an orchestral tone poem and recognize and remember their Shakespeare; to find in the act of listening some new dimension and experience (equal to the power of the plays) brought forward by the composer who used Shakespeare as a unique source of musical inspiration.

“Hamlet”, Overture-Fantasy, Op. 67a (1888)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Hamlet was the last of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s symphonic poems based on Shakespeare and other literary sources. The idea of doing Hamlet first had been suggested in the early 1870s by the composer’s brother, Modest. At that time Tchaikovsky made effort to write a Hamlet symphonic poem but abandoned the task. He returned to the idea only after he had been asked in 1888 to write incidental music for a benefit performance of the play in St. Petersburg. Tchaikovsky finished the piece at the end of the summer in 1888, even though the scheduled performance of the play had been canceled. In the fall of 1888 the symphonic poem Hamlet received its premiere under the baton of the composer. Although Tchaikovsky had used two other Shakespeare plays as the basis for symphonic poems (Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest), Hamlet presented by far the most psychologically and philosophically daunting challenge. When Tchaikovsky came around to writing Hamlet, he no longer relied on his brother’s literary script. Interestingly, the symphonic poem presents both characters and ideas. One can hear Hamlet, depictions of fate, Ophelia (as many commentators have noted, set in a distinctly Russian manner), the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Fortinbras. Although the symphonic poem possesses the outlines of what we associate with sonata form, there is really no development. One is tempted to hear in the work the evocation of a mix of psychological distress and despair with which Tchaikovsky himself identified. Of all the elements in the work it is perhaps the recurring motive of fate that gives the piece its overarching coherence. The work ends, appropriately, with a death march.

“Macbeth”, Symphonic Poem, Op. 23 (1888)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

During the 1880s the enormously gifted young Richard Strauss underwent a musical transformation that drew him away from the more classical traditions favored by his father, the great French horn player, toward what often has been termed the “New German” movement. This school of composition took its inspiration from Liszt and Wagner. The individual most responsible for Strauss’s new direction was Alexander Ritter, a musician and composer who became a kind of second father to Richard Strauss. The result was that after writing two symphonies, Strauss turned to the medium of the symphonic poem in direct emulation of Franz Liszt. The most famous of the tone poems that date from the late 1880s and early 1890s are, of course, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, and Till Eulenspiegel. Strauss’s first foray into this new and different kind of symphonic music was Aus Italian. The second venture was Macbeth. Macbeth gave the composer the most trouble in terms of its composition, and it has remained the least-performed of Strauss’s tone poems. Hans von Bülow criticized the first version because it ended without any musical or dramatic reference to the tragedy of Macbeth. Rather, it celebrated the triumph of MacDuff. But this dispute about the ending was merely a reflection of what Strauss articulated to von Bülow in the summer of 1888, when he wrote that there was “an ever-increasing conflict between the musical poetic content that I want to convey and the three-part sonata form that has come down to us from the classical composers.” This statement, written while Strauss was struggling with the composition of Macbeth, mirrors the contradictions between the demands inherent in Liszt’s vision of music (which called on music to follow poetic and dramatic logic) and the seemingly purely musical structure inherent in the work of Mozart and Brahms. As James Hepokowski has argued in a recent article on Strauss’s Macbeth, Strauss viewed Macbeth as a musical statement of independence– a modernist “manifesto” that asserted the primacy of the literary and dramatic logic aver the formal, classical compositional strategies. However, matching the story line of Macbeth and the musical content of the tone poem has proven difficult. There have been widely divergent claims. Hepokowski finally has found a way to reconcile the musical structure with the dramatic narrative of the play. This program note closely follows his argument. Macbeth opens in a way reminiscent of Wagner and Beethoven. The first sustained musical thought mirrors the idea of power and monarchy. The next section, which is the exposition, presents themes representing Macbeth, prophecy, ambition, Lady Macbeth, and her successful effort to persuade Macbeth to commit murder. The center section is divided into two episodes. In the first, many listeners have located a love motive, but Hepokowski considers this as a continuation of Lady Macbeth’s process of persuasion. In any event, the murder of Duncan is clearly marked in the first episode. The second episode, according to Hepokowski, signals the crowning of Macbeth. In musical terms one can hear in 3/4 time a B-flat-major march. Following these two sections there is a brilliant adaptation of sonata form. A recapitulation ensues, which actually describes the madness that overcomes Macbeth, who fails in his search for redemption. The end of this recapitulation depicts the final battle and the death of Macbeth. The tone poem ends with a coda, which reflects Strauss’s revision. In the original it ended with the music of Macduff’s fanfare, which is heard near the very end of this final version. The sense of triumph contained in Macduff’s music quickly dissolves into a musical reminder of the ambition, madness, and greatness that characterize Macbeth. The work closes with a flourish in D minor. When compared with its rival poems, this Strauss work sounds every bit as convincing It has been unjustly neglected in the concert hall.

“The Tempest,” Symphonic Poem, Op. 31 (1876)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

John Knowles Paine is perhaps best known for being the first incumbent of a professorial chair in music at Harvard University. He studied in Germany and had the privilege of playing for Clara Schumann. By all accounts he became a pivotal member of the Boston and Cambridge community that included Longfellow, William and Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was, among other things, the college organist. It is therefore entirely appropriate that the music building at Harvard is named for him. The early music by John Knowles Paine is truly conservative in its rejection of Wagnerian harmonic practice. In recent years some of Paine’s music has returned to the concert stage. Gunther Schuller recorded the St. Peter Oratorio in 1989. A wonderful Shakespeare overture to As You Like It from 1876, along with the first two symphonies in C minor and A major, were recorded by Zubin Mehta and the New York Philharmonic. Another fine work that recently has resurfaced is the overture to Sophocles’ Oedipus the King entitled Oedipus Tyrannus. Paine’s intimate involvement with Harvard led him naturally to participate in the active theatrical life associated with the university. Paine wrote music not only for Sophocles but also for a production of Aristophanes’ The Birds.

This symphonic poem was written at the same time As You Like It was composed. It is in four interconnected movements, some of which contain a variety of characters and events. The first allegro section describes the storm. A transition is made to an F-major adagio section depicting a “calm and happy scene before Prospero’s cell.” That is followed by on elegiac recitative, an adagio entitled “Ariel” that in turn moves gracefully into Prospero’s tale, which constitutes the third section. The last part of the work depicts three events: the love of Ferdinand for Miranda; Caliban, who is represented by the bassoon; and finally the triumph of Prospero.

“Othello,” Concert Overture, Op. 93 (1892)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Shakespeare! Romanticism and Music performed on Sep 26, 1993 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When Antonin Dvorák came to the United States in 1892, he was hailed as the moral equivalent of Christopher Columbus. The second most distinguished European composer (after Brahms) had come to America to conquer it and establish a tradition of music-making through the vehicle of the National Conservatory in New York, of which Dvorák was the new Director. Shortly after his arrival he conducted a concert that featured a new work consisting of three overtures: In Nature’s Realm, Carnival, and Othello, Opp. 91-93 respectively. Of these three, only Carnival has achieved a regular place in the repertoire. Since we are used to hearing only the Carnival overture as a free-standing piece (a circumstance not dissimilar to the way we hove been accustomed to hearing Smetana’s Moldau, which itself is part of a larger work), we have lost sight of Dvorák intent to create a three-step narrative that led the listener from the appreciation of nature and its essence to the joys of life and then to the tragedy created by those emotions that threaten the equanimity of nature and the happy soul of the human being so ably depicted in the Carnival overture. The last part of this three-part work, the one that depicts how human beings ruin what nature and life have given them, is, of course, Othello. It was begun in December 1891 and completed a few months later. As did Tchaikovsky in Hamlet, Dvorák in Othello utilized sonata form as a starting point. Also like Tchaikovsky, Dvorák rapidly encountered the compositional problem of how to respond appropriately to the dramatic essence of Shakespeare’s play. Some commentators have tried to downplay the parallelisms to the play evident in this overture, citing that Dvorák thought about different titles, including Love and The Tragic. But John Clapham argues convincingly that Dvorák made pencil notations to indicate the parallels between the dramatic action in Shakespeare’s drama and the music. In fact, there are eleven such indications. Curiously, they begin to occur a little more than a third of the way into the piece. Jealousy provided the composer with the most obvious musical focus. There are, in addition, allusions to Wagner and a reference to the Requiem Mass, which Dvorák had completed just a year earlier, in 1890. In this overture Dvorák attempts a musical characterization of Othello and Desdemona; of love and the emotions that are central to the drama. A small but remarkable detail deserves mention with respect to the Othello overture. As is well known, Brahms was a great admirer of Dvorák. While in America, Dvorák resumed his business relationship with Simrock, who was also Brahms’s publisher. In order to facilitate the publication of Dvorák’s new music, Brahms offered to do the proof-reading and to correct the galleys. Othello is one of the works for which Brahms did the editing and which he singled out with particular admiration.

Overture from the Music to Shakespeare’s Tragedy, “King Lear” (1859)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

The evolution of concert music in Russia and Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth century can be understood as governed by a continual tension and uneasy symbiosis between Western European influences and the desire by composers to develop a distinctly national musical idiom. At stake in the case of Russia was a struggle among artists and intellectuals over the soul of the nation as essentially either Western or Eastern. Balakirev was perhaps the most formidable and influential of Russia’s unusual group of late nineteenth-century composers. His works range from the relatively obscure Incidental Music for King Lear, originally written in 1858, the overture of which opens this program, to more famous later works such as Islamey, the “oriental fantasy” for piano. Balakirev attempted to utilize the formal procedures of Schumann and Liszt and also integrate so-called “folk” elements, not only from his native Russia, but from Bohemia, Poland and Spain. Other Russian composers, such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, who also struggled to reconcile the Russian with the Western European, were profoundly influenced by Balakirev. His orchestral music, particularly the two symphonies in C and D minor, and his many overtures are all too rarely performed. This work was inspired in part by Vladimir Stasov, the influential critic and composer. The choice of a Shakespeare text was not arbitrary. During the second half of the nineteenth century, in part to demonstrate that the language and culture of the Slavic peoples were in every sense the equals of the German and French, translations and productions of Shakespeare became immensely popular. Since Shakespeare had been appropriated by the French and German in translation, nationalist intellectuals used Shakespeare to demonstrate that Slavic languages (often looked down upon by snobs and aristocrats as culturally inferior) could transmit the English original of the world’s greatest playwright just as well as German or French, whose claims to cultural universalism and cosmopolitanism seemed more secure. Not surprisingly, many nineteenth-century Russian and Czech composers were eager to write symphonic music designed to accompany or evoke popular nationalist productions of Shakespeare’s plays. In this overture, Balakirev uses a distinctly Russian sound but develops the material along conventional, Schumann-like structural lines. The result is a rich, robust, and economically-organized musical drama. The thematic contrasts, the color and pace of the work transmit the grandeur and pathos of Shakespeare’s tragedy.

Brahms’s Fourth Symphony

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Focus on a Masterwork: Brahms’s Fourth Symphony performed on April 30, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

This concert brings to the contemporary audience a reminiscence of a time in the history of music when the piano was the primary means of musical communication. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the spread of the piano was extraordinary. In part through the use of novel techniques of manufacture, sturdy pianos that could hold pitch were produced in a variety of sizes at a cost to the consumer that made the piano a nearly ubiquitous domestic object. It was the piano that fueled the enormous growth of the audience during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. It can be argued that the piano was used to some extent the way that radios and gramophones would be used later. It is not surprising, therefore, that the decline in piano sales coincided with the explosion of other means of musical reproduction, particularly the radio and the record player. An intermediary instrument was the player piano.

In the late nineteenth century, all varieties of music, from dance-hall music to opera and popular songs, became known through versions for piano. The piano could be taught (by means of fingering or playing by numbers) without the user having a sophisticated ear. Simplified as well as complex versions of the entire range of musical entertainment became available to households, making the piano the center for domestic entertainment. In this sense, musical literacy in the late nineteenth century was centered on the piano, its technological development–the increasing range, brightness, and power–paralleled the expansion of orchestral range and color during the late nineteenth century. Johannes Brahms, for example, was one of the first composers of international stature whose essential musical education was rooted in the piano. His predecessors, from Bach to Mendelssohn, had training and experience playing stringed instruments. Franz Schubert had been a boy soprano and was steeped in the choral tradition. But Brahms’s early development was essentially pianistic, and for the greater part of his career he felt insecure about matters of orchestration. In his early work he deferred to the advice of his close friend Joseph Joachim, the great violin virtuoso. But it was not Brahms’s predilection for the piano or his habit of thinking about orchestral sound in pianistic terms that led him to make piano versions of his orchestral music. In the 1870s and 1880s in Vienna the relative rarity of live orchestral performances made the performance of orchestral music on the piano an essential part of musical life. Most of the symphonic literature was known to the audience through versions for two hands, four hands, and two pianos. Brahms’s first presentation of the Fourth Symphony in this two-piano version was to a group of his close friends, whose judgment of the merits of the symphony was based on the piano version rather than on the orchestral realization. It therefore comes as no surprise that the symphonies by Brahms’s rival Bruckner were heard in concert form at the Bösendorfer Hall in Vienna also in two-piano versions. In short, piano versions of orchestral music in the late nineteenth century were created not merely for domestic use but also for semi-public, if not public, presentation–for listeners as well as for players.

The idea that the piano was a universal medium of musical communication appealed to the anti-romanticism of early twentieth century modernist rebels. Musicians of Arnold Schoenberg and Anton von Webern’s generation grew up in an atmosphere of lush, richly orchestrated concert and operatic music. In this new generation a suspicion developed that color and effect could mask the absence of essential musical content. Therefore, when The Society for Private Performances was created after World War I in Vienna by Alban Berg and other Schoenberg adherents, one of the stipulations was the performance of orchestral works and even chamber works on the piano so that connoisseurs and the public could confront the musical content, stripped of any distracting decoration and ornamentation. This conceit – this separation of coloration and decoration from structure – was crucial to the modernist credo of Arnold Schoenberg. Even though the Opus 16 orchestral version makes considerable, if not explicit, use of the notion of musical color, the need for a piano version was deemed essential since the greatness of the music did not lie in its outward effect but rather in the argument it made in unadorned musical terms. Webern’s version, therefore, not only fulfilled an aspiration to give Schoenberg’s novel work a greater distribution than it could possibly achieve through orchestral performance, but it also proved that the work had an essential merit as an essay on pitch and rhythmic invention. This two-piano version is consistent with Schoenberg’s own musical culture. He relished playing four-hand and two-piano versions of Mahler symphonies. He was from the era in which the knowledge of music history and the canon of musical greatness were based on learning music on the piano and not through either attending live performances or listening to recorded performances.

This concert, therefore, brings back the public and private worlds of music making of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also offers the audience an opportunity to think about the quality of musical imagination at the end of the nineteenth century; about how listeners could imagine orchestral sound without ever having heard it, much the way we hear voices when we read dialogue in a novel or picture landscapes as a result of an author’s use of language. The piano was like the text of a book that permitted the reader to spin a web of sound in her or his mind. This concert also is a test of the modernist proposition: that there are things to be learned from piano versions of the symphonic repertory, and that one can gain understanding of a piece through listening to and studying it in its piano version. These two masterpieces as works for piano are merely two in a great tradition, from Liszt to Zemlinsky, of piano versions of music made by great composers of their own work and of the work of others.

Unjust Obscurity?

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

The influence of history on today’s symphony orchestra concert repertoire is more complicated than might appear at first glance. We are, no doubt, the heirs and beneficiaries of the considered taste and judgment of generations of performers, amateurs, critics and audiences. The span of time of continuous listening and widely disseminated music criticism is about a century and a half; it began in the mid 1840s. A certain degree of stable consensus has emerged, comparable to the consensus with which we are familiar in literature and painting. No matter how historically contingent we admit our tastes in literature and painting to be (as opposed to claiming that our judgments are entirely “objective” and immune to history and culture in some formalist sense), we continue to acknowledge Dante and Shakespeare as doubtlessly great, just as we grant Leonardo and Rembrandt a permanent place in a pantheon of painters.

However, the total history of the forms of symphonic music is much shorter. There was no “classical” era, in the sense of antiquity, which the late eighteenth century could rediscover and assume as a model (as happened in art and architecture). Likewise, because of the advent during the seventeenth century of the orchestra in the modern sense, no “Renaissance” or “Middle Ages” bequeathed a body of work formally continuous in some obvious manner with the eighteenth- or nineteenth-century orchestral repertoire. We are participants in a relatively recent urban ritual, the symphonic concert.

Nevertheless, the Beethoven symphonies and the last Mozart and Haydn symphonies became the starting benchmarks of the concert hall canon (a term used here in its recent fashionable sense, not to indicate the musical form but a body of paradigmatic works) in the mid-nineteenth century. Works by Mendelssohn, Schumann, Berlioz, Schubert and Brahms were added, followed by select works by composers from Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Amidst the ebb and flow of taste a small group of out-standing orchestral pieces, from Mozart to Mahler, Strauss, Sibelius and Shostakovich has emerged as the standard repertory.

However, in contrast to painting and literature, we have become enthralled by the shadow cast by the perhaps 175 orchestral pieces that make up the standard list. We compare all non-canonic works to them. We persistently invoke masterpieces to denigrate lesser-known works, even by well known composers. It is as if we have lost the joy of listening; of following in our imaginations the invention, insight and skill of most of the fine composers from the past. We seem compelled to comment, immediately after first hearing, “but it is not x” or “it is flawed, unlike y.” We have lost perspective and patience. In painting, we are sufficiently pleased and appreciative of lesser works by masters and fine works by lesser figures to hang them in museums and to spend exorbitant prices to own them. In literature, we read with delight book after book from the past without comparing what we are reading to a handful of classics.

In the concert hall, we have become intolerant of the unfamiliar. We are bored too quickly at first hearing. We have become addicted to endless repetitions of the very same works. A cult of the masterpiece has developed, and we search–often in vain–for nuances in the repeated renditions. It is as if we were film buffs who had memorized every line and frame in Casablanca, awaiting eagerly our favorite moment, only to anticipate savoring it once more. Despite the understandable pleasure we all experience in recognition through memory and repetition, the situation has become so extreme that we are in danger of losing one of the great pleasures enjoyed by audiences in the past: the act of fresh discovery and response.

This concert is dedicated to the revival of the history of music as a living presence. We are performing works that are finely crafted and inspired in their own right, written by outstanding composers who used music to express ideas with power, intensity, authenticity and artistic and emotional commitment: music by leading figures from the musical past. The works, in formal terms, are as good in every sense as most of the paintings in our museums and works of literature in print from the past, with perhaps the exception of the 175 most valued examples. That a single work is not the Beethoven Fifth, the Dvorák Cello concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, Debussy’s La Mer or Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue ought not disqualify it from being listened to, even more than once.

Schmidt, Concerto for Piano Left Hand

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

Franz Schmidt’s music has always been the object of fanatical advocacy by a small group of connoisseurs. His opera Notre-Dame (1904), the oratorio The Book of the Seven Seals (1937), the four symphonies and the various smaller orchestral works have always had a loyal following among highly discerning musicians. Among the most enthusiastic Schmidt adherents was Hans Keller, the eminent Austrian musician and critic who emigrated to England in the 1930s and who left an indelible and brilliant mark on twentieth-century English musical life. More than any other composer on this program, Schmidt earned within his own lifetime the reputation of an unjustly neglected master. There is little doubt that the symphonies deserve to be heard more often. They, in my opinion, are equal to the much better known works of Sibelius. In part what prevented Schmidt from receiving his deserved recognition was his personality. (A similar case was that of Hans Pfitzner.) Schmidt, a loyal child of the Habsburg Empire who lived for most of his life in Vienna, was both a fine cellist and pianist. He served for many years in the Vienna Opera orchestra and the Vienna Philharmonic. In that role he developed a burning envy and hatred for Gustav Mahler and Mahler’s brother-in-law, the great violinist and concert-master Arnold Rose, whose quartet premiered much of Arnold Schoenberg’s early chamber music. Schmidt later quit the orchestra to teach piano at the Vienna Conservatory; Jealousy, bitterness and arrogance were Schmidt’s distinguishing character traits. He always felt disregarded as a composer and denigrated – unfairly – as a mere player, whose music was a pale pastiche or imitation of the styles of others. As this ambitious Concerto indicates, Schmidt’s musical architecture, thematic impulses, uses of instruments, as well as the sequencing, mode and development of musical materials owe a great deal, curiously enough, to the Viennese tradition as realized by those arch-rivals Brahms and Bruckner. This concerto was commissioned in 1934 by Schmidt’s fellow Viennese, Paul Wittgenstein, the brother of the great philosopher Ludwig and scion of one of the city’s most musical and distinguished families. Wittgenstein lost one arm in World War I. He proceeded to commission works for left hand alone from Schmidt, Strauss and Ravel. Schmidt also wrote a magnificent quintet for Wittgenstein, as well as a solo toccata.

Szymanowski, Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 15 (1907)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? performed on Feb 26, 1993 at Carnegie Hall. 

Before the mid-twentieth century-the era of Penderecki and Lutoslawski-the two greatest figures in the history of music in Poland were Frederic Chopin and Karol Szymanowski. Like Chopin, Szymanowski was an ardent Polish patriot. But unlike Chopin, Szymanowski lived mostly in Poland (with periods of extended stay in Vienna and Paris) and devoted much of his career, both in the early stages and at the end of his life, to furthering the cause of music in Poland. Like his more famous but comparable contemporaries, the Czech Leos Janacek and the Hungarian Bela Bartók, Szymanowski struggled to confront the powerful influences of the German and French musical traditions and, at the same time, craft a distinct style derived in part from the inspiration offered by his homeland and its linguistic and cultural traditions. However, Szymanowski (particularly after 1918) sought to develop a universal and spiritual but distinctly lyrical modernist musical language of expression. This ambition led him therefore to non-Western and oriental sources for ideas and literary texts. Szymanowski is best remembered for two stunning violin concertos, a magnificent Stabat Mater, the opera King Roger and a host of songs and chamber music.

Szymanowski wrote four works which were to be catalogued as symphonies. No. 4 was a Concertante for piano and orchestra. No. 3 was a work for chorus, soloists and orchestra. Only two works in the purely instrumental format survive. The better known of the early symphonies, No. 2 from 1909-1910 was later edited and revised with the help of the distinguished Warsaw composer/conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, Szymanowski’s friend. The work on this concert, the First Symphony in F minor, Op. 15, although performed in 1909 in Warsaw, was never published, revived or revised. It is therefore obscure in two senses. First, like the rest of the composer’s music, it is too seldomly performed outside of Poland. Second, within Szymanowski’s oeuvre, this work has been given short shrift as a bit “crude”, and not representative of the gifts and achievements characteristic of the mature Szymanowski.

This performance can therefore test the conventional view of this composer’s early work. Only two movements exist. Taken together, they make a powerful musical essay. True, the influence of Richard Strauss and the traditions of Liszt and Wagner are clearly evident. But, as in the case of early Brahms (where the influence of Schumann can be detected easily), there is a compelling immediacy of invention and a wholly original instinct for drama and orchestration less prevalent in Szymanowski’s later works. In this work for example, Szymanowski innovates in the formal structure–in the way the seams within the movements are sewn together by harmonic change and orchestration. He chooses — courageously — to end the work by avoiding the cadential cliches of his time, leaving the listener with a startling mix of finality and ambiguity. Although the composer referred to his first symphony in later years as a “monstrum contrapuntal-harmonic-orchestral,” the brash youthful energy that comes through is convincing. Perhaps the work has suffered because of the title. If it were regarded less as a symphonic fragment, and more as a two-part symphonic tone poem, the work might have taken its rightful place alongside the great Strauss tone poems from the same period. This work can be compared to Bartók’s Kossuth from 1903, a fine youthful symphonic essay by another great twentieth century composer written under the spell of Strauss’ example.

Surrealism and Music?: The Musical World Around René Magritte

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Surrealism and Music? The Musical World Around René Magritte, 1930-1975 performed on Nov 13, 1992 at Carnegie Hall. 

This concert is designed to parallel the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of the work of René Magritte. Two principles of organization are at work: First, the listener will hear works written by Belgian, French and American composers who were contemporaries of René Magritte. Magritte, unlike Giorgio de Chirico, believed that music was an ally of surrealism. He maintained a lifelong interest in music. One of the composers represented here, André Souris, was his friend. Two of the pieces , Poulenc’s Les Biches and Edgar Varése’s Arcana, were written precisely during the years when surrealism emerged from Dadaism in France and Belgium. A third work, by Charles Koechlin,, begun in the mid 1920’s and completed more than a decade later, reflects the wide influence of surrealist aesthetics. The last piece, John Cage’s Concerto for Prepared Piano, pays homage to the twentieth century composer whose conceptual innovations most closely parallel for music the challenge and significance of Magritte’s famous word paintings from the 1920’s and 1930’s and Magritte’s “Les Mots et les Images” (1929). In short, the listener is presented in this concert with a selection of the musical context in which Magritte worked from the mid-19920’s to the mid-1950’s.

Second, using the contemporaneity and geographic proximity of the composers on the program and their works (e.g. Brussels, Paris and New York, three cities where surrealism had a significant following) this concert seeks to explore whether there was in music a development parallel to surrealism during the first half of the twentieth century. Using Magritte as the model, can one describe and understand certain music from the same period as surrealistic in a way comparable to the way we identify surrealist writing and painting?

The irony in the hostility of French surrealism to music and André Breton’s disdain for Schopenhauer is that it would seem that music must have been a natural medium for much of surrealist ideology. Central to surrealism was the notion of an unmediated direct creative outpouring of the imagination, transcending the distinction of the conscious and the unconscious. A nearly mystical sense of unity and the belief in a higher and deeper definition of reality pervaded surrealist discourse. Surrealism sought to explode the distinction between resemblance and illusion, between the visible and the invisible. It was surrealism’s goal to transform the idea of representation and the distinction between the subjective and the objective. Surrealist artists celebrated the transcendence of apparent contradiction and sought to overcome the tyranny of reason, to unleash the atomatic and un-self-conscious dynamic of creativity. Furthermore, inspired by Freud they seized on his investigation of the unconscious within dreamwork to break out of the limitations of what appeared to be the ordinary consciousness of banal reality. The conventions of word usage, of naming perception and symbolic meaning, all underwent critical analyses and challenge.

The tradition of nineteenth-century musical aesthetics should have recommended music as an ideal vehicle for theses aspects of surrealism. As Schopenhauer and Wagner argued, music was the direct unmediated expression of the unconscious, transcending mere representation wheterh as a so-called abstract or absolute aesthetic medium, or as a programmatic vehicle as in opera, one which could accompany words and pictures. Music was alleged naturally to possess the direct creative force sought by surrealism. It surpassed the conventional limitations of speech and illustration; the distinctions between the real and the imaginary.

But it was not until 1946 when André Breton argued in an essay entitled “Silence Is Golden” that music can be a powerful force for the achievement of “incandescence”; that music could reveal an inner music of poetic language. He recognized music as “independent of the social and moral obligations that limit spoken and written language”.

As Breton’s 1946 essay makes clear, John Cage’s writing of the 1950’s possessed close similarities to surrealist rhetoric and strategies. Cage’s approach to the continuity of compositional process and his celebration of indeterminacy are conceptual parallels to the surrealist manifestoes of the 1920’s Cage’s most famous work 4’33” from the 1954 can be regarded as the moral equivalent to Magritte’s 1926 Ceci n’est pas une Pipe. Both Cage and Magritte attempted to penetrate the essence of silence in a revolutionary manner.

The difficulty, of course, is that music, unlike writing and painting–the most familiar surrealist media, was never constructed on an illusion of realism; on the imitation of nature, strictly considered. Even when musical realism became an accepted notion in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, it was clearly an artificial convention.

In the early days of Romanticism, in the writings of Jean Paul, Wackenroder and E.T.A. Hoffmann (despite the surrealist’ open disregard for these writers), music held the power which Max Ernst sought to achieve through surrealism, to turn “topsy-turvy the appearances and relationships” of reality and appearance and address the “crisis of consciousness.” Music became the instrument of the fantastic. Surrealism in painting, as Georges Hugnet argued in 1936, aimed to appeal “to the imagination and fancy” and to take “man out of himself”. Music always had the inherent capacity to link life and the dream. It was traditionally the closest to the “invisible forces” that surrealism sought to capture. Magritte’s recognition of music’s power made him an exception to his fellow surrealists. Musical symbols, particularly as evidence of the hidden, reappear throughout Magritte’s oeuvre.

One reason that surrealism is a more difficult concept in terms of twentieth-century music goes beyond the essential differences between music and the other arts. Music’s inherent non-representational artificiality became exaggerated during the first half of the twentieth century. The dominant forces of musical modernism celebrated the abstract potential of music. Surrealism was a revolutionary movement. It wanted to engender liberation from the political and spiritual evils most powerfully mirrored in the experience of World War I. But it used realist techniques so that the surface of the work could be readily approached. The concurrent musical revolutionary impulse was the embrace of an even more counterintuitive approach to writing music. The attack on the bourgeois conventions and on the status quo in music took the form of atonality, the emancipation of dissonance, the use of “raw” sounds, and the other innovation which made the smug audience uncomfortable.

This trend in modernism struck the surrealists as elitist and as a symptom of a hated art for art’s sake attitude. There were in the 1920’s, however, alternative modernist musical movements which defied the elitist and arrogant tendencies of what eventually became the “orthodox” modernism of Schoenberg and his followers. The composers represented in this concert were chosen because their music 1) suggests contemporary strategies and approaches comparable to the visual and literary surrealism of Magritte; and 2) mirrors a rebellion against the high-handed modernist conceits of musical modernism which claimed the existence of a progressive historical process in the development of musical style and 3) sought to achieve a revolutionary impact on the audience by permitting the listener an immediate access to the work in a manner comparable to the work of the surrealist painters. This required a self-conscious distancing from modern academicism and historical tradition.

Andrew Souris experimented with collage and simplicity to construct a nearly surrealist narrative. Poulenc juxtaposed identifiable fragments and used the history of music much as a painter uses recognizable images to change their significance and penetrate their meanings. Likewise, Koechlin mixed the literary and the musical and poked fun at twentieth-century modernism by constructing a surrealist musical narrative. In Souris, Poulenc and Koechlin bizarre contrasts pierce the surface of so-called reality to level more akin to the experience of dreaming. Varése’s Arcana was inspired, as Varése wrote in 1925 to his wife, by a dream sequence:

I was on a boat that was turning around and around–in the middle of the ocean–spinning around in great circles. In the distance I could see a lighthouse, very high–and on top an angel

–and the angel was you– a trumpet in each hand. 

Alternating projectors of different colors: red, green yellow, blue–and you were playing Fanfare No. 1, trumpet in right hand. Then suddenly the sky became incandescent–blinding– you raised your left hand to your mouth and the Fanfare 2 blared. And the boat kept turning and spinning– and the alternation of projectors and incandescence became more frequent–intensified –and the fanfares more nervous–impatient… and then–merde–I woke up. But anyway they will be in Arcanes. 

(Enclosed with this letter was the short score of Arcana.)

By use of repetition and an unusual sequence of sounds, Varése transformed musical space and obliterated the difference of musical and unmusical sound. Musical space and time became revolutionized in a way that is viscerally evident of the listener. It is as startling and unsettling as the radical canvases that Magritte painted in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s. Like many surrealists, Varése paid overt homage to Paracelsus and the traditions of alchemy which sought to help humankind pierce through to the ultimate unity of existence. A quote from Paracelsus stands on the head of the score of Arcana.

Last but not least, the sense of time and space and the relationship of performer and listener to the experience of music are entirely transfigured in a surrealist manner by John Cage, one of the towering figures of American Twentieth-century culture. Written when surrealism was perhaps at its peak of popularity in America, Cage’s works from the 1950’s, including the concerto, mirror the revolutionary simplicity inherent in the tradition of surrealism. The performance tonight was intended as an 80th-birthday tribute to the composer; it now must be heard as the ASO’s memorial.

It is hoped that listeners to this concert who have looked at and thought about Magritte’s paintings, can find in their response to these five works of music–spanning the time frame of most of Magritte’s career–parallels which can assist in their reflections not only on surrealism and Magritte but about twentieth-century musical modernism and the nature of music in contemporary life. Magritte and the composers on this program all sought to engender an active critical sensibility through art which ultimately could encourage a craving for unity, peacefulness, freedom, justice and creativity yet unachieved in this century.

Collage

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Surrealism and Music? The Musical World Around René Magritte, 1930-1975 performed on Nov 13, 1992 at Carnegie Hall. 

Andre Souris (1890-1970) was one of this century’s most eminent Belgian musical figures. For most of his creative life he was attached to the surrealist movement. Souris was a close friend and colleague of Rene Magritte (despite periodic rifts toward the end of their careers). In 1926 Souris and a fellow Belgian, Paul Hooreman, started a quasi-surrealist journal called Musique and experimented with chance music. By 1927 both Souris and Rene Magritte collaborated with the leader of the Belgian surrealists, Paul Nouge, on the surrealist publication Adieu a Marie. As the leadership not only of Magritte and Souris but of one of Magritte’s oldest friends, the founder of the Belgian Dada and Surrealist movements, the musician E.L.T. Mesens, indicated, what distinguished the Belgian surrealists from their Persian contemporaries was a deep interest in music. Magritte’s brother Paul was a musician. The “official” photographic portrait of the Belgian Surrealists fating from 1034 included both Mesens and Souris as well as Magritte. Their main spokesman and theorist Nouge did not share Andre Breton’s more classical surrealist disregard of music which Breton himself later disavowed in 1946.

Souris worked with Nouge in the theater and set many of his poems. At a concert staged by Belgian surrealists in January 1929, Nouge introduced the works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Milhaud, Stravinsky and Honegger (as well as Souris) on the program which Souris had selected. The hall was graced by twenty paintings by Magritte. In 1946, working with the surrealist poet Paul Eluard, Souris began his lone career as a film composer, writing the score for a film on the surrealist painter Paul Delvaux.

Souris’ concept of surrealism in music took the work of Satie as a starting point. He extended Satie’s effort to de-mystify music and simplify it. In 1925 Souris wrote “The coming of a new art hardly concerns us. Art has been demobilized elsewhere—one must rather live”. Souris’ conceptual effort to undermine the distinction between art and life places his work from 1920’s and 1930’s in a continuum which later would include Varese and Cage.

In the work on this program, parody, a Satie-like simplicity and nearly random linkages all can be heard. Like surrealist painters, the technique of collage—using found and banal elements in a radical extension of a practice first perfected by the cubist—is used by Souris to challenge the expectation of temporal art and structured form. In order to debunk the distinction between art and life, the contrast between concrete experience and aesthetic imagination—between intention and randomness—had to be challenged. In this work minimal textured and contrast occur in sequence, as if by spontaneous association. The music is stripped of the pretense of a formal coherence other than an apparently “automatic” association. This work, therefore sounds most like that quintessential surrealist game, the “”exquisite corpse”, in which a composition is made on a piece of folder paper by separate individuals each of whom has no idea of what the preceding person has done. The absurd and naïve (in the use of solo instruments and repetition) can be found in this work. They are cloaked behind a folk-like ordinariness and sparseness.

Souris, apart from his role in Belgian surrealism, was prolific as a theorist in the psychology and phenomenology of music, a historian (of lute tablature), a teacher, and a conductor. Particularly after 1945, despite a career as composer and conductor which took him regularly to London, Souris exerted considerable influence over the musical life of Belgium.

Suite from Les Biches

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Surrealism and Music? The Musical World Around René Magritte, 1930-1975 performed on Nov 13, 1992 at Carnegie Hall. 

Despite the fact that Andre Breton, the most prominent surrealist writer, despised Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), the great French writer and cultural personality, as a “notorious fake”, during the mid 1920’s the experimentalism of Cocteau, the composer Erik Satie and a group of young French composers who looked to Cocteau and Satie as inspirations—“Les Six” (Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, Auric, Durey and Tailleferre)—had much in common with the first wave of surrealist thinking of the 1920’s.

Cocteau admired Satie for his daring and simplicity. “Les Six” and the surrealists both rejected the pretensions of visual and musical impressionism, of Debussy and Renoir. Likewise the complex and mystifying surface of modernism, particularly in music, seemed to Cocteau and the surrealists as a continuation of an artificial, nearly Wagnerian elevation of the aesthetic over the everyday; the perpetuation of a dated dichotomy between experience and ordinary life on the one hand and imagination and art on the other. Furthermore, both groups were driven by a sense of generational revolt, a need to shock and pierce the surface of bourgeois respectability.

In 1920 Cocteau organized a “Spectacle-Concert” in Paris. This even imitated a music-hall evening. It was filled with dancing, clowns, acrobats, and theater. Cocteau sought to infuse the staid concert ritual with aspects of the séance and the circus. Popular and dance music was included alongside works by Poulenc and Milhaud. As Souris’ surrealist concert of 1929 later underscored, what avowed musical surrealists shared with Poulenc and Milhaud was an attraction to prepetition, circularity, spontaneity, playfulness and the rejection of essentially German notions of music development and progression in favor of techniques of abrupt juxtaposition and satire.

Throughout the 1920’s, however, the differences among “Les Six”, the modernist credos of Busoni and Schoenberg and the views of surrealism remained blurred. Despite an aversion to the Wagnerian ambitions of Schoenberg’s musical modernism, the surrealists, even the neo-classicists and the followers of Satie and Cocteau all shared the mantle of revolution and the desire to shock and overturn what was perceived as the tyranny and superficiality of received taste, rationality, convention, morality and consciousness. Underlying these artistic movements was, after all, profoundly critical political sensibility. Art needed to serve the transformation of the political system and cultural values and conceits which had resulted in the senseless carnage of World War I.

Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) wrote Les Biches in 1923 as a ballet for Serge Diaghilev and his “Ballet Russe”. It was premiered in 1924 with sets by Marie Laurencin. The Choreography was by Nijinska. The ballet scenario was essentially surrealist in the sense that it was, in Milhaud’s words, the result of “full fantasy” unencumbered by the usual conscious effort “to describe, to suggest, to express, to comment upon”. The blurring of the distinctions between reality and imagination and between logic and fantasy was an explicit intention of Les Biches. Even its title mirrored the inextricable unity inherent in language use. The title directly exploded the surface appearance of contradiction. It refers at one and the same time to hind, the female deer, and darling. In line with the surrealists’ defense of “automatic” writing and free association, the title came to Poulenc spontaneously in a taxi. The ballet was decidedly erotic and playful.

Les Bandar-Log

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Surrealism and Music? The Musical World Around René Magritte, 1930-1975 performed on Nov 13, 1992 at Carnegie Hall. 

Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) was the grand old man of the French avant-garde and the unsung hero of the twentieth century French music. Koechlin’s longevity, extraordinary productivity, eclecticism and reputation as theorist and teacher (Poulenc studied counterpoint and composition with him from 1921-1924) all have failed to rescue his music from oblivion. Few Twentieth-century figures in music, however, present as fascinating and subtle a subject for exploration and rediscovery. In the context of a concert inspired by the work of a Belgian surrealist who spent almost all of his life in Belgium, it is ironic that perhaps Koechlin’s greatest triumph as a composer occurred in Brussels during the 1930’s.

In 1933 Koechlin wrote a ballet L’Errante for the “Ballet Russe,” choreographed by Balanchine with sets by the surrealist painter Pavel Tchelitchew. Like the surrealists, Koechlin shared sympathies with communism. In the interwar period he sought to write music for “the people”. Koechlin’s own estimate of his artistic credo revealed further similarities with surrealism. Surface style was of little concern. Rather his art was “dictated” by the interior imagination, by “intuitive power”, and by an “unpremeditated” instinct. At the same time a quite traditional sense of form emerges from his works which might be compared with the compositional and imagistic conservatism of the nearly photographic pictorialism of many surrealist painters.

As Les Bandar-Log illustrates, Koechlin possessed an uneasy relationship to musical modernism comparable to pictorial surrealism’s rejection of many modernist aesthetic strategies. It was the way in which musical elements were organized and formulated rather than the distinct originality of style which concerned Koechlin. Koechlin, like many surrealists also embraced cinema. Among his most interesting works is a work entitled Seven Stars Symphony in seven movements (entitled Douglas Fairbanks, Lillian Harvey, Greta Garbo, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings, and Charlie Chaplin).

Les Bandar-Log is part of Koechlin’s nearly lifelong effort to set Kipling’s The Jungle Book to music. It was first sketched in 1923 and written out in 1939 and orchestrated in 1940. Subtitled “Scherzo of the Monkey’s”, it is based on “Kaals Hunting” from Volume 1 of Kipling’s book. It was premiered in 1946 in Brussels and is perhaps Koechlin’s best known work. It was recorded by Antal Dorati in the mid 1960’s and used for a ballet by Anthony Tudor.

This work shares with surrealism a sharp critical intent toward assumptions of the communication of meaning through sounds, images, and words. Koechlin utilizes nearly all the stylistic elements of twentieth-century musical modernism. Taking the idea of the monkeys making sounds in the forest as his premise, Koechlin attacked the delusions and arrogant claims of twelve-tone writing, neo-classicism, polytonality and atonality. It is as if Koechlin approached this work as a surrealist painter who generates the appearance of a narrative (much in the way Magritte did in the painting entitled The Murderer Threatened from 1927) and who then inverts meanings, time and spatial relations for the viewer. Taking the ironic subject of the “primitive” monkey, Koechlin opens the work with a depiction of the “calm of the luminous morning”. This calm is interrupted by the “procedures of modern harmony”. The monkeys are vain and seek to display their “secrets”. They lurch from romanticism to neo-classicism and “pretend” to return to Back. However within this satire “there is a genuine homage to polytonal language and even to atonality”.

Koechlin, like Magritte, toyed with different styles—photographic realism, impressionism, cubism—but in the end returned to his own virtuosic vocabulary. The orchestration is splendid. Out of distorted juxtapositions and a seemingly disjointed and allusive set of episodes comes a coherent musical reconfiguration. An underlying unity is revealed through disparate parte. Despite themselves, the monkeys manage to make the forest sing. Koechlin mixes illustration with transformation, through a sequence of musical images mediated by reaction of the listener and the plot of the score (e.g., how the monkeys act and finally flee the arrival of the lords of the jungle). Musical illustration and narrative are turned on their heads through the manipulation of the modernist strategies which depict human behavior as if humans were monkeys in a jungle. A dreamlike and almost cinematic effect is achieved.