The Musical Romance of Childhood

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Musical Romance of Childhood, performed on April 5, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In today’s concert, several historical threads work in conjunction with one another. All three works mark the apogee of the nineteenth-century tradition of so-called program music. Until recently it been an accepted premise of music history that during the nineteenth century a great divide took place within European music. On the one side stood composers such as Brahms who supposedly believed in the autonomy of musical expression and meaning, and who chose to stress the continuities in instrumental music between the work of Haydn and Mozart and that of the first Romantic generation of Schumann and Mendelssohn. On the other side of the divide were Liszt, Wagner and their followers, who saw in not only the early Romantics but in Beethoven as well an essential dramatic and narrative logic in music. For them contemporaneity and modernity meant the fulfillment of a logical compatibility between music and poetry and music and drama. Instead of believing a storyline, an emotion, or a visual description as being extraneous to or at odds with “pure” musical expression, this group of nineteenth-century composers and aestheticians believed that modernity required an integration of disparate art forms, using music as the fundamental unifying factor. Their belief in music’s supreme ability to represent and divulge human experience stemmed from the striking philosophical prestige accorded to it as the highest of the arts by Hegel and Schopenhauer earlier in the century.

As we proceed to revise our understanding of the nineteenth century, what seemed to have been irreconcilable differences on a philosophical plane turn out in hindsight to have been more narrowly political and personal. We have now come to appreciate the narrative dimension in what were once regarded as models of pure musical expression in Mozart and Haydn. Formalism no longer seems so absolute, and conversely, narrative music no longer seems quite so structurally dependant on extra-musical logics, as the successful misapplication of Strauss to diverse modern contexts, such as film, have made apparent. Brahms and Wagner seem to possess affinities which would have never been considered by previous generations.

But when the works on today’s program were composed, the rift between program music and absolute instrumental music had not yet been called into question. The employment of large-scale orchestral forms in the service of telling a story, describing a scene, or illustrating an emotion was controversial. For many of the most sophisticated advocates of musical culture, this kind of post-Lisztian orchestral music was a telling sign of the vulgarity of the age and the decline in standards of taste. The symphonies of Tchaikovsky, for example, even though they lacked precise literary programs, were derided as hysterical and bombastic outpourings of human sentiment, unrefined by the formal discipline which was considered indispensable to beauty in music.

The collapsing of the opposition between Brahms’s symphonies on the one hand and the tone poems of Richard Strauss on the other derives from a line of inquiry that was rarely pursued in the nineteenth century but which has become important in the late twentieth century. If we consider the musical culture of the past not from the point of view of the composer but of the listener, and approach music’s reception as a historical process, we realize that in the nineteenth century–an age without the phonograph or the moving picture–audiences (aestheticians not withstanding) listened visually and narratively. A composer may have offered up something called a symphony identifiable only by its formal structure. But that did not mean that audiences flocked to symphony concerts merely to respond to formal achievement. The intensity with which the nineteenth-century audience listened reveals the extent to which music pervaded and inspired the full range of daily experience and feeling. Audiences saw pictures, heard stories, and experienced deep emotional responses, conjuring deep personal associations from instrumental music, no matter the composer, without apology. What the advocates of program music sought to do was to harness this ongoing process more effectively.

When the young Richard Strauss left the Brahmsian model behind him and began writing orchestral tone poems he became an enfant terrible for conservative critics and audiences, but his craftsmanship was so astonishing that even his worst detractors had to admire his command of musical form. All of the tone poems reveal a debt to symphonic writing and classical procedures in their explicitly literary programs (Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Also Spoke Zarathustra). But even Strauss pushed the tolerance of his critics, first with Ein Heldenleben, and then with Symphonia Domestica in 1903. In this work, which has been vilified and ridiculed, Strauss pushes the possibility of description and narration through instrumental music to the extreme. But rather than see this as an extravagant and self-indulgent display of narcissism as some would have it, the Symphonia Domestica may be one of the most ambitious though admittedly perverse challenges to smug assertions of good taste. This work is radical in a way that we generally reserve as a description for modernist experimentalists. Strauss uses irony to extend something self-evident in the work of Robert Schumann: the use of music as the expression of subjective and highly personalized emotion. What is really the difference between Schumann’s private fantasies and illusions which dominate his early piano music and the first person narrative which Strauss offers us? The mundane and precise nature of the program in fact forces us to do more than look for illustration, but to transcend evident illustration and respond to a musical experience–precisely the objective of the opponents to program music. Strauss joins the company of some of his literary contemporaries, such as Henry James (whose masterpiece The Ambassadors was also published in 1903) and later James Joyce, who struggled to represent human psychology through using an astonishing wealth of seemingly trivial and mundane detail. In the cases both of Strauss and his contemporary writers, the quandary was the same: how can one convey interior human responses to life through an aesthetic medium. Rather than escape into abstraction Strauss went the other way.

Indeed, by the time of Joyce’s generation, Strauss’s outrageous experiment had become more commonplace. Charles Loeffler might have been the object of some proper Bostonian’s ire and contempt because of an absence of austerity and rectitude in his music, but no one could accuse Sir Edward Elgar of bad taste. It is also easy to forget that even earlier, in the 1890s, Antonin Dvorák , upon his return from America, wrote a series of tone poems including one called A Hero’s Life. At the end of his career, the great protégé of Brahms recognized the potential in the new forms put forward by the young radical Richard Strauss. The conductor of the first performance of Dvorák ’s tone poem (performed by the ASO five years ago) was none other than Gustav Mahler. The distance between Mahler’s Fifth symphony and Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica is perhaps narrower than we might like to admit.

If program music became as obsessed as literature at the turn of the last century with the representation of internal realities through an extension of illustration, one would expect that the subject matter would move away from the historical and mythological to the personal and autobiographical. That is exactly what happened. This turn inwards was firmly grounded in alarming observations of the changing exterior world. By the end of the century, the transformation of the European and American landscape was unprecedented. The prominence of urban centers with their subsequent social problems and the effects of industrial growth were the external factors that gave rise to an obsessive reflection on the meaning of history and the direction of these radical changes. Whether literate Europeans and Americans turned to Marx or Darwin, the question “Where are we headed?” in response to the runaway pace of societal development was matched by an equally logical question: “What have we left behind?” It is not surprising that childhood as a part of a self-conscious examination of the human psyche became a compelling subject for many artists and thinkers at that time, and that just then Lewis Carroll came along to encrypt children’s desire and terror in complex rhymes and imagery, and Freud sought to reveal a startling picture of the beginnings of mental life.

Children, no longer perceived as merely unfinished adults, were idealized by some as being in a state of nature and innocence, much as the countryside was idealized as a pastoral landscape undefiled by the city. The process of their corruption in the course of maturity constituted the record of the adult’s current psychological state. An examination of memory and perhaps a return to or preservation of childhood therefore became, and remains today, an important part of the interior psychic struggle among adults to live in the world. The three works on today’s program use three different approaches to the question of how one preserves or discards memory and how one assesses the cost of growing up. What differentiates, however, the musical treatment of childhood and childhood memory in the early twentieth century from, for example, the evocation of childhood in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister is that the sense of distance and loss is more profound and the desire to preserve the child in oneself more apparent. Maturity has been found unfulfilling and as a result childhood idealized. As listeners left the daily routine of their lives behind and chose voluntarily to flock into concert halls to be transported by sound alone away from the routines and burdens of their daily life, they welcomed music’s capacity to evoke the nostalgic charm, the intensity, confusion, and tumult as well as the poignancy of youth.

Music of Conscience

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music of Conscience, performed on Feb 25, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Rarely in history have music and politics confronted one another with as much intensity as in our own century. This confrontation reached its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, the era of Hitler and Stalin. It had its roots, however, in the years before the First World War. Musical modernism, particularly in the form which evolved form the work of Arnold Schoenberg but also from that of Igor Stravinsky and his allies, was viewed both by its proponents and antagonists as motivated in part by politics. One can hear an explicit critique of the past in musical modernism–in its use of dissonance, its extreme extension and even rejection of tonality, and its incorporation of vernacular musical elements including folk music and jazz. That critique was directed at a perceived status quo of complacent, middle-class patrons and audiences whose presumed liberal beliefs masked a misplaced enthusiasm for capitalism, autocracy, and chauvinism. Musical modernists sought to rescue art from what they saw as stifling conditions, including the tyranny of late nineteenth-century aestheticism (a self-indulgent claim that art was only about beauty and itself), a commercially manipulated mass culture, and an elitist mésalliance, also inherited from the nineteenth century, between the tenets of “high” musical culture and a social political system which seemed to thrive on inequality and injustice for the European masses.

In their critique of culture and society, the musical revolutionaries of the early twentieth century sought to craft a new musical language and style consistent with the apparent contradictions of modern life. That meant using modernity against itself and not resorting to a stagnant or predicable continuation of the musical language of late nineteenth-century Romanticism. After World War I, a heated and deeply personalized war of words and music erupted. In one camp were the musical conservatives such as Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss. On the side of the progressives were, in addition to Schoenberg, Ferrucio Busoni, Franz Schreker, and a host of pioneering critics and writers. In Germany, these aesthetic wars were fought against the backdrop of the shaky Weimar republic which emerged out of the defeat of the German military forces in 1918. In the new Soviet Union, a comparable struggle was taking place, not so much between Romanticism and modernism but between modernism and socialist realism. These aesthetic conflicts in Germany and the Soviet Union also extended beyond the realm of music into art, architecture, and literature.

In the tumultuous and unstable environment of post-World War I Europe, the cross-currents of debate over what constituted an appropriate musical aesthetic for the twentieth century coincided with the beginnings of fascism in Italy and Germany and the eventual triumph of Stalinism in the Soviet Union. It is in this crucible that the composers on tonight’s program worked and fashioned their outlook as artists and citizens. The 1930s only deepened the conflicts. Hitler came to power in 1933 and by 1938 the pervasiveness and gravity of Nazism were fully apparent. In the Soviet Union, the show trials of the 1930s and a non-aggression pact with Hitler bore witness to the totalitarian nature of Stalin’s regime. The Allied victory in 1945 put an end to the war, but it did not invalidate the premises at the heart of the cultural and political debates. As Jewish Chronicle demonstrates, progressive Germans, dismayed at the weakness of post-World War II efforts at denazification, feared a resurgence of fascism in the form of neo-Nazism.

The search by twentieth-century composers for musical meaning that was both relevant to the contemporary context and politically progressive was lent further impetus by the events of the Cold War. Hanns Eisler, who had fled to the United States form Germany, was called before the House Un-American Activities committee. The proceedings against him in 1948 occasioned a concert by his friends and supporters which took place in New York fifty years ago this Saturday. Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Roy Harris, and Roger Sessions among other participated, but despite the efforts of these artists and such other notables such as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Pablo Picasso, and Jean Cocteau, Eisler was expelled from the United States.

Although Jewish Chronicle was a collaboration of East and West German composers, it was not altogether successful as an effort of reconciliation between the two alternative approaches to constructing an anti-fascist post-war German. Hartmann, for example, an unequivocal anti-Nazi, withheld permission to perform the work for years, in part because of his ambivalence about the German Democratic Republic, with which Eisler and Paul Dessau were closely associated.

It is tempting at first to accept a reductive opposition that equates musical modernism with progressive attitudes to politics and an adherence to neo-Romanticism with a sympathy for fascism. But like his contemporary Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler was troubled by the fact that modernist music could not reach, however didactically, even middle-class audiences, let alone the masses. For Eisler, the goal was to find a way to compose new music that was at once free of commercialism and sentimentality and yet accessible and liberating to more than a sophisticated and somewhat pretentious elite. But because of the close association between conservative musicians and Nazi cultural policy, this “third way” proved to be an elusive and difficult option, and resulted in some ironic ventures for those like Eisler and Weill who sought to write a new kind of music that bridged the concert hall, the cabaret, and the street. Before the war Eisler had found an ideal medium for this goal in German film, but later found himself in the ultra-commercialist Hollywood film industry. He never ceased, however, to capitalize on the advantages of film to make a compelling artistic and political statement: his best-known score is for Alai Resnais’s searing portrait of the concentration camps, Night and Fog (1956).

From our present perspective at the end of this century, these controversies may appear dated, especially since we are surrounded by a wide and seemingly apolitical eclecticism in which late Romantic gestures subsist side by side with new compositions that sustain the legacy of Schoenberg. Tonight’s concert, however, is not an effort at remembrance. The works we perform tonight were motivated by past politics and a discrete historical moment, but they continue to communicate nearly a half century later the intensity and beauty of great musical art as well as the power and profound significance of the historical issues which lay behind their composition. The concentration camp remains more than an image of memory.

The predicaments facing composers at mid-century, precisely because of the politics involved, were also personal and involuntary. Each of the composers on tonight’s program was personally caught in the maelstrom of terror, intimidation, and propaganda. Hanns Eisler was born in Leipzig in 1898. His father was a well-known philosopher and his brother was a very successful journalist. He studied with Schoenberg and in 1926 joined the German Communist Party. He eventually broke with Schoenberg, for whom he never lost profound respect, and in the 1930s began to work with Bertolt Brecht. Since he was both of Jewish descent and a Communist, Eisler was force to flee in 1933. His music was banned by the Nazis. He spend much of the 1930s in America, where he taught at the New School before joining Ernst Toch, Thomas Mann, Franz and Alma Mahler Werfel in Los Angeles. The last period of Eisler’s life, the years after 1949, was spent in East Germany, where Eisler worked vigorously on behalf of a new education system and that country’s musical life. For Eisler, music and politics remained inextricable. He believed the task of the musician was not to detach himself from the mundane, but rather to fulfill an obligation to speak out through art on behalf of a just political system and against tyranny. Prolific until the end of his life, he died in 1962. His Deutsche Sinfonie represents a synthesis of his music and politics. It can with little doubt be considered his magnum opus and most lasting large-scale work.

The first work on this program, Jewish Chronicle, serves as an echo of the political issues that inspired the Deutsche Sinfonie. These specific events which brought this work into being–the outbreak of anti-Semitism of 1959 in Cologne–took place at a time when Eisler was in the twilight of his career. Boris Blacher, Eisler’s somewhat younger contemporary, who was instrumental in organizing this unique collaboration of five composers and one poet, has a markedly different history than Eisler. Blacher was born in 1903 in China into a well-to-do German family of Baltic descent. He moved to Germany in 1922. Unlike Eisler, Blacher was not forced to flee when the nazis came to power, but managed to keep working in Germany until 1938. He was not entirely “Aryan” but he had the support of powerful individuals, among then the conductor Karl Böhm, who used his influence in the Nazi regime to protect the composer. Blacher continued to explore his own modernist aesthetic credo (which included a special affection for jazz), but at the same time, he struggle to exist under the Nazis. Some of his music continued to be performed until 1940. That year, the facts about Blacher’s maternal grandmother, the daughter of baptized Jews, were confirmed and Blacher’s tenuously peaceful co-existence collapsed. He lived out the war in Germany in fear. His music disappeared from German programs. Blacher survived and played a significant role in the life of post-war West Germany until his death in 1975.

Rudolf Wagner-Regény, who wrote the second movement of Jewish Chronicle, was born like Blacher outside of Germany. Wagner-Regény was raised in a German community in what was then Hungary and is now Romania. He was closely associated with the designer Caspar Neher, who found fame through his association with Kurt Weill. In the twenties, Wagner-Regény became a German citizen and married a woman who was half-Jewish. He functioned reasonably well as a composer during the Third Reich. His works were performed by Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan. In 1941 an opera of his was premiered in Vienna, where Wagner-Regény’s friend, the local Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, was well-known for his penchant for high culture. The premiere of this opera inspired the ire of Goebbels. As punishment, Wagner-Regény was drafted into the military in 1943. He was fortunate enough to land a desk job in the army and survive. As a composer, Wagner-Regény struggled to find a musical language distinct from the extremes of modernism but without any association with fascist aesthetics. He eventually found the most sympathetic environment after the war to be East Berlin, where he died in 1969.

Paul Dessau, who wrote the last movement of the Jewish Chronicle and worked with Hans Werner Henze on the fourth movement, was born in 1894. Like Eisler he was of Jewish origin, but unlike Eisler, his Jewishness was a central part of his identity. He was the grandson of a Cantor. In 1933 he emigrated to Palestine and came to New York in 1939. In the early 1940s he met Bertolt Brecht with whom he worked extensively. When Brecht cam to the DDR and settled in east Berlin, Dessau followed him. Like Eisler’s, Dessau’s music ranges across the genres from popular song to opera and music for the radio. But Dessau’s open allegiance to Judaism led him down different paths; for instance, he wrote liturgical music. In 1936 Dessau wrote an oratorio on a Judaic text written by Max Brod, the writer and friend of Franz Kafka. After the war, Dessau was one of the few individuals who were free to travel between West and East Berlin, where he died in 1979. As in the case of Eisler, music and politics in Dessau achieved a symmetry and clarity that make his artistic accomplishment engaging and relevant to this day.

Hans Werner Henze, who recently celebrated his seventieth birthday, is the youngest composer represented on tonight’s program. He was born in 1926; his formative youth was deeply marked by the era of Nazism. In his autobiography, published in 1996, Henze recalls growing up in a context dominated by the Hitler Youth. Henze especially remembers how everyone remained silent about Kristallnacht. His father was wounded early in the war, and he himself was drafted in 1944. The impact of the Third Reich on Henze was to make the issue of politics a central aspect of his life and work, particularly in term so his construction of modernism. Like many of his generation, the experience of Nazism made the vocabulary of musical modernism a necessity as an act of defiance against the past, but Henze is particularly distinguished by the originality and range of his accomplishment. His artistic experimentation was defined by a consistent engagement with contemporary politics, ranging form the Cuban revolution to events in Chile in the 1970s. Henze revered Paul Dessau’s successful reconciliation of the task of the composer and the obligations of the artist as citizen. Like other contemporaries in the worlds of post-war German literature and painting, Henze rejected the convenient escape form political engagement offered by the simplistic dichotomies of Cold War politics. He actively pursued his role as a voice of conscience for post-war Germans.

The contribution of Karl Amadeus Hartmann to Jewish Chronicle may perhaps be the finest artistic moment in this extraordinary piece, and in many respects, of all the composers on tonight’s program Hartmann was the most extraordinary individual. Unlike Blacher or Wagner-Regény, he refused all participation in Nazi Germany, yet he did not emigrate. His inner resistance to Nazism was unparalleled. Much of Hartmann’s music was written in secret during the 1930s and early 1940s and then re-emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, often in revised forms. The integrity of his politics and personal behavior is matched only by the unique power and clarity of his music. Without a doubt, Hartmann is one of the finest composers of this century, whose moment of proper recognition is yet to come. Hartmann’s example as an artist of conscience is all the more remarkable because he was entirely “Aryan” with no reason to resist collaboration except for an unimpeachable ethical sensibility.

We are accustomed now to judge music in a manner that divorces a work entirely from the context in which it was written and from the occasion for which it was written. We carelessly place labels of approbation or criticism on works as if they were sealed off, as it were, from other dimensions of life. Defending works that are not in the standard repertory by citing their “good intentions” in non-musical terms if often done apologetically. In the same vein most critical discussions render the extra-musical meanings connected to those works we now deem masterpieces irrelevant. Greatness in music is often defined as an ability of a work of music to transcend origins and historical contexts.

Tonight’s concert suggests several alternatives. The music heard tonight is music that deserves more than the occasional performance. It does so not because it transcends its context, but precisely because it inspires future generations to make contact with history in a way that only music can accomplish. To deny the extra-musical circumstances of this music would be to insult its power. But to define that musical power as being comparable to the impact of a memorable journalistic or documentary photograph is to belittle the aesthetic achievement of the composers. Perhaps the best parallel to the music on tonight’s program is Picasso’s Guernica, which we revere as a work of art created as an act of outrage and of conscience. The ethical force of Guernica is inextricable from and synonymous with Picasso’s formalist achievements in that work. Eisler’s Deutsche Sinfonie is one of this century’s greatest choral and symphonic works: long after audiences can recognize the tunes for what they once meant, this work will move and inspire listeners. Jewish Chronicle, which is an exception to the rule that a work of music written by many composers–even great ones–rarely succeeds (compare, for example, the F-A-E Sonata by Dietrich, Schumann, and Brahms), reminds us that powerful music must and can be written in response to political challenges. The music of the composers on tonight’s program reminds us that artists, precisely because of their special gifts and talents, must speak out through their art.

Richard Strauss’s Die agyptische Helena

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Richard Strauss’s Die agyptische Helena, performed on Jan 18, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Librettists have a strange habit of disappearing from view as individuals in their own right. For instance, everyone knows that Lorenzo Da Ponte collaborated with Mozart of three of the greatest operas ever written–Le Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Cosí fan tutte–but his name survives primarily as a result of his association with the great composer. Of all the librettists who should not be subject to such a fate, Hugo von Hofmannsthal is the first who should come to mind. In German-speaking culture, Hofmannsthal retains a stature the equivalent of his musical collaborator, Richard Strauss. Independently of his many well-known works with Strauss, Hofmannsthal was an Austrian man of letters with outstanding accomplishments in poetry, prose, and drama. He was a founder of the Salzburg Festival. Even if he had never worked with Richard Strauss, his writing would be required reading throughout Germany and Austria.

Therefore, even though we often mistrust (with some reason) the self-evaluations of authors and composers, the fact that Hofmannsthal believed the libretto of Die ägyptische Helena to be the best he had produced should make us take a close look at it. The ambivalent response to this work as an operatic text is not recent; as James Miller points out in this afternoon’s program notes, there is some uncertainty about its quality, particularly in terms of its adaptability to music. But as Bryan Gilliam aptly notes, the libretto has a rather peculiar genesis. What started out to be an effort at comedy turned in the course of its development into something quite different, something penetrating and psychologically resonant. Die ägyptische Helena is indeed a serous reflection on love, marriage, and forgiveness. Its subject matter, presented in a deceptively simple mythological vehicle, connects it within the operatic repertoire to everything from Figaro to Lulu. Hofmannsthal’s decision to make actions of the original story’s phantom Helen into those of the “real” Helen changed the potential for comedy and a farcical dynamic between stage and audience into a more direct opportunity to go beyond the surface of mere romance into the complexities and contradictions of love, sexuality, and marriage.

Contrary to popular opinion and instinct, these issues are not universal categories. True they seem to plague every culture and generation, but they do so in quite different ways. For the turn-of-the-century generation of Strauss (1864-1949) and Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), an idealized category of the feminine from early Romanticism and the Christian conception of marriage were compromised by the work of two seminal figures whose influence cast a long and permanent shadow over European thought and culture: Richard Wagner and Sigmund Freud. Wagner, himself no paragon of marital fidelity, put on stage a narcotic mixture of music, poetry, and drama that revealed to his middle-class audiences the inherent tragedy in the tension between the pursuit of true love and the constraints of everyday life, including human nature. If Kierkegaard understood the Christian notion of love and marriage to be a terrifying stricture through which an individual could display true faith in the sense of self-denial and psychic transformation, Wagner’s work suggested another alternative. The pursuit of the standard moral and ethical claims of mainstream contemporary Christian thought–which demanded love of family, hard work, and fidelity from the civilized European–suddenly appeared to be sacrifices without any redeeming features whatsoever, let alone salvation. Tristan und Isolde celebrates not only the tribulations of intense passion, but the idea that its experience is preferable over the failure to experience it, over death after a life without it. Wagnerian music and drama created a world of fantasy to which Europeans, trapped in the drab routines of respectable middle-class life, flocked. Wagner created an avenue of escape from the mundane into an arena of the heroic and the ecstatic, a space where each individual might realize the latent power of his own emotion and imagination. This is in party why Friedrich Nietzsche, Europe’s most articulate foe of Christianity, initially embraced Wagner, for he saw the composer as an apostle of an art which could transform modern Europe and cause it to cast off the shackles of Christian morality and connect itself once again to the sense of human power and passion celebrated by the ancient Greeks.

With the writings of Sigmund Freud (especially his Interpretation of Dreams which found their way into the media of literature, music, and painting), the traditional Christian denial of the sexual underpinnings of human behavior, the erotic and the Dionysian, was exposed and discredited in the eyes of the literature European public. What Max Weber called Entzauberung–the de-magification, as it were, of Western culture–reached its peak before 1914, suppressing both superstition and the hold of religion over the lives of modern, urban, European citizens. In this new context, the conventional claims and obligations of marriage, from the process of courtship to the raising of children, seem to collapse form their own obsolescence. Marriage rites, portrayed by Freud as dependent on the darkest sublimations of the human psyche, could be viewed as an act of hypocrisy, counteracting the true nature of humans, and extracting a toll of self-denial and deception that seemed ultimately destructive. The figure of the Bohemian flourished as bourgeois fantasy. In today’s parlance, the utopia of “family values” held little allure and plausibility. Cultural critics at the turn of the century argued that Europe was in the grip of a degenerate aesthetic, subverting all that modernity had sought to achieve in terms of civility, science, and societal progress. Nietzsche and Wagner, the heroes of the young, were seen as the chief culprits.

This fundamental reassessment of values influenced the making of art in which an explosive interest in human psychology and sexuality came to play a central role. Both Hofmannsthal and Strauss were keenly aware of how difficult it was in their own age to draw upon the traditions of artistic expression founded by the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century masters–Goethe and Mozart, for example. Hofmannsthal made his early reputation while still a teenager as one of the most compelling lyric talents to write in German, but by the early 1900s he experienced a profound crisis, in which he came to the conclusion that the concept of language and poetry with which he had begun was no longer relevant to his own time. Strauss, the son of a great horn player, grew up with a youthful enthusiasm for the sort of music his father favored. A precocious young man, he wrote in the conservative traditions we associate with Brahms, Schumann, and Mendelssohn. Like Hofmannsthal, Strauss too had an intense personal crisis, linked to an intense love affair with someone of whom his family did not approve. But personal and artistic transformation were synonymous events for both artists. In Strauss’s case his discovery of Wagner led to self-reinvention as a composer. A conservative now turned radical, he dazzled the world with his series of orchestral tone poems. After two failed attempts at both comic opera and tragic music drama imitative of Wagner, Strauss encountered sensational success with his operatic settings of Oscar Wilde and Hofmannsthal’s modernization of Elektra. These subjects certainly had special resonance for a public obsessed with sexual psychology and intricate relationships. By the end of the twentieth century’s first decade, both Strauss and Hofmannsthal were at the peak of their powers, and began their long collaboration, of which Die ägyptische Helena is the last fully completed product.

Yet here is where Strauss’s own story gets intricate. Despite his fascination with Wagner, Strauss was to his dying day not in accord with the fashions of the fin de siécle. For one thing, his true lifelong musical god was not Wagner at all, but Mozart. For another, in apparent contradiction with his Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan, and Salome, Strauss like Brahms was thoroughly comfortable with the very middle-class lifestyle that was so under siege among his fellow artists, writers, and thinkers. His greatest passion was card-playing, and his personality seemed so commonplace that Gustav Mahler, after hearing Salome, is reputed to have remarked how inconceivable it was that someone so ordinary and bourgeois, so interested in simple material comforts, could write such astonishing fresh and brilliant music. Strauss was no Bohemian; he fashioned his life not only on the model of Brahms but of Haydn: he considered himself the ultimate, highly disciplined craftsman.

Beneath the veneer of bourgeois ambition, egotism, and simplicity, there was in Richard Strauss a profound capacity for insight into the very contradictions and conflicts in values that characterized the modern human being and his culture. In this sense, Strauss did not indulge in the rebellion of the fin de siécle. With his marriage to Pauline d’Ahna (whom Strauss immortalized–not necessarily to her liking–in his autobiographical opera Intermezzo, with a libretto he wrote himself against Hofmannsthal’s advice), he entered into an obligation akin to Kierkegaard’s definition. His wife, once a great soprano, proved over time to be notoriously difficult, petty, and demanding. There is a famous anecdote associated with the premiere of Die ägyptische Helena, which recounts how when Strauss was trying to demonstrate a certain passage to the conductor Fritz Busch, Pauline kept disrupting the rehearsal by meddling onstage with the singers and their costumes. Strauss finally ceased conducting and, in the pregnant silence that followed, pronounced with characteristic irony the final line of Salome: “Kill that woman!” Nevertheless, unlike most of his contemporaries, Strauss saw in the self-discipline of martial fidelity and loyalty not the death of creativity, but its source. In the decade following the premiere of Die ägyptische Helena, Alban Berg set Frank Wedekind’s character of Lulu to music. Berg was supposedly the beneficiary of an ideal marriage, but as scholarship has since revealed, he had an intense and longstanding affair with the sister of Franz Werfel. No research, however, is likely to uncover any infidelity on Strauss’s part. The very nature of vacuous bourgeois family served Strauss as an environment in which a human being might reach his fullest powers of imagination and find the best possibilities for inspiration. The dialectic between the ordinary and the extraordinary was for Strauss the dialectic between mundane living and art. One did not miss the few opportunities to transcend the ordinary through art by squandering them on an artistic lifestyle. Strauss’s self-imposed discipline in his own private life created a wide interior expanse from which a profound recognition of human everyday suffering and desire could flow forth in music.

Hofmannsthal was therefore an ideal partner for Strauss. His command of language and deep respect for literary classicism was powerfully augmented by an unusual musical sensibility. In contrast t some observations, it can be said that few writers of that generation were possessed of as much connection to musical culture as Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Beginning with Der Rosenkavalier, their most famous and commercially successful collaboration, the two men wrote a whole series of operas about love, loyalty, and marriage. But as a result of these operas, Strauss the composer of Salome and Elektra was accused of reversing his musical development and becoming a conservative. Despite its success, Der Rosenkavalier was considered a manifesto against modernism. For most of the century the rest of Strauss’s output, particularly between the years 1914-45, were considered competent but not comparable to his earlier successes. He acquired the reputation of being a gifted composer who had peaked early and lived too long. Arabella, with a libretto which Hofmannsthal was never able to revise, became successful only as an echo of Der Rosenkavalier.

Today’s listener, however, should view the standard account and critical assessment of Strauss’s output with a hefty dose of skepticism. For when Strauss became the bête noir of all advocates of twentieth-century musical modernism (whether they were disciples of Stravinsky or Schoenberg), he still remained the only apostle of tonality and the Romantic gesture from whom one could not withhold respect. He hung around for the first half of the century like the ghost of Banquo, a painful reminder of a guilty conscience. Yet Strauss made his own pact with the devil by participating actively with and allowing himself to be used by the Nazis. While he was certainly not a rabid ideologue–his greatest motivations were his own venality and comfort, as well as a desire to take revenge on all his contemporaries who dismissed him–there is no way to defend his association with the Nazis. Strauss, who could render human frailty more compellingly than anyone, who rarely camouflaged the ambivalences and contradictions of human behavior and self-presentation, must not be rationalized by his biography. This aspect of Strauss’s life is relevant in part because modernist theorist such as Theodor Adorno have tried to link Strauss’s allegiance to the musical language he employed in Die ägyptische Helena with an aesthetic credo which was itself ethically compromised as a logical partner of fascism and oppression. This ideological linkage of aesthetic modernism and progressive anti-fascist politics itself needs to also be treated with skepticism, not so much to defend Strauss but to explain why composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Walter Braunfels, and Marcel Rubin–victims, émigrés, and in some cases, political progressives–shared Strauss’s anti-modern stance. Not every musical modernist was a progressive, and not every adherent to nineteenth-century musical romanticism was a fascist.

Since Strauss’s death, critical reassessment of his work has progressed much too slowly. There are some among us who have argued (without great acceptance) that Strauss’s work from the 1920s to the 1930s, particularly Die ägyptische Helena, are high points in his artistic career. His choice of musical language enhances not only the subject matter but Hofmannsthal’s verbal language. The filigree-like delicacy and complexity of Strauss’s orchestration and voice-writing always reveal the Mozart in him. No one at this afternoon’s concert should have any doubt about the premised shared by the artists on stage today that Die ägyptische Helena is not simply a curiosity or an interesting if flawed work by a great composer, but rather that it is the kind of masterpiece that needed a future generation to discover it and assign it to its proper place in the mutable canon of artistic acceptance.

The fact that the opera has seemed static to some perhaps reveals a reductive expectation of dramatic action. Strauss always urged conductors of his operas to take great care when dealing with the massive orchestration not to sacrifice the clarity of the sung words. As Mozart and particularly Wagner made evident, music’s greatest moment in combination with text is its capacity to augment and express inner thoughts that may not correspond to the spoken work, and in fact may occur in opposition to explicit expression: this is the ongoing internal dialogue that constituted our complex and ambivalent psychologies. On the operatic stage, thinking without actions becomes representable in a way that radically extends the possibilities of conventional theater. In this sense, a Strauss opera of the 1920s is comparable to reading one of the great psychological novels of the turn of the century–by Henry James, perhaps–in which the real events occur as internal perceptions, invisible to the external spectator but profoundly consequential.

Finally, in his mature years, Strauss achieved a synthesis of seemingly contradictory styles. His music reflects the same intense ability to transform and develop material that we so highly value not only in Mozart and Brahms, but in Wagner and Berg as well. To a 1920s public enraptured by modernism and aesthetic radicalism and obsessed with the irrational, Strauss offered a contribution of his own which indicates how much he ultimately ran against the grain of his times by being keenly aware of it. He abandoned all need to follow fashion, but sought through the operation and musical traditions he so cherished to compel his listeners to confront the possibilities and consequences of heir own autobiographical struggles. He urged them to find individuality and creativity not in a perpetual sequential search to recover the excesses of new desire, romance, and fulfillment, but to accept the challenge that mortality and morality offer us: to love, to marry, to live productively in a necessarily limited world, and yet still to transform loneliness, suffering, and disappointment not into resentments but into occasions for self-recognition, wisdom, and the discovery of otherwise unimaginable beauty. Hofmannsthal was right: not only does Die ägyptische Helena possess his finest libretto, but it offers the vehicle for one of Strauss’s most intensely introspective and alluring artistic statements. In Die ägyptische Helena, we encounter the genuine modern heir to Mozart: a composer who enables us, with the help of a great librettist, to experience our own human frailties and sufferings without dilution, using the archetypes of musical theater and mythology,. We should emerge from Die ägyptische Helena a bit more reflective about our own lives for that experience.

The Other Voice of Johannes Brahms

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Other Voice of Johannes Brahms, performed on Nov 30, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

As the centennial year marking the death of Johannes Brahms comes to a close, it is to be hoped that our appreciation for the remarkable range of Brahms’s character and music has deepened, as well as our understanding of his complex and changing role in the history of Western music. During his own lifetime, Brahms was maneuvered into a position as the antipode of Wagner, when in fact Brahms was among Wagner’s most earnest admirers. He was profoundly impressed by Wagner’s genius and craft. Indeed, Richard Heuberger, composer, critic, and disciple of Brahms, reported that Brahms held two works of dramatic music in particular regard: Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Brahms’s objection to Wagner was more directed at the cult, the personality, and the man, than at the composer. Two works on this afternoon’s program, Rinaldo and Triumphlied, hint at Brahms’s awareness of Wagner’s musical influence. However, Brahms’s admiration for Wagner’s dramatic music did not stop him from being cast as the arch-conservative and the proponent of so-called “absolute” music.

Before World War II, Arnold Schoenberg wrote a seminal essay entitled “Brahms the Progressive,” which inspired a new direction of interest in Brahms. He was heralded as the prophet of modernism and given credit for extending the techniques of classical style–particularly in the transformation and elaboration of thematic material–in ways which served as models for the innovative strategies of the Second Viennese School. The Wagnerian path, in which music was subordinated to a narrative framework and where repetition thinly camouflaged by the magic of extended harmonies led to a musical aesthetic of lavish neo-Romanticism, was unfavorably contrasted to the economy, density, and essential integrity of Brahms’s music.

More recently, a third image of Brahms has come into being. Modern scholars see Brahms as mirroring the deepest paradoxes of the nineteenth century. In many ways, Brahms was terrifyingly conscious of the weight of history. In him we may see an artist who responded with intense self-doubt to the facile claims of progress that marked nineteenth-century politics and historical theory. If Reinhold Brinkmann, writing in the 1990s, has linked Brahms to the idea of melancholy, the German critic and pedagogue Louis Ehlert made precisely the same point in 1880. It is one of Brahms’s singular achievements that his music can seem to satisfy those content with sentimentality as well as those in search of a Mahler-like recognition of the bittersweet and ironic. Our contemporary image of Brahms is of the philosophical musician, in whose works we hear, as the composer Mauricio Kagel once noted, the spirit of the Tragic Overture and the Academic Festival Overture simultaneously. Affirmation and doubt stand side by side in a way that is singularly compelling to a modern sensibility in which faith and sincerity seem extinct.

All of these images of Brahms contain some, but not all, of the truth; they demonstrated how resistant he has been historically to definitive assessments. Today’s program therefore seeks to complicate his legacy further by considering yet another aspect of Brahms’s life and achievement. Of all nineteenth-century European composers, Brahms was perhaps the most intensely curious and well-read. For all of Wagner’s penchant for writing prose works and delivering himself of opinions in writing, a cursory glance at the library of Brahms inspires awe and wonder. He once boasted as a young man that he spend all his money on books. The worlds of literature, philosophy, and art history were dear to him. In Brahms the composer, therefore, one always encounters Brahms the reader, and while few of his works carry an overt program, it is rewarding to consider what Brahms was thinking about in matters literary and philosophical when he wrote music. If indeed the two towering figures in late nineteenth-century music were Brahms and Wagner, perhaps the greatest contrast lies in Brahms’s personal integrity, his resistance to anti-Semitism, his determined association with progressive voices in his own time, particularly in Vienna, as opposed to the dishonest, spiteful, and racist fulmination of Wagner the poseur, that object of Nietzsche’s vitriolic reassessment.

Of Brahms’s often performed music, the most familiar is his chamber music, where intimacy, subtlety, and spiritual complexity are perhaps most appropriately expressed. The symphonies and concertos which are part of the standard repertory have been properly judged as works of chamber music writ large. Their scale emerges as the outgrowth of smaller constituent elements and gestures. There is very little in Brahms that is overtly theatrical, grandiose, or pretentious. Even the allure of Ein deutsches Requiem, for example, rests in Brahms’s ability to transform the evident monumentality of the sound into an intimate experiences for each listener. The works on this afternoon’s program are no different in this sense, but they have not shared the same popularity or favor as the composer’s other works.

But the rarity of these works in no way reflects upon their artistic value. Brahms’s acute self-criticism led him to destroy a great deal of unpublished music about six years before his death. Unlike other major figures in the history of music, there is probably no second-rate Brahms; in fact one suspects that Brahms was perhaps too rash. It is therefore not entirely accurate to identify these works as “lesser” Brahms, despite their relative obscurity in his canon. All three works date from the late 1860s, after Brahms permanently moved to Vienna. Although he lived in the city for over thirty years, he never identified himself with Vienna the way its native-born citizens did. He remained an outsider, a north German and a Protestant who was viewed with suspicion by many Viennese intellectuals, politicians, and musicians. He enjoyed the popular music of the city and he developed a close friendship with Johann Strauss the younger, whose music Brahms loved and admired. (There is a famous anecdote about Brahms’s writing out on a fan the opening notes to the “Blue Danube” Waltz with the phrase, “Alas, not by Brahms”.) Brahms’s alienation was further defined by political events. The Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War and the creation of a German empire, for example, was not an entirely welcome event in the Habsburg Empire, since Austria had been defeated in 1866 by the Prussians. Yet Brahms was delighted, as Frank Wedekind (a devoted admirer and author of Lulu) later immortalized in a 1909 play. Furthermore, in an age of burgeoning nationalism, sections of the German-speaking population of the multi-national Habsburg Empire began to dream of breaking away and becoming part of an All-German empire under Prussian leadership. From 1870 on, the political climate in which Brahms lived and worked in Vienna became increasingly divisive and strident.

The Song of Triumph is less known not because of its failings as a work of music, but because of its synthesis of political and religious sentiments. In the wake of two world wars, it is understandable that an unabashed celebration of a militarily powerful and unified Germany as a act associated with a Protestant theology would fall on unsympathetic ears in the English-speaking world. Likewise, Rinaldo is a text twice removed from the consciousness of audiences in America and England. Tasso’s and Ariosto’s epic romances have not been widely read in America or England since the eighteenth century and Goethe’s reworking has had no place in his English-language canon, insofar as there is one beyond Faust. Furthermore, the sound of Rinaldo–the reliance on male choir and solo tenor–has associations with the male choral societies of nineteenth-century Europe and America, a forgotten tradition closely related to German musical culture. At the beginning of this century the German-speaking men’s choral association in Buffalo proudly held the same toot as the prestigious Vienna men’s choral society: “Free and loyal in song and deed.” The Liebeslieder Walzer are of course among the most well-known of Brahms’s works, but are rarely performed in this arrangement by the composer. The orchestration of the waltzes is a fine example of how Brahms can easily retain the integrity of the scale of the waltzes while making elegant use of the wide range of sound available in a full orchestra.

The reception of works of music should not remain frozen in history; it takes time to vindicate works of music, to allow neglected masterpieces to emerge from the weight of historically contingent prejudices. The failure of Triumphlied and Rinaldo to become as well known and popular as they deserve can be largely attributed to matters of politics. The fin de siécle generation already in Brahms’s lifetime–not to speak of the generation that came of age at the turn of the century–found what they regarded to be the ideology of these works to be either foreign or unattractive. Additionally, a work like Rinaldo, Brahms’s closest effort at operation and dramatic music, complicates the neat polarity between Brahmsian absolute music and Wagnerian programmatic music. The anomaly of Rinaldo as well as the politics of the Triumphlied made these works increasingly obscure as the twentieth century wore on. But as the century finally draws to a close and we enter a second hundred years of engagement with the music of Brahms, these two neglected major works ought to take their rightful place. We may now take the opportunity to discover the power and beauty of these works, if only to enhance further our picture of this great musician and thinker to whom so many concerts have been dedicated in 1997.

Uptown/Downtown: American Music 1880-1930

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Uptown/Downtown: American Music 1880-1930, performed on Oct 22, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The American Symphony Orchestra, founded by Leopold Stokowski as a way of supporting American instrumentalists and composers, is pleased to begin its thirty-fifth season by presenting a program devoted to American music. The program we have chosen offers a wide spectrum of American music from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, all works closely associated with New York City. These compositions demonstrate the trials and triumphs experienced by American musicians who were committed to the enterprise of fashioning an American musical culture which could hold its own without apology against the daunting legacy of Europe–particularly German-speaking Europe, where all of the composers in tonight’s program pursued their musical education.

It is a truism to assert that by comparison to its European counterparts, America is a young nation. This country’s relative youthfulness, combined with the fact that it evolved substantially as a nation of immigrants, helped frame an issue that plagued American artists through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century: how might the distinctly American be defined and expressed? Was there and could there be a unique American counterpart to European cultural achievement in literature, painting, and music? If the voluntary and involuntary immigrants who came to America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought with them defined cultural heritages, discrete languages and societal traditions, what then would emerge, culturally speaking, from their interactions and their future in the new world? In literature, most American writers suffered from a peculiarly American form of what Harold Bloom has terms the “anxiety of influence”: the world of English letters was never far from the consciousness of American writers. Some, like Poe, James, and Wharton, mastered the greatest traditions of European fiction. But a distinctly American voice could also be discerned as the nation matured through the nineteenth into the twentieth century, particularly in the works of Emerson, Melville, Whitman, Twain, Cather, and Faulkner. That, however, did not dampen the sensibility that Europe remained the source an showcase of the highest literary achievement and refinement. One only needs to think of the many American writers who lived as expatriates in Europe during the twentieth century to remind ourselves of the persistent insecurity and ambivalence felt by many about American culture. The anglophilia of T.S. Eliot, for example, was an extreme incarnation of such cultural snobbery.

If the English language shared by Americans made identity a difficult issue for American writers, the American landscape did not make matters easier for American painters. Despite the achievements of the Hudson River school, American painters, perhaps until Abstract Expressionism in the mid-twentieth century, felt themselves in the shadow of both European traditions and European contemporaries. When we consider the canvases of Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, or Childe Hassam, our minds tend to drift immediately to the more famous contemporary French exponents of Impressionism. Even the work of the Ashcan school seems less interesting to us than historically parallel European movements. Twentieth-century modernism began as a European phenomenon. Decades later, when we look at the work of Burgoyne Diller from the 1930s, we easily detect the European influence, in this case of Piet Mondrian. Only in the 1940s did American art begin to seem distinctive to both American and European eyes.

In the area of music the circumstances tell a somewhat different story. In music, the influence of immigration would make its first and deepest mark on forms that would emerge as definitely American. That creative transformation is most evident in such phenomena as ragtime, Tin Pan Alley, and jazz. In large measure as a result of the influence of African Americans, by the end of the nineteenth century America had already developed original forms of popular music. But genteel music, both in the salon and in the concert hall, suffered profoundly–even more than music’s literary and cultural counterparts–from comparisons with Europe. In the arenas in which Europeans excelled–concert music–a uniquely American contribution developed more gradually and haltingly. Americans still remain suspicious of the capacity of a European art form based on aristocratic patronage to adapt to populist American circumstances. Concert music, more than painting and literature, still seems associated with the pretentious aspects of the ambition to become “cultured” in some vaguely undemocratic way.

When Antonin Dvorák came to take over the National Conservatory in New York in 1892, he urged American musicians to turn to African American and Native American roots to find a distinct voice (he was spurred on by the New York critic Henry Krehbiel). Dvorák ’s sense that American composers were too wedded to European models was well-founded. Two of the composers on this program, Edward MacDowell and George Chadwick, were typical. Their works reflect the indispensable European training that American composers of that era felt they needed. After studying in Europe, both of these men returned to America to teach: MacDowell at Columbia, and Chadwick at the New England Conservatory in Boston. The prestige of their work was enhanced by the fact that Chadwick had been a student of Jadassohn in Leipzig and Rheinberger in Munich, and MacDowell had studied with Joachim Raff in Frankfurt and Louis Ehlert in Wiesbaden. MacDowell’s career as a teacher and performer in Europe and his appearance before Franz Liszt lent him a special aura among Americans. Nevertheless, these composers tried to assert in the formats of the European symphony and concerto, an American sensibility, particularly in the use of construction of themes. Chadwick’s first works, particularly the concert overture Rip Van Winkle, despite its overtly American program, were embraced with enthusiasm in Europe as American realizations of European models. Given Dvorák ’s plea, it is ironic that the symphony by Chadwick on this program was chosen by Dvorák himself to receive the coveted prize of the National Conservatory in 1894.

MacDowell’s and Chadwick’s audible debt to their German mentors is pervasive, but when one turns to what is conceivably the other end of the scale in that era–the music of Victor Herbert and Jerome Kern, one realized that the gulf between so-called popular and serious music was no so great as it is today, and that the character of the melodies, the orchestral sound, and more ephemerally, the mood of all the music on tonight’s program can be perceived as emerging from a single source. That source is precisely the crossroads between the effort to be American and yet competitive with European standards. Victor Herbert was born in Ireland and educated in Germany, and came to America as a result of his wife Therese Foerster’s engagement at the Metropolitan Opera. Herbert played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and began to conduct and write his own music. Like many immigrants, he became enamored of the peculiarities of American life and landscape and wrote all sorts of music ranging from marches to film scores (including The Fall of a Nation).

Herbert’s greatest achievements, however, were in the arena of popular musical theater. He wrote more than forty operettas, most of which had their premieres on Broadway. The most famous of these is Babes in Toyland (1903), based indirectly on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz. Immigration itself was the focus of some of Herbert’s popular work; Naughty Marietta is about the relationship between an immigrant Italian girl and a man from Kentucky. Eileen, originally entitled The Heart of Erin (1917), is typically American in its self-conscious assertion of American-Irish solidarity with Ireland. Mademoiselle Modiste takes on another favorite subject also treated by Henry James (who played it out in a different social class and very different context): the relationship between a rich American man and a young Parisian woman. Herbert, a founding member of ASCAP, was an indefatigable popularizer of music and a staunch advocate of American composers and musicians. Using the same artistic heritage as MacDowell and Chadwick, he ventured to adapt another European model, the operetta, and create a bridge between American popular music of the nineteenth century and a different European tradition, equally indebted to concert music. His music clearly shows the skills of a composer well-trained in nineteenth-century European compositional strategies.

When one thinks of the influence of the Jewish immigration of the late nineteenth century to New York City on American popular musical culture, one thinks first of Irving Berlin and George Gershwin. The patterns and sensibilities of the Eastern European Yiddish song seemed to be eminently adaptable to the world of early twentieth-century New York. But in American musical theater specifically, it was the earlier German-Jewish immigration to New York that played a decisive role. Oscar Hammerstein II’s grandfather, who founded the Manhattan Opera House, was born in what today is Poland, but which at the time of his birth was part of Germany. His formative years were spend in Hamburg, and he came to New York sometime around 1860. His grandson would collaborate with another musician of German Jewish descent who was born in New York, Jerome Kern. Kern also felt compelled to go to Europe for further training and chose to receive his advanced musical education in Heidelberg. Ironically, a larger number of his songs became popular as added numbers in American productions of European operettas.

It is a paradox in the evolution of an American music that what we now consider quintessentially American in spirit was developed by those who had every reason to consider themselves outsiders. Immigrants and t heir children articulated the sounds and styles on the stage that we now associate with Mississippi, Oklahoma, and the West. Two descendant of German Jewish immigrants wrote “Ol’ Man River” and other icons of vernacular American music. Jerome Kern’s greatest achievement was Showboat from 1927, a work which deals explicitly with America’s identity as a nation of contentious cultural intersections. Partly influenced by the very same compositional ambitions that compelled MacDowell and Chadwick, Kern pioneered the development of the American musical as an integrated form, with a coherent musical trajectory from beginning to end. He rejected the model of musical theater as a medley of disparate, popular songs. Despite the immense success which both Herbert and Kern achieved in popular mediums, however, they never lost the desire to make their mark in the hallowed European tradition of concert music, the world from which MacDowell and Chadwick never departed. Like George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, despite their successes, Herbert and Kern suspected they would only be vindicated in the eyes of history if they succeeded as “serious” composers. To that end, Kern agreed in 1914 to the creation of an orchestral suite from Showboat entitled “Scenario.”

All of the music on tonight’s program has a direct association with the cultural life of New York City. MacDowell, a pivotal force in the music department of Columbia University, was lionized by New York society. Chadwick, although based in Boston, achieved the singular honor of being recognized by Dvorák in New York. The tradition of Broadway and the American musical theater in New York owes much to Herbert and Kern. But to the credit of both American concert and popular music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the distance between Tin Pan Alley–the center of sheet music publishing in New York–which a century about was located between 14^th and 28^th Streets, and the more refined reaches of Morningside Heights or Carnegie Hall and the Metropolitan Opera, was, as I hope tonight’s performance demonstrates, far narrower than we might at first glance imagine. Perhaps as this century comes to a close, we will once again witness a new incarnation of the inspired creative influence of immigration on the arts in America and a convincing cross-fertilization between popular and concert music.

Admiration and Emulation: The Friendship of Brahms and Dvorák

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Admiration and Emulation: The Friendship of Brahms and Dvorák, performed on May 14, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The American Symphony Orchestra has thought to contribute to the centenary of Johannes Brahms’s death by highlighting two unusual but significant dimensions of Brahms’s work and life. In this concert, we focus on Brahms’s friendship with Antonin Dvorák, a relationship that is quite unparalleled in music history. Next fall, we will explore some of Brahms’s works for chorus and Orchestra which are not often performed and deserve representation in this centenary celebration as a means of deepening our appreciation of the many sides of his complex genius.

Conventionally, music history has characterized Brahms as a conservative force at the end of a tradition, rather than as the herald of a new era. That distinction is usually reserved for his presumed arch-rival, Richard Wagner. We sometimes forget, however, that Brahms held Wagner in the highest esteem, and among his extensive collection of manuscripts, he sincerely treasured the works of Wagner. Nevertheless, it is true that Brahms lamented Wagner’s influence on a younger generation. Brahms’s conservative image was also reinforced by the fact that he often did not have a generous opinion of the work of his contemporaries, He had no pupils in the formal sense, though he sat on the board of Directors of the Conservatory of Vienna by holding a lifelong trusteeship at the Society of the Friends of Music. In 1875, he relinquished his post as conductor of the Society’s concerts.

Though surrounded later in life by a younger generation of admirers, Brahms was not noted for his encouraging manner. Quite to the contrary, the composers Hugo Wolf and Hans Rott developed psychotic obsessions with Brahms’s lack of appreciation for the aesthetic ambitions of the younger generation. Before he was institutionalized, Rott experienced a paranoid fear that Brahms had placed a bomb under his carriage. Wolf’s criticisms of Brahms during the 1880s make any subsequent example of critical vitriol seem pale. Gustav Mahler, also of Wolf’s generation, was somewhat more appreciative, since he was indebted to Brahms for having indirectly helped Mahler get his appointment at the Vienna Opera. Brahms had seen the young conductor in Budapest and was impressed with his talent, though he might have been less enthusiastic had he an inkling of Mahler’s compositional aspirations. Mahler considered Brahms a conservative master, whose allegiances were turned backwards in time rather than toward the future. There is also a famous anecdote concerning Brahms’s visit to a friend who was a composer of minor note. Brahms arrived to find the man playing outside with his children. His wife apologized for the host’s absence, explaining that her husband composed so much that he rarely found the time to break from his work – to which Brahms replied, “Thank God, it should happen more often.”

In Vienna, the circle of Brahms’s followers were pitted against the coterie surrounding Anton Bruckner, a circumstance which further lent to the perception of Brahms as a conservative force. But the Brahms circle was actually progressive and cosmopolitan. Brahms himself was a far-sighted individual, proudly self-educated, with a deep interest in literature and art as well as the history of music. And he was an intensely loyal friend. In exploring Brahms’s influence on and support of one composer of the younger generation — Dvorák found another avenue toward understanding Brahms not as the end of an era, but as the beginning of a new one.

In 1874, Brahms reluctantly sat on the jury of the Austrian State Stipendium with the critic Eduard Hanslick and the Director of the Imperial Opera, Johann Herbeck. The jury was to award financial support to talented composers in need within the Habsburg Empire. Brahms encountered a massive submission from an obscure Czech composer: fifteen works including two symphonies, several overtures and a song cycle (Op. 7). Brahms was visibly overcome by the mastery and talent of this unknown individual. As a result of Brahms’s support, Antonin Dvorák received the stipend (and twice more in 1876 and 1877). In 1877, Brahms arranged for Dvorák’s work to be given to Brahms’s own publisher, Simrock. Simrock not only accepted Dvorák’s Moravian Duets, Op. 20, but commissioned what was to become one of Dvorák’s most enduringly popular works, the Slavonic Dances, Op. 46.

It was also through Brahms’s intervention that the critic Louis Ehlert came to write his famous critical essay in 1880, which brought the international breakthrough in Dvorák’s career for which the dispirited composer had been waiting. Throughout Europe, German musical criticism and the German music industry dominated, and recognition by the German-speaking community was indispensable for any aspiring composer in both central and eastern Europe. Dvorák’s prior success in Prague constituted at best a provincial achievement; he needed to be accepted internationally – and that is precisely what the acknowledgment of Brahms provided. As Hanslick wrote to Dvorák in an 1877 letter discussing Brahms’s enthusiasm, “it would be advantageous for your things to become known beyond your narrow Czech fatherland, which in any case does not do much for you.” For Brahms, Dvorák’s Czech “otherness” was no more exotic than the Hungarian elements in his own music. What impressed Brahms about Dvorák was the seemingly unlimited inventiveness of Dvorák’s melodic materials, his uncanny sense of time and duration, and the dazzling sense of musical line that the younger composer achieved. Brahms considered string quartets to be one of the most difficult forms of composition; he did not think well of his own efforts in this area. Though he criticized Dvorák s as well, Dvorák was unique in Brahms’s view for having produced worthy contributions to the genre. Brahms’s enthusiasm for Dvorák was rooted in his recognition that Dvorák was a composer of such tremendous capacity that he possessed more than the ability to write novel tunes; Dvorák could in fact write extended musical essays of the quality to which Brahms himself aspired – modern incarnations of classical models.

Dvorák never forgot that he owed his dramatic international rise to Brahms’s interest. From the mid-1870s on, Brahms and Dvorák were in regular contact with each other, the older composer constantly offering advice and support. During Dvorák’s sojourn in America, Brahms took the remarkable step of serving as copy editor and proofreader for Dvorák’s submissions to Simrock in order to facilitate their timely publication. Even Haydn’s admiration of Mozart did not reach such an active level of involvement. Brahms even offered to leave his entire estate to Dvorák if he would move to Vienna, an offer Dvorák ultimately refused. Brahms was once quoted as saying that any composer would be honored to have the ideas that Dvorák discarded.

The capacity in Dvorák, recognized immediately by Brahms, to transcend the provincial or partisan is evident in Dvorák’s mature success in balancing the Wagnerian and Brahmsian influences in his work. His late works–the tone poems that were written after his return from America and after Brahms’s death–reveal a Wagnerian and Lisztian influence. But during the 1880s, when the Sixth Symphony was written and first performed, the neoclassicism represented by Brahms was for both aesthetic and biographical reasons in the forefront. Dvorák’s Sixth pays homage to Brahms and to Beethoven, particularly the latter’s Eroica. At the same time, however, it is unmistakably Dvorák. Here, Dvorák uses the Brahmsian example to surmount his status as an exotic, Czech folk-composer without forcing him to abandon his overt affection and debt to his musical heritage. What is perhaps most striking about this symphony is its explicit foray into large – scale symphonic form. Dvorák, like many other composers from the so-called European periphery (even Tchaikovsky), has been subject to the academic and often Germanocentric criticism of weakness with respect to their use of formal procedures in symphonic music. There seems to be something sentimental, formless, and purely lyrical in their use of techniques of musical elaboration, as opposed to the organic and dramatic way in which many composers have been seen as adapting symphonic form – the use of development, recapitulation, the coda, and, above all, patterns for the final movement. In his Sixth Symphony, Dvorák undertook to assume his place as master of the grand symphonic essay (much as he had in his First Symphony–the C Minor–which was only discovered in the twentieth century), by placing considerable weight in the finale.

Brahms’s Second Symphony one enters a somewhat different world. Like Dvorák, Brahms works explicitly within the context of Beethoven, and, to a lesser extent, Schumann and Schubert. As Reinhold Brinkmann makes apparent, Brahms’s Second Symphony also refers to his own Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. In Brahms’s Second, the gravity of the structure has often been understood to rest with the opening two movements; in Dvorák’s Sixth, one senses an attempt to find a way to balance the traditional emphasis on the first movement with the continuation of the post-Beethoven experiment of shifting the weight to the finale. Brahms, however, creates a finale with a more compact, condensed profile, thereby leaving the weight of the first movement undisturbed.

In this concert, we reverse chronology by performing Dvorák’s symphony first, because it gives more room to the listener to make his or her own judgment on the matter of influence. Brahms’s symphony is much better known and legitimately acknowledged as a masterpiece. Dvorák clearly uses Brahms’s symphony in the same key as a model, but by no means should Dvorák’s be seen as mere aftermath. Listen, then, to the Sixth Symphony in its own right, and then remember its answer to the great achievement of Brahms. Furthermore, since both composers refer consciously back to Beethoven, let us allow Dvorák to initiate that dialogue first. It remains to the listener to discover the many interactions between Dvorák, Brahms, and Beethoven.

The central purpose of this concert is not only to celebrate the remarkable relationship between two great composers, but to remind us that the cantankerous Brahms was also a generous and devoted friend and mentor, and a dynamic visionary. Brahms managed to bring new life to forms which Wagner insisted were dead: the piano sonata, the string quartet, the song, and the symphony. Brahms’s example and achievement became an inspiration not only to composers in Germany, but throughout Europe and America, regarding the adaptability of classical and early Romantic traditions of music writing. In the twentieth century, Arnold Schoenberg reinvented Brahms as the father of modernism and of a progressive approach to musical composition. This radical revision of Brahms’s historical role has found many defenders. The “artwork of the future” need not turn out to be the music drama and tone poem exclusively. Brahms’s influence on Dvorák is comparable to Brahms’s influence on a wide array of turn-of-the-century composers, including Schoenberg, who saw the Wagnerian example as more daunting and less encouraging than the inspired achievement of Brahms, who, in his own time, despite staggering success and world-wide renown, suffered the misfortune of being branded a reactionary. The potential of the traditional to nurture the possibilities of the new finds ample testimony in what Dvorák learned from Brahms.

Against the Grain: The German Influence in French Music at the Turn of the Century

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Against the Grain: The German Influence in French Music at the Turn of the Century, performed on April 13, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

French music in the late nineteenth century can be understood as possessing a tripartite character. One aspect was associated with Jules Massenet: a tradition of well-crafted but stylized music that appeared to lack substance and suffered from the apparent absence of compositional gravity. Another strain reflected the not always consistent amalgam of French composers who were influenced by Richard Wagner and by German traditions of instrumental composition, particularly by Beethoven. And a third development–equally indebted to Wagner–emerged in the 1890s. It proved to be the dominant one; at its center was the work of Claude Debussy, whose Prélude à L’Après_midi d’un faune of 1894 marked a turning point in French music.

The works heard today are on the program for two reasons. First, Albéric Magnard’s Symphony No. 3 (1902) and Florent Schmitt’s Psalm 47 (1904) are relatively unknown but are by any standard remarkable pieces of music that deserve more frequent representation in the orchestral repertory. Vincent d’lndy’s Istar (1896) has fared somewhat better, because it was a favorite of Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch. The second reason is that today, when we think of turn-of-the-century French music, the only composer who initially comes to mind is Claude Debussy. The originality of Debussy’s music propelled him to prominence not only as an innovator but also as a representative of a distinctly French sound and style. But Debussy’s tong shadow over the French fin de siécle tends to obscure the richness of French musical life of which he was only one part. Of course, many works by Saint-Saëns survive in the repertory. So does the music of Gabriel Fauré, and we encounter regularly a few works by Edouard Lalo. Belgian born César Franck’s D-Minor Symphony (1888) also stands out in the French symphonic tradition. Saint-Saëns’ Third Symphony has retained some popularity in part on account of its use of the organ. But Saint-Saëns is often perceived as standing apart from French music as a sort of French Brahms. In the end, the distinctive tradition of French composition has been associated almost exclusively with three names: Franck, Fauré and Debussy. Today’s concert seeks to restore the balance somewhat by bringing back onto the concert stage music of French composers who were contemporaries of Debussy, but who forged an ambivalent synthesis between Wagner and German musical traditions and a French sensibility. An important figure in the development of that synthesis was César Franck.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Paris in 1861 set the direction of French music until the outbreak of World War I. Baudelaire’s famous essay “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” and the later founding of the Revue Wagnerienne serve to remind us how important Wagner was to the world of French letters well beyond the realm of music. Too often, we are content to speak of music in reductive nationalist terms, but the idea of a “French” or “German” style seems practical when talking about nineteenth-century music, because identity was a primary concern of the composers themselves. At the same time, however, there was a concurrent assumption of transactional traditions. Crucial to that notion was the concept of classicism, itself an invention of the later nineteenth century. Despite the unmistakable Germanic ideology and content of Wagner’s music dramas, they were as popular outside of Germany as they were in Germany even after 1871. The French defeat at the hands of the Prussians inspired composers in France not to abandon Wagner, but to appropriate him. In fin de siécle England and France, Wagnerism remained as much of a cult as it was in the new German empire.

The French engagement with German traditions of music-making in the nineteenth century began with the deification of Beethoven. The first performance of Beethoven’s symphonies in Paris by Habeneck and the writings of Hector Berlioz on Beethoven were pivotal events in the evolution of music in France. The Magnard symphony reflects the struggle among French composers to develop a tradition of symphonic music which could match the sequence of German achievement, predominant since Beethoven and unbroken until the era of Bruckner and Mahler. There is no better example of the French obsession with Beethoven and German music than the case of Romain Rotland (1866-1944). Rolland won the Nobel Prize for his novel, Jean-Christophe, based on the image of Beethoven (which first appeared in 1904, precisely when Psalm 47 and Magnard’s symphony were either being written or performed). He wrote eight books on Beethoven and was among other things an ardent admirer of Strauss and at the same time a powerful force in turn-of-the-century French musical criticism.

The embrace of an ideology of universalism and internationalism in music-making coexisted therefore not only with the search for individual originality, hut with the development of distinctly national cultural identities. In the case of France, the career of Vincent d’Indy (1851-1931) makes this point most poignantly. D’Indy was perhaps the most energetic and influential as well as controversial figure in French musical life at the turn of the century. He revered Franck (his uncle, an amateur composer, studied with Franck). But Franck’s negative reaction to d’Indy’s early music inspired d’Indy to study the craft of musical composition in a rigorous manner. Parsifal was, in d’Indy’s opinion, an unimpeachable model of musical and dramatic achievement. In the early 1890s, he was asked to submit a plan for the reorganization of the curriculum of the Paris Conservatory. D’Indy had contempt for what he regarded to be the sloppy and lackadaisical traditions of Massenet and the Paris Conservatory. Later, he also opposed Debussy. D’Indy’s recommendations, which called for the imposition of a rigorous curriculum, involving close study of the German symphonic tradition, including Beethoven as well as medieval and Renaissance music, were rejected. D’Indy then used his wealth to found a rival institution, the famous Schola Cantorum, which became known for its emphasis on the study of counterpoint and complex formal strategies. But for all of his advocacy of Wagner, and the symphonic form as developed by German-speaking composers, d’Indy was a nationalist. He used French folk material, and in Istar turned to the East for inspiration and participated in a quite distinctly French fin de siécle Orientalism. At the same time, he was time devoutly Roman Catholic and arrived at an anti-Semitism as virulent as Wagner’s, though formed independently of the German composer’s influence.

Albéric Magnard (1865-1914), like d’Indy, came from a prominent family. He had the particular misfortune of being the son of Francis Magnard, who later became the editor of Le Figaro, the most influential newspaper in Paris. Magnard struggled against the loss of hearing in his career. Like Smetana and Beethoven, he became increasingly isolated and even misanthropic as a result of his disability. Above all, Magnard was eager to show that any success he had as a composer was not the result of family influence. It was perhaps this determination to gain respect in his own right that led him to leave the Paris Conservatory and study with d’Indy. Magnard wrote to a friend that “the artist who does not draw his strength from self-denial is close to death or dishonor.” This exacting Christian asceticism tinged by a sort of vague Nietzscheanism was not too dissimilar from d’Indy’s own ethos. Magnard’s Third Symphony, which closes this program, was one of the few works to gain him international recognition. It was performed by Busoni in Berlin during the 1905-06 season. As Martin Cooper has noted, in contrast to d’Indy’s music, the influence of César Franck is less audible, even though Magnard considered himself one of Franck’s disciples. In this symphony, one senses a direct affinity with contemporary German symphonic practice. Magnard was extraordinarily talented. His obscurity derives from the fact that he was killed by the advancing German army in 1914. Apparently, when German troops trespassed onto the grounds of his estate, Magnard shot and kil1ed a German soldier. The Germans responded by burning his house to the ground, killing all its occupants, including the composer. It is to the credit to the late conductor Ernest Ansermet , who performed and recorded the Third Symphony at the end of his life, that this work retains any contemporary presence at all.

In contrast to Magnard, Florent Schmitt (1870- 1958) took his entire training at the Paris Conservatory. But like d’Indy, early in his career he became attracted to German music. Schmitt traveled throughout Europe, and his first efforts at composition, including Psalm 47, mirrored the influence of trends outside of France. The two most prominent figures in terms of their influence on Schmitt are, finally, Debussy and Strauss. What all these French composers shared was an on going and nearly obsessive engagement with the legacy of Wagner, the classical traditions of German music exemplified by Beethoven, and the vitality of late-nineteenth-century German Romantic composition, most elegantly represented by Gustav Mahler, Anton Bruckner, and Richard Strauss. It is no accident that Mahler and Bruckner in particular were received coolly in France. The skeptical reaction of the French was a result of rivalry and pride, perhaps tinged with envy. Only Debussy and Fauré found independently in their maturity a stylistic’ and compositional originality which set them wholly apart. But the overvaluing of stylistic’ originality is a common error which often prevents us from coming to terms with first-rate music that unabashedly shows its debt to prior models and practices.

The plain truth is that both French and German composers of the later nineteenth century understood their task as reacting to the challenges that took their most daunting shape in Wagner’s last work, Parsifal. The issues of composition that concerned composers of this time were whether classical symphonic forms and procedures were still applicable, despite Wagner’s abandonment of them. Was it possible, as d’Indy suggested, to turn to medieval and Renaissance music as new sources of inspiration that could be melded with Wagnerian strategies of sound and color? If instrumental music had an unambiguous dramatic function, was it necessary to have a program and if so, what sort of program? For all of the explicit and implicit critique of Christianity, evident in most of Wagner’s work (Parsifal notwithstanding) what was the future relationships) between religion and music, particularly Roman Catholicism? The works on this concert grapple with each of these questions. Istar uses aclassical strategy–variation–but reverses its sequence in almost Ivesian manner. Classicism in d’Indy is merged with a late_nineteenth_century Wagnerian sensibility. And there is a program that is set of variations follows closely. In contrast, Magnard eschews all programs, and presents a convincing achievement in the four_movement symphonic form. It has a distinctly French Aspect it in both the dance movement and pastorale, but in a manner that makes it understandable that while Schmitt was composing the Psalm, he was contemplating a ballet on the subject of Salome. Like Debussy’s The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, sensuality and religiosity of the fin de siécle seemed capable of being paired much the way Wagner had done so alluringly in Parsifal.

It is hoped that this concert will encourage listeners to explore other works by these three composers, and seek out the riches of the late nineteenth-century music written in France. What is “against the grain” in this concert is not so much the German influence in French music, but rather a challenge to the ideology which has driven the development of the canonic repertory in the twentieth century. Central to that ideology is the simplistic application of nationalist criteria. We celebrate Sibelius because he appears quintessentially Russian, and Elgar for being typically English. Although within these nations there were spirited debates about developing autonomous national styles, it is a mistake to overlook the repertoire of the past that does not seem to us sufficiently typical according to reductive definitions of national spirit. If we set aside criteria linked to nationalism, we will rediscover an enormous treasure of symphonic music produced between 1885 and 1918 throughout Europe of outstanding quality, written by composers who regarded the nationality of Beethoven and Wagner as either secondary or irrelevant.

Dreams & Realities: Reinventing American Music 1929-42

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Dreams & Realities: Reinventing American Music performed on March 12, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In his classic 1983 study Music in the New World, Charles Hamm characterizes the period from 1894 to the outbreak of the second World War in the history of American music as “the search for a national identity.” Hamm, like many writers before him, begins the discussion of this “search” with the controversy that erupted over Antonin Dvorák ’s endlessly quoted assertion that American composers should find their own voice by doing something other than producing bland imitations of European musical models. Dvorák had come to America to take over the National Conservatory in New York, but unlike many subsequent European composers who came to work in America, including Mahler and Schöenberg, Dvorák was enchanted by that which he regarded to be uniquely American. He did not wield the heavy hand of presumed cultural superiority as did many European musicians who worked in the New World. Dvorák students included Will Marion Cook, the African American composer who helped create the American musical theater; Harry Burleigh, another distinguished African American musician; and Rubin Goldmark, the nephew of Karl Goldmark and one of Aaron Copland’s teachers.

Dvorák encouraged his students to seek in African American and Native American music the sources for a new American musical vocabulary and sound. His example inspired Arthur Farwell, among others, who was a particular champion of Native American traditions. Dvorák was indeed prescient, in that the decades which followed his brief sojourn in American saw the emergence of jazz amid other American and popular folk idioms, all of which would eventually leave an indelible imprint on musical culture not only in America, but in Europe and elsewhere in the world. However, the struggle over national identity remained unresolved, not so much in popular culture, but in the concert music tradition. Among American composers, Dvorák proposition was not greeted with unmitigated enthusiasm. Quite to the contrary, prominent Americans ranging from Amy Beach to Edward MacDowell to Charles Ives took exception to Dvorák’s contention. To many of them, America had already developed its own voice through the ways in which the European musical heritage had been transformed in an American manner–particularly in New England–by English, Irish, and German immigrants.

The polemics of the early twentieth century regarding the “true” and “proper” nature of American music paralleled anxieties about American national uniqueness in painting and literature. America was, by any European standard, a young country marked by brashness, wealth, and superior industrial and economic achievement. The American piano had by 1900 become the world’s standard. After 1919, America, by virtue of its decisive entrance into World War I, emerged as a dominant world military and political power. However, American artists and writers continued to struggle with what seemed to be the overwhelming allure of European trends. These trends included modernism, whether in the form of Stravinsky’s work, or Dada, or Surrealism. At the same time, a new American culture, particularly the jazz and dance which emanated from New York in the 1920s, became wildly popular in Europe. For composers who saw themselves in a European tradition, the challenge was to find ways to bridge the gap between a vital popular culture that culture that seemed unquestionably American, and the prestigious high cultural traditions of a European character, which could also plausibly be argued to be American, albeit more evidently derivative.

External events helped to focus the identity problem and point the way to new solutions. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Depression which ensued radically transformed American life. To begin with, no American artist could avoid coming to grips with the economic and social crisis of the decade. Furthermore, the extent of unemployment and poverty foreground the knotty question of the purpose and role of art. Would music continued to be an art form in America, designed for concert-halls constructed during the gilded age and populated by upper middle-class citizens, self-consciously emulating habits of patronage and taste which took their model from English and continental examples? How could composers trained as “classical” musicians reach their fellow citizens on a large scale, in a decade in which the talking film, the radio, and the phonograph exerted an unparalleled influence and in which a nation turned to art and mass entertainment for solace, escape and inspiration? The stark realities of modernity and national soul-searching demanded an imaginative response within the arts, particularly music.

The composers on tonight’s program offer the listener a glimpse of a decisive decade in the equally momentous political and social shift in our nation self image. During the 1930s, Frederick Converse taught at the New England Conservatory. The movement “Manhattan” from his American Sketches is the earliest music in our program. It was written in 1928, just before the onset of the Depression. Of it the composer wrote that its improvement was “descriptive” without being “realistic.” Indeed, the optimism and exuberance of the 1920s are evident to the ear. Converse said that he sought to express “the activity and turmoil of the great city; the grandeur as well as the sinister sordidness of its various scenes. Through it runs a thread of loneliness which is often felt by sensitive souls in such overpowering surroundings.” Converse studied at Harvard with Julia Knowles Paine, who in turn had studied in Germany. Converse himself also went to Munich to study with Rheinberger. Perhaps motivated by the momentum of the twenties, he turned to the task of writing music which would mirror the distinctly American. American Sketches bears the subtitle “Seeing America First.” Converse’s most famous piece, Flivver Ten Million, written 1927 was a take-off on the staggering success of the Ford Motor Company’s production line.

The spirit of Converse’s music quickly became dated (despite the merits of the music itself), as can be inferred from Aaron Copland’s Statements, which was the next work in this program to be written. It was begun in 1932, although it was premiered a decade later in New York The work occupies a pivotal place in Copland’s cannon. He had gone to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger, and the music he wrote during the 1920s represented a period of experimentation with modernism. Between 1928 and 1931, he and Roger Sessions sponsored a legendary series of concerts in New York devoted to new music. But in the summer of 1934, Copland underwent a political transformation. Moved by the Depression, his politics turned to the left. He was impressed by the radical farmers of Minnesota, where he was staying that summer and he realized that the people of America, not merely the urban intellectuals of New York, were attracted to socialism and communism, despite the surface dissimilarity to the voluble and highly intellectual New York radicals he knew so well. In fact, as Vivian Perlis recounts, Copland made the only political speech of his life to the farmers in Bmidji, Minnesota in the summer of 1934. It was during that summer that Copland completed most of the work on Statements. This piece represents Copland’s transition from his modernist strategies to the more populist work of the late 1930s and 1940s for which he has became most famous. In Statements, one can hear Copland’s initial efforts to find a modern voice which could reach a larger population with integrity. The work is designed to be the beginnings of the aesthetic bride Copland sought to build linking radical New York, modernist Paris and rural Minnesota.

Elie Siegmeister went further than Copland in terms of his politics. The New Deal, for all its merits, did not in the end effectively solve the economic problems of the decade. The war ultimately would. Siegmeister, who also studied with Boulanger, was a political radical. He became a member of the Composer’s Collective in New York, and wrote under the name of Swift. He pioneered the use of American folk music and was determined to write music that was both populist, politically inspired, and unmistakably American. He was, among other things, a founder and moving force behind American Ballad Singers. Like Copland, but more aggressively, Siegmeister returned to Dvorák’s exhortation, but extended the search for American roots beyond race, focusing instead on class. He found in rural America and the urban working class a powerful musical voice and a new public for modern composition.

Ruth Crawford Seeger, as her distinguished biographer Judith Tick notes, was a committed experimentalist and modernist. Unlike Copland or Siegmeister, she displayed less of an initial debt to European models. Ironically, however, the work on this program, written one year after the Siegmeister, was her only foray in the use of folk materials. Nevertheless, like Siegmeister, she worked on behalf of the documentation and dissemination of American folk music. Rissolty, Rossolty emerged out of a collaboration with the towering figure of the American folkrevival of the 1930s and 1940s, Alan Lomax. Seeger was one of America’s most gifted composers. Unfortunately her name remains familiar to the public primarily through her association with her husband Charles, the distinguished theorist and experimentalist composer, and her stepson Pete Seeger, who has unflaggingly continued the progressive political and aesthetic traditions of the 1930′s to this day.

Roy Harris, unlike Copland, became famous first during the 1930s. He was born on Lincoln’s birthday in Nebraska. He came from a working-class family, grew up in California, and worked for a time as a truck-driver. Unlike Copland or Siegmeister, both of whom were Jews who came of age in New York, Harris seemed quintessentially American, rather like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. Harris preferred to think of himself as an autodidact, even though he too had studied with Nadia Boulanger and had been influenced by Arthur Farwell, who among other things introduced him to the work of Walt Whitman (whose poetry Frederick Converse brilliantly set in The Mystic Trumpeter in 1904). Harris’s first symphony ,entitled 1933, was premiered in Boston by Serge Koussevitzky. In 1936, Harris married Beula Duffey, later known as Johana Harris, a pianist with whom he collaborated for many years. The Folk Song Symphony, which was first written in 1940, revised in 1942, and premiered on the last day of that year, marks the high point of the intense effort which began in the early 1930s to integrate American folk music with symphonic concert music. This symphony has always stood in the shadow of its predecessor, the third symphony, the only one of Harris’s to retain a place in the current repertory.

Apart from the recurrent references to folk music in several of the works on this program, there is little question that there is something uniquely American about all the music on tonight’s program. Particularly intriguing is the way in which many of the composers, especially Seeger and Copland, seek to make a synthesis out of modernism and a recognizable Americanism. All of the music with the exception of Converse’s takes inspiration from a political commitment to the renewal of participatory democracy and social justice. In this sense, all the music written after the Converse work (although it as well in its own way) can be understood as political. The question then for the contemporary listener is whether this music still speaks to us today.

We have become accustomed to an overarching assumption of how the standard repertoire of music evolves. We are given to understand that many pieces of music are written and even well-received when first played, but few stand the proverbial “test of time.” Somehow, certain works are able to transcend their context and speak to succeeding generations and are played over and over again. When works such as the ones on this program are revisited, we are often told that the exhumation is either unjustified or in vain. The music which is revived which has not remained consistently on concert programs is understood to be- however well intentioned-simply not great music.

It may very well be that this commonplace assumption about how a canon of musical works comes into being is flawed. Perhaps there is nothing inherently objective or right about the “test of time”. The music for this program was not chosen simply because it fits a coherent historical narrative. There are many works from the 1930s and early 1940s which would have qualified just as well. No doubt there was and still is much well intentioned and well crafted “political art” that fails to do more than merely be political. That is not the case with respect to the works on today’s program.

Nevertheless, it is particularly instructive for us today to reexamine the art and music of the 1930s. Their reappearance in today’s political context can be illuminating to us as we grapple with today’s issues concerning art and politics. The 1990s have turned out to be a decade in which questions of national and ethnic identity have come to the forefront of national debate. We are inundated by discussions of multiculturalism. We hear much talk of social fragmentation and the loss of a coherent sense of America’s culture. Insofar as music is both a mirror and catalyst of cultural movements, it is particularly apt to listen once again to the music of the 1930s written by composers who struggled with comparable issues of identity and purpose. Whether one is interested in these political and cultural questions or not, as one turns the pages of these various scores, one cannot help but be impressed by the quality of the musical imagination in these works and by their ambition, integrity and freshness of spirit. They are worth hearing, not only as works of music in and of themselves, shorn of their historical context, but as expressions of American composers who understood their role as doing more than just writing music for the sake of career and fame, or music simply designed to entertain and win the approval a small group of self-styled experts. It is our view that these American works deserve to be heard and appreciated more than a half-century later as worthy and convincing contributions to a distinctly American twentieth-century compositional tradition.

The Soul of Poland in Modern Times: The Music of Karol Szymanowski

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Soul of Poland in Modern Times, performed on Jan 24, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Karol Szymanowski’s life and work are bound up with the question of Polish independence and identity, and with the creation of an authentic cultural voice for modern Poland. Unlike some other concerts that are organized around historical and biographical themes, this concert possesses particular significance in terms of contemporary politics and culture. One might have thought that nineteenth-century styles of nationalism had become things of the past, but the events that have transpired since 1989, particularly in eastern Europe, have been startling in their demonstration of the extent to which an old-fashioned sort of national fervor persists and flourishes.

Nationalism is especially alive today in those countries which found themselves after the beginning of the nineteenth century squeezed between two opposing political and cultural giants, Russia and Germany. The corridor of eastern Europe, ranging from Ukraine (Szymanowski’s birthplace) in the east to Serbia and Bosnia in the south and Latvia and Estonia in the north, is composed of national groups whose sense of their distinct identities have been forged in a struggle against external political and economic domination. It is only in the twentieth century that many of these entities have experienced political independence for the first time. Principles of self-determination and the specific details of the Versailles Treaty after World War I created an independent Poland (with very different borders than the one we know today), a Lithuania (much smaller and with a different capital), a Hungary (reduced in size), a Czechoslovakia (now divided into two states), and a Yugoslavia (which has disintegrated). One of the knottier problems in this region is the difficulty in defining the borders that separate these groups, a situation which has created a number of minorities in an environment where, precisely because of the precariousness of political independence, inclusion in a majority is crucial to the safety and survival of individuals.

The post-World War II era of Communism as a supranationalist ideology ultimately did little to deflect or suppress the intense debate within these national groupings about what constituted the essence of their distinct characters. From 1848 on, in the spheres of literature, art, and music, this issue was also informed by an awareness of an international world of arts and letters. The idea of cosmopolitan and transnational standards ironically raised a circumscribing specter, for anything that was not connected in some way to the cultural lives of London, Paris, Berlin, or Vienna was immediately deemed provincial. Even the turn-of-the century intellectual and artistic community of St. Petersburg and Moscow quarreled over whether to prize native and presumably authentic sources for art or to defer to German and French models of compositional technique, style, and form.

If painters, poets and composers residing in the capital of the empire of Czarist Russia could turn to Berlin, Paris, and Vienna as models, it should come as no surprise that the leading literary, artistic and musical talents in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia would do the same. For these smaller nations, the search for an authentic and autonomous cultural tradition befitting political independence and connected to one s own language while still internationally viable was, to put it simply, daunting. For the Czechs and the Poles, however, the matter was further complicated by the fact that, apart from the allure of French and German traditions, there was the overwhelming presence of a dominant Slavic culture as well: Russia. Leos Janacek, for example, was fascinated by the idea of Panslavism, and the Polish poet Julian Tuwim (represented on tonight’s program) deeply admired Pushkin and translated Pasternak into Polish. Ciurlonis, the greatest Lithuanian musical and painterly talent at the turn of the century, was trained both in Poland and Russia. The spiritual capital of Lithuania before 1914 was Vilnius, which also happened to be the home of Poland’s greatest poet, Adam Mickiewicz. To further complicate matters, Vilnius was a legendary center of Jewish learning, a fact that just hints at the crucial presence of Jews throughout the nations of eastern Europe. One of the most tragic ironies in modern European history is the extent to which the distinct culture and religion of the Jews were vilified during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a means of galvanizing exclusive national identities.

The case of Poland is perhaps the most familiar to Americans, in part because of the massive Polish immigration at the turn of the century. America and France both have special connections to Polish history. Kosciuszko and Pulaski both fought in the American Revolution. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau drafted a constitution for Poland. Dombrowski formed a Polish legion which fought in Napoleon’s Italian campaign; in fact, the marching song of those Polish troops later provided Poland with its national anthem. Unlike the English, the Poles revered Napoleon because of his brief creation of an independent albeit fragmentary Poland. Poland also differed from Hungary and Czechoslovakia in its distinct advantage of having a single unified and powerful religion, Catholicism (if one excludes the large Jewish population in Poland before 1939).

Poland faced a number of problems in its search for a national character. Inter-war Poland (the state created after 1918) contained significant German-and Russian-speaking minorities. The city in which Tuwim was born–Lodz–was during his childhood nearly one third German-speaking. Another third primarily spoke Yiddish. Therefore only one third of Poland’s second-largest city could consider itself entirely Polish. At the time of Szymanowski’s birth, the Polish aristocracy of Szlachta, was composed primarily of landowners in a largely rural nation. They constituted a significant percentage of the population. Since the time of Chopin, they maintained a decidedly francophilic intellectual perspective. The Polish language, although Slavic, uses Latin characters and has a subtle and elegant palette of sound that make it of all the Slavic languages the most like French. A further ironic dimension in the struggle for independence and a secure national identity in the history of modern Poland, particularly after the failed rebellion of 1863, was the memory of Poland’s distant past. Many Americans may not realize that centuries ago, Poland, under the leadership of national heroes like Jan Sobiewski, was a great and powerful empire with a sphere of influence that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. That past greatness–it’s heroism and chivalry–was glorified throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Polish literature. The great national poem of Poland, Mickiewicz, Pan Tadeusz, bears eloquent testimony to this fact.

Karol Szymanowski remains after Chopin Poland’s greatest composer. He was born into the privileged, landowning class of the Polish aristocracy. His mother, to whom he was extremely close, was highly sophisticated and encouraged her artistic children. One sister was a professional singer, the other a writer and a poet, and Karol’s brother Felix was a pianist and composer. Like many other intellectuals and artists who lived under the shadows of Germany and Russia, Szymanowski sensed that knowing only his native language was not enough. He became fluent in Russian, German and French. He also spoke Italian, and shared with many of his German counterparts a special romance with Italy. Szymanowski was a great patriot, despite the fact that the conservative Polish public never appreciated his music. He spent many troubled years at the Warsaw conservatory, which he had helped to revive after World War I. His sense of his own compatriots’ lack of appreciation was somewhat mollified, however, by an honorary degree from the University of Cracow.

In his personal life, Szymanowski was frequently depressed and lonely; he suffered from tuberculosis and other chronic illnesses. Money was a continual source of anxiety for him, and he tragically became one of the many in the long list of composers whose financial strains were in part responsible for an untimely death. Szymanowski was also truly cosmopolitan, living for a time in both Vienna and Paris. His relation to French music may be compared to that of the Czech composer, Bohuslav Martinu. Szymanowski, however, was profoundly impressed by Mahler, and avoided the intense germanophobia of some of his Polish contemporaries. His first symphony (performed in our subscription series three seasons ago) clearly reveals the influence of the music of Richard Strauss. But Szymanowski’s closest friends were Polish-most of them from the very prominent and significant Polish Jewish middle-class community. They included composer and conductor Gregor Fitelberg, pianist Artur Rubinstein, and violinists Roman Totenberg and Pawel Kochauski.

Musically, the three composers most readily comparable to Szymanowski are Bartók, Stravinsky, and Janacek. Bartók, especially, admired Szymanowski and was particularly influenced by his innovative use of the violin. Szymanowski’s Stabat Mater (performed in our subscription series two seasons ago) speaks to the close connection between Stravinsky and Szymanowski. Like Janacek, Szymanowski was deeply fascinated by the specific character of his native language. Szymanowski shared with all three composers an exploration of folkloric traditions as an expression of an autonomous cultural past, to be used as a source for creating music which could compete with the “universal’ standards set by German and French music while also asserting a distinctive and discrete national voice. The key in this approach was to compose music that expressed a national character without leaving the overtly local or specific untransformed. These composers sought to use the national as a fresh aesthetic foundation, not as a superficial illustrative symbol. To Szymanowski, Bartók seemed the most successful at this effort. Rather like the young Stravinsky, Szymanowski in his early years chose to turn eastwards, away from occidental Europe, for a different perspective. Many ofSzymanowski’s generation flirted with the idea that the real distinction between eastern and western Europe lay in eastern Europe’s closer cultural proximity to the Orient.

But Szymanowski’s deepest connection to these three composers is their mutual determination to escape becoming marginalized as artists purely because of their exoticized national identity. Polish writers may win Nobel prizes–Sienkiewicz, Reymont, Milosz, and Wislawa Szymborska in 1996, for Example–but the fact remains that, like Hungarian and Czech, Polish is not an international language, and Polish writers for the most part still struggle against obscurity. Music, however, holds the promise of being universal and international. A nationalist composer of the twentieth century could aspire to compete globally on the highest artistic level without abandoning his cultural authenticity or his love for his native soil, history, and language. Bartók and Stravinsky are two of Szymanowski’s contemporaries who succeeded brilliantly. It is time that we allow the same triumph for Szymanowski, whose music will continue to stand the test of time in concert halls far outside of Poland.

The four works on this program provide a short but dense overview of the mature composer’s career. The concert closes with Symphony No. 3, which Szymanowski considered one of his two best pieces. It reflects Szymanowski’s attraction to orientalism, an attraction which diminished after Poland’s independence. Szymanowski then turned like Bartók to forkloric traditions, particularly those from the Tatra region in the Carpathian mountains. Our concert opens with a composition which falls chronologically between the third and fourth symphonies: Slopiewnie, Szymanowski’s setting of a poem of Julian Tuwim, Poland’s greatest inter-war poet. In his magisterial work The History of Polish Literature, Czeslaw Milosz describes it as “a whole poem [which] conveys no meaning other than an aura of some inventive proto-Slavic language.” As Milosz notes, it betrays a “sensual, amorous relationship with word-stems, their prefixes and suffixes.” By setting Poland’s great contemporary poet to music, and by choosing a text which celebrated the distinctive sound of the Polish language, Szymanowski set the stage to declare his own equivalent in the music: a timbral, tonal, and rhythmic sound which could be heard as national without becoming exotic or caricaturizing. Symphony No.4 was written at the end of the composer’s career. It focuses on Szymanowski’s own instrument, the piano, which was of course also the instrument of his great predecessor, Chopin. In this work, perhaps the best-known on the program through its prominent place in Artur Rubinstein’s repertoire, Szymanowski’s idiosyncratic way of integrating the national and the universal–the particular and the general–becomes as invisible as it is transparent. The concert also includes Symphony No.2, which represents Szymanowski’s transition from a complete dependence on the models presented by Mahler and Strauss to the formation of his own distinct musical language. Although less known and critically considered less typical of the mature Szymanowski, it was clearly one of the composer’s favorite works. He returned to it and struggled to improve it in the last years of his life. His affection for it derived not only from the breakthrough it represented in his own mastery of composition, but also because it gave him his first important international success. All of these works represent major achievements in Szymanowski’s career. They are not presented in chronological order, but are arranged to give the listener a sense of the remarkable scope of his composition.

Tonight’s program mirrors the striking variety of experimentation, unerring refinement, and intensity of this great composer s oeuvre. The contemporary listener should perhaps reflect that without the example of Szymanowski, the post-World War II Renaissance of Polish music, most recently exemplified by the popularity of Gorecki, would be difficult to imagine. For those concerned with the future of Europe as well as with music, listening to Szymanowski should engender hope. If Europe is to be unified without relegating eastern European nations once again to their peripheral status as oppressed annexes of dominant superpowers, then the music, art and literature presently being created might do well to emulate Szymanowski’s example, in which both the intimate is expressed and the national embraced in a voice that is distinctively individual, yet compelling to listeners from all parts of the world and from different generations.

Szymanowski, Symphony No. 2 (1910)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Soul of Poland in Modern Times, performed on Jan 24, 1997 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The Second Symphony was considered by Szymanowski one of his best works. In the context of this concert, it provides the listener with an impressive point of departure from which to consider the composer’s artistic evolution. It was completed in 1910 and premiered in Warsaw in 1911, while Szymanowski was still in his twenties. It was Szymanowski’s first great success outside of Poland, and was performed to enthusiastic response in Vienna and Berlin. The reaction at the Warsaw premiere was predictably lukewarm. As a result of the Second Symphony’s success in Vienna, however, Szymanowski was given a publishing contract with the prestigious Universal Edition, Europe’s premiere publishing house for new music.

The symphony has been long considered an example of Szymanowski’s mastery of counterpoint. One encounters fugal writing and variation form. The music shows the continuing influence of German contemporaries, particularly Max Reger, but Richard Strauss is still present in the lush sound and large-scale ambition of the work. What is immediately apparent in listening to the work is that Szymanowski had begun to cut his own path, particularly in the use of tonality. The work extends tonal vocabulary through the use of rapid shifts, giving the impression of a highly chromatic and variable tonal logic. Szymanowski’s preoccupation with this symphony is evident in the fact that in the 1930s, he undertook a revision and a reorchestration of it with the help of Gregor Fitelberg. Although Szymanowski died before the revision of the second movement was completed, it is in the revised Fitelberg version that the work is performed. Even in its revised form, one can hear the influence, particularly in terms of orchestration, of Mahler. But if, as the leading commentators on Szymanowski, including Christopher Palmer and Jim Samson, have observed, this symphony clearly shows the distinct musical voice of the composer. In a daring and unusual step, for example, he opens the symphony with one of his most trusted and characteristic instrumental vehicles, the solo violin.

Szymanowski was intent in this work to eschew any programmatic association. It is as if he wanted to distance himself from his earlier association with the “Young Poland” literary movement, exemplified by his friendship with Tadeusz Micinski (1873-1918), the philosopher poet. Micinski was the translator of the poem by the Persian mystic Jallal al-din Rumi that Szymanowski later used in his Symphony No.3. Like Julian Tuwim, Micinski was born in Lodz and traveled extensively. He shared Szymanowski’s fondness for the Tatra mountains, particularly the town of Zakopane, a gathering point for artists.Micinski’s life came to an end during World War I, when he was mistaken for a Russian general and murdered.

The Second Symphony betrays an almost obsessive ambition to demonstrate the composer’s ability to transform and yet weave seemingly disparate material together. Szymanowski described his work as having “a first movement in a grand manner” followed by “a theme in nine variations, the adagio and finale with a fugue.” References to the primary theme of the first movement are heard in the second. The distinct fugal subjects at the end of the second movement are also audibly related to the work’s beginning. If this structure seems to resemble Beethoven’s last piano sonata, Op. 111, that is because Szymanowski used it as a model. But unlike other early Szymanowski works based on German models, such as the Concert Overture, Op.12, which was based on Wlast the Hero by Micinski, a poem in the spirit of Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, and which has been condemned unfairly as being derivative, (despite the fact that it was hailed at its 1906 Warsaw premiere,) this second symphony is clearly the work of a composer that has come into his own. Here Szymanowski uses models only to make a distinctive musical statement within the confines of the central European symphonic tradition. In his letters, Szymanowski himself did not hesitate to make the confident assertion that it would be his second symphony that would be remembered after his death as a masterpiece.

A “Politically Incorrect” Masterpiece

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert A “Politically Incorrect” Masterpiece, performed on Nov 22, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When the history of twentieth-century music is written from a distance greater than our own, the story that is told may very well be different from the one with which all of us have lived. Until recently, we have understood the history of twentieth-century music as a history of progressive development. The essentials of the story begin in the nineteenth century with Wagner. He is credited with extending harmonic practice, transforming time and duration, and enlarging the palette of musical sound. He abandoned the traditional forms of classic and romantic music. From Wagner on, progress–understood as the pursuit of originality and innovation–continued unabated until tonality was abandoned altogether. Modernism in the form of the twelve-tone strategy of Arnold Schoenberg and the work of second Viennese school appeared to be the logical culmination of the evolution of a musical language specifically appropriate to twentieth-century life and culture. The motto on the Secession building designed by Joseph Maria Olbrich, which was completed in 1898–when the twenty-four year-old Franz Schmidt (who was born in 1874, the same year as Arnold Schoenberg) was already a member of the Vienna Imperial Opera Orchestra under Gustav Mahler–read, “To each age its art, to art its freedom.” This motto implied historicism; it meant that each age would place its distinctive stamp on the many forms of aesthetic expression that it produced. That stamp was linked to the dominant and unique historical circumstances which artists and audience shared alike.

In this familiar story, two exact contemporaries, Schoenberg and Schmidt, ended up occupying two radically different places in the progressive narrative of music history: Schoenberg was placed the center and Schmidt ended up at the periphery. Why? Although Franz Schmidt grew up in the same Vienna as Arnold Schoenberg, the inspiration he took from the city was radically different. As a cellist in the opera orchestra, he did not particularly like Mahler’s personality. (Listeners to tonight’s concert, however, will notice many Mahlerian touches in Schmidt’s score, particularly in the orchestration.) Schmidt studied with Bruckner and Robert Fuchs and aligned himself with a cultural movement which saw itself as the healthy mainstream, and viewed the innovators of the Viennese fin de siecle as narcissistic rebels and philistine purveyors of change for change’s sake.

Indeed, not all composers in the early part of the twentieth century understood the legacy of Wagner in the same way. By the 1920s, an open rift existed in the German and Austrian musical world. In 1917, a leading German composer, Hans Pfitzner, wrote a polemical essay entitled “Danger: Futurists!” designed as an attack on Ferrucio Busoni. Pfitzner then published a more extensive essay, “The New Aesthetic of Musical Impotence,” in 1920. An anti-modernist conservative camp developed. Although Max Reger died in 1916 on the eve of the rift, he emerged as a founding father of the anti-Modernist tendency in twentieth-century musical composition. There are many points of comparison between Reger and Schmidt, not the least of which can be discerned in moments of extreme chromaticism and in the organ solo which opens the second part of the work on tonight’s program.

Reger, Pfitzner, and Schmidt are the three central figures of the anti-Modernist German and Austrian line in twentieth-century European music before 1950. All three composers believed that twentieth-century music needed to retain the ideal of a common musical language rooted in tonality. They were determined to continue a historical tradition reaching back into the Renaissance in a manner that was wholly recognizable as unbroken to the contemporary audience. They drew inspiration from both Wagner and Brahms, and saw themselves as sustaining the true German Romantic tradition. They were eclectic in their use of “pure” musical forms and the writing of so-called “program music.” Ironically, they had much in common with their Modernist enemies, particularly Schoenberg. For example, Pfitzner, Schmidt and Schoenberg all believed in the superiority of German music, and each considered himself in his own way a great patriot. Schmidt, like Pfitzner, paid overt homage to the classical past by using both the symphonic form and the variation form. In tonight’s work, he undertook a task reminiscent of the great Passions of Johann Sebastian Bach. In Schmidt’s case, there is a particular affinity between this work and the religious intensity and commitment in the choral music of his teacher, Anton Bruckner.

The great divide between Modernist and anti-Modernist music had its echoes in politics. Pfitzner became an avid Nazi and had the misfortune of outliving the Third Reich. Unlike Richard Strauss, his political engagement was fanatical, a fact which has helped keep much of his music from the concert and opera stage. Only the monumental Palestrina, among whose admirers was Thomas Mann, seems to return periodically. Schmidt was an Austrian who died shortly after the Anschluss in 1938. There is some dispute about how bad his politics actually were, and there is some evidence that, like Wilhelm Furtwängler, Schmidt behaved decently in his personal relationships with his Jewish colleagues. But any attempt to improve Schmidt’s image cannot avoid coming to grips with his sympathy for Austro-fascism. Aesthetic conservatism and political conservatism went hand in hand in the cultural politics of early twentieth-century Austria. Schmidt, after all, did begin work after the Anschluss on a celebratory cantata entitled Die Deutsche Auferstehung (The German Resurrection). His profound commitment, evident in this work, to the traditions of Austro-Catholicism lent him both prestige and an image of nativist authenticity dear to Austrian conservatives. Like Bruckner, he took on the mantle of the uncorrupted, anti-cosmopolitan artist rooted in his native soil and culture.

Owing to Schmidt’ s political leanings during the 1930s, his music became associated with Austrian fascism and Nazism. In the years between 1938 and 1945 in the concert programs of Vienna, the music of Franz Schmidt played huge and prominent role. This association resulted in making his music unwelcome and politically tainted after the war. In this sense, his music and career was labeled “politically incorrect” and took on a symbolic role directly in conflict with any effort at de-Nazification. The situation in Austria was even more complicated than in Germany, for in Austria, the process of coming to terms with the past was delayed and submerged by Austria’s delusive and inaccurate self-image an unwitting dupe of Hitler.

The coincidence of art and politics cannot be brushed aside. But at the same time, it cannot give us the right to turn away from the musical achievement of Franz Schmidt. Unlike Pfitzner, Schmidt was not a collaborator, but merely a fallible human being with his share of relatively commonplace but dangerous prejudices. He was also, however, a composer of remarkable gifts. Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln is unquestionably his magnum opus. Like the music of Max Reger, it shows its debt to the past even as it displays unmistakable originality. Schmidt did not write music as an act of restoration. He used historical models to fashion something new. The tenor role of Saint John may conjure up the memory of Bach, and there may be other glimpses of direct references to the musical past, but all these allusions are cast in an ambitious, sweeping and intense fabric of musical and spiritual inspiration. This work qualifies as few others do as a neglected masterpiece. It should lead the listener on a spiritual journey that illustrates and magnifies the mysteries, metaphors, and images of the Apocalypse. It stands in the greatest tradition of the sacred oratorio.

To return to the story of twentieth-century music, a revival of Das Buch at the end of this century is particularly appropriate. The heyday of modernism has passed, and in that amorphous and eclectic aftermath called post-Modernism, tonality and traditional forms of composition and narrative music have returned. Franz Schmidt may have a place in the story of this century that will be told in the future, that is closer to that occupied today by Arnold Schoenberg than we may heretofore have suspected was possible. New generations may discover the unbroken conservative line of music making in this century with enthusiasm. They may hear it in a new way, detached from the polemics of the day, much the way we now hear Wagner, Brahms, and Bruckner side by side. It is therefore poignant and fitting that the first performance in recent years in the United States should feature the Arnold Schoenberg Choir from Vienna with the American Symphony Orchestra in New York. The pairing of Schoenberg and Schmidt in this way constitutes not only an act of symbolic reconciliation, hut also a more precise and penetrating reflection on the history of music in the twentieth century.

The Composer’s Voice: Influence and Originality in Hartmann and Mahler

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Composer’s Voice, performed on Oct 6, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Karl Amadeus Hartmann was, as Andrew D. McCredie, the leading Hartmann scholar, has pointed out, an artist of conscience. The central question for his generation–the crucible of its creative work–was the rise of fascism and the Second World War. Hartmann was a Bavarian and born a Catholic. He was the descendant of generations of artisans, artists, and teachers. In contrast to most of his contemporaries, he was unable to come to terms with the horrors of Nazism. Emigration was unreasonable and collaboration impossible. As a result, in his formative years, he found himself driven to silence.

It should therefore come as no surprise that a large portion of the music that appeared publicly after 1950 which made his reputation drew from music written during the 1930s and 1940s. Before 1945, Hartmann could find practically no acceptable venue for expression. Writing music in opposition to the world around oneself with no opportunity for performance and the ever-present possibility that one could put oneself in jeopardy present a psychologically terrifying reality. Hartmann was one of the very few German artists and intellectuals who maintained a truly honorable “inner emigration.” He stayed in obscurity, out of the public eye. At the same time, he composed arguably some of this century’s greatest, most intense music. What characterizes his symphonic work is not only an extraordinary command of the craft of composition, but a thorough commitment to the complex and subtle elaboration of musical ideas. Hartmann’s music, from the first note to the last, reveals an emotional power and a moral honesty. Human decency and talent are transfigured into a distinctive musical voice. Most of his works from the 1930s and 1940s function simultaneously on a formal and programmatic plane. In the formalist matrix, the pain of recognition around the composer is audible throughout. Hartmann’s heroism and achievement are all the more remarkable because his music affects us decades after the political events have passed into history.

The core of Hartmann’s accomplishment is his eight symphonies. In this sense, his work can be compared to that of Dmitri Shostakovich. Shostakovich was another leading composer caught in the web of dictatorship and terror, but he remained a public figure and sought to come to some accommodation with the world around him, despite its evident evil. The cost to Shostakovich was profound and gave rise to elements of satire, banality, crudeness, irony, and bitterness. Hartmnann’s retreat from the world lent his music a pervasive integrity and the aspect of suffering. I believe that Hartmann is a symphonist equal in stature to Shostakovich, and one of the few great symphonic composers of this century.

The First Symphony is typical of Hartmann’s struggle to reconcile music with life. Much of it was written during the 1930′s. Hartmann took his text from the American poet Walt Whitman, who himself was profoundly influenced by the American Civil War. In Hartmann’s First Symphony, then, we have a German composer setting the words of the poet of democracy and the enemy of his own country. But Whitman’s significance for twentieth-century musical modernism was not solely political. By the 1920s, Whitman had become a favorite of the German avant-garde. In 1913, the leading journal of turn-of-the-century musical modernism, Der Merker, published aphorisms by Walt Whitman. Hartmann’s choice was therefore also a statement about the necessity to continue the modernist idiom in music which came into being during the first three decades of this century.

During the 1930s, the Nazi Party spearheaded an aesthetic turn away from modernism toward a nostalgic conservative neoromanticism. Music and text in the First Symphony set the stage for Hartmann to write a symphonic essay that integrated political resistance in the form of aesthetic experimentalism. Although, as Robert Maxham points out, Hartmann was deeply influenced by Bruckner, the First Symphony reminds one also of the Mahler of the Second, Third, Sixth, and Ninth Symphonies. Hartmann’s musical language is an eclectic but thoroughly original achievement. Arnold Schoenberg was reputed to have said to an aspiring composer that no one should write music unless it sounded as if it had to be. There is this aura of necessity in all of Hartmann’s scores. lie never lapses into sentimentality or self-indulgence. Hartmann was severely self-critical and as a result, the final versions of his music are tightly structured and unerringly well-paced, with magical and terrifying timbres.

The Sixth Symphony, like the First, was derived from another case of the symbiosis of the literary and the musical. This time Hartmann chose Emile Zola, who like Whitman had become a symbol of a humanistic social conscience. Zola, more particularly, was the most celebrated opponent of political anti-Semitism owing to his courageous role in the Dreyfus affair. Once again Hartmann’s anti-German feelings are evident in his use of a French writer. His legendary penchant for revision and his difficulty in letting works go may (as in the case of the Sixth Symphony) indeed constitute a final piece of evidence regarding the nobility of his spirit. finlike other composers in the post-World War II era, Hartmann never exploited the public recognition of the war’s atrocities. He never conveniently used the pain and suffering of the past in order to spur his own muse. A listener today will find access to the aesthetic and the emotional in Hartmann’s music without any awareness of the specific historical circumstances which occasioned the music’s composition. It is to be hoped that the music of Hartmann–which is entirely neglected in the American concert hall–will be given its due not only because it reminds us that it is possible to sustain human decency without martyrdom even in the worst of times, but because it is great music that is accessible upon first hearing, which does not lose its magic after repeated exposure.

Today’s listener will have already anticipated many of the links between Hartmann and Mahler. To refer once again to the insights of Schoenberg, Mahler’s integrity as an artist and friend was what made him the idol of a younger generation of musicians, composers, and writers. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, three of the most influential twentieth-century composers, saw in Mahler their most significant predecessor. As the distinguished Mahler scholar, Edward R. Reilly, has written, Das klagende Lied held a special place in Mahler’s life. It was his first foray into large-scale composition, and its rejection led to a period of self-doubt. Like Hartmann, Mahler reworked and reutilized his own music. The material of his songs appear inure than once in his symphonies. In Hartmann’s case, the thematic material in the symphonies can be found in other works. It was with a sense of triumph and irony that Mahler chose the revised version of his early work with which to make his debut with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1901, after he had been elected by that orchestra as its conductor. If Hartmann, who was no outsider in his own community in terms of nationality and religion, chose as literary inspiration the writings of foreigners, Mahler, a Jew from Bohemia, chose the quintessential nineteenth-century source of German cultural authenticity–the fairy tales of Grimm–with which to appear in triumph before the Viennese audience. In one clear sense, Mahler, in this work, provided a model for Hartmann. As in Hartmann’s First Symphony, text and the procedure of symphonic writing work together. Both composers believed deeply in the ethical and in oral power of art. If neither of them succeeded in writing music that encouraged more goodness and perhaps even tolerance in listeners in their own time, they nevertheless wrote music which to this day retains the potential to inspire its listener to reflect and to resist evil. The achievement of both of these composers bears witness to the resiliency of the aesthetic imagination in this century.

Murderer, Hope of Women, Op. 12 (1919)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Sounds of Fantasy: Music and Expressionism, performed on May 10, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Hindemith’s Mörder, Hoffnung Der Frauen, composed in 1919 and the first of his triptych of one-act operas, belongs to the category known in German as Literaturoper. A substantial work of literature–Oskar Kokoschka’s expressionist play of 1907–is used as a ready-made libretto. (Kurt Weill’s Der Protagonist, like Berg’s Wozzeck and Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten, is another such Literaturoper.) But an Expressionist play does not guarantee an Expressionist opera, even though Kokoschka’s sententious baffle of the sexes seems literally to cry out for musical stylization.

The snarling semitone with which the onstage brass are instructed to “drown out” the orchestra at the opening obviously symbolizes the irreconcilably dissonant relations between the archetypal “Man” and “Woman.” Yet the work’s musical language in general does not emancipate its dissonances in the way that, say, Schoenberg’s prewar expressionist pieces do. The rich, eclectic idiom is contained within a more or less tonal framework. Nor, unlike Schoenberg’s atonal vocal works, does Hindemith respond in persistent detail to the immediate expressive or representational demands of the text. More symphonic than operatic, Mörder‘s form is similarly quite conventional, divided as it is into four readily distinguishable parts: a thematic exposition with lyrical second group, a development section, a slow movement, and a recapitulation-cum-finale. Such a fusion of a one-movement sonata design with the contrasting characters of the four-movement sonata cycle (called “double-function form” by the musicologist William S. Newman) was a common approach to the large-scale organization of nineteenth-century instrumental writing, especially in the work of Liszt.

Stylistically, Hindemith’s writing betrays a number of other influences, too: Straussian instrumental exuberance, Schrekerian opulence, and Wagnerian lyricism. In fact, the lyrical second thematic group, to the words “Our Woman,” is an obvious allusion to Tristan und Isolde (ironically, perhaps, to the so-called “Motif of Love’s Rest”). If Expressionism in music seismographically extrudes inner emotional turmoil (as in Schoenberg’s monodrama Erwartung), then Hindemith prefers to stay nearer to the surface, juxtaposing diverse idioms to convey the broader dynamics of the ritualistic tableau.

Such a mixing of styles suggests an almost parodic distance from the expressive tradition on which Hindemith relies. He speaks various musical languages with almost disarming fluency, but none of them is really his own. We may say this only with hindsight, of course, knowing Hindemith the prolific creator of the later well-crafted instrumental music, written in his own distinctive voice.

The premiere, given by Fritz Busch in Stuttgart in 1921, achieved something of a succès de scandale. While a number of critics rightly sensed a composer of enormous talent and promise, negative reactions sufficed to establish Hindemith’s early reputation as a young upstart. It was a bold–if ultimately uncharacteristic–beginning to a remarkable career.

Sounds of Fantasy: Music and Expressionism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Sounds of Fantasy: Music and Expressionism, performed on May 10, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

It is easy to forget the shock of World War I. The massive slaughter on the Western front and the unprecedented brutality of modern warfare paralleled the purposelessness of the conflict. The chauvinist euphoria with which the war opened was based on the belief that the war would be brief and relatively painless. But as the fighting dragged on, the intransigence of the combatants seemed to grow in direct proportion to the absence of any effective rationalization. The First World War brought the nineteenth century in Europe to an end, and with it died a facile belief in progress and the inevitable triumph of rationality and civility.

The consequences of the war in terms of art helped to inspire a generation to cast off the habits of the past. Tradition lost its prestige precisely because it became associated with the value system which led millions to their deaths in the trenches. If the war was a catastrophe, so was the influenza epidemic of 1918. By the time the Versailles Treaty was signed in 1919, the last glimmer of a better future had been extinguished. The great hope for a reconciliation, Woodrow Wilson, came to Europe with the famous “Fourteen Points.” But the terms of the settlement allowed pre-war enmities to fester. Not only was the Austro-Hungarian Empire broken up into smaller nation-states, but the principle of self-determination was only partially upheld. A rabid nationalism took the place of dynastic hegemony. Germany was humiliated beyond reason and held solely responsible for the war.

The German defeat came as a shock to its own citizens. The years 1918 to 1920 were ones of extreme political instability. The new Republic, dominated by the Social democrats, betrayed the extreme Left and projected an implausible compromise between the old Wilhelmine habits and the promise of a socialist order. The established elites of the army and the judiciary remained intact, and what later became known as the Weimar Republic gained a few genuinely loyal adherents. From the Republic’s commencement, a powerful right-wing sentiment flourished, sustained by the legend of the “stab in the back” Traitors inside Germany were responsible for its defeat, not the superior power of the Allies, fueled by the American entrance into the war in 1917.

These historical events provide the background for the music on today’s program. The right-wing reactionary movements of post-war Germany quickly took aim against the avant-garde culture of rebellion encouraged by the immediate post-war years. The First World War contributed to the success of the dada movement in Europe. Artists, writers, and musicians challenged the conceits of continuity, coherence, and meaning as understood by the bourgeois audience of pre-war Europe. Culture, taste, and refinement in an ordinary sense seemed to have little to do with a sense of justice and ethics. One might have liked to believe that progress in the nineteenth century mean not only the spread of education but the raising of standards in aesthetic judgment. One would have liked to think that conventions of morality and ethical judgement were also on some historical road to improvement, along with aesthetic taste. But skepticism and cynicism were appropriate responses to the war, and so to was a distorted Nietzscheanism, a celebration of the ecstatic present moment. Above all, any assertion of privilege on behalf of realism or its equivalent-to some criterion of objective beauty-came under siege. Expressionism was, after all, a vindication of the subjective as the only valid standard. And if art were to have any legitimacy, it had to assist in the radical transvaluation of beliefs, including aesthetic expectations.

Franz Schreker was from the older generation. When the war broke out, he was not a young man. After the war, he moved from Vienna to Berlin, where he had the good fortune of not living to see the full ascendancy of Nazi power. Of Jewish descent, Schreker lost his position as head of the leading conservatory of Berlin shortly before his death. It was during the years before 1933, however, that he built up the conservatory, recruiting everyone from Artur Schnabel to Arnold Schoenberg as teachers. Like Schoenberg, Schreker sided with the new generation of rebels, and was one of its teachers and mentors. The Chamber Symphony was written at a time when it was already clear that the war was senseless and lost. The successor to Franz Joseph, the Emperor Karl, tried unsuccessfully to bring the war to a close. The Habsburg Empire was doomed. It had sealed its fate by deferring to imperial Germany in its foreign polity. As Christopher Hailey, author of a masterful biography of Schreker, points out, there is something retrospective inSchreker’s music. But at the same time, the intimacy and sensuality of the work point as much forward as backward.

Since the late nineteenth century, a rivalry had existed between Berlin and Vienna in terms of art and culture. Many figures, such as Max Reinhardt and Schoenberg played significant roles in both cities. It therefore comes as no surprise that a composer without any links to Vienna, Paul Hindemith, should have taken as the libretto for his opera a text written by that enfant terrible, Oskar Kokoschka. Kokoschka is best known among music aficionados as the lover of Alma Mahler. When their torrid relationship came to an end, he built a life-size effigy of her, brought it to the opera, and burned it publicly. After Egon Schiele’s death in the influenza epidemic, Oskar Kokoschka became the undisputed leader of the Austrian expressionist movement. His play Murderer, Hope of Women was designed to shock middle-class culture buffs, and so it did. Kokoschka himself was a devoted music-lover, whose instinct for the musical was apparent to Hindemith. The fascination with male and female as polemical categories was a commonplace for the Vienna of 1907; Kokoschka’s views were unexceptional In this regard. Otto Weininger had already published his scathing Sex and Character (and later committed suicide in the house in which Beethoven died). Karl Kraus, whose The Torch served as a bible to Kokoschka and his friends, was obsessed with the character of the feminine. Additionally, Arnold Schoenberg, during this pre-war period, worked on Ewartung and Die glückliche Hand, both of which can be understood as expressionist experiments. The connection between Schoenberg and Kokoschka is particularly interesting, in part because of Schoenberg’s own foray into Expressionist painting during the period in which in which Kokoschka wrote the play upon which Hindemith based his opera.

By the time Kurt Weill finished The Protagonist in 1925, the worst of the immediate post-war era seemed to be over. The visceral instinct to experimentation that dominated the years 1918 to 1921 had given way to a more coherent movement. What is significant about this early work of Weill’s is that it brings together music, text, and theatre in a manner unique to the era before the sound motion picture, as Bryan Gilliam points out. It is an unknown and unfairly undervalued work by a composer whose career is difficult to characterize. In Germany, Weill is known primarily as the composer of Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Three Penny Opera–an important voice of the Weimar Republic whose works bridged the world of popular music and art music and who represented the essence of pre-Nazi liberal culture. Weill is at the core of the American cliché of Weimar cabaret. Mark Blitzstein’s version of The Three Penny Opera helped to secure Kurt Weill’s appeal to the American Left. However, in the United States, Weill, the son of a cantor, abandoned his association with Brecht and Weimar culture and became a successful composer for Broadway, reinventing himself in the American musical scene, to the dismay of many of his fellow immigrants. The earlier instrumental music of Kurt Weill has now returned to the concert hall: the two symphonies, the cello sonata, the concerto for violin. And slowly, the American Weill is becoming known in Germany. Oddly enough, however, amidst the current Kurt Weill renaissance, The Protagonist has remained in the shadows.

Of the art and culture of the inter-war period, it is the visual that has made the most lasting impression on the general public. German expressionism has acquired canonical status largely in the arenas of film, architecture, and painting. It is hoped that this concert can bring into equal relief the musical achievements of that era. The painters, architects, and filmmakers of the day would themselves be astonished to think that the work of their musical colleagues had been allowed to languish. One can only truly understand post-World War I visual expressionism and architectural modernism (particularly its emphasis on the economy of materials and the absence of ornament)-Kokoschka, Max Beckmann, Walter Gropius (and his Bauhaus colleagues), Robert Wiene, Fritz Lang–if one also has the music of Schreker, the young Hindemith, and Kurt Weill in one’s ears.

Faith: Meditation and Mysticism in Turn-of-the-Century France

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Faith: Meditation and Mysticism, performed on April 28, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Anyone living in the late 1990s in America might be tempted to think that he or she is trapped in an age peculiarly weighed down by doubt, aimlessness, and pessimism. If one is to believe the daily press and many cultural and political pundits, ours is a time when fundamental moral values have deteriorated, civility is in decline, and standards of art and culture have been cast adrift. Above all, the old verities of decency, reason, and objectivity have been undermined. As a result, we are told, many in our midst are turning once again to religion and mystical and metaphysical traditions in order to find firm bearings in a troubled age.

This cliché-laden depiction of cultural ennui and hopelessness today can be compared to the state of affairs at the turn of the century in Europe, particularly France. Perhaps the ends of centuries bring out admixtures of psychic and sociological insecurities. Numerological symmetries seem to take their toll on the way we think about history. The fact remains, however, that the late nineteenth century was a time in which artists, writers, and intellectuals were deeply concerned about the direction of society and culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, modernity seemed to have gone awry. The shift from a rural to an urban culture brought with it poverty, decadence, and an impersonality that appeared to exist in stark contrast to an idealized, pre-industrial world. despite enormous progress in science and technology, advances in rationality struck many observers as having been achieved at the cost of basic spiritual values and sensibilities. The attraction to Wagner’s Parsifal as a symbol of the renewed spirituality owes much to this state of affairs.

Max Nordau was perhaps the most famous turn-of-the-century cultural critic to charge modern art with reveling in decadence and degenerate depravity. In his view, the progress of modern civilization had been turned on its head by the generation of musicians, painters, and poets who had come of age during the second half of the century. By 1900, the most infamous of the culprits were probably Friedrich Nietzsche and his one-time hero, Richard Wagner, Parsifal‘s overt claim to purity notwithstanding. In differing ways they were both held responsible for subverting common sense and the moral yardsticks of Christianity.

The result was that painting, dance, and music were accused of celebrating the erotic, gaudy, the decadent, and the self-indulgent. There was indeed a fascination with what psychologists now might term the unconscious and instinctive, the seemingly basic currents of human emotion that lay below the controlled exteriors of Victorian-era bourgeois existence. The popularity of Oscar Wilde coincided with a widespread belief in Darwinism and a confidence in evolutionary progress. Progressive theories of history existed side-by-side with a fascination with the “primitive” and with sexuality and violence.

The so-called progress of modern life that was visible in the spread of literacy and the development of art and music–the creation of a public space with civilized inhabitants in the urban centers of Europe and America–filled some of Europe’s most prominent figures with horror. The most famous voice in the wilderness was that of Leo Tolstoy, the Russian novelist. After the publication of Anna Karenina in 1876, Tolstoy became increasingly committed to spreading his own version of the teachings of the Gospels. His amalgam of utopian socialism and primitive Christianity led him to a scathing critique of modern culture, art, and civilization. His last novel, written twenty years after Anna Karenina, entitled Resurrection, was his valedictory effort to reconcile art and morality. In it, Tolstoy confronts the issues of sexuality and morality that obsessed him. Prince Nekhludov struggles to shed himself of the habits and instincts of elegant cultivation to reclaim an ascetic, transcendent spirituality characteristic of simple, anti-modern rural life.

Of Tolstoy’s three large-scale novels, Resurrection is now the least favored and known. But when it was published in English, it was tremendously popular. It was initially banned in England, but the ban was revoked through public pressure. Eventually a stage version was created for the English public. European intellectuals at the turn of the century heard in the later Tolstoy a prophetic voice. Even if his solution seemed irreconcilable with modernity (and this was the view of the great German sociologist Max Weber), its purity, authenticity, and appeal remained undiminished. Appropriately, Tolstoy dedicated all the receipts from this novel to a utopian pacifist community in Russia. The young Albert Roussel was therefore not alone in his attraction to Tolstoy and to this tale of a spiritual journey that confronts two of life’s leading temptations: the allure of external culture and one’s inner instinctual forces, both of which threaten each individual’s capacity for goodness.

If Tolstoy was the late nineteenth century’s conscience in search of a return to simple Christian virtue, the Italian poet Gabriele d’Annunzio embraced all of the fin de siecle’s contradictions. He was notorious for every form of degenerate behavior. He was so obsessed with luxuries, that it was said even his horses slept on Persian rugs. His works were put on the Vatican’s Index, and he was reviled as the emblem of contemporary moral depravity. But matters are never that simple. d’Annunzio was no doubt part posturing charlatan. But he was also a successful poet and a figure of charismatic public flamboyance. He later distinguished himself on the field of battle and became one of the icons of Italian fascism.

On the surface, d’Annunzio was the polar opposite of Tolstoy. What links them together, however, is their shared dissatisfaction with the conceits and conventions of modern life. Beneath d’Annuzio’s radical disregard for bourgeois standards was a genuine desire to fashion for his contemporaries a world view that transcended mere materialism and surface rationalism. He turned not to the traditions of ascetic Christianity but to Paganism. Despite the disingenuous eroticism of the text, d’Annunzio and Debussy were in search of a new source of religious spirituality for their times.

Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien was therefore not merely an extravagant theatrical enterprise. As Debussy himself admitted, even though he was in no sense conventionally religious, a spiritual quest not unlike Tolstoy’s is distinctly audible in the music he wrote for d’Annunzio. Scholars have tried to downplay Debussy’s contribution by suggesting that he composed the work reluctantly and just for the money. Perhaps he was in search of a theatrical triumph comparable to that of Pelléas et Mélisande. But the fact remains that he completed the project and did not disavow it. A composer’s estimate of his own work may not be the best guide, and neither is posthumous criticism. The music to Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien achieves a spiritual clarity and a translucent beauty. Debussy’s music infuses Tolstoy’s dimension of simple truthfulness into d’Annunzio’s overheated, multimedia extravaganza.

A word should be said about this performance of Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien. The value of reviving this work has frequently been brought into question. Marcel Proust thought the music trivial, and more recently, Pierre Boulez has rejected claims that the music is of more than passing interest. Yet this work, despite practical obstacles, has been repeatedly brought back to life. The version being performed tonight restores all of the narration (including the prologue) used by D.E.. Inghelbrecht, the French conductor and friend of Debussy who selected the text with the composer’s approval. Previous performances have generally cut the narration or dispensed with it entirely. We have chosen to restore the full narration in the form in which Debussy’s score was revived after the first World War because the effectiveness of his music depends on its interruption by either the spoken word or dramatic action. Debussy wrote this work as incidental music to a drama. Therefore, to perform Le Martyre de Saint-Sébastien as one continuous musical composition with sequential movements is to distort it. Debussy’s music functions as a call and response to words and action. In part, it accompanies words and action. But the medium of music played a distinctive role in a theatrical production that was originally part mime, part theater, and part dance. The restoring of the extended narration honors the cumulative power and impact of the music as part of a larger whole. If Debussy had been asked to write a tone poem, symphony, or opera, his musical materials and decisions might have been different.

In today’s concert, the audience can experience some inkling of the way Debussy conceived of music functioning within the realm of the mystical, magical, theatrical event. If Tolstoy in his novel sought to use his gifts as a writer to serve the moral betterment of mankind, in Saint-Sébastien Debussy sought to make his unmatched command of musical timbre and color serve as the medium of spiritual transformation.

America’s Musical Pioneer: Homage to Leopold Stokowski

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert America’s Musical Pioneer, performed on March 3, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Fame and success in one’s lifetime do not necessarily ensure respect. Neither do they secure the prospect of a positive posthumous revisionism. The career of Leopold Stokowski (1882-1977) is a case in point. In his own day, Stokowski was idolized by audiences–particularly in Philadelphia, where he built a legendary ensemble as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He elicited a distinctly silken string sound. He innovated on the style of performance and mesmerized his listeners with the expressive painterly gestures of his hands (he used no baton), his dashing profile, his shock of flowing hair, and his elegant presence.

Stokowski was a showman and a born entertainer. He was a man addicted to the theatrical. He collaborated with Walt Disney and shook hands with Mickey Mouse on the silver screen. He became a world-famous media figure. For all this he was branded by critics and many rivals as a charlatan and a mere popularizer. He was rarely taken seriously as an interpreter. Toscanini, Furtwängler, Klemperer, and Walter all were held in higher regard. For connoisseurs of a particular bent, Reiner and Mitropolous were considered, in contrast to Stokowski, musicians’ musicians with a profound command of musical texts.

In our day, record collectors and listeners take an interest in the performance traditions of the past. All the conductors listed above have had their discography re-released in modern formats. Their work has been poured over by critics and emulated by young conductors. The posthumous reputation of Stokowski, however, has lagged behind. Whether it was his penchant for the life of a socialite (including a marriage to a Vanderbilt) or his wide popularity, his work is still denigrated. It remains less known than it should be. Self-conscious sophisticates and those with pretensions to profound insight still continue to dismiss his work, much as Stokowski’s contemporaries once did.

Among the performers of the past who have gained a nearly fanatical posthumous following and authority, few can rival the respect and awe now associated with the work and career of Glenn Gould. Gould was a genuine iconoclast. He was consummately a musician of ideas, whose writings deserve study and rereading, and we still mourn his untimely death. To his credit, Gould was not afraid to differ from his contemporaries. He admired and understood Stokowski. He recorded Beethoven with Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra. At a minimum, Gould’s judgment should lead us to question received wisdom concerning the artistry and achievement of Stokowski.

Leopold Stokowski was a great conductor, an inspired musician, and a tireless advocate of new music. The list of works introduced to the United States and premiered by Stokowski in Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Houston, and New York is staggering. It includes Berg’s Wozzeck, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. No other major conductor, not even Serge Koussevitzky in Boston, was as adventuresome, as fiercely eclectic, and as tirelessly innovative. Stokowski rivaled Toscanini in the popular imagination and exceeded Koussevitzky and Mitropolous in his advocacy of new and experimental music.

Stokowski loved life. His vitality was inexhaustible. He lived well into his nineties, conducting concerts in England and making recordings. He founded a new orchestra in New York in 1962–the American Symphony Orchestra–and kept it alive with his own funds. He sought to fill the vacuum created when the New York Philharmonic left Carnegie Hall. He also wanted to show that an orchestra made up of young Americans trained here could match European orchestras and American ensembles dominated by Europeans. He encouraged young American conductors and composers during the 1960s. He premiered Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony with the ASO. At the ASO he developed a program of concerts with low ticket prices in an effort to broaden the audience for concert music.

Stokowski the conductor not only cultivated a lush and rounded sound, but also took risks in creating excitement, showing how music functioned dramatically and utilizing often unexpected (but not capricious) shifts in tempo, color and mood. His ASO performance of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony is a case in point. He tinkered with scores, but he always elicited a distinct and alluring line and sound, and his performances were never boring. Above all, he made many transcriptions, including an innovative version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which the ASO took on tour to Japan in 1994. Perhaps because he had started his career as an organist, he conceived of the orchestra as a single organic instrument, as capable of flights of unique, soloistic timbres as it was of producing huge, integrated sonorities.

This concert pays homage to Stokowski’s legacy and contribution by presenting four works associated with him and reflective of his range of interest. Today’s ASO seeks to honor his example of innovation and his embracing of new audiences. All the works on this program were first performed by him in the United States. Two of them, both by Americans, were given their world premieres by Stokowski. The opening work on the program, the Bach-Stokowski D minor Toccata and Fugue, is perhaps the most famous of his many transcriptions. It was his signature piece.

Stokowski’s example and contributions to twentieth-century musical life in America ought to be an inspiration to future generations of performers and listeners.

Jews and the European Musical Tradition

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Jews and the European Musical Tradition, performed on Jan 26, 1996 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Tonight’s concert reverses the sequence of history. It opens with Schoenberg’s Kol Nidre, written in 1938 on the eve of the destruction of European Jewry by Nazism. It closes with a throwback to the pre-modern European world before 1848, to an age before virulent nationalism and racial hatred, when notions of the inevitability of tolerance and rationality in the history of humankind still held sway. The concert’s closing work, Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang Symphony, celebrates that faith in the triumph of reason and enlightenment over superstition and prejudice. It communicates the expectation that all sectarian religions ultimately will converge over time into one credo under the banner of a demystified and rational modern Protestantism. For Mendelssohn, the divine is not ineffable but capable of expression in human experience and language as light and reason. At the core of the Lobgesang is a vision of a world at peace, marked by neighborly love and the absence of violence.

Schoenberg was a German-speaking composer, born a Jew in Vienna who converted as a young man and then reconverted in 1933. His return to Judaism was motivated by the radical extremes of hate that soon were to be followed by an unimaginable torrent of physical and psychic violence and cruelty. Schoenberg refashioned a Jewish identity along his own philosophical lines and in his later years espoused an intense Zionism. In the 1920s, in part through a break with the painter Kandinsky, Schoenberg confronted the fact that anti-Semitism in Europe could not be eluded by a religious conversion. Being a Jew meant more than maintaining allegiance to a doctrine and a way of life. He not only returned to membership in the Jewish community, but in his unfinished masterpiece, Moses und Aron, he expressed his conviction that the notions held dear by Felix Mendelssohn were wrong. The divine could not be expressed adequately. Human language was unequal to the task. Humanity, like the Biblical nation that turned to the Golden Calf while waiting for Moses to come down from Mount Sinai, was condemned to doubt–to be seduced by surrogates and to debase reason and truth with inadequate speech and corrupt action.

It is ironic, then, that this concert closes with an expression of unimaginable harmony among humans and a vision of a faith expressed in music and language that seeks to bind humans one to another and not divide them. Mendelssohn did not convert from Judaism as an adult. Yet he grew up as a devout man of faith, although (unlike his grandfather) as a Protestant. He married a pastor’s daughter and produced the most significant church music in Germany of the nineteenth century. Yet, in contrast to his father, Felix never dropped the obvious and emblematic Jewish name Mendelssohn. He never forgot his origins as a Jew or lost his sense of solidarity with the people and religion of his forebears. Like Schoenberg, he knew that being a Jew transcended faith. In fact, Felix Mendelssohn believed that his embrace of Protestantism vindicated Judaism, the ideas of his grandfather, and the logic of history.

Felix Mendelssohn was, after all, the grandson of the eminent philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, contemporary of Immanuel Kant, and the greatest Jewish figure of the German Enlightenment. Born into a family of both material and spiritual wealth, Felix, despite enormous privileges and fame, experienced anti-Semitism, particularly around the so-called Hep Hep riots of 1819. Notwithstanding his forebodings about the rising tide of nationalist sentiment, particularly in the years immediately preceding his death in 1847, Felix still held fast to the hopes eloquently articulated by his grandfather. Moses Mendelssohn had called on his fellow Jews to modernize their religion and seize the opening up of the ghetto in the 1780s and the opportunities created by edicts of toleration to enter into a Christian world as equals. Moses’s son Abraham took the logic of emancipation to its logical extreme. He converted and assumed a new non-Jewish name, Bartholdy. Upon the death of Moses Mendelssohn’s widow, he had his children baptized. Another of Moses’ children, Felix’s aunt Dorothea, married the philosopher Schlegel and embraced Catholicism.

In the third work on the program, placed between Schoenberg and Mendelssohn, we encounter the nearly forgotten music of another German Jew, Berthold Goldschmidt. Unlike the works that surround it, it is a work of “absolute” music, devoid of overt ideology and reflective of the intense identification by German Jews with the traditions of European culture–their contributions to these traditions and their aspirations for them. Goldschmidt was born into the last generation of German Jews who would come of age primarily as Germans and not as Jews. In this concert we hear the voice of the generation of victims, of a distinguished representative of a cadre of artists and intellectuals born at the fin de siècle who descended from German Jewish families who prospered between 1848 and 1933. despite increasing political anti-Semitism, German Jews flourished as assimilated Jews in German society. Goldschmidt was lucky, in a comparative sense. He survived the war in England. But his career as a composer was destroyed, and he was forced to struggle as an outsider, displaced from a world to which he once believed he belonged, prejudice notwithstanding. Unlike some émigrés, he did not lose faith in his values. during the war he fought the mixture of appropriation and disfigurement of culture by the Nazis by broadcasting European concert music on the BBC directed to Europe as a propaganda measure against Nazism.

Today it is ironic that the history of Jews in Germany has become an object of genuine and intense interest on the part of a younger generation of Germans in Western Germany. Books, movies, and plays about the Jews are plentiful. Visual artifacts are carefully preserved. A non-Jewish readership eagerly reads Martin Buber and contemplates the wisdom of the vanished world of Eastern European Jewry, including Hasidism, as mediated not only by contemporary scholars but by the romanticized accounts of Austrian and German Jewish writers of the 1920s–Joseph Roth, Arnold Zweig, and Alfred Doblin. The philo-Semitism of young Germans today is akin to the romance with the Native American in our own country. A society obliterates the living protagonists of a contrasting tradition only to see subsequent generations use the memory of that destroyed tradition as an object of exotic wonderment and a vehicle of social and cultural critique.

A German-speaking culture without Jews! Perhaps only the most virulent of nineteenth-century anti-Semites–possibly Richard Wagner–could have imagined such a possibility. Indeed, the sustained interaction between Jews and Christians in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany led to the fact that German Jewry–despite the context of unremitting anti-Semitism–made remarkable and crucial cultural, intellectual, social, and economic contributions to Germany. Assimilation and acculturation were profound and successful realities. It was as if the paranoia and irrationality of anti-Semitism in Germany only increased as the objects of hate ceased to be openly and visibly Jewish in some preconceived and preferably exotic manner.

Mendelssohn died before it had become clear that neither assimilation nor acculturation could be sustained for the very long term, before the brutal fact emerged that in German-speaking Europe the Jewish Diaspora, despite centuries of cohabitation, ultimately would not find itself secure and at home. The grand sweep of history as retold in textbooks and schools tends to mask the encouraging realities of individual experience and daily life framed by one or two generations of experience. In the end, although, with hindsight, we might think the catastrophe appeared inevitable, the Jews of Germany were shocked by the events of 1933 and 1934. When Hitler turned out not to be a brief nightmare, but was accepted, appeased, and even emulated in the rest of Europe, even after the violence of 1938, few were prepared for the subsequent slaughter. The image of Germany that the Jews of German origin held on to was the Germany of Moses and Felix Mendelssohn; a Germany of Kultur (culture) and Bildung (self-cultivation), of refinement and reason, the “good” Germany of classical Weimar and Goethe.

This concert is dedicated to the memory of the German-speaking Jewish community. Too often when we think of the European Jewry destroyed by Hitler and his allies our mental picture turns exclusively to the poor, pious, shtetl Yiddish-speaking Jew, untouched by Western modernity. But in Germany, and in all of Central and Eastern Europe as well, particularly in Budapest, Vienna, Warsaw, Lodz and Prague, modern European Jews–the Jewish Weitburgers–millions of cosmopolitan Jews–were also obliterated. Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and Goldschmidt were descended from that line of European Jewry. So were a disproportionately high percentage of the European audience for music and culture before 1933.

We would do well to more than just marvel at the extent, variety and magnitude of the achievement of assimilated and acculturated European Jews. In the face of the power of the music on tonight’s program, we ought to recall and to rekindle a modern Jewish vision of a world of tolerance, freedom, reason, learning, and culture that, despite the Holocaust, survives as a complex set of aspirations for our own day, worthy of respect and emulation.

Behind the Curtain: Submission and Resistance under the Soviet Regime

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Behind the Curtain: Submission and Resisteance under the Soviet Regime,, performed on October 1, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The first concert of this season focuses on the dilemmas faced by artists in conditions of extreme “unfreedom” and censorship. The historical situation that we have chosen is the Soviet Union before Perestroika and after the rise of Stalin. This period was the worst era of sustained dictatorship in Soviet history. Two generations of composers are considered today: Nikolai Myaskovsky came of age before the October Revolution, Dmitri Shostakovich and Tikhon Khrennikov were still children–eleven and four years of age–when the Communists took over. Myaskovsky’s evolution and career as a mature composer, therefore, had to take into account the shifting direction of post-revolutionary politics. Audience members who are familiar with the flowering of progressive visual art, theater, film, poetry, and architecture after the revolution may be familiar with the immediate post-revolutionary history in the arts, which encouraged experimentation and modernism. But the flirtation with modernism in the Soviet Union was brief. By the mid-1930s an entirely new and terrifying official aesthetic had evolved. In the full flower of Stalinism, the choices facing artists were not easy. The list of those who died or were tortured because of their independence is tragic. It includes the poets Babel and Mandelstahm. The lives and careers of countless others were destroyed.

Of all the arts, music presented the most complicated case. Unlike painting, theater, film, or literature, music certainly could be regarded as more elusive with respect to the issue of political meaning. But that did not deter the Soviet state apparatus from imposing accepted standards. Nevertheless, the room accorded musicians for the creation of independent meanings, ironies, and ambiguities was far greater than that facing architects, painters, and writers. In the end, instrumental music in particular, which is featured on this program, could be argued to be exclusively about itself. That such a formalist view of music will not hold up under severe scrutiny and was not in favor with the regime does not diminish the inherent capacity of music to better elude strict political control.

When we think of everyday life under the two most brutal dictators of the century, Stalin and Hitler, the tendency has been to think about heroes and heroines–individuals who, in some Hollywood-like fashion, stood up to terror and risked martyrdom and, more often than not, achieved it. Those are the stories we like to tell, even though few of us possess either the character or the courage to act in the same way. Heroes and heroines are and always will be the exceptions. For most of us, the will to survive necessitates a large spectrum of adjustments to realities over which we perceive very little or no control. Most people want to be left alone to pursue their private lives. Others with ambition to achieve something in the public arena quickly encounter the need to compromise–to “play ball,” so to speak–in order to give their own hopes and dreams a chance to become real. Those of us who have lived with the privilege of freedom are often too quick to condemn those who have compromised and have eluded an open conflict with authority–those for whom the thought of terror, death, and the inability to work were far too frightening. But no one can doubt that the consequences of resistance and defiance under Stalin were severe and swift.

In today’s concert we turn to individuals who were not martyrs, dissidents, or resisters. They were artists of stature and achievement. In our simplified view from the outside it is easy to turn any society into a picture with only good and evil participants. To live in the world and to function in any capacity, including that of being an artist, requires varying degrees of grayness and ambiguity.

The two figures on this program who are the most intriguing are Myaskovsky and Shostakovich. Shostakovich is far better known. The Fifteenth Symphony, his last, was written in a time that was perhaps the most awkward for the composer since the debacle surrounding Stalin’s reaction to his Lady Macbeth in the late 1930s. With the explosion of open dissidence in a neo-Stalinist era in the Soviet Union, Shostakovich, a senior and revered figure, allowed his name to be used on the side of the state against individuals such as Andrei Sakharov whose names now have become legendary symbols of the struggle for freedom. But the Shostakovich case is profoundly complicated. He was one of the great examples of how a genius with a nearly unparalleled musical imagination and a profound spirituality struggled to function under totalitarianism. He continued to work, to write, and to exist as a musician. He was at one and the same time part of a “system” and a thorn in its side. The music mirrors the anguish and complexity of his circumstance and speaks on many levels, particularly to posterity. Shostakovich reveals without question the necessity of music as a form of personal expression and as an arena that ultimately can resist and elude political appropriation and domination.

The case of Myaskovsky is less well known but comparable in that a profoundly talented composer struggled to adapt to changing circumstances and survived as a professional. Unlike the other arts, an orchestral composition needs to be heard and put on stage. It cannot exist–as a book or a painting can–without being performed publicly. And the public performance is ultimately controlled by those who command political and economic power. Compromise and collaboration become unavoidable if one wants one’s work to be heard and wants a public in one’s own time.

The case of Tikhon Khrennikov may strike many listeners as the most puzzling and unfamiliar. He did more than cooperate and find a way to survive. He became a leading official of the state. By assuming power, he was responsible for the hated system. In retrospect, there are those who would defend him by saying that under his leadership things were actually better than otherwise might have been the case. From the perspective of this concert, the question in the end is–what kind of music did he write and how does it now fare with audiences when the evil with which he was associated has become historical and is no longer contemporary? If one is unable to approach the music dispassionately, it is interesting to hear what officially sanctioned music sounds like. How does it adapt to our ears? does it evoke its political context or origin?

An obvious example of how official music can end up successfully shedding the skin, so to speak, of its origins is Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. At the end of the day, how does the music of Tikhon Khrennikov strike us, even though he, like many other composers of greater and lesser distinction, can hardly be viewed as having been a saint or an admirable political personality? Music does not always live in harmony, side by side with virtue.

This concert, therefore, is designed to be provocative, in the first instance, as a precis of a very important and grim era in the Soviet Union in which musical life, particularly in a moment of extreme unfreedom, was vital to many, many people. The concert hall was one of the few public gathering spaces marginally independent of rigid control, where personal expression, however camouflaged, was still possible. Second, this concert forces us to think about the relationship among politics, personal ethics, and art. The music should force each of us to look with a differentiated sensibility on the predicament of those who sought to live and function in some plausible way and to continue their vocations as artists in a context that made unreasonable demands and inevitably distorted any natural impulse to distance oneself from radical evil.

Between War and Peace: The End of the Second World War

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Between War and Peace, performed on April 30, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This final concert of our 1994-95 season honors the momentous events of fifty years ago. In the spring of 1945, the war in Europe came to an end. At the San Francisco Conference, the hope of humankind, the United Nations was created.

In the brief period between the end of Hitler’s War (and with it the full recognition of the unparalleled brutality and horror of Nazism) and the dawn of the Atomic Age on August 6, it was perhaps still possible to believe that the worst humanity had to offer had been overcome. The sense of triumph was not merely one of military victory and national pride. Amidst the despair visited on all that resulted from the destruction of Europe there was a glimmer of hope that the world had just experienced the war to end all wars; that the radical evil of the hate, terror, and atrocities exemplified by Nazi Germany would never be repeated. The United Nations held out the possibility that the old ways of power politics would be changed.

The arts were not left unaffected by the War. Each nation, on both sides of the conflict, marshaled its leading musicians into the battle for the heart and minds of its people. Marc Blitzstein was commissioned by the Air Force to write The Airborne Symphony. Although later on he distanced himself somewhat from the Nazis, at the start of the regime Richard Strauss accepted an official position as head of the music section of the Cultural Ministry. Arthur Honegger’s sympathies for the French Resistance were clear from the start.

In modern history, World War II shattered the illusion that music can remain neutral and value free, an aesthetic arena concerned with beauty that stands independent of politics. Good music is just good music, one might like to say. Even though this is not quite the case, since music is different from art and language, it offers a unique forum and vehicle for communicating. The often repeated claim that music is a universal language is somewhat true in that the variety of meanings to which it is subjected can never be exhausted and never remains stable. The motto of victory for the allies was the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Yet the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven was performed repeatedly under the Nazi flag in the context of the celebration of the Third Reich. And Beethoven is performed today without any shred of evident political meaning and without any residue of its use and abuse during the Second World War. Music resists evil by simply being elusive. It is susceptible at any hearing to any individual’s way of listening and ascribing meaning.

At the same time, music has been able to give voice to a sense of existential hope and despair in ways that remain recognizable and that transcend the historical moment. It is therefore not surprising that war has inspired the writing of great and lasting music. One thinks, for example, of the Napoleonic Wars and the work of Haydn and Beethoven.

This program chooses three examples of music inspired by the closing years of the war, when victory was within grasp, the recognition of suffering unavoidable, and the yearning for a better world matched only by a fear of the total destruction of civilization. In the case of Strauss’s Metamorphosen, the composer’s pessimism and despair led him to write a work whose musical language broke the barrier of his own narrow and amoral attitudes. A profound expression of sorrow and humanity could emerge from Strauss only in music, never in words. Here a sense of loss and defeat is expressed in terms that remind us all of our common fate and limitations as human beings; it overcomes our rage and resentment of those who were once our enemies. Dark as the work is, it is at the same time an expression of hope in that it shows the best of that of which any of us might be capable: the ever-present possibilities of redemption from evil.

Despite the rousing patriotism of The Airborne Symphony, Blitzstein was careful to end the work with a plea to reject the false sense of moral superiority that victors inevitably display. The lesson of America’s bravery in the air, the sacrifice of its fighting men, and the promise of modern technology was a world beyond nations–the open sky of a universe marked by international cooperation and tolerance.

This concert contains one work by the vanquished and one by the victor. The other work is by Arthur Honegger, who was Swiss. While he was actively anti-Nazi, he was formally a citizen of a neutral nation. In symbolic terms his presence in this concert represents the voice of the engaged bystander–the many individuals who were left to resist, withdraw, watch, and try to understand helplessly the killing and suffering. This great work–like Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Symphony No. 1–reminds us of the horror of war and oppression. But unlike Hartmann’s work, Honegger’s looks ahead as well as back. Within its overtly religious framework it offers, in music, an expression of faith in humanity’s divine spark–our capacity to begin from the rubble again, perhaps in a more just and noble fashion.

Many readers of this program will reflect on how little progress seems to have been made in the last half-century. The events in Bosnia and all over the world–not to mention the hate and violence with which we live every day in our own country–can lead us to hopelessness. Our collective failure to restrain evil and violence and our callous adaptation to an environment marked all too regularly by suffering and death are perhaps signs of our inability to redeem the possibilities that faced the world in 1945. At the same time, this music, written fifty years ago, should remind us that it is never too late to start, to renew the idea of international cooperation, to secure human rights for all, to educate and extend ourselves to others, to display tolerance, to resist radical evil, and to prevent war. The music on today’s concert reasserts the unpredictable and staggering power and richness of the human imagination. The greatness that is possible in music by individuals should be equally possible in the conduct of everyday life.

Unjust Obscurity? (1995)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Unjust Obscurity? (II), performed on March 10, 1995 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert explores one aspect of the American Symphony Orchestra’s mission. We would like to offer a challenge to the habits by which orchestras set their repertoire. Why are some works repeated over and over again and others only occasionally performed? Why is it that some works are rarely ever heard? Implicit in the ASO’s mission is a healthy skepticism about the way we understand music history. The commonplace wisdom is that “history” is itself an objective judge. That means that if a piece of music doesn’t survive in the repertory over many generations it must not be a masterpiece or even worth hearing. The idea behind this is that somehow all works receive an equal and fair chance to be heard and to be judged as worthy of rehearing by generations of listeners. The truth of the matter is that for every work that survives in this manner there are works that have to be resurrected laboriously without the verdict of “history.” Perhaps the most famous example is the Beethoven Violin Concerto. After the first two performances, it was declared a failure and a bore. Nearly four decades after its composition, Joseph Joachim revived it by performing it persistently despite the objections of concert organizers. Future generations are grateful that he took the time and trouble.

We at the ASO also hope to puncture the exaggerated emphasis that many lovers of music place in the ideal of the “masterpiece,” we would like to encourage listeners to enjoy a piece of music, appreciate its magical and memorable moments, and even recognize weaknesses without feeling compelled to dismiss any work to oblivion simply because it is not an equal of a familiar and flawless masterpiece. Why shouldn’t we love and appreciated fine music the way we look at fine paintings and read fine books? Over the past few seasons, the ASO has revived works that past generations of listeners have been moved by and have appreciated; works of mastery and inspiration that have been belittled in some quarters because they still don’t seem as good as, for example, a Brahms concerto or a Mahler symphony. But if listening to the music of the past is to be a living experience, must we restrict ourselves to a diet of a very limited number of works form the enormous wealth of excellent music writing during the last two hundred years? The works the ASO is presenting today are not in any sense “second rate.” They are not “minor” works by “minor” figures in the history of music. The only way one can consider them minor is if we redefine our sense of proportion. Such a redefinition would render most of the artists whose pictures we cherish minor and most of the books we read and respect as minor. Why are some of us so impatient and judgmental when it comes to music?

Periodically the ASO devotes an entire program to works that we believe need to be performed more often. Obscurity is, of course, a relative term, and some in the audience may be troubled by the idea that any of the pieces on today’s program are considered obscure. Connoisseurs, for example, have a different definition of obscurity. But from the point of view of most music lovers and concert goers, none of these works are everyday fare. To hear them live or even on a recording is a comparatively rare experience. Perhaps the most important thing to point out is that our experience has been that the staff and above all the musicians of the ASO have come to believe in and respect the so-called “obscure” works we present. It is our hope that we successfully communicate this affection and admiration to the concert public.

In 1996, we will celebrate the 100^th anniversary of the birth of one of the great American composers of the twentieth century, Roger Sessions. By today’s standards, his music may sound modern in an old-fashioned way. But in every style in history there are great and lesser practitioners. Even if a musical vocabulary of expression should experience an eclipse for a period of time, the genius of those few who used that vocabulary as an authentic vehicle should not be forgotten. Among twentieth-century modernists, Roger Sessions was a giant. His works will continue to electrify, fascinate, and move listeners despite changes in fashion. This Piano Concerto is a fine example of Sessions’s compositional mastery.

The Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck is less known than he ought to be. Those who know his music admire it for its subtlety and lyricism. His works deserve a wider audience. This Concerto is truly an undiscovered jewel. Since it is a lush and expressive violin concerto, it should appeal to virtuosos and audiences alike. There has always been a demand for Romantic violin concertos, and we hope that this performance will lead to other performances. The work is elegant and intimate. It was written for Stefi Geyer, a fabulous violinist form Hungary who was, among other things, Bela Bartók’s first love. She was a student of Hubay and a classmate of Bartók’s in Budapest. Bartók wrote his first Violin Concerto and the Two Portraits for her. Before World War I, she moved from Budapest to Switzerland, where she met Schoeck.

Psalm 114 of Mendelssohn is a less familiar example of the still-to-be-revived choral repertoire of the mid-nineteenth century. Although Mendelssohn’s music for chorus and orchestra was enormously popular a century ago, most of it has disappeared from concert programs. This is particularly the case for the shorter sacred works.

The closing work is by Karol Szymanowski. Szymanowski was one of the great composers of this century. Although his two violin concertos are reasonably well know (but not played as often as they should be), most of Szymanowski’s music, particularly the great opera King Roger, still awaits systematic advocacy by conductors, vocalists, and instrumentalists. Several years ago, we performed a very early, neo-Straussian work, the First Symphony. We now present one of Szymanowski’s masterpieces, the Stabat Mater. It reveals Szymanowski’s distinct music language. As the program notes indicate, this work was written for performance in either Polish or Latin. We have chosen to perform the work in Latin for two reasons. Too often Szymanowski is praised in a somewhat condescending manner as a great “Polish” composer. The implicit prejudice is that form some national cultures of Europe–for example, those of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary–different criteria should be applied. Some well-known names are considered as great nationalist composers, but are less regarded if viewed from a so-called universalist, international context. One, for example, rarely speaks of Beethoven or Bach as “German” composers (unless one is a die-hard German nationalist). Yet we persist in speaking of Szymanowski in relationship to his identity as a Polish citizen. No doubt Szymanowski was s fierce Polish patriot, but Brahms was as much a German patriot and we don’t speak of Brahms as a German c composer in quite the way we refer to Szymanowski as Polish. Therefore, we will perform the Stabat Mater not in Polish but in Latin in order to underscore the fact that this work can stand comparison to other great settings of this Latin text. It is a profound work of religious faith designed for listeners all over the world. Furthermore, in the score there are some slight musical variants depending upon which language in which the work is sung. Ironically, in most cases the Latin, I believe, strengthens the musical line. In an era when the work of Gorecki has become wildly popular, it is both appropriate, enlightening, and sobering to listen to the great spiritual and music achievement of Karol Szymanowski.

Symphony No. 5 in B-flat major [Schalk edition] (1894)

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.

Amidst all the discussion of politics, a few words should be said about the music in the major work on this program, the Bruckner Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat.

The work, which is in four movements, was written in 1875 and 1876. Bruckner revised it again in 1878 but never heard the work performed by an orchestra. It was published in 1896 with the help of Franz Schalk, who conducted the first performance. For the published version, large sections were reorchestrated, the last movement was cut extensively, and a brass choir was added at the end to strengthen the closing bars. At the first performance the added brass were offstage, but the score explicitly calls for the new brass choir to be “behind the orchestra on a raised platform.” Either the offstage placement did not work or there was no room. Some Bruckner devotees may wince at this version, but I believe it makes a fantastic case for the work. In this version, the work should be heard more often and recorded.

The first movement is nominally in B-flat major. This can be said because the first movement may be one of the most interesting and powerful experiments in the relationship of harmony to the conventions of symphonic first-movement sonata form. The work has a slow introduction (the only one of its kind in Bruckner), which resists a firm tonality and drifts through G-flat into A until the Allegro. But even in the Allegro, tonality always seems to shift, together with wonderful new thematic and rhythmic materials and periodic breaks in the surface continuity. C major, F minor, E major, G minor, B-flat minor, E-flat major-among others-all are explored as this grand, nearly improvisatory harmonic journey makes its way to its massive end, which asserts the B-flat major. This movement is one of the most innovative in the nineteenth-century literature and bears the marks of Bruckner’s genius in using harmonic color and unexpected relationships to frame the emotionally powerful but intricate and subtle musical structure, in which the matter of a defining tonality is challenged.

The second movement is in D minor and is marked by a lyrical clarity achieved, In part, by simple cross rhythms. The second subject is in C major. Bruckner’s melodic genius is evident throughout. The closing bars are particularly notable with the D pedal in the timpani and the quiet close in D major. The third movement Scherzo is in D minor and is typical Bruckner. There is a slower second theme, reminiscent of the Austrian Ländler dance. The transition to the trio, which is not In 3/4 time, is an example of Bruckner’s harmonic usage. The F sharp of a D-major triad becomes used as a G-flat. The audience hears the same sustained note from one context immediately become the basis of another unrelated context without warning. in this movement, particularly the Trio, Bruckner’s humor and his relationship to Schubert and the eighteenth century are audible.

The last movement, after the introduction, is built around the writing of fugues. There is also a stunning chorale. Throughout this massive, multi-subject contrapuntal movement-even in this shorter form- Bruckner’s dramatic sense and sonic imagination are breathtaking. For the listener there will always be two outstanding aspects: the constant influence of the sound of the pipe organ on Bruckner’s use of the orchestra and the utterly original attitude to the creation of musical continuities. A majestic structure is built around blocks of sound, closely interrelated musical ideas, and carefully organized counterpoint–all placed in discrete and harmonically unexpected sequences. Bruckner creates his own sense of time and therefore the inner journey for the listener, it is likely that the essence of that journey, for Bruckner, was the celebration of faith and a sense of awe; and the expression of the variety and majesty of God’s creation through sound.