The Uses of History: Reincarnations of Beethoven

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Uses of History: Reincarnations of Beethoven, performed on March 30, 2001 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

During the first decades of the twentieth century Claude Debussy’s music was introduced into Germany. When it began to exert serious influence, some nationalist critics noted that, while it was all well and good for Germans to follow in the footsteps of French painters–since painting was never a field in which Germans dominated–when it came to music, to emulate a French composer was a travesty. Standing at the very center of the conceit that German culture defined music universally and normatively was the figure of Beethoven (in whom, not surprisingly, Debussy showed little interest). By 1900, the appropriation of Beethoven as a claim to legitimacy by subsequent generations of German composers had become an honored tradition. Not only did Wagner declare himself as the true successor to Beethoven, so too did the advocates of Brahms. Their master had become the “third B.” Later, Schoenberg and radical modernists in the 1920s also claimed a connection to late-style Beethoven as the harbinger of their own new aesthetic. Invoking the authority of Beethoven was one means of defending one’s approach to the future of music in the troubled early years of this century, when issues of modernity, innovation, and the interpretation of the past framed an intense debate about the purpose, nature, and future of music. Battle lines were drawn when both twelve-tone composition and a new brand of neoclassicism emerged in the context of the cataclysmic political transformation of Europe after World War I.

All three of the composers on tonight’s program were prominent figures in the musical culture of German-speaking Europe at the juncture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Only one of them achieved historical superstardom–Richard Strauss (1864-1949)–although that superstardom was associated with music written before the War. When Strauss undertook this arrangement of the music of Beethoven, he was already considered a great composer well beyond his prime, though he would experience what subsequent generations termed a glorious “Indian summer” as a composer after 1945. This standard view of Strauss as an anachronism in his own time (that is, after 1912) has only recently come under sustained reassessment. In 1924 Kurt Weill wrote on the occasion of Strauss’s sixtieth birthday that he is “for me–at the threshold between the nineteenth and the twentieth century–a glance backwards and a challenge.” However, most critics in the 1920s considered both Franz Schmidt and Strauss to be conservatives in a world characterized by many incarnations of an avant-garde espousing either a break with the past or a radical shift. Schmidt (1874-1939), despite his personal regard for Schoenberg, was notorious in Vienna for his open hostility to Mahler, in whose orchestra Schmidt once played cello. Schmidt composed four fine symphonies, numerous sets of variations, a famous left-hand concerto (performed by the ASO in 1994), and his masterpiece, The Book With Seven Seals (performed by the ASO in 1997). In an era characterized by the Bauhaus and Surrealism, the music of Schmidt and Strauss could easily be dismissed as conservative echoes of the past designed to function as challenges to surface progress and innovation.

The assessment of Max Reger (1873-1916) in the conventional history of twentieth-century music and modernism is more difficult to describe. Since his death at age 43, widely viewed as a tragedy, occurred before the end of World War I, Reger as a composer and personality became part of history before the bitter controversies about the future and nature of modern music in the post-War era erupted. Reger was part of a generation of extremely talented composers who probably more than any other nineteenth-century group felt the awesome weight of history. Almost ten years younger than Strauss and thirteen younger than Mahler, Reger was always overshadowed by towering figures just a bit older than himself. Given the shortness of his career, it is startling to think that the distance between the death of Brahms and Bruckner and Reger is fewer than twenty years. But Reger’s fame and reputation in Germany during his lifetime were strong enough for him to be hailed as the hope for the future for the classical music tradition. Reger, the composer of numerous chamber and orchestral works including the Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin (performed by the ASO in 1995) possessed an extraordinary command of music compositional facility. Although regarded as a kind of neo-conservative deeply indebted to Brahms and an anti-Wagnerian figure, when one considers works such as An die Hoffnung and Eine Romantische Suite, both written around the time of the orchestration of the Beethoven Variations, one hears an expansive neo-Wagnerian romanticism which one would not usually associate either with a follower of Brahms or with Reger’s too-often cited reputation for academicism. Reger had many disciples and admirers, among them the brothers Adolf and Fritz Busch and the generation that carried on the Busch tradition, particularly Rudolf Serkin. From today’s perspective, it is reasonable to suggest that Reger’s time may now have come. He is no longer overshadowed by others and we now have the distance to rediscover the wealth of power, inspiration, and variation contained in his remarkable output of compositions.

It is fitting that Reger’s is the oldest piece on this program, because in Reger’s music his own contemporaries identified the finest realization of the German tradition of musical literacy and culture. His meteoric rise catapulted him to prominence as a symbol of the continuity of high culture in the guise of “absolute music” against philistinism, cultural decline, and the spread of operetta culture–the superficialities associated with modernity at the turn of the nineteenth century and traceable in the eyes of cultural pessimists in large part back to Richard Wagner. The reaction of German-speaking Europe against Wagner was not only motivated by an aversion to his theatrical enterprise. There were those who considered his musical strategies as corruptive not only of taste but of basic standards of musical literacy. Although Wagner claimed to be the true heir of Beethoven, he was considered by many as the ultimate bowdlerizer, who appropriated only Beethovenian gesture and abandoned the fundamentals of Beethovenian composition. Gone were thematic development and variation–the kind of transformation of musical material that Beethoven both pioneered and perfected. In their place was endless repetition and coloristic effect sustained not by musical logic, but by dramatic spectacle. This view was strongly propagated by the followers of Brahms (although not by Brahms himself). The anti-Wagnerian Romantics saw in Reger the ideal candidate to contain the dangerous direction that Richard Strauss, for example, had taken in his compositional evolution in the 1880s and well into the next century. Strauss, who had been brought up in a household with conservative musical taste, fashioned his earliest allegiances to Brahms and that reconverted Wagnerian, Hans von Bülow. But by the late 1880s a new Richard Strauss had emerged who had embraced the music of Liszt and Wagner. What few contemporary critics realized, however, was that Strauss’s conversion to the “enemy” was not pervasive. Classical form and techniques–the kinds associated with Beethoven–are integrated into all of Strauss’s music, even the most radically narrative such as Also Sprach Zarathustra (1896) and the Symphonia domestica (1903). And Strauss returned to the symphony later in life with Eine Alpensinfonie (1915). Likewise the scores to Elektra and Salome owe a debt as much to the musical strategies of Beethoven and Brahms as they do to Wagner. Ultimately, at the heart of Strauss’s aesthetic credo was neither Beethoven nor Wagner, but Mozart, one of Reger’s key sources and inspirations as well.

In the case of Reger and Schmidt, it is not surprising that they chose for their themes ones that were widely recognized by the amateur listening and performing public. Beethoven was at the very core of middle-class tastes and expectations vis-à-vis music. Likewise, when Strauss adds his melodrama and invokes themes from the best-known symphonies, he too acknowledges a conception of musical communication shared by Reger and Schmidt that allied itself with the middle-class, urban, well-educated audience of the last third of the nineteenth century. There were literally in Germany tens of thousands of amateur pianists and violinists who played the Bagatelles and the Spring Sonata. Any moderately educated adult could identify the themes of the Third and Fifth Symphonies (critics and the lay public would have to wait for the generation of Thomas Mann and T.W. Adorno to award an equally privileged place to Beethoven’s later works).

By using some of Beethoven’s most famous themes, these three composers cut to the very center of what the musical debate at the time was really about. Mahler and later Schoenberg and many other modernists possessed anger and hostility toward the middle-class audience that reveled not only in its recognition of the themes chosen by Reger and Schmidt but in their capacity to follow the transformations indulged in by these composers in their sense of variations. Going to a concert was for most a delightful exercise cutting across generations in the timeless assertion of connoisseurship, the achievement of culture and taste, and the capacity for making discriminating assessments. Strauss too wrote for that public and never abandoned it even with Elektra and Salome. But much of modernism in the 1920s was an explicit act of rebellion and revolt precisely against the conservative middle-class culture and its construction of a cultural “establishment.” Thus late Beethoven, which like contemporary music was hard to grasp and had traditionally been far less popular, seemed a willing ally in the attack on the covert philistinism and ignorance masquerading under a veneer of education and culture, worn by the concert-going public. The source of the Beethovenian echoes in tonight’s music is the Beethoven loved by the lay public that radical modernists believed the public never really understood properly.

These three composers, cast reluctantly by history into the role of conservative standard-bearers intent on demonstrating the continuities between Beethoven and modernity, celebrating the centrality of Beethoven for modern times, helped define a struggle over the soul of Beethoven in the early twentieth century. The dimensions of that struggle as it existed are perceived now only by implication in the music like a ghostly shadow. But the point of the struggle retains its relevancy. These works are an affirmation of the value of continuing a tradition of composition and music education, amateur music-making and concert-going that Reger and particularly Strauss and Schmidt considered endangered not only by the transformation of contemporary life but by the aesthetic consequences of modernity. These works show more than a debt to the past. They are not only acts of homage, they are creations characterized by an aggressive counter-attack against the perceived insurgency against standards of taste and culture represented by the two most radical dimensions of twentieth-century culture: experimentation in the forms and materials of music and the rise of the commercial entertainment music directed at the brave new world of mass consumerism. They are an admonishment not to forfeit or distort history so readily.

Nostalgia: The Past Idealized Through Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Nostalgia: The Past Idealized Through Music, performed on Feb 4, 2001 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In 1861, the Paris production of Tannhäuser changed the course of music history in France. Charles Baudelaire’s famous essay helped secure Wagner’s place in the forefront of French musical life. The Revue Wagnerienne became a source of inspiration not only for musicians but for poets, novelists, and painters. Throughout the 1880s, Ernest Chausson, a man in his mid-twenties, was obsessed with Wagner. Indeed, he spend his honeymoon at Bayreuth in order to hear Parsifal.

Great composers must confront the models created by great predecessors. No one would think of denigrating Beethoven because of his debt to Haydn, or Brahms because of his connection to Schumann, and certainly not Mozart or Bach for their borrowings from predecessors and contemporaries. However, for obvious political reasons particularly in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the search for a French national voice came into direct conflict with the embrace of Wagner. French composers in the Third Republic struggled to come to terms with Wagner’s achievement. More than a century later, the traces of that political struggle are still apparent in the whole generation of French operas that remain in obscurity simply because they do not sound like Debussy. There is no reason to revisit the tired opposition between the German Wagner and the French Debussy, unless it is to see how that false polarity made historical casualties of the extraordinary group of French operas which includes not only Chausson’s Le roi Arthus (1895) but Dukas’s Ariane et Barbe-bleue (1907).

No one would have been more sensitive to this dilemma of identity than Chausson himself. He was a polymath. Born into a wealthy family, his life story defies all the clichés we associate with the struggling artist. Although his personal wealth has been exaggerated by some detractors, Chausson never had to work for a living and was able to support less fortunate colleagues including Debussy. Like Felix Mendelssohn, Chausson was very well educated outside of music. Like Schoenberg he was a gifted visual artist, and like Schumann, he had literary ambitions as well, authoring short stories and working on a novel. Beyond these accomplishments, Chausson also studied law, even earning a doctor of laws degree and obtaining admittance to argue cases in the highest courts of France. His highly cultivated upbringing persisted into adulthood in his famous salon gatherings, in which the most distinguished painters, writers, and musicians participated. Chausson’s special engagement with literature is evident in his use of a short story by Turgenev as the basis for perhaps his most famous work, the Poème Op. 25 for violin and orchestra (1896).

Chausson studied with both Massenet and Franck. If Massenet represented to a more serious, younger generation a tradition of pleasant superficiality (although this traditional disparagement is as questionable as the similar and yet-to-be-challenged dismissal of Meyerbeer), then César Franck provided an alternative. Imbued with a mystic spiritualism, Franck’s music seemed to promise an adequate alternative for French composers in a world suffused by Wagnerian profundity.

Chausson was among the most gracious and supportive of colleagues and was at the same time riddled with self-doubt and anxiety. Despite Franck’s admiration for him, Chausson was particularly sensitive to the charge of dilettantism. In 1886 he assumed leadership of the Societé Nationale de Musique and became a pivotal figure in French musical politics. As the 1890s progressed, he was increasingly aware of the talent and originality of Debussy, whose work would eventually eclipse his own.

Chausson labored on Le roi Arthus for more than a decade and believed that in this work he had successfully de-Wagnerized himself and achieved a new, transcendent musical voice. The premiere took place in Brussels on November 30, 1903, but Chausson did not live to see it. He had died in a freak bicycle accident four years earlier, at the age of forty-four. Despite some attempts to revive the opera in the last century, it has been left to languish in undeserved obscurity. German critics have repeatedly identified it as the culmination of the French Wagnerian obsession, following in the path of Chabrier’s Gwendoline (1885), d’Indy’s Fervaal (1897), and Lalo’s Le roi d’Ys (1888). The efforts of d’Indy and Lalo to mask their debt to Wagner with references to Gregorian chant or French folk melody have been viewed by critics as transparent. In contrast, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) is embraced as the first original French achievement. Whether Wagnerian or in some manner distinctly French, Arthus must take its place in this distorted historical narrative as a great and original masterpiece.

The choice of Arthurian legend as the opera’s subject is fascinating in terms of its ambiguous emancipation from Wagner’s heroic subjects. It explicitly invokes an Anglo-French past, thus identifying Chausson among the group of French composers who sought for a French mythic equivalent to Germanic epic as a way both of defining themselves against Wagner and of eluding the tradition of trivial and charming music and subject matter associated with the French light opera of Gounod and Massenet. This effort is similar to that of Max Bruch, who searched for Homeric and biblical subjects to serve the same elevated function as Wagnerian epic without sounding Wagnerian. There are no doubt clear parallels that today’s listener will find between Chausson’s music and original libretto and those of Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal. But as Chausson himself noted, Arthus may possess dramatic elements akin to Wagner–betrayal of friendship, the tragic loss of love and friendship, an appeal to mystic Christianity–but these are generally features of high epic which need not lead to the same musical realization that Wagner envisioned. The choral sonorities, the harmonies, orchestration, and melodic usages make this music distinctly Chausson’s.

In his use of Arthurian legend, Chausson also finds a third way among even broader oppositions of modern culture and our memory of the past. In Arthus, a fictionalized account of the distant past is used to contrast sharply with the present. The modern world in which Chausson lived was one of rapid industrialization, dominated by an unprecedented obsession with progress, profit, and materialism. The reaction of nineteenth-century Europe to the far-reaching and uncontrollable social consequences of these changes was two-fold. On one hand, Victorian intolerance reigned. Puritan rectitude, middle-class values, and materialism masked the social horrors of extreme inequity and exploitation that fueled the industrial age. On the other hand, a younger generation rebelled against this ethic by indulging in an aestheticism and celebration of sensuality and amorality, which they saw as a means to escape from Victorian hypocrisy. France’s fascination with the “decadents” is evident in the tremendous popularity of Huysmans and Wilde. Against both of these social reactions Chausson invokes the figure of Arthur, ruler of a realm dependant not on material goods but on Christian virtues of solidarity and moderation. Chausson (whose alienation from Debussy was due in part to his disapproval of Debussy’s private life) does not allow Arthur to indulge at all in the ethos of Pelléas. There are few moments as poignant as the close of this opera, when Arthur, faced with the deaths of his dearest friend and his wife, transcends his worldly existence with undiminished commitment to idealized principles of Christian love, charity, and loyalty. As many have pointed out, the affair between Genièvre and Lancelot is not celebrated like that between Isolde and Tristan. The hero of this opera is neither of the star-crossed lovers, but the dignified and heroic title character. Chausson’s own commitment to these ideals is evident in the opera, but equally apparent is his nostalgic notion that such ideals are lost, possessed once but now departed with a passing age. Arthur’s closing lines and the chorus’s echo signal not only a critique of the present but the hope of redemption and the return of idealism. Debussy might question whether such ideals ever really existed or are pertinent, but for Chausson, the present moment is one of absence, sharply and painfully sensed through memory and its relentless capacity to imagine better times.

Forgotten Patriotisms: Music as Political History

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Forgotten Patriotisms: Music as Political History, performed on Dec 13, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

After forty years of cold war, and only a decade of post-cold war, it is not surprising that a tendency remains among many Americans to recall impressions of life in the Soviet Union as reductive caricature of state oppression and control. Our collective memory judges the Soviet Union as a failed experiment in state socialism, an “evil empire” empowered by strict and enforced prescription of private life, culture, and art. But the experience was far more nuanced, and now that one no longer need fear knee-jerk accusations of closet sympathy for the patent evils of the Soviet system, it is possible to search through the remnants of Soviet culture to see the more complex effects of state cultural domination. In this sense, this concert is an exercise in memory, not rehabilitation.

We go to the heart of the matter by focusing on both the most inspiring and the darkest episodes of Soviet cultural control: the immediate post-Revolutionary period and the era of Stalin. The first question to be asked is whether the state-approved, ideologically determined aesthetic standards which defined the appropriate art for the socialist cause (sometimes called socialist realism), were ever successful, or at least more successful than any of the other many historical attempts to promote homogeny through artistic and cultural expression. Were they more effective or much different than, for example, the efforts of the medieval papacy to render the liturgy, art, and practice of Christianity uniform throughout Europe? The question points to the unchartable region which art inhabits, the region between public discourse and private, personal belief. Under conditions of censorship, the authentic translation of private thought into a public artistic form of communication is disrupted. When public expression is controlled, will private consciousness alter itself to cohere with public expression (as the state intends), or will both become polarized? Some scholars have suggested that in Czarist Russia, with its own severe censorship policies, the artistic community had already developed a very strong, private discourse that could be understood as nascently existentialist. Artists and intellectuals considered the morally tragic condition of humanity secretly while creating public works that were acceptable to the state. This tension between the public and the private in nineteenth-century Russia was observable in the art itself, and can easily be imagined to carry over in the context of post-revolutionary Russia, though the terms had changed. Of course, one complicating factor was that just after the Revolution, there was an enormous amount of idealism about the possibilities of a new order and society. When those hopes dimmed in the 1920s and 1930s, the vitality of subterranean discourse became even more pronounced.

As negative as Soviet repression was, however, other aspects of the Soviet Union’s attitude toward art should give us a moment’s pause. The great irony in the state’s effort to use art and music to promote change in consciousness was that art and music were given tremendous prominence as official state enterprises. In the United States, we encounter exactly the opposite circumstance. Our government does next to nothing to support the arts or to recognize it as integral to the character of democracy. Consequently, art is left the beneficiary and prisoner of free market commerce and private philanthropy which is only mildly encouraged by the tax code. The government’s role is indirect at best, and the great cultural institutions and patrons of our country are private entities. Despite its apparent benefits, this system exists at the cost of art’s exclusion from a central role in the construct of the public and of the nation. The role of art and artists is greatly diminished in the eyes of citizens and society–except when controversy erupts, which is usually over a moral standard that instantly ignites the threat of censorship. In Soviet Russia, subsidy of the arts allowed artists to enjoy significance as genuine cultural presences (if only they could have expressed themselves publicly without restraint). Stalin and Shostakovich had direct contact with each other; in the United States, only Hollywood’s calls are taken by the President.

The appropriation of musicians and composers by the new Soviet state began very shortly after the Revolution. Nikolai Yakolevich Miaskovsky had already made a considerable reputation as a composer before 1918. He trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory and by the time of the Revolution he had written five symphonies. The Sixth Symphony (1923) is essentially conservative in its musical idiom; one hears in it very little of the kind of experimentation that took place in the 1920s. Yet, during this period, the Soviet regime was enamored with progress and technology. In its first decade it encouraged aesthetic experimentation in design and literature, best remembered perhaps by the work of the Russian constructivists and stage designers. But Miaskovsky did not follow in that path with this work. He instead chose to use older models to write a masterpiece that commented on the desperate and difficult conditions his country encountered in the years immediately following the Revolution. However, this should by no means be mistaken for an expression of nostalgia. Rather, in recalling forms suddenly fallen out of favor, Miaskovsky rebuffs the fierce, affirmative patriotism of the younger generation and instead offers a picture of the ambiguity of this new civilization’s birth. The end of the old and the beginning of the new are responded to with a sense of tragic foreboding, vividly evoking all the inconsistencies, contradictions, and disappointments that attended the devastating social upheaval. Predictably, the work was accused of being a remnant of an old intellectual elite, and Miaskovsky was considered unable to grasp the possibilities of the new political reality. Yet there is something profoundly Russian and affectionate in this work. It is, as many commentators have noted, a worthy successor to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, the Pathetique. After the Sixth Symphony, Miaskovsky continued to work in the Soviet Union and had an immensely productive career. As a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, he exerted a powerful influence over a generation of composers, and was an intimate of Prokofiev. He survived the 1930s with his career and reputation intact, remained loyal to his native Russia, and adapted to the new political realities. The Sixth Symphony is now regarded by many to be his masterpiece, perhaps because it is a work written during that narrow window of opportunity, when the private and the public could come together openly.

In the generation of Prokofiev and Shostakovich, the relation between art and politics became much more awkward, difficult, and dangerous. Although Prokofiev was only ten years younger than Miaskovsky, the older composer encouraged Prokofiev’s career. Like Miaskovsky, Prokofiev had already made something of a name for himself before the Revolution, particularly with his First Piano Concerto. He had also won the Rubinstein prize in 1914. But shortly after the Revolution in 1918, Prokofiev left for America, where he stayed until 1922. He then moved to Paris and lived there for more than a decade, and except for a tour in 1927, remained outside the Soviet Union until 1936. It is not clear why Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union in 1936, which was certainly not an auspicious time. The grim realities of Stalin’s rule were quite plain, and Shostakovich had already suffered the dictator’s condemnation. Yet Prokofiev did return, settled in the Soviet Union, and made explicit attempts to come to terms with the regime. He participated in the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution, and save for some brief tours in the late 1930s, remained in Russia until his death in 1953.

The listener must rely on his or her own judgment to determine whether there is any irony in the piece offered on tonight’s program. The archives of Prokofiev’s life and work will only be opened in 2003, so we will have to wait for scholars to comb through what are now sealed materials to shed any more light on the composer’s reasoning. As Maya Pritsker properly notes, however, Zdravitsa is not merely a piece of hack music. It cannot be discarded, as much other “occasional” music has rightly been, into that category of patriotic and politically sycophantic works composed at the request of rulers (especially dictators). Even when good composers write topical works on commission, the result is often something like the Centennial Overture of Wagner, or Der glorreiche Augenblick of Beethoven, or worse. But Zdravitsa was thought good enough to merit a substitute text after Stalin’s death. This fact highlights even more dramatically the contrast between the music and the original text, which can be only shocking to listeners who know that by1939, no one had no illusions about the extent of Stalin’s cruelty and butchery, which involved the systematic purging, exile, and murder of peasants, leading artists and intellectuals. While Stalin lived, this work served as a primary example of the way in which high-quality music was used to engage public consciousness and sentiment even in the face of an inconsistent reality. After Stalin’s and Prokofiev’s deaths, we are left with the troubling question of how a great artist like Prokofiev could have reconciled public expression and private truth that way. Better, perhaps, if he had written a hack work after all.

The case of Shostakovich is perhaps the best known and most controversial. After the tremendous impact made by his First Symphony, Shostakovich entered a period of experimentation with new musical techniques and styles. Here is an example of how compatible modernism and Communism were at first. Shostakovich indulged the notion of a new modern aesthetic that would reflect the triumph of science and constructive materialism through experimentation and thus advance beyond a decadent, bourgeois tradition. Communism, progress, and modernity were supposed to combine into a transcendent experience of ideological inspiration. For these reasons, the Second Symphony as well as the Third have in retrospect been set aside by most observers as merely works of propaganda. Even at the time of its composition, conservative observers were put off by the signs of modernist experimentation, and later in his life, Shostakovich himself disavowed these works. Today, conventional views of these symphonies deem them second-tier achievements. Yet, the idealism of the young Shostakovich, his embrace of a new way of making music, and his attempt to forge a relationship between that and a new political vision were widely shared in the 1920s not only in Russia but in the rest of Europe and America. Only recently has the traditional sharp distinction between Lenin and Stalin come in for reassessment. Even if Lenin was not the heroic figure he was once thought to be, the absence of irony in this symphony should not be the object of criticism but rather of investigation.

With its choral finale, the Second Symphony offers a powerful juxtaposition of the modern and the politically affirmative. It is a fine case study–deserving of a second hearing–of the difficulty of using music in general to dramatize an interpretation of social transformation. Shostakovich suggests the extent to which issues of politics, social change, and ideology can inspire and be liberating in their own way as bases for art works that are capable of transcending the ostensible context of their origins. However truncated, the choral finale harkens back to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Mendelssohn’s Lobgesang, as well as to Mahler. Before dismissing the symphony for its naïve celebration of Soviet hope, consider whether claims for spiritual transcendence, Christian faith, or vague Enlightenment notions of universal brotherhood seem less complicated and more innocent than the praise of Communist revolution. The failure of Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Mahler to inspire listeners to behave in a more Christian or humanist manner has never been held against them. Is it less idealistic or plausible that Shostakovich’s praise of the leader of the Russian Revolution and the promise he held may have warranted the same intensity as Beethoven’s attachment to Schiller’s vision of universal brotherhood, or Mendelssohn’s notion of a synthesis of Judaism and Christianity, or Mahler’s obsession with the spiritual? In all of these examples, music attempts to interpret the promise of history, however narrowly. The real irony, as Shostakovich later learned, is that history tends not to fulfill the promise of music.

Tonight’s program is designed to offer an aural evocation of the difficulty and power associated with the role of the artist in post-revolutionary Russia, and to permit us to remember the ambiguities and complexities of both the private and public opportunities and necessities. It is easy to understand the relation of politics and art when it involves those marginalized or excluded from power. We properly recognize the voice that has not been heard, the literature and music of the oppressed and excluded. But does genuine personal expression in art need exist only at the margins, or can works that have widespread and official sanction be compelling as well? In the Soviet Union, of course, artistic choices were weighted by the possibility of physical danger. Yet as we see here, composers encountered the problem of official “favor” in numerous and diverse ways. In our own time, the question has different terms but remains pertinent nevertheless. When fame and commercial success are lavished on contemporary artists, they may in a sense be as complicit as the composers on this program, who were the beneficiaries of official support, writing in the public realm on behalf of a centralized state that was neither democratic or capitalist. For the sake of our own times, it may be fruitful to recall a moment, even a failed one, when art was considered more than a separate aesthetic experience, when the only view of music was not solely for art’s sake, when mere formalism did not triumph, and when the making of art was an important part of an engagement with the well being of an entire nation. Before dismissing the music of the Soviet Union as the work of “sell-outs,” perhaps we should consider the larger potential role of politics and idealism, philosophy and social justice in the inspirational nexus of a composer. When art encounters power, and when the artist is afforded the officially sanctioned opportunity to influence social memory and interpretation, what should the artist do?

The Anxiety of Influence: Music as Historical Legacy

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Anxiety of Influence: Music as Historical Legacy, performed on Nov 19, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

On the surface of things, the concept of influence seems straightforward. An artist trying to define a space for himself or herself under the weight of tradition is inspired by precursors. She or he selects elements that are useful or admired, interpolates them with implicit commentary of his or her own, and arrives at an “original” production that nevertheless grasps what has gone before. Influence is pervasive and inescapable, even if the artist is a revolutionary and acknowledges the past only to condemn it. In this way history in the arts makes progress.

In 1973, the literary theorist Harold Bloom published a study which questioned this commonsense formulation. In The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, Bloom explored the psychology of influence, and concluded that it was conflict of Oedipal dimensions between the poet and his or her literary forbearers. It is the struggle of the artist, Bloom argued, to find his or her own voice through an ambivalent, anxiety-ridden relation precisely with those precursors whom they most admire. Through creative misinterpretations of these shadowy figures, the artist, in the very act of holding up certain past artists as admired precursors, also imagines them as incomplete, failing for all their genius, and falling short of the mark that only the present artist is capable of reaching. If the present artist did not believe that, what would be left for him or her to accomplish? Admiration therefore necessarily becomes accusation, and the present artist only discovers his or her own power by distorting, demonizing, and then devouring those influences that he or she loves so much. Originality is achieved in the misinterpretation of the precursor as incomplete, which allows one to write the past according to one’s own agenda, that is, to influence (in imagination) one’s precursors instead of letting them influence one. One unconsciously takes credit for their work and completes their failed intentions in one’s own work. History progresses in the arts if only in the anxious unconscious of the artist.

Bloom’s analysis became enormously influential (indeed a Laius to an entire generation of critics), and has been widely applied not only to literature but many other artistic disciplines including music. A sociological aspect may be added to the theory (not that I am trying to complete it) if the anxiety of influence is also understood as a basically modern phenomenon, for it presumes that slavish imitation and deference to authority are not forced on modern poets and composers. The dilemma faced by Palestrina, for example, in adjusting his style to church authority is different from that encountered by most composers living in the early modern and modern ages, with the obvious exception of those living under dictatorial constraint, as is the case in two of our concerts this season which focus on music composed in the Soviet Union and in Nazi Germany. For the composer with fewer restrictions on the making of art, the abiding motivation since the mid-eighteenth century has been originality, and the oppressive regime has been embodied in those very figures from whom they learned all they know. Today it sometimes seems as though this quest for originality has deteriorated into an addiction simply to what is new. Many composers seem reduced to searching for the most superficial marks of distinctiveness in their desire to do something never done before. It is shallow achievement, however, to substitute novelty for art. As the eminent theorist Leonard B. Meyer points out, many of the greatest composers in the canon of music–Bach, Handel, Mozart, Haydn among others–were not fundamental innovators of style.

In today’s concert, perhaps the most classic case of the dynamics of the anxiety of influence in both stylistic and psychological terms is in the music of Ernst Krenek. As Matthias Schmidt points out, the young Krenek had the explicit intention of answering Mahler. Krenek exemplifies all six of Bloom’s stages of anxiety: clinamen, or the “correction” of Mahler; tessera, the “completion” of Mahler’s intentions; kenosis, the “emptying” of Krenek’s own egoistic ambition and hence Mahler’s; demonization, the suggestion that Mahler’s work only faintly reflects an artistry that was actually beyond Mahler; askesis, the “diminishment” of Mahler and of Krenek himself; and finally, apophredes, called the return of the dead, in which admiration for Mahler returns in a complete appropriation of his achievement. Can we really hear all this in Krenek’s music? Arguably yes, and if there is any doubt still that Krenek had a complex, personal response to Mahler, we may also consider the psychological implications inherent in the fact that, in addition to his intent to produce a legitimate successor and improvement on Mahler’s symphonic achievement, he also married Mahler’s daughter.

Eventually Krenek became one the most prolific and chameleonesque composers of the twentieth century. He was one of those great figures to whom homage is regularly paid verbally, but who is underrepresented in performance. His output was immense and he took on a striking variety of styles in his dynamic involvement with the influences of the past. In this sense he was much like Picasso, with numerous, distinct periods. But his music reveals that it was not originality in its superficial sense that motivated him, but complex distinctiveness in relation to established systems. In this symphony, notice the Mahlerian elements, and observe their magnificent distortions.

Krenek also wrote a splendid opera, Karl V (1933) as well as one of the most difficult yet outstanding works of choral music of this century, the Lamentations of Jeremiah (1941). He was born and worked in Vienna and spent time in Berlin. He was influenced by many figures ranging from Schreker and Busoni to Schoenberg. Perhaps his most famous moment in music history was his opera Jonny spielt auf (1926), a mixture of verismo and jazz in the German style. It was a sensation and became, to his credit, an emblem of the kind of degenerate music fascists did not appreciate. Krenek later emigrated to America and traveled about, teaching some of that time at Vassar College and Hamline University. He finally settled in Palm Springs, California after marrying the composer Gladys Nordenstrom in 1950. He lived to the venerable age of 91. In his later years, his longevity turned him into the last of the original central European proponents of the avant-garde. In addition to his huge compositional output, he was also a brilliant prose writer. His autobiography (written in English but strangely only available in German), his book on Okeghem, and his trenchant 1949 account of music in America, Music in the Golden West, are a few instances of the genius and versatility of an individual who rightfully became a legend in his own time. Ernst Krenek’s name and place in history are already assured, but we hope his music may come to be more fully appreciated by future generations. To this end we are pleased to participate in his centenary celebration with our chamber and orchestral performances.

The remainder of our program is devoted to two world premieres. It adds a special complication to the theory of the anxiety of influence when works are heard that have never been performed before. We have asked each of the composers to write a few words and by so doing we have tried to let them place their work in a context they consider helpful. Harold Farberman is a composer just celebrating his seventieth birthday, who came of age in the context of a variety of decisive influences. These influences are represented not only by the composers he admires, but by entire cultures, since these composers were very much focused on separating a distinctly American musical tradition from its European precursors. Born into a family of Klezmer musicians, Farberman became one of America’s most precocious and brilliant percussionists. Like Krenek he became a conductor, performer, and teacher. Through his experience as a member of the Boston Symphony, he came to know intimately the Russian and French music of the twentieth century. As a percussionist, however, he was never far from a profound affinity for indigenous American popular music and jazz, much like Copland and Bernstein. And like Bernstein and Gunther Schuller, he was one of the first Americans to embrace the music of Charles Ives, as is apparent in his use of explicit quotations in this work. Also like Bernstein, Farberman was an early proponent of Mahler. His reissued Mahler and Ives recordings have once again been embraced by aficionados as some of the most valuable readings available in the recorded archives. In today’s concert, his presence extends the anxiety of influence to performance as well as composition, since as one of America’s leading pedagogues of conducting, he has profoundly influenced many performers, including myself.

Our concert’s finale is a premiere by Philip Glass, arguably the best know if not the most celebrated American composer of his generation. Glass represents one of the most telling examples of the anxiety of influence in Bloom’s sense. A pioneer of a new style called minimalism, Glass’s most famous works seem to have nothing to do with the complex serial atonal work in which he was trained and produced early in his career. But Glass’s revolution may have been less revolutionary than its surface implies. His apparent departure from the legacy of Schoenberg and Webern may not be a renunciation as much as a fulfillment of their ideals. Schoenberg and Webern were after all ardent neo-classicists. They considered their music to have attained a classical simplicity, a clarity uncluttered by Romantic pretensions. Glass’s own responsive subversion of their techniques eventually led Glass to his own expressive form, the very essence of which is a lucid purity that subverts post-Wagnerian Romanticism. In this purity, one hears many precursors from Bach to the present, transfigured by distilled sounds and structures.

I can perhaps best illustrate the impact of Glass’s shift during the mid-1970s and early 1980s from the predicted trajectory of twentieth century composition and his attainment of his own “strength,” as Bloom calls the transcendence over precursors, with a personal anecdote. During my college years, having decided to become a performer, I vowed never to write music criticism. But in 1981, in a period of depression after the loss of my eight-year-old daughter Abigail, I was persuaded by a friend to begin work again by writing a piece for The New Republic on Glass’s opera Satyagraha. So scandalized was I by what I thought was some inexplicable, incomprehensible distortion of treasured modernist paradigms, that I wrote a vitriolic, defensive, and ultimately envious review. Once it was printed, I realized what I had written was not only embarrassing about what it said about me, but gratuitously unkind in its reactionary response to what was clearly an original and significant occasion in music. My subsequent mortification prevented me from taking advantage of any opportunity to break the awkward silence that persisted during the next few years. Then, as luck would have it, late one evening I had to rush from Caramoor to catch a flight to Europe. When I arrived at the airport, I entered the lounge to discover that the only other occupant of the room was Philip Glass. With characteristic courage and grace, he introduced himself to me with an expression of admiration for several ASO concerts that season. I was only too happy finally to apologize for my unkind and arrogant misrepresentation of his work. The incident reveals how easy it is to misconstrue and even resent the positive originality that results from the artist’s interaction with the past. Some time later, he contributed a setting of Psalm 126 for an ASO benefit concert for the Jerusalem Foundation. Tonight through the good offices and enthusiasm of Jonathan Haas, the American Symphony Orchestra is privileged to premiere Philip Glass’s Double Timpani Concerto.

The question I struggled with prejudicially in that review was the question of what kind of music Philip Glass should have written. The real issue for criticism was whether this new music–the turn in his style–was born of an authentic encounter between the historical moment and a person of talent and conviction–the best possible outcome of the anxiety of influence. The answer in the case of Philip Glass is clearly yes. In today’s performance, we express our belief that he and the other composers represented here will generate considerable anxiety for many generations of composers to come.

A Symphonic Saga 2000

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert A Symphonic Saga: Glière’s Ilya Muramets, performed on April 16, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

In this afternoon’s concert, two recurrent features of the American Symphony Orchestra’s continuing effort to challenge the boundaries of the standard repertory (or the idea of a standard repertory itself) come into play. Ilya Muramets may be arguably the greatest composition of the Russian composer Reinhold Moritsevich Gliere, yet it is certainly not the most famous. If any symphonic work by him is familiar, it is the Red Poppy ballet (1927), or perhaps the Bronze Horseman ballet (1949). In Gliere we therefore encounter once again a composer only remotely familiar, with one or two works that one may or may not know. But also once again, this composer and in particular this work have among musicians and music enthusiasts a substantial underground aura and following. This Symphony is rarely performed (and may never have been performed before today in its entirety in this country) but is known by reputation. The founder of the American Symphony Orchestra, Leopold Stokowski, was one of Muramets’ ardent defenders, but in true Stokowski fashion, he generated his own version, which deleted approximately half of the original material. Another champion of this piece is the American composer/conductor Harold Farberman (who will have a work premiered by the ASO next season). He made a historic recording–the first complete one–with the London Symphony Orchestra.

An epic work by a relatively obscure composer seems to court oblivion. These factors are compounded in the case of Gliere by several other historical factors. Gliere died in 1956, nearly forty years after the Russian Revolution. This particular work, however, was written at a unique point in Russian history, the three decades before the outbreak of World War I. This was a moment of rapid economic expansion, cultural vibrancy, and the evolution of both liberal and radical political agitation. The Russian monarchy had been deeply damaged by the Russo-Japanese War, with its humiliation of the Russian navy at the Battle of Tsushima. The Revolution of 1905 ushered in a period of expectancy, optimism, and intense debate over the future of the Russian nation. If one wants to understand Gliere’s musical work from the perspective of Russian culture, the closest and most significant analogy is the work of the Russian painter Vasily Surikov (1848-1916). Surikov produced three large, brilliant examples of Russian historical painting including “The Morning of the Streltsy Execution,” (1885) “Boyarina Morozova,” (1887) and “Yermak Conquering Siberia” (1895). These three paintings are massive in scale, psychologically penetrating, unbelievably rich in detail, and dramatically structured with many variations in tension and repose. Each of them is bound by an overarching theme, yet they allude to dimensions of the crossroads facing monarchical autocracy. Russia in 1912 might have become more reactionary or moved toward democracy, or a socialist state, or possibly Communism.

The moment of transition that defines this period of time also finds an analogy in the matter of music. Gliere was at once the contemporary of Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) and of Stravinsky (1882-1971). He was caught between two conflicting directions in instrumental and symphonic music–towards modernism and towards the idea of musical realism. His command of music as a descriptive and suggestive medium fostered his reputation as a founder of the official art form know as Soviet Ballet. He had also been a student of Alexander Taneyev (1850-1918) and Anton Arensky (1861-1906). As Muramets demonstrates, he was familiar with the evocations of Russian nationalism by such predecessors as Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) and another teacher, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935). But when Gliere’s Symphony premiered in 1912, Stravinsky had already written The Firebird (1910) and Petrushka 1911), Debussy had gained a wide reputation, and Schoenberg was well on his journey away from post-Wagnerian chromaticism.

Gliere’s obscurity and particularly the neglect of this work can be attributed in part to politics inside and outside of music. Although a conservative composer, Gliere was a figure in the Soviet cultural establishment. He died just at the moment of the post-Stalinist thaw. Unlike Shostakovich, Gliere never benefited during his lifetime from the ebb and flow of East/West tensions. At the same time, to most younger generations, his music represented a throwback not only in its mode of composition and its sonorities, but also in the way the music interacted with narration, text, and illustration.

Anthony Burton has noted that at first glance the sheer scale of the Symphony suggests Mahler, but as Burton properly observes, there is not much Mahler in this work. Midway in his career, Mahler foreswore explicit program music and was never particularly drawn to the tone poem. If a German analogy is appropriate, one might do better to think of Strauss. But the genuine models of Muramets are indeed Russian, since the subject of the Symphony goes to the heart of the political debate in which all Russia was engaged at the time of its composition. Would Russia move further economically and socially in the direction of the West, or would it, as many contemporary painters and writers argued, seek sustenance from its folk past for modern inspiration? The inspiration of this Symphony suggests a parallel between Gliere and many of his eastern European colleagues, who struggled in the first years of the twentieth century to re-appropriate a national myth and history on behalf of the modern. These contemporaries include Dvořák , whose last orchestral works are tone poems based on poetic retellings of folk tales, and Bartók, one of whose first orchestral pieces is the tone poem Kossuth (1903). 

This work represents a pinnacle in the tradition of the use of the orchestra alone as the provider of an experience of listening that is suggestive and illustrative. Ilya Muramets is an opera in instrumental sound alone, without voices or text. It uses form and color to outline a story in a manner specific enough to help hold the audience’s attention, and yet it provides enough freedom enough to permit each listener to draw a myriad of influences about its meaning. By using instrumental sound alone, Gliere explores the boundaries between precision and ambiguity, and creates a space for interpretation that goes beyond what might be possible for the reader of a written account. Indeed the length and ambition of this work makes it akin to Jean-Christophe by Romaine Rolland, War and Peace by Tolstoy, or the novels of Sienkewicz, but it is also related to other contemporary forms and genres in theater, poetry, painting. In our current cinematic age we might identify the visual as the primary medium of storytelling. But this Symphony and indeed all great works in its class (even the unsuccessful ones such as by Siegmund von Hausegger’s Barbarossa) suggest that it is eminently possible to provide the listener with all the tension of the theater, the private engagement of the reader, the detail of the visual, as well as the indescribable, nearly spiritual sensibilities invoked by music, with the orchestra alone. And in this regard, Gliere is at his best. Ilya Muramets, despite its great scale, deserves a genuine place in the repertory. It resounds even for the jaded and over-stimulated ears of audiences in our time who have been subject to endless hours of movie and television music. Like the tone poems of Strauss, this work still makes its point by placing great music at the very center of the process of how the experience of time is transformed.

Beyond Good and Evil

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzshe and Music, performed on March 8, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The influence of Friedrich Nietzsche on twentieth-century thought can hardly be overestimated. During his lifetime his popularity among his contemporaries was remarkable. Also sprach Zarathustra (1885) was to the fin de siécle generation what Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) had been to young people at the end of the eighteenth century. Nietzsche’s thought was later instrumental in providing the framework for the criticism of the nineteenth century that became central to modernism after 1914. His work celebrated the subjective, the power of the human individual and the triumph of the spirit. Precisely these ideas, however, permitted his work to be appropriated by pre-fascist and fascist movements. In editions skillfully edited by his sister, Nietzsche’s work was rendered popular in a manner fundamentally at odds with its own philosophical positions, and became a rich source of intellectual justification for the Nazis. It took many decades for English-speaking readers to shed the distorted view of Nietzsche as a proto-fascist. French readers, however, saw through the distortion more readily, and immediately following World War II, found in Nietzsche a key forerunner of existential philosophy. Indeed Nietzsche’s influence on Heidegger and Jaspers in the 1920s and 1930s sparked a revival of interest years later in Nietzsche as the father of existentialism. A related aspect of Nietzsche eventually emerged in American intellectual thought in the 1960s, when the image of his troubled brow became an icon for younger generations, and his famous epigraph “God is dead” found its way to many a graffiti-covered wall. This perspective on Nietzsche’s work is perhaps just as distorted as the fascist appropriation, but it clearly demonstrates the one consistent feature of his work: its profound elusiveness, and its shifting and enigmatic rhetoric that seem to lend themselves so easily to a variety of agendas. That protean rhetorical quality has more recently caused Nietzsche once again to occupy center stage in intellectual life, as literary theorists take delight in his breathtaking ability to “deconstruct.” Nietszche’s life has in no small way added to the ongoing fascination with him. He never married, became enmeshed in several triangular relationships, and finally suffered madness as a result of syphilis. Insofar as madness itself has been a category of analysis and criticism in contemporary thought, that fact alone has only inflamed the controversy about the seemingly infinite attributions of meaning behind his words.

What made Nietzsche so popular and electrifying in his lifetime, and what made his writing so important in the twentieth century to groups holding diametrically opposing views, is the fact that, with few exceptions, Nietzsche did not write philosophical treatises. He was first and foremost a poet–a poet in prose and verse. Nietzsche’s aphoristic prose, as rhetorically complex as any poem, was particularly inspired by Emerson, who used a dynamic rhetorical strategy to undermine explicitly the notion of an all-encompassing, logically constructed system. Thus two composers as diverse as Strauss and Delius can find radically contrasting sources in Nietzsche, contrasts which speak to the elusive and almost chameleon-like quality of Nietzsche’s work. It is often asserted that Strauss was no intellectual and could not possibly have understood Nietzsche, yet Strauss’s grasp of the irony, sarcasm, and inversion of conventional wisdom which are the hallmarks of Nietzsche’s writing suggest the deep affinity between philosopher and composer.

Indeed, it seems inevitable that Nietzsche’s philosophy should have a strong connection to music, since his writings are so much about language and the collapsing of those artificial oppositions that underlie our precious systems. What better language than music to escape the tyranny of a certain kind of logical thought? Nietzsche wrote extensively about music and musicians. He harbored ambitions to be a composer and was himself a pianist. He never lost his awe for musicians and for the power of music. In this sense he is a successor to E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) and Jean-Paul Richter (1763-1825), who saw in music an instrument of consciousness, expression, and meaning that eluded, transcended, and overpowered mere reason. Nietzsche was clear about his own debt to Artur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who privileged music above all other artistic creations in his philosophical analysis of human thought and action.

The one figure who seemed to hold the promise of the realization of music’s cultural power for the young Nietzsche was Wagner. Nietzsche understood Wagner all too well, and later came to revile and parody him. Much has been written about his ambivalent relation to Wagner, but as Kyle Gann correctly points out, Nietzsche’s musical training was (as was also the case with Schopenhauer) the result of a response to pre-Wagnerian romantic music that of the generation of Schumann and Mendelssohn. Wagner’s explosion onto the scene must have looked to Nietzsche like a violent new day, which later darkened into a realization of the dishonesty of Wagner’s aesthetic ambitions and philosophical pretensions. In his later life–his post-Wagnerian phase–Nietzsche greatly admired Bizet: he never lost his affection for Viennese classicism.

However, more important than Nietzsche’s own engagement with music is the blend of poetry and philosophy that constitutes his writings. There is a mystical side to Nietzsche, an affinity for the transcendent and reoccurring. Nietzsche’s fiery prose has remained an inspiration to those who seek to puncture the pieties about progress, religion, morality, and politics. To his readers it is evident that Nietzsche took no prisoners, as it were. In Also sprach Zarathustra he spares no profession of modern faith, including the conceits of science and the purveyors of political utopias. But as he exposed hypocrisy and the limits of language and reason, he reminded his readers that what is to be celebrated is the potential of the human being. He was the psychologist who anticipated Freud in a profound exploration of the complex and counterintuitive geography of the mind. He led a fanatical crusade against the internal mechanisms each of us develop to denigrate ourselves, to feel guilty, to submit to the authority of others, to imitate, to cower before self-proclaimed expertise, and to turn our potential individuality into a docile slavery to convention. Nietzsche hated the tyranny of modern mass politics and the world of journalism and fashion so aptly attacked by Balzac a generation earlier. He also had little use for his fellow academics and the pretensions of scholars and scientists, who in their confidence in explaining the world, reduce it to sets of useless and constricting categories. Amid this rubble left by unrelenting criticism and argument, the artist and the musician must remain unscathed, in order to make art and more particularly music seem in the modern world a still viable instrument for the realization of genuine individuality and originality. Music especially functions as an antidote to the self-imposed spiritual slavery brought to human kind by the wonders of progress.

These ideas were of course an intense inspiration for composers, and resulted in a long and diverse body of music related to the writings of Nietzsche. It is naturally impossible to catalogue tonight all of the ways in which Nietzsche asserted his influence, no more than it is possible for any one of the works performed here to offer the definitive “Nietzsche.” In tonight’s concert, therefore, we ask you to listen to two aspects of Nietzsche that are evoked by this music: the sheer beauty and power of his language, and the radical assertiveness of his allegiance to the creative individual. He is perhaps the greatest German poet after Goethe, and possibly also the thinker who most effectively argues that the making of art and the aesthetic sensibility are neither trivial aspects of humanity, nor the moral equivalents of a cultivated taste for “fashion.” For Nietzsche, the unique greatness of the human condition is best expressed by the capacity for music. We open with an example from Nietzsche’s own musical imagination, then turn to a great twentieth-century composer’s point of view. We then offer an early work by Frederick Delius especially reconstructed for this performance, after which we return to the twentieth century, and then conclude with one of the most familiar and triumphant syntheses of Nietzschean philosophy and music ever created.

Symphony No. 1 in E-flat Major, Op. 13 (1905)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Polishing the Jewel: The Genius of George Enescu, performed on Feb 4, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Symphony No. 1, Op. 13 vividly reflects Enescu’s training in Vienna, where he studied with Robert Fuchs and mastered the Brahmsian tradition in composition. At the same time, however, this work reveals the enormous French influence on Enescu that took hold when he studied in the 1890s with Massenet and Fauré. In 1905, Enescu was already well established as a violinist and some of his first pieces, including the Symphonie concertante for cello and orchestra, Op. 8, had already appeared. However, the numbering of Po. 13 belies the fact that Enescu had written four previous symphonies already which are now known as “school” symphonies. The fourth such symphony is in the same key as Op. 13 and was completed in1898.

When encountering an early symphony by a young composer, one might be struck by the enormous burden of the task, the great weight of tradition and accomplishment behind the form. It certainly struck Brahms, who waited decades before writing his first symphony. Enescu, however, had no hesitation in confronting his predecessors confidently–he chose as a key for this symphony E-flat major, inviting a comparison to the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven, not to mention Schumann’s Third Symphony as well. Like these two earlier works, the piece opens with a dramatic and stunning statement in 3/4 meter announcing not only the key but the basic thematic material. Both first and second thematic groups are related in the first movement, which is written in sonata form and marked assez vif et rythmé. Enescu makes good use of percussion coloring including triangle, cymbal, and bass drum. In a concession to the habit of dramatic extension characteristic of the later nineteenth century, he structures a fabulous closing coda to the opening movement.

The second movement, marked lent is based on a slow-moving eighth-note pulse and is particularly noteworthy for its original instrumentation. The use of bass clarinet, English horn, and trumpets and two harps, alongside an innovative use of timpani, give the movement a distinctly mysterious and French atmospheric sensibility. The movement has aspects of a free, improvisatory fantasy on a basic opening motif. It opens in A-flat minor and closes in B major, as it dies away with an eloquent evocation of the unique sonorities that the composer evokes.

Enescu prefigures a modernist tendency to rethink the four-movement symphonic form in the Op. 13. Instead of writing a scherzo and then a grand finale, he chose to write only a three movement symphony. The last movement the finale marked vif et vigoureux combines aspects of scherzo and finale. In this sense, the Beethoven and Schumann models, which can be brought to bear in an understanding of the first movement, become less significant in favor of a new idea. The examples of Brahms and Bruckner are left behind as well. Enescu mixes the rondo form and the sonata form, and explicitly challenges the tendency during the nineteenth century to shift the weight of the symphonic form away from the first movement toward the last movement. This is a process which began with Mozart’s last symphony and which was measurably popularized by Beethoven’s Eroica and Ninth Symphony. Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler sought to give the symphony an organic character by making the last movement the dramatic highpoint so that a symphony would not, as had become customary in the classical period, become defined by the opening movement. The third movement of Enescu’s Op. 13, however, is shorter than the first two, and is marked by tightly constructed episodes. However the movement shows a clear and concise architecture. It opens with rapid string figuration characteristic of a scherzo, above which is the thematic material of a grand finale. As the movement progresses, Enescu utilizes his mastery of orchestration to give increasing weight to the powerful dramatic gesture. The movement closes in a blaze of symphonic glory. In the final bars, the Viennese influence is present as Enescu slows the pulse of the work down, permitting a majestic ending to unfold, asserting with trumpet fanfares the framing tonality, E-flat.

Since Enescu is best remembered as a violinist and as an advocate of Romanian folk traditions, the choice of this work was motivated by the conviction that in Enescu the twentieth century possessed a great and overlooked master of symphonic form. All of the four “school” symphonies are worth hearing and performing. Of the works that Enescu himself considered worthy of publication, there are three symphonies in all, the last of which uses both chorus and piano solo. Further, there are also two more unfinished symphonies. It is clear that Enescu was throughout his career fascinated and compelled by symphonic form. Of all seven completed works, this one may be the most impressive. In the massive output of symphonic music after the death of Bruckner, the symphonies of Enescu deserve a better place in concert programs than they now occupy. This work reminds us that it is not sufficient for English and American and German critics and audiences to pigeonhole composers from Eastern Europe as merely ethnic and exotic, as figures from so-called peripheral cultures who have appropriated mainstream European forms. Insofar as there is any residual value to the claim that music transcends ethnicity and nationalism, the unexotic originality of Op. 13 is a straightforward tribute to the compelling talent of this great violinist and composer.

Polishing the Jewel: The Genius of George Enescu

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Polishing the Jewel: The Genius of George Enescu, performed on Feb 4, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Since World War II, many of the leading twentieth-century composers of Eastern Europe have become part of the standard concert repertory. But figures such as Szymanowski, Bartók, and Janáček, despite the popularity of their works, are still viewed through the prism of a simplistic notion of national identity. No doubt they were indeed nationalists, and used an array of folk materials and distinctive characteristics of their native language and culture in their music—but the same can also be said of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. Yet we never marginalize these classical masters as idiosyncratically German or Austrian; they seem to transcend national characteristics. Despite the broadening of Western European and American tastes, our attraction to the composers of eastern European is still intimately connected to our sense that there is something exotic about their music. When these composers have tried to counter that sense and avoided highlighting an audible nativism, their music has been traditionally criticized as derivative. This double bind has been particularly true in the case of the lesser known twentieth-century Russian symphonists. We still fall into the trap of concentrating on what seems uniquely Finnish about Sibelius or Danish about Nielsen.

There are two composers from Eastern Europe who have suffered particular neglect because their work does not lend easily to reductive nationalist symbolism: Ernst von Dohnányi and George Enescu. The careers of both of these musical geniuses have unusual parallels. Each was a remarkable prodigy as an instrumentalist—Dohynanyi as a pianist, Enescu as a violinist. Each was trained in Vienna at a conservatory over which the tradition of Brahms held a profound influence. Dohnányi and Enescu both went on to achieve international success primarily as performers, and both contributed actively to the development of concert life and musical culture in their homelands, Hungary and Romania respectively, after 1918. Unlike Dohnanyi, however, Enescu honored a longstanding Romanian cultural connection, and went on to study in Paris, where he came under the spell of French masters and influences. In this regard, Enescu’s experience bears particular resemblance to those of Szymanowski and Martinu. Unlike the rest of Eastern Europe, the linguistic connection between Romania and France was quite intimate. Bucharest prided itself on being the Paris rather than the Vienna of Eastern Europe. As a result, Enescu more self-consciously than Dohnányi became a truly international and cosmopolitan figure, who lived not only in Romania and Paris but (again like Martinu) in New York.

As CD re-issues of his violin playing have made clear, he was a spectacular and original violinist, as well as a great violin pedagogue who found a way to integrate the French violin tradition with that of central Europe. His sound and interpretive strategy were completely different from the Russian tradition that emanated from Leopold Auer (which has left a distinct mark on our tastes through the artistry of such pupils as Jascha Heifetz), or the tradition which took hold in Berlin through the influence of Joachim and Flesch. In this regard, Enescu outpaces Bartók, Szymanowski or Janáček, because he maintained a virtuosity as an instrumentalist that was indisputable and lifelong. Perhaps only Dohnányi, who returned late in life to public piano performance, offers a legitimate comparison. But the comparison is a bit ironic, because even more than Dohnányi, Enescu saw himself first and foremost as a composer. Despite this conviction, however, most of his music is largely neglected today beyond the borders of Romania (though, thanks to the advocacy of Lawrence Foster, the opera Oedipe [1936] is experiencing something of a revival today). This is also ironic, because Enescu’s music cannot in any way be simplistically defined as Romanian, but rather is an innovative extension of the three traditions he knew—French, German, Romanian.

To acknowledge that Enescu artistically transcended nationalism is not to say, however, that he abandoned his native country. Rather, Enescu’s life and work serve to disrupt the hard and fast categorization of a restrictive nationalism in the first place. Unlike many of his equally famous Romanian contemporaries, Enescu managed to avoid both sides of a terrible opposition. He neither flirted during the 1930s with local fascist movements that exploited national pride, nor succumbed to the lure of distancing himself entirely from Romania through acculturation into an international world of artists (which is often a form of cultural conformism in disguise). Like Bartók, Enescu was a courageous and honorable individual in a world obsessed by nationalist hatred, xenophobia, fascism, and anti-Semitism. His tireless work to expose Romanian musicians to the range of European tradition and technique, as evidenced in his founding of Romania’s most important musical institutions, make Constantin Stihi-Boos’s comment on Enescu’s constant compositional revision–that he was “like a first-rate jeweler continually polishing precious jewels”—applicable to his service to his country as well. Enescu wanted to point out a direction for his native land towards an open, proud, and tolerant democratic society. He has been a national symbol in Romania in both the autocratic and democratic eras. The conservatory and leading orchestra of Bucharest are named after him, and there are Enescu streets and statues everywhere.

It is not, however, out of respect for Enescu’s life and personality that his music deserves to be reintroduced into the repertory. In one final comparison to Bartók, it must be acknowledged that Enescu was a great composer. To this end, this concert has been designed to provide as concise a snapshot of his orchestral output as possible. Two pre-World War I works show the full range of his mastery and appropriation of nineteenth-century traditions. One major work represents his most productive period in the 1930s, and there is one fine example of the music he wrote later in his career.

Die Liebe der Danae, Op. 83 (1940)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Richard Strauss, Die Liebe der Danae, Op. 83 (1940), performed on Jan 16, 2000 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When efforts are made to revive a major work that failed to gain acceptance at the time of its creation, it is revealing to explore the reasons for and value of the resuscitation, particularly when the work is by one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. Richard Strauss’s later work has gradually undergone a positive reassessment. This reappraisal is partly a consequence of the demise of the cult of modernism. But as Die Liebe der Danae (1940) may show, the reconsideration of Strauss an anti-modernist is too facile. This opera in fact has everything to do with the modern; it is uniquely a work of our time. In the midst of fascist Europe, the Depression, and the Second World War, a morality tale about wealth and the power of love was irrelevant at best, and in 1952 (the date of the public premiere in Salzburg), when the ravages of the war and the post-war economy made for a grim landscape (further compromised by the specter of Stalinism and the Iron Curtain) Danae was destined to fall on unsympathetic ears. But we now live in a period of extreme wealth and ruthless self-confidence about the power of money and its significance. Indeed those apparent contemporary qualities which put Danae out of step with the time of its composition in the late 1930s or it with its delayed premiere in the post-war early 1950s, make it a highly germane work for the present time, as we reflect upon what the last century has made of us.

In the score, Strauss achieves a modernist transparency in this opera, especially in his deft use of thematic development and harmonic color. The orchestration is distinctly twentieth century in its lightness and use of fragmentation and contrast. However, Strauss also integrates numerous musical references to the past (it opens with an echo of the music of Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler) and to his own work, and thus forces the listener to engage the present through the lens of tradition and history. Like so many of his other operas, Danae is also filled with personal history–autobiographical references, self-criticism and self-reflection. But Strauss does not lapse into nostalgic sentimentality and grand empty gestures. The music in this opera is not the music of a contented craftsman, relying on the conventions he himself helped create. Although the opera has failed to be performed with any frequency at all and is not available in any complete recording (there is only one heavily cut CD version of the 1952 premiere), audiences that have embraced the music of Philip Glass, John Adams, Arvo Paart, and David Del Tredici, John Corigliano and an even younger generation of American composers will find old Strauss remarkably up to date.

The explicit moral lesson the opera draws about money requires little explanation in this day and age. The inhabitants of Danae’s world do not earn their money the old-fashioned way like good nineteenth-century industrialists, nor do they even acquire it as the inherited privilege of landed aristocracy. Gold is a magical occurrence for them, almost like day-trading on the internet. And just as today, when Midas’s touch may be the click of the mouse, the spontaneous accumulation of wealth instantly reduces all value to market-value. This is evident in the pathos of Pollux, whose lack of capital makes his royal rank meaningless, while a donkey-driver with wealth can instantly acquire a kingdom. Indeed, in making Midas’s wealth a reward from the gods, Strauss alters the traditional myth of Midas, who is cursed with the golden touch as punishment for his greed. Midas rapidly learns the value of things other than gold when he finds he cannot eat or touch other humans. Of course the most powerful image in the confusion of money with intangible values is the shower of gold itself, the opera’s only erotic event. Unlike other erotic visions or fantasies (for instance, Europa’s bull) the shower has no parallel symbol for physical sexuality: the gold is erotic purely by displacement, as a kind of fetish. On the most explicit level, then, the opera’s conflict seems so simple as to be a major cliché of the century: money is no substitute for love.

But to accept the opera only on that level is to miss Strauss’s true modernism, his Joyce-like appropriation of the mythic and mundane life. Like Joyce, Strauss does not use myth to reduce the present to a tired maxim, but to complicate the maxim itself. That Strauss might want to complicate this particular maxim is made clear by certain autobiographical facts. Strauss was very aware that he was reviled for being interested only in money. He was after all among the leading advocates of copyright protection, but his advocacy was profoundly self-centered. He reveled in the economic success of his work. He was known for his love of comfort and took pride in his house in Garmisch, which he boasted was the result of his fabulous royalties. To many contemporaries and critics, his musical efforts after 1918 were not true reflections of creativity but the work of a calculating old man interested only in exploiting his fame and reputation. Furthermore, Strauss had a difficult, Junoesque wife who thought of herself as socially superior. Having come of age in a society dominated by families grown rich in the brewing industry, Strauss understood very well both the petit-bourgeois mind and the industrialist.

But the old Strauss also had his memories, especially of his youthful, passionate affair with Dora Wihan. This moment of idealistic love, opposed by his parents, lingered on well into the years in which his marriage with the decidedly unpleasant Pauline had settled into a comfortable domestic routine. Strauss was unquestionably a devoted and loyal husband and cherished the ideal of the family and his love for his wife until the end of his days. But however mundane his domestic life might have been, a sense of gleaming youthful ardor, audible in the Danae/Midas duets, remained with him. For Strauss it was neither naïve nor clichéd, but rather a dream, an ideal to be sustained if not in life, then in art. If Strauss chose to live in Jupiter’s golden castle which Danae forsakes, then in some room of that dwelling of capitalist success and respectability, there still remained the passionate, rebellious ideals of youth. It is remarkable how much Strauss’s valedictory, this nearly unperformable, complex work, seems more the product of excessive youthful ambition than of the learned economy of experience.

And yet, Danae possesses the music of experience as well. Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who conceived the scenario upon which Josef Gregor based his libretto, were not so naïve as to present their bourgeois audiences with a simple moral about the power of love over wealth. Strauss embeds a somber yet provocative commentary into this moral tale through the use of myth, music, and the depiction of human relationships. In the figure of Jupiter, we may see one of those self-conscious reflections for which Strauss is known. Jupiter is not a youthful presence. As the literal source of the most sought-after commodity, gold, he is already at the summit of success. But his persistent desire defines the limits of gold from the outset–he wants love, especially the love that characterizes youth. In this sense he resembles the Marschallin of Der Rosenkavalier, whose wistful reflection about her aging (which may seem an over-reaction these days) edges the aspirations of the youthful lovers with more than a touch of sadness.

But Jupiter also evokes the example of Wotan, especially in Danae’s closing scenes. There are few operatic occasions so glorious for a low male voice (albeit a lyric baritone) and so tragically evocative of self-realization. Although Strauss in his later years turned increasingly to Mozart as a model, and there is much neoclassical flair in this work characteristic of twentieth-century neoclassicism (including the canon from the third act), there are also strong hints of Wagner transfigured. Danae’s and Jupiter’s third act duet is reminiscent of Wotan and Brünhilde (as well as of Sieglinde and Siegmund, especially with its reference to the glint in the eyes, the thinly veiled disguise, and the libation in the context of domestic hospitality). Like Wotan, Jupiter is a god with an ambivalent, competitive, interventionist and jealous attitude to human existence. The musician Strauss in this opera is in conflict with his double Jupiter. While Jupiter graciously confronts his own limitations as a god, as an aging man his composer, without disagreeing, flaunts his youthful inventiveness in the music itself. It could well be argued that the closing scenes of this opera is Strauss’s most successful counterpart to the end of Der Rosenkavalier, his most popular operatic achievement. Among the particular twentieth-century aspects of this score are Strauss’s intricate use of rhythmic displacement and cross-rhythm, his angular and daring harmonic adventurousness, and his integration of dissonance and tonal ambiguity. The score can be compared to the work of Bartók and Janacek, two composers who never abandoned a tonal framework, but who went well beyond post-Wagnerian clichés. In its placement in Strauss’s career, it stands as Falstaff and Otello do in the career of Verdi.

On the most conventional level of the narrative, Jupiter is the loser, and Danae and Midas the winners who acquire the ideal love that the god cannot experience. His golden dreams are rejected by the lovers’ embracing of fulfillment in each other in a relentlessly ordinary, non-magical existence. But Jupiter’s plight in its musical context–some of the most glorious that Strauss ever penned–gives him a force that imbues the young lovers’ circumstance with a dreadful irony. His presence drives home the fact that this dream of perfect love and simple joy in the absence of any other ambition by two people willing to sacrifice everything just to live with each other in a hut, giving away all their aspirations for wealth and power, is itself among the most terrifying of illusions perpetrated on ourselves in modern life. If Midas could not eat because his food turned to gold, he and Danae may not find food any more easily now in their poverty. The experienced Strauss was all too aware of how remote for himself and others the fulfillment of this dream was. More than most, he knew how difficult and how unrealistic such pure devotion is to sustain in any relationship. How then can we take such an implausible lesson to heart? In the end, are not the pathetic Pollux and his entourage, easily mollified in the third act by the shower of gold, a more realistic, honestly human depiction? As our contemporary culture makes too plain, it seems much more natural to imitate the gods and seek wealth and dominion over others than to try to sustain love over time?

Though the opera’s mythic convention may seem to suggest that the mortals find their true destiny in a Rousseau-like rejection of materialism, it in fact offers a pertinent question: where exactly is the myth, and where the reality? Jupiter realizes that humans, unlike gods, are blessed with a capacity, unique to themselves and linked absolutely to their mortality, for a kind of love completely independent of any distinction or achievement. This is the same point apparent at the end of one of Strauss’s own favorite operas, Die ägyptische Helena (1928), in which the epic figures of Helena and Menelaus must come to terms with each other as ordinary, modern husband and wife faced with a history of infidelity. But this modest and poignant gift of humanity is precisely that which humans have the most difficulty realizing. It is the domestic bliss of Midas and Danae that is the myth, a tantalizing but forever elusive ideal.

But as Jupiter–the catalyst of this sequence of events, and the most interesting and complex figure in the opera–demonstrates, this beautiful myth is not to be dismissed. Strauss does not pillory entirely the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century elaborations of love, desire, and romance in favor of a twentieth-century devotion to avarice. Regardless of its unfeasibility, this intangible ideal of human contact is something to be celebrated and treasured, even if modern life will not allow for it. And it is the figure of Jupiter himself that symbolizes the reason for this. Alone at the end of the opera, Jupiter resigns himself to his role as a god, a creator who cannot directly participate in the activities of his creations. His power and immortality are all characteristics and aspirations of the modern artist and composer, and ones so eminently achieved by Strauss himself. Jupiter embodies most fully the realization communicated by the musical form of the opera itself: that the one solace surrounding the failure of human relationships and the key instrument to sustaining human relationships may be the art of music itself. Jupiter’s observations in the glorious end of this opera are plausible precisely because of the transcendent power and stunning beauty of Strauss’s musical invention. Music, that wordless language, is probably the only effective instrument of human love. Strauss, the elderly seer, makes it plain that the idealization of love and its search can be a curse more painful than Midas’s touch. Its failures are so utterly human and engender so much suffering. But they are redeemed not by their fulfillment but by the fact that they end up necessitating art and music as the only instruments of survival and hope.

Die Liebe der Danae is an overlooked masterpiece (marred perhaps only by the absence of Hofmannstal’s elegant prose). The impracticalities associated with the work, such as the difficulty of the Jupiter role, have not helped. But the time has come to give this work a new life. To that end, this performance is being recorded for commercial release as the first sound document of the complete opera. Audience members are respectfully asked to minimize extraneous noise.

Goldmark Violin Concerto

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner’s Divided Vienna, performed on Dec 1, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Asked what he did for a living by an old lady with whom he found himself traveling, Karl Goldmark (1830-1915) is said to have answered, “I am a composer-I am the composer of The Queen of Sheba.” “Ah yes,” the lady responded, “and does the post pay well?”

Apocryphal it may be, but the incident underlines the fate of a certain kind of composer. There are composers we celebrate for an entire oeuvre; and then there are those whose names have come down to posterity linked to just a single title. One such was Anton Rubinstein, long known at one time only for his Melody in F (and even that has largely disappeared from current view); another was Henry Litolff, whose Scherzo, from the Concerto symphonique No. 3, enjoyed warhorse status half a century ago among romantic pianists.

The Hungarian-born, Vienna-based Goldmark’s choice of The Queen of Sheba as self-evident calling-card may seem to put him in the sympathy-evoking category of the “one-work composer.” His case, however, is a little more complicated. There may be few music-lovers or even musicians today who can claim acquaintance with the whole range of his production. On the other hand, the category must be expanded in this instance from one work to three-though perhaps never all three at the same time. During the last forty years of his life, the Goldmark work of note was indeed that first of his six operas, premiered in Vienna in 1875. By the middle of the twentieth century, Sheba had been passed in popular esteem by Rustic Wedding, composed in 1877. A vividly atmospheric symphonic poem, it was one of those slightly off-the-beaten charmers that formed a major segment of Sir Thomas Beecham’s repertoire.

By now, with its other great champion Leonard Bernstein no longer among us, Rustic Wedding in turn has lapsed into relative obscurity. And so for practical purposes we are left with the piece that has, through all these vagaries, maintained at least a degree of currency thanks to the advocacy of such star soloists as Ruggiero Ricci and the late Nathan Milstein: the A-minor Violin Concerto, also dating from 1877, and sometimes referred to as “No. 1” though all trace of its putative successor seems to have vanished.

If he is to be relegated to “one-work composer” status, the Violin Concerto is as deserving of being that work as either The Queen of Sheba or Rustic Wedding. Indeed, it may be fairly described as combining Goldmark’s best qualities in the highest concentration. A skilled orchestrator, thanks in part to his experience of playing and also scoring other composers’ music during years of working as a violinist in Vienna’s theater orchestras, he achieved in the concerto a finely effective balance between solo and tutti, often reinforcing the pyrotechnics of the violin part by backing it with unobtrusive but firm woodwind lines in longer note-values. This technique is used with particular flair in the colorful finale, whose rhythms at once recall the “polacca” style of the last movement in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto and foreshadow the bolero meter of the finale in Sibelius’s Violin Concerto.

If skill in orchestration comes partly from training and experience, the gift for lyrical melody is essentially inborn. Goldmark possessed it in abundance, and it comes to the fore in the warmly expressive lines of the central Andante movement. Along with those two qualities, and reinforced by the enthusiasm for Wagner that marked Goldmark’s critical writings (and had led him in 1872 to take a leading role in the formation of the Vienna Wagner Society), was a taste for expanding the scope of his themes beyond merely lyrical proportions. Thus, in the first movement, after a brief orchestral exordium, the solo violin’s first entry spins a rapturous line, marked by turns “cantabile,” “dolce,” and “espressivo,” suggestive of Wagnerian “endless melody,” before dashing off on a flight of more conventional bravura.

The soloist’s subordinate theme is even more expansive in its melodic reach. And there is a nice touch at the recapitulation, where, after a vigorous orchestral fugato based on the spikier opening theme of the concerto, the violin enters after a short silence with a demonstration that she can play at that game too-but soon returns to her original expressive cantilena as if to say: “But this is what I am really about.” Clearly, that is also what Goldmark was about, and it is what has kept the appeal of this tuneful concerto fresh for more than a century.

Bruckner’s Divided Vienna

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner’s Divided Vienna, performed on Dec 1, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Rarely have politics and music engaged each other with such tenacious consistency as in the case of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Vienna and German-speaking Austria. The recent elections in Austria that have enlarged the power of Jorg Haider and his People’s Party may seem at first glance to have little to do with tonight’s concert. But as the politics of the Salzburg Festival in recent months have shown (in large measure through the insightful commentary by Cornell historical Michael Steinberg) culture, particularly surrounding music, has long been political in Austrian life. The president of Austria, Thomas Klestil, and Haider have all attacked the current leadership of Salzburg in terms strikingly similar to the critical vocabulary used at the turn of the century against Mahler and his innovations at the Vienna Opera.

The consistent politicization of music stems from the divisions that occurred in the rapidly growing metropolis which Vienna was after 1867, when constitutional reform made migration to the city from within the Empire much freer. The pieces by Brüll and Goldmark were written and premiered in the twilight years of a liberal era in Vienna. The 1860s and early 1870s had been a time of rapid economic expansion and massive physical reconstruction in the city. But the stock market crash of May 1873 ushered in a long era of disillusionment and decline. By the time the Löwe version of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony was first heard, a new radical politics was in the ascendancy, marked by a nostalgia for pre-industrial artisan economy, anti-Semitism, and the aggressive assertion of the superiority of Germanic culture and people. Despite the fact that Vienna was a multi-ethnic and polyglot capital, by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a place that mixed an open and creative cosmopolitanism with a narrow-minded provincial rigidity most often expressed in rabid anti-Semitism. Jews were the city’s most visible and significant minority. Their visible and extraordinary contribution to cultural life was widely understood.

The political divisions between liberal traditions and a new radical political conservatism which was nativist and reactionary had their musical mirror. Brahms who settled in the city in the early 1860s was identified with the liberal tradition. He was north German and Protestant, and his friends were predominantly liberals and included many Jews. Brüll (who had the distinction of having his portrait painted by Franz von Lenbach) was one of Brahms’s closest friends. What linked them was not only Brahms’s admiration for Brüll’s spectacular pianism and Brüll’s allegiance to an anti-Wagnerian compositional tradition, but a shared outlook which was open to progress and to tolerance. It should be noted that Brüll’s music was more successful and is more compelling than recent scholarship suggests. More of his music deserves a hearing. Even though Goldmark absorbed many Wagnerian habits and was an enthusiastic admirer of Wagner’s, in the politics of Vienna, Goldmark and Brahms were allies and friends, despite differences in compositional and aesthetic outlook. Goldmark, a Hungarian Jew, was an outsider in the terrible racial politics which engulfed the city.

The career of Anton Bruckner denotes the other side of the story. Brought to Vienna from Linz as an organist and teacher of counterpoint and legendary as an improviser, Bruckner was anything but cosmopolitan. Unlike Brahms, Brüll, or Goldmark, he remained true to his local roots, resisted the pleasures and blandishments of elegant urban life, proudly displayed his regional dialect and remained devoutly Catholic. His rise to fame among a younger generation of students and musicians in the 1870s and 1880s was only in part due to his embrace of the Wagnerian. Bruckner seemed the true heir to Schubert–a genuinely local genius whose strength appeared to derive from things decidedly Austrian and Catholic. Although Löwe was himself of Jewish birth, an important source of support for Bruckner as an antipode to Brahms and later even to Mahler (who deeply admired Bruckner and performed his symphonies, albeit with cuts) came from Bruckner’s willingness to be used as a cultural symbol against what was perceived to be the growing influence of foreign elements in Viennese culture. In this debate cosmopolitanism took on the negative connotation which it has retained to this day as a code word for “Jewish” and the influence of the “other.” Bruckner permitted himself to be the honorary head of a new academic Wagner society in Vienna, distinct from the one Goldmark helped create, which had as one of its bylaws the explicit provision that no Jew could be a member. The right-wing press and politicians lauded Bruckner, and he developed the aura of a local Wagnerian master whose genius was underestimated and unrecognized as the result of a conspiracy of Jews and cosmopolitans who controlled public opinion and who failed to understand the spiritual essence and greatness of Bruckner’s music. Bruckner became the embattled, marginalized master, struggling against people like Eduard Hanslick, institutions such as the Neue Freie Presse and an apparent cabal of influence peddlers and second-rate foreign artists including Brüll and Goldmark, who were supported behind the scenes by Brahms. Brahms did not think much of Bruckner’s music, and there was little fondness between the two men, who ended up dominating the musical life of the 1880s and 1890s.

This was the ugly world into which Gustav Mahler stepped in 1897 and in which the young Arnold Schoenberg struggled to make a career. This was the environment in which psychoanalysis was branded as a Jewish science and alliances on behalf of new art, literature, and music, were constantly threatened by provincial politics, anti-Semitism and intolerance. As Benjamin Korstvedt makes clear in his essay, Bruckner, who was genuinely a spiritual and harmless figure surrounded by intense and loyal admirers, was deeply uncertain about the final form his symphonies should take. It is true that this insecurity may have derived from the difficulties he encountered among Viennese critics and with Viennese audiences.

But some of Bruckner’s uncertainties were compositional in nature and not political. He had relatively little experience with orchestration. As a result, Bruckner like any other composer shared his work with loyal admirers and often took their advice. He was grateful for the support he received, given that he was by no means an unqualified public success. Among his first supporters was the Viennese publisher Gutmann and Löwe, both of whom were of Jewish origin. In the case of the Fourth Symphony, he clearly agreed to and endorsed the first publication and the changes it contains from earlier versions. But the contemporary suspicion that foreigners had meddled with the true Aryan and Austrian master who was helpless against the “evil whisperings” of people really incapable of understanding his true essence, survived in Brucknerian circles and among Wagnerians well into the 1920s. It should therefore come as no surprise that when a new critical edition of Bruckner came into being under the aegis of the Nazis, that Löwe’s version of the Fourth would be discredited. Bruckner was probably Hitler’s favorite composer, and his music was, as Bryan Gilliam has convincingly argued, considered a source for an alternative to both Christian and cosmopolitan spirituality. Bruckner’s music provided the sounds of a new Aryan religion.

The restoration of the original versions in the critical edition had the effect of bringing back to the stage an often more austere orchestral sound and less concise forms of many of the symphonies. Only a few conductors, out of instinct, championed the versions published in Bruckner’s lifetime, the versions which had helped make many of the symphonies including the Fourth world famous. These included Eugene Ormandy and Hans Knappertsbusch. A new generation of scholars including Benjamin Korstvedt (whose pathbreaking scholarly work on the Fourth Symphony in part inspired this program) and Crista Brüstl, have pierced the veneer of objectivity and scholarly care associated with the work of Haas and Nowak, the editors of the critical edition. The fingerprints of Nazi cultural politics have now been exposed. The irony is that in this case the Nazis did not invent history; they simply extended and augmented an attitude spawned during Bruckner’s lifetime.

Tonight’s program therefore offers three individuals who represent the spectrum of Viennese taste in the 1870s and 1880s. On the most musically conservative side stands Brüll. Here we see the irony of an alliance between musical conservatism and progressive liberal politics. In the middle we find Goldmark, who managed a synthesis between Brahms and Wagner. The modern, represented by the figure of Wagner, was linked to reactionary nationalist politics. In Goldmark’s career art and politics become separate. Aesthetically he was more inclined to Wagner, but socially and politically he kept his distance from Wagner’s political implications. In Anton Bruckner we hear a profound religious conviction, a brilliant and inspired appropriation of Wagnerian techniques and new impulses within symphonic form. Although he seemed a naïve individual, grandeur, profundity and subtlety have legitimately become the hallmarks of Bruckner’s music. For most of the twentieth century, outside of Austria and Germany, the tensions between Brucknerians and Brahmsians which seemed sharp and unbridgeable to their contemporaries in the 1880s disappeared long ago. Conductors from Mahler on have performed the works of both composers with equal conviction and allegiance. It is tragic, however, that as the memory of World War II and the Holocaust recede, the Viennese political discourse which accompanied the creation of the works on tonight’s program is still relevant and continues to wreak its havoc.

Tales of Edgar Allen Poe

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Tales of Edgar Allen Poe, performed on Oct 15, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Edgar Allan Poe died 150 years and eight days ago. It is one of the great ironies in literary history that he has had far more influence in Europe than he has had America, his native land. This is not to say that Poe has not become a household word. American school children for generations have been exposed to “The Raven” and the Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Poe has also done very well in Hollywood, in large measure as a result of the advocacy of director Roger Corman and actor Vincent Price. Though Poe wrote in a variety of genres, it is the author of horror and suspense, the creator of “Lenore,” that still has a grip on the popular imagination. But precisely his flirtation with the bizarre have prevented Poe from being widely accepted as a serious force in American letters. In the shaping of an American literary tradition, the Puritan legacy, the naïve optimism of a frontier mentality, the rhetorical majesty of Emerson and the epic power of Melville, have seemed far more pervasive and influential. Poe, whose writings have little to do with forging a national American identity, has traditionally been dismissed as derivatively European (though we might wonder how many pages of Poe a young American today is likely to have read, compared to pages of Emerson.)

It took Europe to recognize and convince America of Poe’s originality and significance. His neurotic characters and vague settings indeed did not seem “American,” but that doesn’t mean that Poe was Europhilic either. Rather, what interested Poe, and what in his writings spoke to many writers and artists especially in France and Russia, was the human mind in general, the psychological realm shortly to be explored by Freud, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists. Taking a step beyond E.T.A. Hoffmann, Poe used heavily symbolic narratives to explore our nightmares, and electrified such writers as Charles Baudelaire. It has not been until recently, however, that we have come to realize that in using condensed, overlaid narratives to dramatize the troubled mind, Poe proved himself American after all by transforming a genre that eventually became a seminal form in American literature–the short story.

In music, a similarly circuitous reaction occurred. European composers have long been inspired by Poe just as their literary contemporaries were, but American composers (with the exception of Edward Burlingame Hill) took little notice of Poe as a source for musical dramatization. From the mid-nineteenth century on, Poe’s peculiar mix of the supernatural and symbolic fascinated French and Russian composers who experimented with literary narrative and poetic texts as the basis for musical structure. Their sense of affinity between Poe’s writings and music perhaps rests in the amorphous, abstract, yet psychologically powerful qualities of Poe’s dramatic illustrations, which seem to resemble the qualities of music itself.

Appropriately, Poe provided the basis for one of the great mysteries of French music. Debussy worked for many years on a second opera, The Fall of the House of Usher, of which only an incomplete fragment remains, despite repeated efforts by noted musicians and scholars to construct a performable version. As the works of Schmitt and Debussy’s close friend Caplet indicate, Debussy’s fascination with Poe was not unique. When Russian intellectuals and artists, among them Turgenev, Stravinsky, and Diaghilev turned to Paris during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for inspiration and refuge from political oppression and cultural isolation, they asserted a singular resistance to Germanic culture (partly in response to the historical tensions between Germanic and Slavic politics and traditions). Through France, then, Poe’s ghost migrated to Russia. The connection in music history between French and Russian schools of composition is well-known. Hence the young Rachmaninoff encountered Poe (via Balmont) just a few years after Schmitt composed his Le palais hanté and Debussy was contemplating The Fall of the House of Usher.

The modern composer therefore has a substantial and even formidable tradition to draw upon when it comes to illustrating Poe in music. The Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara implicitly confronts the French/Russian attraction to Poe by offering his own composition, based on “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” Despite the striking development of a national school of composition in twentieth-century Finland, that country was for centuries caught between the twin dominations of Russia to the east and Sweden to the west. The music and culture of the countries of that geographical region–Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and northwestern Russia–display many common features, despite considerable difference in language and religion. Rautavaara’s text is based on the final two entries of Pym’s diary, which are also the final two paragraphs of Poe’s story (save the annotation). As Robert Layton points out, Rautavaara was attracted to the proposition of illustrating in music the inscrutable mystery represented by Pym’s fate.

This exploration of Poe through the prism of European music reminds us that, though we often think of American culture as derived from that of our European forbearers, the New World was also quite influential on the cultural self-image of the Old World. A sense of European dominance has especially defined the field of classical music, where American culture seemed wholly the prisoner of European practices, attitudes, and training. But Poe’s presence in literature and music demonstrates that some of the most innovative artistic developments arise from a cross-fertilization of cultural ideas. America has emancipated itself from a self-imposed cultural subordination to the English, French, and German models only in this century, but America’s contribution and threat has loomed large among Europeans since the seventeenth century. Thus, as the example of Poe makes plain, nineteenth-century European culture is unthinkable without the existence and influence of the Americans.

Fin de Siècle

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Fin de Siècle, performed on May 12, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

As we confront the fin de siécle of the twentieth century with the hope and apprehension that often marks our self-consciousness about changing units of time, it is perfectly reasonable that we would want to reflect on the beginning of the current century, to learn what we can from our predecessors’ similar experience, to seek connection with them and so define our own place in history. Only after World War II did the beginning of the twentieth century become sufficiently removed to be made into an object of increasing historical and cultural fascination which, when selectively retold, can help to explain our own times. In Mahler’s music, for example, those elements have been emphasized which seem to suggest the seeds of modernity and a critical commentary on the claims of nineteenth-century romanticism. Mahler has come to embody the tortured loss of innocence about progress and reason with which we associate this century. Few in the early 1900s might have predicted that Mahler would emerge even as one of the most popular composers in the late twentieth century, let alone as a voice of modern angst. Mahler’s iconographic appeal has been triumphant among both general audiences and a very ambitious (if somewhat pretentious) school of intellectuals. At one time we thought that there was too much focus on Beethoven. We may now be approaching a similar phase with Mahler.

But in the years after the post-1960s Mahler craze, our fin-de-siécle penchant for historical reflection has initiated a reawakening of interest in his contemporaries–particularly Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker, both of whom are represented in this program. Chronologically, these composers are more colleagues of Arnold Schoenberg than of Mahler. Furthermore, unlike Mahler, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky managed to excel in the field of opera. Both composers were crucial to the evolution of opera in the years between Parsifal (1882) and Wozzeck (1925). Schreker died in 1934 and Zemlinsky less than a decade later (1942, in relative obscurity in Larchmont, New York). Their posthumous careers, however, were not helped by either of the two opposing phenomena of the early twentieth century which so influenced the course of modern musical art: Nazi aesthetics and anti-Semitism on the one hand, and the mid-century dominance of Schoenberg and Stravinsky as pillars of “authentic” modern music, on the other.

Indeed, the aesthetic world which shaped these three composers was not the radical novelty and chaos and turbulence of post-1918 Europe. In this sense, despite their closer temporal proximity to Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Schreker aesthetically belong alongside Mahler. But it is also space as well at time which binds these three great figures together. All three were profoundly influenced by the city of Vienna, in which they all studied. Zemlinsky was among the most successful students of composition to come out of the Vienna Conservatory. Early in his career, he won extravagant praise and quickly became the elder statesman of the post-Brahms generation of Vienna. He taught Alma Mahler (with whom he had an affair), and Arnold Schoenberg (whose brother-in-law he would later become). After World War I, Zemlinsky was extremely active as a conductor in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin. But in the 1920s, his music seemed out of step and therefore fell out of fashion. Franz Schreker, who among other things, premiered Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, became an important teacher in Berlin in the 1920s. His music too experienced some decline in popularity in the 1920s. In Schreker’s case, the early operas of Hindemith, the success of Kurt Weill, and of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck also lent Schreker’s music the aura of being reflective of a pre-World War I aesthetic. But whatever stylistic characterization one wishes to make, these two were great and prolific composers. Through the efforts of Christopher Hailey, Schreker’s modern biographer, and Antony Beaumont–and in the arena of performance, James Conlon–the music of these composers is finally getting a wider distribution.

Mahler, Zemlinsky, Schreker help us to understand the world of fin-de-siécle Vienna in a new and more complicated way. Vienna has long stood in the popular imagination as a center of elegant, insulated culture–the epitome of fanciful visions of European refinement lost after two world wars. Among scholars, fin-de-siécle Vienna has been generally characterized as a city whose people sensed impending doom, a culture “in decline” caught between conservative thinkers who fiercely resisted the coming firestorm of modernism and seminal innovators including Freud and Wittgenstein. But more recent revisions of Viennese history have suggested that, contrary to popular myth-making, modernism was embraced by many: Mahler was lionized in Vienna and extremely successful there. The important break with the tastes of the Viennese audience really occurred with Opp. 9 and 10 of Schoenberg (1907-8). But even in the case of Schoenberg, as the 1913 premiere of Gurrelieder points out, he too enjoyed success in that city. And if we long for the myth of the lost, bittersweet elegance of Viennese society, we might want also to acknowledge how deeply tainted it was by the ubiquitous anti-Semitism which all of these composers experienced.

The historical Vienna was actually defined not by refined frivolity, but by a pervasive cosmopolitanism with all its attendant richness and conflict. It was the center of medicine, science, philosophy, painting, architecture, and theater. Its huge immigrant community and polyglot quarters and neighborhoods lent its artists a remarkably diverse resource of traditions and cultures. True, the image of “old Vienna” in the years between 1780 and 1848 (Joseph II to Franz Joseph) was heavily sentimentalized, but this nostalgia filled the gap between two important historical legacies. One of these was the fact Vienna was a relatively new city, everything before 1683 having been destroyed by the Ottomans; it was therefore an urban landscape of Baroque splendor. The second factor was that as a city Vienna was constantly updating itself, as is best symbolized by the construction of the Ringstrasse. One of the clearest indications of Vienna’s aggressive cosmopolitanism was its pervasive interest in and borrowing from cultures beyond Europe. For example, Mahler’s use of Chinese elements in Das Lied von der Erde is well know. And the collection that Zemlinsky turned to for his Symphonic Songs, Afrika singt, was an extremely popular anthology of poems of the Harlem Renaissance translated –very loosely–into German.

Vienna consisted therefore of much more than the preconceptions we might cull from Freud, Klimt, and Mahler. It was an irresistible magnet to young people of talent. This was particularly true in music and theater; it is no accident that Zemlinsky and Schreker were opera composers and Mahler a great opera conductor. As young artists they were drawn to the city in which musical theater had dominated since the eighteenth century. But having made Vienna their base, where did these three budding legends of modernism go within that city to perfect their craft? What institution on the very forefront of the changing cycle helped each of them break his distinct path into the twentieth century? It was the Vienna Conservatory–an unlikely candidate indeed.

After 1875, Viennese musical life experienced a distinct divide in aesthetic taste between those who associated themselves with Wagner and those who allied with Brahms (though the opposition was not so strongly felt among the composers themselves). The Vienna Conservatory was largely dominated by friends of Brahms. The distinct sense from the mid-1870s on that, despite Bruckner’s presence on the faculty, the Conservatory was anti-Wagnerian and rather conservative was increased by the 1880s, when Brahms, who sat on the Conservatory board of directors, became a powerful force in the musical politics of the city.

One member of the faculty whom Brahms particularly admired was Robert Fuchs. It was through Fuchs’s classes at the Conservatory that all the younger composers on tonight’s program passed. Fuchs taught at the Conservatory from 1875 to 1912. His curriculum was profoundly traditional, reflecting his respect for historical forms and practices. In addition to the composers on tonight’s program, Fuchs taught Hugo Wolf, Franz Schmidt (between 1889-91), Jean Sibelius and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Franz Schreker studied with Fuchs beginning in 1892, and again later studied composition with him. Fuchs considered Schreker “particularly talented” and “remarkably productive.” Fuchs made no secret of his skepticism about Schreker’s great masterpiece Die ferne Klang (from which tonight’s work is drawn), but Schreker retained throughout his life an enormous amount of affection for Fuchs. Their friendship extended through the period in which Fuchs composed his Third Symphony. Fuchs ultimately was very tolerant and relatively neutral with respect to the ambitions of his pupils, though his own compositions never embraced modernism. And many of Fuchs’s students were grateful for his insistence that they command a great variety of forms, particularly classical forms such as the serenade, in which, as Fuchs’s own successful Serenade demonstrates, the teacher himself excelled.

As a composer, Fuchs’s output of nearly 120 works is dominated by chamber music. The first Serenade from 1874 in D major was his first very well known work. There are also one published opera and many songs as well as choral works. The Third Symphony was written nearly a decade after Brahms’s death, and reflects a powerful command of the formal procedures of symphonic writing. But it is not nearly as conservative as one might imagine. The year of composition, 1907, was personally significant to Fuchs because it marked his sixtieth birthday and his award of an honorary pension from the Emperor himself. Fuchs’s remarkable knowledge of form and harmonic procedures are evident in this work; one has a glimpse of the highest standard of compositional practice and of accepted wisdom which a new generation confronted. These are the conventions of composition to which one can consider Schoenberg’s Treatise on Harmony from 1911 as a response.

That it is Robert Fuchs, emblem of Brahmsian conservatism, who should provide the common thread between three utterly disparate modernist composers, elucidates the lesson to be learned from the last fin de siécle. The connection of generations, teacher and pupil, and musical practices allow us to appreciate the evolutionary dimension of the shift from the late nineteenth century to expressionism and finally to modernism in the twentieth. The end of the cycle is therefore never a true rupture, no matter how great the differences in eras or stylistic surfaces seem to be. Rather, like Yeats’s “widening gyre” the new always carries at least some of history in itself.

Ariane et Barbe-bleue (Ariane and Bluebeard) (1907)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bluebeard!, performed on April 25, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

One of the only truly genuine twentieth-century prodigy composers, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, took pride in his originality, particularly during his years as a composer for the movies. Many of his successful colleagues in that genre stole shamelessly from the masters of great music. In a moment of rare candor, however, Korngold is reputed to have confided to a friend that many of the ideas in his best music were borrowed from Paul Dukas’s only opera, Ariane et Barbe-bleue. Korngold’s admiration for Dukas’s opera was by no means unique. Richard Strauss, generally not an admirer of the French tradition of composition, singled out Dukas for particular praise. The opera was also held in high regard by Arnold Schoenberg and Alexander von Zemlinsky, and more recently found one of its most ardent defenders in Dukas’s pupil, Olivier Messiaen.

Why, then, is this opera so rarely performed either in concert version or on the stage? It enjoyed a fabulous start, including an American premiere performance by Arturo Toscanini with Geraldine Ferrar at the Metropolitan Opera. We always want to believe that the standard repertory reflects the enduring best of music. If something is not standard and popular, we often assume that there must be a good reason. But that is frequently not the case. The truth is that in the performing arts, particularly music, what remains in the standard repertoire is the result of habits and tastes that have as much to do with convenience and prejudice as with anything we might call quality. If we listen to Ariane, we might have difficulty in finding enough fault with either the music or the libretto of this masterpiece to warrant its disappearance from the stage. The libretto was written intentionally for music and it is not only by a major literary figure (the author of Pelléas et Mélisande) but it also presents a view of the Bluebeard story that ought to make it particularly pertinent to late twentieth-century audiences. In this version, the woman triumphs and much of the opera presents a powerful portrait of an attempt at convincing other women to liberate themselves. In the end Ariane fails, and that in itself gives the opera a level of psychological subtlety that should propel it onto the contemporary stage.

The word masterpiece in relationship to Ariane et Barbe-bleue is used deliberately, in part because Paul Dukas rivaled Johannes Brahms in his puritanical self-criticism. Far fewer works by this composer survive than were written. He felt about his music as Gogol did about the sequel to Dead Souls, and many of Dukas’s compositions suffered the same fate. As a result, however, what remains of Dukas’s work are pieces that are nearly flawless in their construction and refinement. Yet if one asks the average listener what Dukas wrote, one will invariably hear one title: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1897), and this most likely because it was appropriated into the same genre in which Korngold excelled–it became part of the film score for Disney’s Fantasia.

If contemporary audiences had more opportunity to hear Dukas’s C-Major Symphony (1896), or his early works for chorus and orchestra (which remain unpublished), or La Peri (1912), the ballet which may have been Dukas’s most successful work for the stage, they might be aware of Dukas as more than the musical support for a rather emotive mouse. Dukas’s posthumous reputation has also not been helped by the politics of French and European music. For instance, Dukas was born from a partly Jewish ancestry, and was not helped by the fact that one of the most powerful forces in late nineteenth-century French music was Vincent d’Indy, who, despite a nominal friendship with Dukas, was known to be as widely a propagator of virulent anti-Semitism as Richard Wagner. Furthermore, Dukas was exceptional in his complete lack of interest in his self-promotion. He was a taciturn and extremely private individual who married late in life (at age fifty-one) and fell largely silent as a composer in his later years. Unlike Strauss, Dukas felt no urge to be polemical by writing music in a manner that was provocatively out of step with the contemporary.

Despite the subtlety and profundity of its musical symbolism and the psychological depth of its rendition of the traditional story, Ariane et Barbe-bleue may have been relegated to obscurity because of unintentional competition from two other nearly contemporary works, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (1911) and Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902). This conjecture is all the more disturbing when one considers it in context with the other fantastic riches in the operatic repertoire that await revival from the late nineteenth century, particularly in French music. Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus (1895), Fauré’s Penelope (1913), and the operas of Magnard and d’Indy also remain in the shadows. But when one hears the beauties of this score, the powerful representation of its characters’ tangled lives, and the masterful orchestration, the comparison should not be with other works that have fallen out of the repertory but with those that remain. The American Symphony Orchestra is proud to be able to present a twentieth-century masterpiece by a composer whose command of the craft of musical composition was consummate and whose unexpected modesty and artistic self-scrutiny merit not only our admiration, but possibly even a degree of awe.

The Composter’s Advocate: Serge Koussevitzky

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Composter’s Advocate: Serge Koussevitzky, performed on March 17, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Tonight’s concert pays tribute to a legendary and charismatic figure. Among Serge Koussevitzky’s formidable talents was his capacity to use his distinctive personality and dashing style as a source of inspiration for others. He left an indelible impression on Leonard Bernstein and several generations of students and protegés at Tanglewood. No conductor in the history of the Boston Symphony has ever been so beloved by his audience. Few would dispute that under Koussevitzky’s watch the Boston Symphony developed it own unique sound with a Russian-French patina, an elegance, fluidity and transparency decidedly different from the Germanic power of the Chicago Symphony tradition or the luscious sensuality and brilliance of Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra. Koussevitzky by all accounts gave great performances of many works in the standard repertory. However, he is best remembered as a patron of new music, both during his lifetime and through the tradition sustained posthumously by the Koussevitzky Foundation. Although Leopold Stokowski was undeniably adventuresome in his programming, no one could rival Koussevitzky in his support of new music through the act of commissioning new works. Stravinsky, Martin, Bartók, Dutilleux, and Copland, just to name a few, saw many of their finest works come into being as a result of Koussevitzky’s request for new works.

Despite all of this, there is a strange undercurrent in the posthumous legacy of Koussevitzky. One can detect it even in the program notes to this concert. Gary Karr alludes to the rumor that Koussevitzky did not write his own concerto. Bernard Jacobson quotes Stravinsky’s sardonic observation that Koussevitzky seemed unaware of massive errors in the parts and score he was using. The result was a catastrophic set of performances of the Ode on today’s program. There is in addition the testimony of Nicholas Slonimsky, who loved to tell of how he had to teach Koussevitzky The Rite of Spring, and even rebar it for him. And then there are the stories of how the members of the Boston Symphony knew when to come in at the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: they watched Richard Burgin, the concertmaster, who in turn observed when Koussevitzky’s hand went below a certain button on his jacket. The implication was that Koussevitzky was somehow deficient in conducting technique and basic musical skills. This seems quite implausible. For reasons that are not entirely self-evident, Koussevitzky is not remembered with the reverence accorded to other past masters, the way Toscanini, Szell, Furtwängler, Reiner, or now Karajan and Bernstein are. Stokowski was accused periodically of having been a charlatan, and Koussevitzky came in for his own share of critical snobbery, but in the massive output of CD reissues, Stokowski has still done better than Koussevitzky. Yet Koussevitzky was an international star with a prodigious role in twentieth-century music history and a devoted following among the greatest musicians of his day.

Born in Russia in 1874, Koussevitzky made his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1908, after gaining a substantial reputation throughout Europe as a double-bass soloist. He quickly acquired stature as a conductor notably through numerous guest engagements with the London Symphony. In 1924 he became music director of the Boston Symphony, a post he held for 25 years. With the BSO, he commissioned such works as Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Ravel’s Piano Concerto, and Hindemith’s Konzertmusik, among numerous other works. But it was with the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, which he established in 1942, that the conductor ushered into music history some of the finest works of the twentieth century, including Britten’s Peter Grimes, Barber’s Prayers of Kierkegaard, Copland’s Symphony No. 3, Milhaud’s Symphony No. 2, Villa-Lobos’s Madona, Blitzstein’s Regina, Malipiero’s Sinfonia No. 4, Piston’s Symphony No. 3, Harris’s Symphony No. 7, Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw, Honegger’s Symphony No. 5, Fine’s String Quartet, Thomson’s Lord Byron, Dallapiccola’s Tartiniana, and Bernstein’s Serenade. After his death in 1951, the Foundation carried on with works by almost every major composer of the century, including Bloch, Chavez, Riegger, Carter, Schuman, Sessions, Toch, Foss, Tippet, Blackwood, Ginastera, Walton, Cowell, Poulenc, Berio, Henze, Krenek, Babbitt, Crumb, Cage, Del Tredici, Penderecki, and Birtwistle.

Perhaps it was Koussevitzky’s charm, success as an organizer, and his personal access to wealth that made him the source of envy. But the fact remains that he was a great conductor, an inspiring presence on the podium, a virtuoso of note, a competent composer, and a suave but canny observer of contemporary music. He managed to make the Boston Symphony an utterly crucial part of the cultural and civic life of that city and all of New England. He founded a school and festival which has remained a model for the entire world, through which practically every major composer, conductor, and musician has passed at some point in his or her career. After settling in Boston, Koussevitzky did not do much guest conducting and traveled reluctantly. His discography is only now slowly being made available in digital format. Tonight’s concert should inspire us to reflect on what a difference a magnetic, full-time, non-jet-setting music director of an orchestra can achieve in a city; how an orchestra can function in the culture as more than the instrument of subscription concerts; how it can generate new music and not simply be a museum intent on conservation. Koussevitzky showed how a great orchestra can play an educational role in the community, and how magnetism, elegance, generosity of spirit, and a vision can legitimately be considered an integral part of being a music director and conductor. The overwhelming fact is that no conductor in the twentieth century, not Toscanini and not Furtwängler, left such a decisive imprint on the character and direction of twentieth-century music as did Serge Koussevitzky. Through the commissions he gave and the institutions he created, Koussevitzky changed the course of history and brought into being icons of twentieth-century culture such as Bela Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.

For Koussevitzky, conducting was not the act of making a highly personalized case about an existing canon. Conducting was not merely an act of interpretation. For Koussevitzky, conducting was an act of advocacy not of dead composers but of contemporaries who needed to be prodded and supported in order to write the next new work for orchestra, so that the canon of twentieth-century music would eventually rival that of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. From the Edition Russes de Musique (a publishing house he founded in 1909) to the last commission, 48 years after his death and at the end of the twentieth century, we can observe with confidence that the legacy of twentieth-century orchestral music does indeed rival the historical body of work upon which Furtwängler and Toscanini expended most of their efforts. That this is the case is in no small measure due to Koussevitzky. The American Symphony Orchestra is particularly pleased to remind us all that the Koussevitzky tradition of support for new music continues as the Koussevitzky Foundation proceeds to commission works for the concert stage.

Music of the 1960s

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music of the 1960s, performed on January 17, 1999 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Since the eighteenth century, it has been customary for scholars and critics to try to understand history in terms of discrete periods about which large generalizations may be made– the Age of Enlightenment, the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, etc. Such periodization is a dangerous enterprise. The telling details of the past are often subsumed, and the complexities and cross-currents of life are obscured by the reductive effort to render the chaotic coherent. Too often, we characterize the past in general terms which are germane to our attempt to explain our own times. As the German writer Friedrich Schlegel aptly observed, historians are often prophets in retrospect.

When we look back at the 1960s from our present perspective at the end of the century, we tend to explain that turbulent decade using evidence which we believe was decisive to the historical participants of the time. We instantly envision, as David Schiff rightly points out, a limited number of scenes from what time has judged to be the most memorable phenomena: student protest, the Viet Nam war, the civil rights movement, generation gaps, sexual liberation, the Beatles, the counter-culture. The 1960s, especially for those who actually lived through them, seems to have been an utterly unprecedented historical era–a watershed comprised of pivotal moments of social change and revolution. But how do we judge this watershed? Among the most important assessments at the time was a tract called The Greening of America (1970) by Charles Reich, a utopian mishmash of predictions, none of which have turned out to be accurate and which are now buried as mere memory as is the book itself. This is not to say that the decade’s euphoria and enthusiasms did not leave their permanent residue on manners, mores, and beliefs. But a confident belief in the positive revolutionary consequences of 1960s’ culture is no more convincing than the tiresome neo-conservative argument of a perfect world in the 1950’s, ruined by the subsequent decade. The modern agenda of cultural conservatism is very much driven by the tacit acceptance of the view that the 1960s were indeed a transformative decade whose influence must be reversed in order to restore American culture to health.

As the distinctiveness (or lack thereof) and legacy (if there is one) of the 1960s continues to be debated as myth and as history, there is little doubt that whatever revision takes place, the visual and musical symbols of that decade are fixed in our memories. But as the meaning of these symbols are contested by accounts that now search for continuities from the 1950s to the 1960s, and as we currently struggle over values, religion, and politics, we may do well to ask what the concert music of that period can tell us . If indeed there is a consistency that lies below the surface of all this apparent revolution, what does the orchestral music of that era reveal that the dominant popular culture, or journalism, or emblematic clichés and video clips can not?

Our first instinct might be to say that the music on this program represents how marginal concert music became at that time, when it was eclipsed by popular music and culture. The 1960s, however, was a remarkably vibrant time for concert music. It saw the triumph of American artists such as Leonard Bernstein and Isaac Stern, who were in their prime, while at the same time, the older pre-war generation of European masters were still active. The long-playing record and new stereophonic technology captured a larger mass-audience than ever before. No doubt there were rumblings about the obsolescence of the orchestra and acoustic concerts as old-fashioned, but the debate about the future of music was a debate about something vital and ongoing–not a nostalgic or conservative quarrel about a dying art form in need of resuscitation.

The composers on today’s program believed that writing concert music in the high art tradition was an important task with clear political and cultural overtones. All of these composers lived through the debates over modernism in music of the mid-twentieth century, when lines were sharply drawn. For them, disciplined modernism was an unequivocal resistance to fascism and tyranny. Today, some revisionists would like us to see hidden affinities between Schoenberg (and his advocates) and autocracy, rigidity, and inhuman abstraction. But during the 1960s, the complex and revolutionary sounding modernism evident in much of today’s music, was highly regarded and respected. Even Aaron Copland and Igor Stravinsky found themselves drawn to a more aggressive modernism during this decade. For them, modernist music embodied a progressive, triumphant reply to the charges of degeneracy and disfigurement of beauty articulated at length by followers of Hitler and Stalin. The 1960s, after all, were close in time (indeed, closer than we are to the 1960s) to the 1948 Zhdanov decrees (Stalin’s condemnation of modernism) and the cultural politics of Nazi Germany. The historical memories of this afternoon’s composers encompassed an earlier, very different time from the decade in which they produced their greatest works. This is especially true of Luigi Dallapiccola, who witnessed the close collaboration of conservative Italian composers with Mussolini.

In Europe, the political and aesthetic radicalism of post-1945 clearly expressed a desire to cleanse Europe of its past evils, the mass destruction of World War II. In America, this link between politics and art was not as clear and convincing. One reason that modernism–even as represented by Elliott Carter–seems stronger in Europe than in the United States is because American audiences did not necessarily hear in twentieth-century modernism the same echoes of liberation and spiritual freedom. They did not as urgently perceive the necessity for a break from the tempting and dangerous connotations of post-Wagnerian Romanticism. Modernism to American ears seemed arbitrary, obscure, and alienating in its highbrow complexity and incomprehensibility. American audiences’ response to 1960s concert music revealed that the historically powerful connection between progressive art and progressive politics was in the American consciousness tenuous at best. In contrast, for Witold Lutoslawski, modernism was a sign of the victory of Polish national identity over Stalinist domination. Modernism in Polish music flourished after the successful confrontation between Gomulka and the Soviets in 1956. Poland became the scene of the most progressive art-making in the visual and performing arts within the Soviet block and a powerful link between east and west. His music may have struck some American hearers as cerebral and abstract, but for him detachment was hardly the point.

The turning of the tide which marks the end of modernism’s moment in the center stage of the twentieth century is audible in Luciano Berio’s self-conscious Sinfonia, even though it is entirely contemporaneous with Elliott Carter’s magisterial revelation of the power of modernism in his Concerto. All these works are not just about music, but explicitly about politics and history. Far from being abstract or cerebral, they have an intense commitment, and it is precisely the emotional intensity, economy, and elegance of the music that can be appreciated without anxiety thirty years later. A conventional bit of wisdom inherited from Samuel Johnson–that artistic greatness is a test of the ages–is perhaps most true for music which in its own time was acknowledged, respected, but not entirely loved. What the music on this program tells us about the 1960s, which rock music, television shows, political events, and the familiar icons do not, is the enormous and ironic debt the 1960s had to the very past it was trying to wipe out, to the power of historical continuities as opposed to ephemeral surface changes. All the innovations we are prone to recall about the 1960s were dependent on and played out within a context of powerful and convincing modernist enthusiasm, not only in music but in painting, literature, poetry, and architecture. History is not about victors but about the restoration of memory.

Future generations may, when they write about the 1960s, begin to recognize the traditions audible in today’s concert as characteristic of a decade whose revolution was founded on the knowledge that the inventive imagination can offer a critical response to the past that does not descend into nostalgia. The 1960s were about the confidence to change, destroy, build anew–to clean house so to speak. Whether that actually happened or not is irrelevant. But the confidence is diametrically opposed to the nostalgia and insecurity that marks our current adulation of idealized moments in the past, rife with sentiments which suggest that the past is better than the present and that the future will be worse, and that the best we can do particularly in music is be pale imitators of glorious days gone by. The composers of this program fought the politics of the past through the notion that the art associated with it needed to be set aside and a more just present needed to be created which possessed its own unique aesthetic signature. They believed that the musicians of their own day were in a position to improve on past traditions. Our current sensibilities seem strikingly different and quite the reverse. At the end of the century, culture seems more than comfortable with evocative sentimentality. The modernist composers on today’s program struggled to replace sentimental reflection with action, and offer their listeners the sense of elation that accompanies a transcendence of familiar expectations and complacency.

Miske (“In the Forest”) (1901)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music and Visual Imagination, performed on Nov 11, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

M.K. Ciurlionis (1875-1911) is with little doubt the leading artistic personality of turn-of-the-century Lithuania. In modern history Lithuania has witnessed the subordination of its national culture (particularly linguistically) to those of Poland and Russia. Therefore, the need for a profoundly patriotic figure of international stature in painting and music has allowed Ciurlionis to emerge as a significant presence in Lithuanian art and has added immeasurably to his posthumous reputation. It is not simply coincidence that the first President of independent Lithuania after the fall of Communism, Vytautas Landsbergis, is a leading scholar of the work of Ciurlionis. Even in Soviet times, Ciurlionis was celebrated as manifesting in music and painting a distinctly Lithuanian voice.

Ciurlionis died young—just a few months before his thirty-sixth birthday. Nevertheless, during his short lifetime his work already attracted the attention of leading figures in St. Petersburg and Warsaw, where he had studied. He began his career as a musician, studying at the Warsaw Institute of Music, from which he graduated in 1899. In his twenties he also tried his hand at literary writing, although he would ultimately be best known as a painter. In 1901, the symphonic poem Mi_ke (In the Forest) was composed for and won a competition in Warsaw. In the Forest is particularly interesting because its composition coincided with Ciurlionis’s first efforts at painting. Only after completing his musical studies in Leipzig (under Jadassohn and Reinecke) did Ciurlionis begin formal training as a painter. Between 1902 and 1905 he studied painting intensively while supporting himself as a teacher of music. Although in retrospect Ciurlionis’s reputation is most firmly established as a painter, he continued to work as a conductor, teacher, and composer until the end of his life.

One of the most striking aspects of Ciurlionis’s work is the remarkable integration of the visual and the musical. Especially in his later work, Ciurlionis created paintings that were organized on a musical basis and were designed to embody musical concepts, such as the “sonata” paintings entitled The Pyramids (1909) and The Sea (1908). Indeed, there are seven visual sonatas with separate images corresponding to musical movements, entitled Allegro, Andante, Scherzo, and Finale. Among his earliest work is the cycle of seven paintings entitled Funereal Symphony. There are also a number of visual preludes and fugues. In addition to the specific paintings, Ciurlionis often created corresponding musical compositions as well, as in the case of The Sea.

The subject of tonight’s piece is a landscape, a theme which resonates throughout his painting. Ciurlionis painted a number of works entitled Mi_ke; the first dates from 1904. The painting reproduced here (1907) is among the best known of his many landscapes. The symphonic poem In the Forest was perhaps Ciurlionis’s first major musical success. It begins in C major and although a fantasy, has a clear process of thematic development. There are hints of Lithuanian folk-sources. The piece is significant because it gives the listener an insight into Ciurlionis’s sense of organic unity and his concern for instrumental color. Although the later tone poem The Sea has often been presented as a superior work, In the Forest engages precisely because of its unabashed expression of the composer’s intense attachment to his native environment and culture. It is free from the self-consciousness and lack of economy that characterizes The Sea, written after Ciurlionis went to Leipzig to study.

Despite the fact that his posthumous reputation is most heavily weighted toward his painting, we must remember that Ciurlionis above all remains a musician. What one hears tonight are not the efforts of a young painter dabbling in music, but of a young musician with a complex understanding of the relation of music to other arts. In this sense, Ciurlionis’s synthesis of music and painting associates him with Russian Symbolism, a powerful artistic movement during his lifetime. Music takes primacy in the relationship between the visual and the musical because, the Symbolists believed, it was the proper objective of painting to turn from discrete representation and narration toward a status more like music, a sensory experience independent of the familiar physical objects around us that we mistake for “reality.”

But while the intellectual influence of the Symbolists, and the musical legacy of Wagner and Chopin (in the piano music) may be discerned, there is also something different here. The originality of the music reflects two central ambitions of the young Ciurlionis: first, to find a voice that is distinctly Lithuanian without being provincial through music, that assists in evoking the essential experience of being in the Lithuanian landscape; and second, to use art and music in a free, mystical fashion, employing color and light. It is precisely the atmospheric and coloristic instincts of Ciurlionis the musician that led him to experiment with color, fantasy, and symbol in the painterly work, which has ensured his lasting fame as an artist.

Music and Visual Imagination

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Music and Visual Imagination, performed on Nov 11, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The Russian poet Aleksandr Blok made the observation that there are only two kinds of time and therefore two kinds of space. The first is historical and is reflected in the calendar. The other dimension of time and space is musical. Blok speaks of the musical time and space as being tied essentially to nature as an experience that comes to us when we set civilized consciousness aside and surrenDer to “the global orchestra.” For the Russian Symbolists of the turn of the century, the search of the artist was to penetrate the artificial screen of realism and the illusions created by narrative coherency, and to find the cosmic in the specific. Andrei Bely, perhaps the most original voice of Russian Symbolism, placed music as the highest of the arts precisely because it proceeded through time and was not static. Rhythm rather than melody was the essence of music, since emotional expression required time to be felt. For Bely, passion and emotion, even when experienced visually, utilized the temporal dimension offered by music. Music dominated the other arts because it was beyond civilization and reason—at once utterly natural and earthbound, and at the same time pure and abstract. The laws of all art could be organized musically, so to speak, just as the laws of physics could be organized mathematically. The essence of the real was abstracted. Music was the guiding principle toward which art in the use of space, dimension and color should turn. With respect to meaning, visual art should thus be like music: indirect in its allusions and therefore ultimately symbolic.

However, despite the philosophical prejudice expressed on behalf of music during the era during which the music on this program was written, in terms of social history, precisely the opposite was occurring. In European culture, the nineteenth century can easily be regarded as the century of music. By 1900, however, the high-water mark of concert music’s significance as a social factor had been reached. The twentieth century would become the age of the visual, beginning with the explosion of innovation in painting and sculpture in the earliest decades, continuing through the rise of photography and the silent film, the sound film, and ultimately with television and video.

All of the composers on tonight’s program initially focused on music but eventually developed a deep interest in painting and visual imagery. One of them, Mikolajus Ciurlionis, eventually became better known as a painter than as a musician. The generation of Ciurlionis, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alexander Scriabin—all of whom were born in the same decade—was profoundly impressed by the aesthetic philosophies prevalent at the turn of the century. They sought to eliminate not only the boundaries between reason and emotion (and therefore between the rational and the seemingly irrational) but the demarcations between fields of knowledge: science, ethics, and epistemology. Central to their various mystical and pseudo-mystical speculations was an effort to seek meaning beyond language and to bridge the physical and metaphysical worlds. In the arts, much of this effort to find a unified theory through aesthetic experience had been propelled by Wagner, but this later generation went well beyond that starting point by actively seeking out the philosophical implications contained in the connections between sight and hearing. Schoenberg, for example, became friendly with the painter Wassily Kandinsky and contributed to the journal Blaue Reiter. Kandinsky for his part produced his own opera entitled Yellow Sound. Kandinsky would become the pioneer of non-objective art, just as Schoenberg would help return twentieth-century music to traditions of pure formalism.

At the turn of the century, visual art was both Schoenberg and Scriabin at the center of a new religion of art. The search for an underlying organic logic which could perhaps only be intuited through different aesthetic media working in concert together led Scriabin to resort to that panacea of nineteenth-century rationalism, mechanical technology. The remains of his efforts to design a sound-and-color machine still exist in a dilapidated state in the museum that was once his home. Ciurlionis, who like Scriabin died young (and within four years of the Russian composer), began to paint and write music almost interchangeably, in order to generate a fusion of both aesthetic experiences.

In tonight’s exploration of the early twentieth century’s engagement with the crossroads between the musical and the visual, Schoenberg’s Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielszene (1930) represents a transition from the mystical symbolism of Ciurlionis and Scriabin to the reassertion of a less integrated parallelism between music and the visual evident in the Hindemith. Schoenberg wrote this piece many years after he had stopped working systematically as a painter. Nevertheless, the work owes much to Schoenberg’s remarkable gifts as a visual artist and his practical engagement with the making of art. The Mathis Der Maler Symphony, perhaps Hindemith’s most successful piece for orchestra, is in Bely’s terms, ultimately a work in which time is understood both historically and musically. Hindemith attempts to evoke the substance of the work of art, the experience of the viewer in front of the altarpiece, and the struggle of the artist in making it. Music assumes all the roles we might assign in a film or opera (from which the music is Derived). Although Hindemith’s strategy is more akin to that undertaken by Max Reger in his 1913 Four Tone Poems after Arnold Böcklin, (performed by the ASO in 1994), Hindemith’s music can be understood as having been influenced by the rising importance of the film medium. We should not underestimate how radically our sense of time and musical space has been influenced by the motion picture.

In the case of George Gershwin, many of the strands of speculation engaged in by his European contemporaries find American equivalents. Like Ciurlionis and Schoenberg, Gershwin turned to painting, and became obsessed by both making art and collecting it. More than Schoenberg and Hindemith, the film was a crucial part of the culture in which he worked, for it was America that pioneered the business of moving pictures. Like Scriabin, Gershwin was fascinated by technology and modern instruments of reproduction and the transmission of sound, (as is evidenced by the “city sounds” in the Second Rhapsody). In this sense too he was truly American. But what sets Gershwin apart from the others was not only his greatness as a composer of popular music. Precisely because his audience cut across social classes in a way unimaginable to the others on tonight’s program, he had an instinct for the listening habits of his age. Furthermore he knew that in the 1920s, many American artists including Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keefe, and Joseph Stella, were inspired in their painting by music. The synthesis of the visual and the musical was therefore not located so much in the work of art itself (as had been advocated by the Symbolists), as in the act of listening visually, and by being inspired through the auditory experience to see differently.

Gershwin’s visual ambitions were neither musical nor abstract, nor even symbolist. They reflect a much more common-sense realization that hearing and seeing both take place in time and space, making the cultivation of the eye a potentially powerful experience for the musician, just as the training of the ear might help the artist. As we celebrate the centennial of Gershwin’s birth, we should revisit his painting and engagement with visual art as a way of understanding his musical ambitions during the last decade of his life. Tonight’s concert-goers may encounter unfamiliar dimensions of the mature Gershwin’s ambition, including those of making a name for himself in the field of symphonic music as a “serious” classical composer, and of becoming a fine painter. Perhaps nothing represents these dimensions better than Gershwin’s portrait of Arnold Schoenberg. We present it here with other art works connected to tonight’s program, so that audience members may experience for themselves each composer’s intended connections between hearing and seeing.

The Eternal Road, Acts III and IV

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Kings and Prophecies: A Road of Promise, performed on Oct 4, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Whether in excerpts or in its entirety, The Eternal Road has eluded revival for over sixty years. One might think that such a grand spectacle created through the collaboration of three seminal figures of twentieth-century European culture-composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) , author Franz Werfel (1890-1945), and Director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943)-would have seen the light of many days. The difficult history of this vanished epic stems, however, not only from the legal morass which led to the collapse of the New York production or even the deteriorated state of the surviving performance materials (recently edited brilliantly by the scholars of the Kurt Weill Foundation, making today’s performance possible). A primary reason for the disappearance of The Eternal Road was that it was written by three German-speaking Jews-one from Dessau and Berlin, one from Prague, one from Vienna-at the dawning of the catastrophe of the Nazis’ seizure of power and Hitler’s surprising legitimization by foreign leaDers and nations. The Eternal Road opened before Kristallnacht and vanished before World War II, the Holocaust, and the birth of the state of Israel. In other words, the intellectual, social, and cultural world which engenDered this masterpiece birth was completely overtaken by subsequent events. As a result, those who bothered to take a look at The Eternal Road since the 1950s have been struck by how out of step it appears with respect to the events that immediately followed it and with the realities of the second half of the twentieth century.

One concrete example will suffice. Recently the distinguished Weill scholar David Drew prepared an excerpt of the final act (Act IV) of The Eternal Road for concert performance in 1998 for the Proms in London and in later in Vienna. The excerpt, entitled “Propheten,” replaces the original ending with an ending from the preceding Act III, “Kings.” Drew made the change in part for musical effect. The change solves a difficult ideological dilemma. In the original form (which you will see today), the Jews retain their “exceptional” status as a people without a homeland or political entity of their own. Assimilation into the hostile host nation is not discredited and armed resistance to oppression is represented as improbable and implausible. The Jews seem fated to wanDer forever among other nations and be faced perpetually with minority status and a legitimate pressure to acculturate and assimilate. If one compares the ending of The Eternal Road to Felix Mendelssohn’s setting of Goethe’s Die erste Walpurgisnacht, one is struck by a vital difference. Mendelssohn, although bearing the most celebrated name in early nineteenth-century German-Jewish history, had been converted and become a devout Protestant. Nevertheless through his music he celebrated with empathy and pride the courageous resistance of the Druids to the siege on their traditions and beliefs laid by violent Christian attackers. In contrast, The Eternal Road ends much more ambiguously with a vague hope for a return to Zion among a defeated and divided community, bowing to a fate of perpetual exclusion, persecution, and powerlessness.

Of the three authors of The Eternal Road, Kurt Weill was the least distant from Judaism. He was also the youngest. Despite his premature death in 1950, he has emerged as the most well-known of the three. Unlike Franz Werfel, Weill embraced America and turned his back both musically and politically on his German past. He is followed in reputation by Max Reinhardt, whose impact on Hollywood and whose founding of the Salzburg Festival as well as his remarkable career as a Director has kept his name alive. Reinhardt was undoubtedly the most original Director in German-speaking Europe; his production of Elektra inspired Strauss to write his opera. He had some success in America and in 1935 directed a legendary film of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Mickey Rooney and James Cagney, which used Mendelssohn’s music adapted by Reinhardt’s fellow Viennese é;immigratesé;, Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Franz Werfel has for English-speaking audiences vanished into obscurity. He was a gifted poet as a young man and was one of the people who first recognized the talent of Franz Kafka. He remains a hero to the Armenian people for his novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh (1933), which brought the tragic massacre of the Armenians to international attention. Although now largely forgotten as a novelist (his historical novel Verdi [1924]merits attention), he also authored several brilliant short novels including one of the most perceptive novels of adolescent school life ever written, translated as Class Reunion (1927). Werfel also went on to Hollywood and enjoyed his greatest success with his screen adaptation of his best-selling novel celebrating Catholicism, The Song of Bernadette (1941). Accompanied to America by his notorious wife Alma Mahler (an anti-Semite, as was her stepfather, the painter Carl Moll) Werfel published in 1937 a heartbreaking essay “Upon the Meaning of Imperial Austria.” In this essay he romanticizes the Habsburg Empire as a political entity holding the promise of transcending the evils of nationalism, in which the Jews could function as ideal citizens, as cosmopolitan people of ideas and culture without irrational allegiances to blood and soil. All three creators of The Eternal Road were in fact exemplars of the exceptional status of the assimilated Jew as protagonist of modernist aesthetics, anti-nationalism, and the virtues of art and culture. They were genuine Europeans: Jews who had realized for themselves the promise of emancipation from the ghetto by helping to create an international community of science and culture seemingly beyond politics.

The success of Nazism and of anti-Semitism in Europe during the late 1920s and early 1930s (including the anti-Semitism of Austro-fascism) challenged the funDamental premises of the majority of German-speaking Jews who had enjoyed until 1933 the most promising experience of integration into a non-Jewish European environment. The degree of assimilation in Eastern Europe and even in France was not nearly as great as what had occurred in Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite the persistence of official and unofficial anti-Semitism. In 1933, however, all German Jews who qualified under Nazi law as being non-Aryan were forced to come to terms with their identity as Jews, despite intermarriage, conversion and upbringing with very little understanding of Jewish history and tradition.

The Eternal Road closes with the prospect of another Babylonian exile, which the authors knew was a period in Jewish history of great intellectual achievement. The Babylon of modern times was to be America, albeit a reluctant America, whose immigration policies were restrictive and prevented millions of Jews from surviving. By the time of their collaboration, Weill, Reinhardt, and Werfel knew very well that tens of thousands of German Jews were seeking to emigrate, but that no nation including America would have them. They knew that Palestine was essentially closed to mass immigration. They also realized that many German Jews wanted to stay in Germany, hoping that the Nazi regime would be temporary, and were enduring indignity and hardship in the expectation that bad times would pass once again. It is in the eerie historical interlude marked by fading hope and betrayal by trusted friends and neighbors that The Eternal Road came into being. None of the authors, actors, audience members in 1937 had an accurate idea of what history would actually bring to the Jews of Europe. But despite the efforts of these three individuals to generate a politically powerful integration of the Bible and modern history, they never conceived of either the extent of the disaster that was already looming or the possibility that the Zionist dream would be realized.

What happened of course is that over six million Jews perished and a Jewish state was created in 1948. From the perspective of the present day The Eternal Road, particularly its conclusion, seems at best naïve if not erroneous. Zionism’s success and the history of the state of Israel during the past fifty years have proven, often painfully, a point that was perhaps incomprehensible to the authors of The Eternal Road. That point is that the Jews are not doomed to be exceptional. Given the chance to have their own political life and act as a nation, possess power include military power, and engage in politics as a majority, Jews naturally display all the virtues, vices, shifts and conflicts of any nation and culture. The exceptional Jews of European history-artists, scientists, and intellectuals-could not have foreseen the successful normalization of the Jewish people after 1948 in Israel, but operated only on the premise of a continuation of the European diaspora experience. Even in America, since Jews were white and not the dominant minority in an environment where race was the decisive criterion of discrimination, the Jews, in contrast to all European experience, found their way into the majority and have become normalized in the sixty years since the opening night of The Eternal Road, particularly after 1945.

The obscuring of the conclusion of The Eternal Road may therefore be convenient, but in my view it does no justice to the integrity of the original conception. The Eternal Road is a powerful work of storytelling, music, and theater, and the ending is in fact more affecting because it reminds us of the psychic and material devastation experienced by German Jewry in the mid 1930s. Death camps have rightly dominated our image of what the Nazis did, but we should not dismiss the traumas created by the segregation, dispossession, and violence that led up to that ultimate horror. The Eternal Road tells the story of a vital and patriotic community of Jews dismembered, expropriated, and persecuted by their neighbors who tragically embraced the leaDership of the Nazis.

Dwelling on what was best about the Jews in their European historical career, the three authors cling to the idea that what is ultimately human is not essentially political. It is not wealth or power that make life worth living, but rather the life of the mind and imagination-traditions of belief, philosophy, literature, learning, art, music, theater. Exile is not permanently devastating because the spiritual possibilities of the future always survive political disenfranchisement. The proper context in which to consiDer The Eternal Road, therefore, is not in the ideology of the Zionists who realized that the Jewish people could only be secure if they had a politics of their own and consequently reversed the conceit of an apolitical or supranational Utopia. Nor is it in the romanticization of minority status in which a people compensate for a restricted form of life by making culture and learning a primary tenet of identity. Today’s audience might think of The Eternal Road in the context of Sigmund Freud’s exile to England and the perspective on past and future evident in his three late essays The Future of an Illusion and Civilization and its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism.

Our decision to revive The Eternal Road coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the state of Israel and the centennial celebration of the city of New York. It is ironic that both these events pay homage to the two most successful historical responses to the fate of the Jews so eloquently portrayed in The Eternal Road. There is no need to apologize for the ideology of this spectacle. The revival is in fact timely because it reminds us of the need to restore the memory of the German Jewish experience and the plight of European Jews before the outbreak of World War II. Precisely because of the triumphs we are celebrating, we can afford to be empathetic to points of view regarding Jewish history and European history that flourished before 1939 that do not point inexorably either to the Holocaust or the creation of the State of Israel.

Finally, as Guy Stern and Edward Harsh point out, The Eternal Road was a self-conscious effort on the part of its three authors to break the apparently impenetrable barrier between high art and popular culture. This opera/theatrical drama was designed to appeal in all its elegance and profundity to a mass audience without descending into cynical theatricality. In this sense, it contributed to a pivotal and defining debate in twentieth-century music. What kind of music constitutes the voice of modernity, and for whom should contemporary concert music be written? It is fitting to open our season-long look at the twentieth century with The Eternal Road, which set a very high standard for what we might today deem a “crossover” genre, from which future generations can easily learn. Art, entertainment, and moral edification are brought together in this work in an unforgettable and brilliant manner.

Nadia Boulager: Teacher of the Century

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Nadia Boulager: Teacher of the Century, performed on May 13, 1998 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

If one imagines a history of twentieth-century music written around 1970, one would assume that such a history would describe twentieth-century musical modernism as a phenomenon shaped by two dominant and somewhat opposing figures: Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Both men might be legitimately charged with an egocentrism that made them consciously present themselves as the founders of modernist traditions. Throughout his career, Schoenberg maintained a powerful role as a teacher, but for all his irrepressible tendency toward authoritarianism, he was generous in giving his time to younger colleagues (such as Alban Berg or John Cage), particularly those eager to follow in the master’s footsteps. In marked contrast, Stravinsky never taught in the formal sense. Nevertheless his work and aesthetic outlook became the impetus for a school of composition which seemed explicitly to compete with the tradition that Schoenberg sought to create. Writing at the end of his life from Los Angeles in 1949, Schoenberg noted that American music was in the first instance characterized by apathy and a “commercial racket.” But he then commented that “there is a great activity on the part of American composers, la Boulanger’s pupils, the imitators of Stravinsky…they have taken over American musical life, lock, stock, and barrel…”

The individual whom Schoenberg mentioned so derisively was Nadia Boulanger. It would be hard to imagine a more charismatic and forceful personality in the history of twentieth-century music than Boulanger. She began her career as a composer studying under Fauré, but eventually turned to performance in keyboard (she also studied with Charles Marie Widor) and conducting. She was central to the rebirth of public performances of pre-classical music during the first part of this century, particularly music from the Renaissance and Baroque. Boulanger’s first performance in the United States was as the organist in the premiere of the Symphony for Organ by her most famous pupil, Aaron Copland. Boulanger was the first woman to conduct the major symphony orchestras in the United States. One of her last appearances was here in New York with the New York Philharmonic in 1962, when she conducted works by her sister and the Fauré Requiem. With characteristic elegance and generosity, she dedicated the Sunday afternoon performance to the memory of Bruno Walter, who had died the night before.

Boulanger first gained a reputation as a teacher at the Ecole Normale. From 1920 on, she was on the faculty of the American Conservatory at Fontainbleu. During World War II, she taught in the United States. Boulanger’s teaching was firmly rooted in her allegiance to Stravinsky (whose Dumbarton Oaks Concerto she premiered). Before World War II, she had already become the teacher of choice for aspiring composers. In addition to those on tonight’s program, her pupils included Jean Francaix and the Americans Virgil Thomson, Roy Harris, Elliot Carter, David Diamond, Walter Piston, Louise Talma, Elie Siegmeister, and Marc Blitzstein.

The history of modernism in America across all the disciplines is rooted in the confrontation between nativism and Europe’s pervasive influence. The iconoclasm of Charles Ives and the experimentalism of Henry Cowell were self-assertive reactions to the continued dependence of Americans on European models. In the 1920s, Paris became a veritable Mecca for painters and writers as well as musicians. In the United States, the role played during the 1930s and 1940s by such towering émigré figures as Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Bloch produced an American following for German and Austrian innovations.

Apart from the specific history of European influences transmitted through teachers in this century, when we consider the influence of teachers in general terms, we try to understand the degree to which the student assimilates the ideas and perspectives that have been taught, as well as the process through which an independent identity is forged. Haydn’s reputation as a teacher of Beethoven is well known, but what precisely did Beethoven learn from that experience? Certainly Thomas Attwood actually studied with Mozart, but in the end to what effect? Schoenberg’s influence on Berg and Webern is unmistakable, but how do we assess shared influence in the context of the striking differentiation of style and ambition? In the case of American musical modernism, however, we also confront the larger question of nationalist cultural ambition. Why did so many quintessentially American-sounding composers emerge from the classroom of Nadia Boulanger?

Perhaps the answer lies partially in Boulanger’s pedagogical approach, which may contains some ironic clues on the matter of influence. Can one speak of a uniform impact on Boulanger’s students, particularly the American ones? The disciplined modernist Neoclassicism with which Boulanger was associated did result, one might argue, in an American school of which Aaron Copland was the most elegant exponent. However the orchestral version of the Piano Variations on tonight’s program comes from a period of Copland’s music which predates the era of Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and the Third Symphony, works which have in whole or part become emblematic of Copland’s musical rhetoric. Boulanger’s teaching in the case of many of her American pupils inspired compositional strategies which tolerated a more conservative, accessible style and ones which lent themselves to narrative and dramatic uses related to the stage and film. But when one considers the work of Elliott Carter, for instance, one would be hard-pressed to find an overriding common thread in the music of Boulanger’s American pupils.

We might therefore conclude that what made Boulanger a great and magnetic teacher not only for a cadre of famous composers but for many other distinguished musicians who studied with her was less the imposition of an aesthetic than the transmission of discipline and the encouragement of individuality. Indeed, the sheer range of her pupils’ styles and development is astonishing. Perhaps it was her decision to abandon her own compositional aspirations that allowed her avoid competition or impose her will on her pupils or, as in the case of Schoenberg, to experience jealousy and resentment regarding the creative success of her students. The one common element she shared with Schoenberg, however, was an abiding and imaginative interest in the history of music. Schoenberg’s attention as a teacher was focused on Mozart and Brahms; Boulanger introduced her students to the wonders of Monteverdi and Gesualdo.

Nadia was not entirely immune to competition, at least as far as Lili Boulanger, her younger sister, was concerned. But perhaps no where else are the personal qualities that made her a great teacher more in evidence than in that relationship, for her career demonstrates any sibling rivalry Nadia may have felt was eclipsed by her recognition and nurturing of Lili’s prodigious talent. That the music of Lili Boulanger remains in the repertoire is very much a result of the advocacy of her elder sister, who was Lili’s first and perhaps most influential teacher. The person closest to Boulanger after her sister on tonight’s program was no doubt Copland, whose career she helped to launch. Easley Blackwood, whose sixty-fifth birthday is celebrated this year, may be a figure less familiar to audiences in New York, but inhabitants of the second city, Chicago, are far more familiar with his music. In addition his compositional achievements, Blackwood is a formidable pianist; his performances of Ives’s Concord Sonata and Boulez’s Second Sonata are legendary. In addition to his First Symphony, another early work, the Chamber Symphony, Op. 2 (bearing the influence of his other famous teacher, Paul Hindemith) is a remarkable achievement, all the more so given the youth of the composer. In recent years, Blackwood has turned his attention to music written on the basis of a microtonal system of tuning.

Perhaps one of the most enigmatic figures on tonight’s program is Igor Markevitch, best known among music lovers as an extraordinary conductor and teacher of conducting. As the Icare on tonight’s program hints, among Markevitch’s most celebrated achievements as a conductor were his performances of Stravinsky. His output as a composer was limited; like Gustav Mahler, his primary identity during his lifetime was as a conductor, especially in Stockholm, Montreal, Havana, and Paris. He shared with Boulanger a background in the French-Russian traditions of twentieth-century music. Not surprisingly, Markevitch was an enthusiastic exponent of twentieth-century music and was responsible for the first recordings of the music of Lili Boulanger.

Though there may not be much commonality in the compositional achievements of Boulanger’s students as represented on tonight’s program, there is one important characteristic that they do share, wherein perhaps lies Boulanger’s finest legacy. Blackwood, Copland and Markevitch showed early on a profound commitment themselves to teaching others. Too often in this century, individuals of enormous talent who have taken the vocation as a “creative artist,” whether in the visual or the performing arts, have developed a contempt for the role of the teacher. It is an idiotic adage that “those who can do; those who can’t teach.” By this logic, the truly successful artist should not have to teach, engendering a sense of superiority and suspicion about those who do. In the history of music especially, this attitude cannot claim an honorable historical tradition. The list of great composers who taught with enthusiasm is probably longer than the list of composers who shunned teaching as beneath their dignity. Nadia Boulanger evidently demonstrated to her pupils not only that a first-class, demanding and genuinely supportive teacher is indispensable to artistic development, but that being such a person for others can also be rewarding. In 1958, the year following his three years of study with Boulanger, Blackwood accepted a position at the University of Chicago where he has been a powerful force for the past forty-one years. Copland served as chair of the faculty at the Berkshire Music Center for twenty-five years. The inestimable contribution of Tanglewood to American music has much to do with Copland’s influence. Markevitch’s achievements in the instruction of conducting nearly matched his renown as a conductor, and exceeded his success as a composer. It is only recently that his compositions have begun to attract their deserved attention. Perhaps Lili Boulanger would have demonstrated a similar commitment had she not died at so tragically young an age. Therefore this concert might well be viewed not only as a recognition of the most successful and influential music teacher of the century, but also an acknowledgement of her triumph in communicating the significance of teaching in itself to her own pupils. We celebrate not only the continuing tradition of twentieth-century music-making but also of music-teaching: a crucial synthesis of the continuance of traditions with the will to innovation.