Inventing America

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Inventing America, performed on Sep 25, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

When Leopold Stokowski founded the American Symphony Orchestra in 1962 as a naturalized European-born citizen, he was still fighting an old battle. That battle was over the question of how to make symphonic music genuinely American. Despite our nostalgia (fueled by distorted accounts of the past) for a time when classical music played to full houses and was embraced as a central part of cultural life, American orchestral life before 1962 was not very American. The rosters of orchestral musicians revealed large numbers of Europeans, both recruits and émigrés fleeing from persecution. The major conductors, with the exception of Leonard Bernstein, were all European. And the standard repertoire was overwhelmingly European. Stokowski, who during his tenure with the Philadelphia Orchestra (and with his hand-shaking cameo with Mickey Mouse) stayed in the vanguard for democratizing classical music, made his final contribution to its Americanization by creating the American Symphony Orchestra. Two principles were of paramount importance to him. First, the concerts had to be accessible in price to a wide public in a manner reflective of the egalitarian streak in American democracy (a principle that still guides this Orchestra’s mission). Second, the personnel of the Orchestra were to be all native-born American musicians.

Forty years later, the American Symphony doesn’t need to go out of its way to maintain the second principle. Orchestras in America are now many in number and today the personnel is overwhelmingly American. We still import conductors from abroad but we see many Americans in important posts in the United States and even Americans with significant posts abroad. Indeed the whole issue of this sort of patriotism has changed in character. Internationalism and globalization have asserted themselves for better or worse. Orchestras need not be instruments of national self-representation. This is particularly true for a country such as the United States, which has prided itself on being an inclusive nation of immigrants. In this sense Stokowski’s initial premise was too narrow. If there is a magic to America, it rests on the capacity to make the many émigrés who played in the NBC Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic fifty years ago, feel entirely American. This is a nation, after all, where citizenship is not acquired exclusively by birth or genealogy. This fact ought to give American nationalism a less virulent xenophobic character. What makes many of us proud to be Americans is the absence of a nativism, and the embrace of freedom and the capacity to dissent.

Another aspect that concerned Stokowski, however, remains inadequately addressed: the repertoire. The situation he confronted has, if anything, gotten worse rather than better. The generation of Stokowski, which included Koussevitzky, Klemperer, and in part Bernstein, was committed to the ongoing tradition of new music. Each of the great conductors championed one or two living composers. Stokowski was particularly interested in furthering a tradition of American composition. It is in that spirit that we present this afternoon’s program.

Today’s concert is designed to address two issues: first, the self-conscious effort in the twentieth century to generate a distinctly original American symphonic tradition, and second, the generational question in music history, crystallized in this case by the relationship of teacher and student. The music on this afternoon’s program dates from a crucial era in American history: that between World War I and the onset of the New Deal. What is special about this period is that it represents America’s bold and unabashed entrance into world politics as a dominant force. World War I brought the nineteenth century to an end. Despite the United States’s imperialist adventure in the Spanish American War and its brokering of the peace in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, its debut as a super power really occurred in 1917, when it participated conclusively in what at that time was the largest war in history. The years that followed the end of World War I became a period of experimentation and bravado, glittering innovation and intoxicating prosperity. The works by Ernest Bloch and Roger Sessions were composed in this era of expansion, optimism and greed. The 1920s were also a period that marked the end of open borders for the United States and a decline in rates of immigration. America began consolidating itself as a new national entity. Randall Thompson’s work was composed after the market crash of 1929 during the Hoover years, but before the onset of the awareness of the gravity and extent of the Great Depression, and prior to the progressive agenda of the New Deal.

With the New Deal came a shift in the ambitions of American composers. Roy Harris and Aaron Copland, for example, were inspired by the rediscovery of an American folk tradition and embraced a populist style. They stepped away from the optimistic and in some cases arrogant claims of modernism as it put forward a progressive musical vocabulary, adequate to the burgeoning scientific and technological transformation of the period. This more populist turn was anticipated already by the senior member of today’s trio of composers, Ernest Bloch. Bloch was not a native of America but an immigrant. Born a Jew in Switzerland, he came well equipped to appreciate the United States. Switzerland, despite its xenophobia, is one of the West’s oldest and most successful democracies, with a profound history of civic egalitarianism (though in the 1920s only for men). America was the best hope for the European Jew who wanted to acquire political rights. For Bloch as for many immigrants, America was a dream come true, a land of promise not only in the material sense but in ethical and political senses as well. The Epic Rhapsody is unwittingly as close as any piece can come to the work imagined by the protagonist of Israel Zangwill’s famous play from the turn of the century, The Melting Pot. In that play, the protagonist, David Quixano, is a Jewish composer who has fled persecution and dreams of writing an epic and visionary orchestral and choral work that evokes, in the spirit of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the promise of the New World in a distinctly American way. Bloch materialized Zangwill’s image and produced a work that, when it premiered, was an outstanding success. It was heralded, performed, and held up as the first truly American act of symphonic self-expression. But then after its initial impact, it disappeared quickly from the repertoire, much to the composer’s dismay. The lasting achievement of an American sound would fall to the son of immigrants, Aaron Copland, and Ernest Bloch would be remembered primarily for his powerful expressions of Ashkenazi Jewish faith in works such as Schelomo (1916) and Baal Shem (1923).

But Bloch’s enthusiastic romance with America was not without its residue. The brief fame of the work left a lasting impression on Harris, Copland, and subsequent composers who sought to realize the dream of a truly American symphony. (With a smile we can remember that in the 1920s no one paid any attention to Charles Ives. It would be Leopold Stokowski and the American Symphony Orchestra that would give the world premiere in the 1960s of the most American of all symphonies, Ives’s Fourth.) Bloch’s real legacy in America, however, was as a teacher more than as a composer. Two unmistakably American talents, Roger Sessions and Randall Thompson, both of multi-generational Anglo-Saxon stock and with no apparent insecurities about their identities, seemed to understand that the traditions of classical music were traditionally European. Just as young talents in the 1890s went either abroad to study or sought out Dvořák at the National Conservatory in New York, Thompson and Sessions chose to study with a true European master, Ernest Bloch. Twenty years later it would be Paul Hindemith and Arnold Schoenberg who would achieve public recognition as teachers of American composers.

This brings us to the second theme of this concert, generational change and the relationship between teacher and pupil. Today’s program is a study in contrasts. Randall Thompson is the less remembered figure in music history. He was a longtime, well-respected teacher at Harvard. But with the exception of a few choral works, the Alleluia and the Testament to Freedom (performed by the ASO in 2000), Thompson’s music has almost entirely fallen out of the active repertory. But Thompson sustained the somewhat conservative aesthetics and vocabulary of his teacher Bloch. In this sense Thompson’s music can be set alongside symphonic works of Harris and Copland from the 1930s and 1940s. Thompson’s allusion to jazz elements was not only a characteristic habit of composers in the 1920s, including George Antheil, but it was a symbol of both the American and the modern. It might be argued that Bloch did set a direction for American music distinct from European modernism defined by Stravinsky and Nadia Boulanger and the more radical post-tonal variety pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. However Thompson also, like Bloch, may have his greatest importance as a teacher rather than as a composer.

The same can be said of Roger Sessions. However, Sessions’s music and reputation have survived in a much more active manner. Sessions steadfastly held to the ideal of developing a modernist American musical vocabulary framed in a European tradition. Unlike John Cage or Henry Cowell, he was not, strictly speaking, an experimentalist. His sense of form and structure is classical and conservative, but his realization in terms of sound is visionary and avant-garde. His chamber and orchestra works are still held in high esteem and appear with some frequency. (The American Symphony recently recorded his Eighth Symphony.) Sessions’s music is difficult, but in the spirit of Bloch it is deeply emotional and expressive. Sessions created an expressionist modernism, an American equivalent of the music of Alban Berg. His music is not academic or dry but intense and powerful. Like Thompson he had a long, distinguished career as a teacher. He was also among the most articulate and literate of American composers. His writings on music are among the finest produced in twentieth-century America.

There is an irony in the fact that Bloch’s attempt to transform a European tradition into an American one is eclectic and drifts within America toward a populism that would be fully realized by Copland in Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man. Yet the idea of a sing-along at the end of the Symphony in a moment of patriotic enthusiasm remains startling and novel. For all the talk of finding ways to reach a broader public, no composer of any stature has tried to do something comparable to what Bloch asks for at the end of this monumental work. Bridging the symphonic experience and the habits of popular singing even to the extent of karaoke has never been easy, but here Bloch also pierces the barrier between active participation and passive listening, and between professional and amateur.

Bloch’s two most successful and prominent American pupils developed their own distinct characters as composers, but they learned two vital lessons from their teacher. First, music is an art of emotional expression directed at a broad public. It is an alluring mix of the intimate and the civic. Although Thompson and Sessions took different paths in terms of the musical methods they adopted, they understood from Bloch that the writing of music was not a matter of “art for art’s sake” or simple virtuosity. Second, they recognized along with their teacher the enormous opportunity that America offered. As a mature industrial world power placed in a massive and diverse landscape both urban and rural, America offered a new and challenging context in which a tradition of musical composition could emerge that was clearly a product of novel geographic and historical circumstances. Both Thompson’s and Sessions’s symphonies mirror optimism and opportunity of the sort that would also attract other European artists such as Edgar Varése and Piet Mondrian. What is remarkable is that the era from which the works of Sessions and Thompson date was a moment when the definition of the American, in stark contrast to Bloch’s Rhapsody, bypassed the obvious source of national self-identification: folk tradition. To the immigrant like Bloch or Dvořák, the concept of nationalism could easily be expressed by so-called nativist elements. But for confident American-born white Anglo-Saxon men, the challenge of the 1920s was to find the distinctly American in the modern.

Olympische Hymne (1934)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Richard Strauss Choral Works, performed on April 17, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Strauss wrote the Olympic Hymn with some reluctance, but not because of its political implications. He communicated to Stefan Zweig, the Viennese Jewish librettist of The Silent Woman (and whom Strauss defended, much to the displeasure of the Nazis, at the premiere of their joint effort), “I kill the boredom of the advent season by composing an Olympic Hymn for the proletarians—I of all people, who hate and despise sports. Well, idleness is the root of all evil.” The events surrounding the Hymn’s premiere highlight the ambiguous relationship Strauss was in with the Nazis. The national Olympic committee, which commissioned the work, was not pleased with Strauss’s hostility to sports. At one rehearsal of the Hymn Hitler planned to be present, and Strauss was explicitly asked to absent himself. Nevertheless, Strauss did conduct the premiere at the Games in Hitler’s presence. His contempt for politicians extended to Hitler but his overwhelming egotism prevented him from recognizing the distinction between what was simply distasteful and what was evil. In the years that followed the premiere of the Olympic Hymn, Strauss continued to find accommodation that suited his purposes, seemingly oblivious to the extent to which Hitler and the Nazis were not just another set of contemptible rulers. As the undistinguished text by the undistinguished writer suggests, Strauss was allergic to the primitive muscularity of the ideology of the Games.

Richard Strauss Choral Works

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Richard Strauss Choral Works, performed on April 17, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The posthumous reputation of Richard Strauss has its own extraordinary history. When he died in 1949, he was regarded as an ancient survivor of a bygone era, at best the most facile representative of an outdated musical aesthetic. He was remembered for the now standard works he composed before World War I. By the turn of the twenty-first century, however, matters had changed. Strauss was rediscovered as a precursor to the post-modern and as a figure more representative of the twentieth century perhaps than Stravinsky and Schoenberg.

Such exaggerated claims hold little value except to remind us of those things about Strauss that are perhaps not well understood. First, he was among the most gifted and unerringly prolific composers in the history of music. Many, like Telemann, Milhaud or Martinu, wrote a great deal of music and did it quickly. But there are few who are consistently productive and never fail to write something that displays consummate craftsmanship, even if it is intentionally designed to be superficial. Strauss was certainly the twentieth century’s Haydn in this respect. He seemed incapable of writing music poorly. Second, Strauss did more than write for the operatic stage and large orchestra. There is a wealth of music for the voice and even chamber music, notably a sonata for violin championed by none other than Jascha Heifetz. This afternoon’s program is a tribute to an entire genre in Strauss’s oeuvre that is frequently overlooked: his music for chorus. In addition to the works on this program, Strauss wrote brilliant pieces for a cappella chorus. Like the classical master he most admired, Mozart, Strauss was a composer of astonishing versatility.

Third, and perhaps most important, is that there was more than one Richard Strauss. There are probably four distinct phases in his career. The first was influenced by the example of Brahms and the prejudices of Strauss’s father Franz, a distinguished horn player. This phase is represented on this afternoon’s program by Wanderers Sturmlied (1884). The second phase in which Strauss emerges with his own distinct voice is the era of Don Juan (1889), Taillefer (1903), and Bardengesang (1905). These are the years when practically everything best known by Strauss was written. The third phase was in many ways the most ambiguous and difficult for Strauss himself. These were the years between World War I and the end of World War II. It is from this phase that the last of the well-known operas come, including Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918), Austria (1929) and Die Tageszeiten (1928). In these years, Strauss felt increasingly marginal and irrelevant with respect to the aggressive claims of modernism and the explosion of new forms of popular music which many serious composers attempted to co-opt, such as jazz, hit songs, and new types of popular dance such as the tango and fox trot.

The fourth and final phase was Strauss’s “Indian Summer.” In the span of four years Strauss produced music that has consistently met with acclaim. In his final years Strauss became sentimental and even nostalgic, and above all pessimistic. This afternoon’s program has only one evocation of those years, Strauss’s own short orchestral pastiche on Die Frau ohne Schatten, his Symphonic Fantasy (1946). After 1945 Strauss’s isolation from modernism was further aggravated by the recognition of his cowardice and collaboration during the Nazi era. On that point, a consensus has finally emerged that Strauss, as the compositions Austria and Bardengesang demonstrate, was first and foremost an egotist willing to flatter any government and form of politics as long as they served his music and what he considered to be valid principles of art, and if they protected the economic wellbeing of musicians and composers. Strauss had always been a shrewd businessman and a vigorous defender of copyright laws. Ironically, the Olympic Hymn, which is not on today’s program, was commissioned before the Nazis came to power, but its symbolism as evidence of Strauss’s complicity is legitimated by the fact that he chose to conduct it in 1936 at the Olympic Games in Berlin.

Before discussing the place of Strauss’s choral music in his overall output, a word has to be said about place and significance of choral music in German culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the 1840s, choral singing became an extremely important aspect of German culture and the evolution of German civic identity. Every town, and particularly all the large cities, had their choral societies, which included mixed choirs and male choruses. These institutions bridged the world of art and culture and the world of everyday socializing. Through choral societies, German folk music became modernized and popularized. The repertoire of these societies included light entertainment as well as compositions of serious artistic ambition. They were secular institutions, distinct from church choirs. In Protestant communities, these were the institutions for which oratorios were written on religious and biblical subjects, notably by Mendelssohn in his St. Paul (1836) and Elijah (1846). Such large-scale works continued to be written well into the twentieth century. They did not always have a religious subject, as the oratorios of Max Bruch, Odysseus (1872), and Achilles (1885), indicate. Curiously enough, when Strauss was approached to write a work for one of Vienna’s most celebrated choral societies, the Schubertbund, he initially was put off by the fact that texts by the poet Eichendorff had already been set for choir by his contemporary Hans Pfitzner in the latter’s Von deutscher Seele [Of the German Spirit] (1921). As the title of Pfitzner’s opus makes clear, by the end of the nineteenth century, these choral institutions, particularly the male choirs, became civic bastions of national sentiment. As the constitution of the Schubertbund suggests, it was originally organized as an association of schoolteachers. Membership in these choral societies ranged over the entire middle class and included professionals as well as artisans.

Vienna, where Strauss lived after World War I, was especially noted for its choral traditions. Austria was written for Vienna’s male choral society, an institution founded in the 1840s by political liberals who were held in suspicion by the reactionary Habsburg monarchy. (Some of the society’s founders died in the 1848 Revolution.) By the time Strauss wrote for that organization (to whom The Blue Danube Waltz is also dedicated), it had become a symbol of pan-German political solidarity. Indeed, throughout Strauss’s career, there were regular festivals of German choirs that gathered German-speaking people from all over Europe to celebrate their common heritage through music. When one looks at the performance history of Strauss’s works for chorus, the list of cities extends well beyond those we identify with international cosmopolitan concert life. These works were written by and large for amateur choirs in Heidelberg, Würtzburg, Düsseldorf, Elberfeld, Krefeld, and Strasbourg. Particularly fertile ground for choral singing as politics were parts of modern day Romania, where early performances of Wanderers Sturmlied took place. Secular choral singing for mixed and male choir became an important assertion of German identity in German-speaking communities outside the boundaries of the German Reich to the east and as far west as the United States.

Today’s program offers a glimpse of Strauss’s evolution as a composer through his choral work, rounded out by two examples of that for which he became most famous, the tone poem and opera. But the program also highlights the fourth and final aspect of Strauss, which perhaps bears the closest scrutiny. Strauss is often compared with his contemporary and colleague Gustav Mahler, whom he admired. In the context of the massive late twentieth-century enthusiasm for Mahler, a convenient dichotomy has been accepted. Mahler is understood to be an artist of deep and complex emotions and intellectual profundity. Strauss, in contrast, has been seen as a composer of extreme facility, charm, superficiality, elegance and even cynicism. Strauss has not become famous on account of the assumed philosophical depth of either his artistic intentions or the meanings his music conveys. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. Strauss, far more than Mahler, was a vigorous and disciplined reader and a connoisseur of literature and painting. It was he and not Mahler who struggled with the ambiguities and complexities of Goethe and Nietzsche. As most of the works on today’s program suggest, including Don Juan, literature was a significant source of inspiration for him. He studied Greek tragedy and confronted through music the credo of aesthetic individualism and the myth of the hero put forward by Nietzsche. Above all, consciously following the example of Mozart, he used music to explore not only the joys but the sufferings of ordinary and everyday life, particularly the ambiguities in human conduct inspired by the institution of marriage. Strauss was no self-satisfied bourgeois. Under the mask of external respectability, there was a questioning and deeply reflecting artist overwhelmed by the elusive character of love and the daunting allure of intimacy. In Mahler, parody and irony aspire to the philosophical and mystical; in Strauss they, along with humor, turn inward and reflect backward on the wonderment we can find in the everyday world.

Among the hardest things for us to reconcile with Strauss was his emergence during the late nineteenth century as a preeminent radical. We are so accustomed to thinking of him as a clever manipulator of orchestral sound and melodic gesture that we overlook the bravery of Strauss’s stance in the 1880s and 1890s as a modernist who outraged his public. Strauss did not, as some have argued, shift his allegiances from the Brahmsian camp to the Wagnerian. He was influenced by both, but at the same time rejected the fundamental claims for music that became associated with the names of Brahms and Wagner. For Strauss, music was an expressive medium of ordinary human experience. He rejected the transcendental metaphysics of those who argued that instrumental music was a self-contained, spiritually ennobled world above the quotidian, more profound than words and images. This conceit of early romanticism, which was adopted in part by Brahms, held little appeal for Strauss. On the other side, the elevation of art as a surrogate for religion, as a platform for myths sufficiently powerful to rescue modernity from materialist corruption (a view derived from Wagner and his polemics) was equally foreign to Strauss. Indeed this conventional audience-pleasing composer was the most Nietzschean of all twentieth-century masters. In contrast to Schoenberg, for example, who pursued in his own way the Wagnerian spiritual ambition on behalf of music, Strauss was a confirmed atheist. The only thing for music to celebrate, in his opinion, was the specifically human dimension of life. In his hands music became a radical instrument of realism, expanding our understanding of and relationship to birth, death, desire, entertainment, card-playing, sex, loss, aging, and memory. A wide range of human emotion and experience as articulated by the artist through music can be heard on today’s program from the most grandiose and vulgar, but nevertheless genuine triumphalism to the saddest, most internalized experience of loneliness.

Ultimately, however, what never fails to astonish is the extent to which music was for Strauss an entirely natural language, even more so than speech. The aesthetics of music are often discussed in ways that suggest that music begins where language ends. For Strauss that order was reversed. It is music that precedes language. That frames the irony of today’s program. When Strauss read, it reminded him of music. Unlike some composers, including Schubert and Verdi, Strauss was a severe literary critic and judge. It was not so much that music was, as Mendelssohn once put it, more precise than language, but that music was required particularly for the greatest of literary texts, because Strauss the reader (as for example when he first read Oscar Wilde’s Salome or Goethe’s poetry) heard the music he believed these great writers would have written if they had been composers. The most human of all experiences was music. In Strauss’s view, what defines the human being and the individual is a capacity for music, not the universal gift of language. If there is any truth in the notion that Strauss, as he himself believed, was the last representative of a great tradition, it is in the possibility that Strauss may have been the last composer in modern western history to have lived his life by thinking, but only in and through music, as an act of nature rather than of learning.

Hans Christian Andersen

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Hans Christian Andersen, performed on March 11, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Hans Christian Andersen lived from 1805 to 1875. This year we celebrate the bicentenary of his birth. We are, however, certainly not the first generation to recognize and be fascinated by his peculiar genius. For the composers on tonight’s program, Andersen’s contributions to the genre of the fairy tale held a special enchantment, which actually reflected a larger pattern of recollection and nostalgia for the early romanticism of the nineteenth century. Like E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Hölderlin, and certainly the Grimm Brothers, Andersen seemed to embody for the generations following the pivotal year of 1848 a purer form of romanticism, perhaps even romanticism in its youth. Early romanticism was an era that became idealized by subsequent generations. It was a time when the aesthetic imagination flourished in the first of many encounters with modernity and industrialism. For Andersen, the demonic, mystical, magical and fantastic, in all its darkness as well as joy, dramatized life’s experiences by suggesting a world of morally ordered supernaturalism, of rules and actions which provoked consistent consequences of tragedy or triumph. Such is the world as children might experience it.

Vanished childhood is a theme that runs parallel to the construction of national identity and one of its key components, the study of the history of language. In both Denmark and Germany, the early nineteenth century witnessed an explosion in the creation of dictionaries and the systematic exploration of etymology designed to reveal and stabilize language as a national, historical patrimony. These efforts, on the one hand, reflected a progressive attempt to standardize language and education, and on the other, a reactionary attempt to resuscitate a past that seemed threatened with deterioration by the mores that derived from material progress. Hans Christian Andersen’s earliest readers approached his seemingly simple stories in a context of significant social and political transformation.

The composers on tonight’s program, however, belong to a later era. For them Hans Christian Andersen had already assumed his historical place as a teller of psychological myth and parables. His simple narratives hinted at a fantasy within, a realm of psychic imagination and repressed or displaced desire. What may have first been comfortingly viewed as morality tales became for the early twentieth century modern myths, pregnant with dangerous meaning. As such writers as Bruno Bettelheim later explained, the interest of fairy tales is in what is beneath their seemingly innocent surfaces, and what is beneath is often sexuality. These composers were writing, after all, in an intellectual climate in which Freudian psychology emerged and thrived.

It is this view of Andersen’s stories as psychological mirrors of the inner self that suggests his allure to many composers who were deeply interested in the modern development of music. Zemlinsky, Paul von Klenau, and Igor Stravinsky had a strong desire to be seen as part of the vanguard of the contemporary or modern, but they were also in an important way indebted to a past that modernity threatened. It was during the period of Andersen and his contemporaries—the age of romanticism—that music assumed primacy as the most romantic of the arts. In the aesthetics of Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, music possessed a transcendental quality that gave it ascendancy over spoken language. Music had a direct connection to the psychology of the human spirit and was the expressive vehicle of the human will and the non-rational. But prior to the advent of modernism in the post-Wagnerian world, that privileged status of music was threatened by Wagner’s success and influence. Albeit unintentionally, music was stripped of its unique status. Suddenly it was illustrative and contingent on language. Instead of symphonies, the fashion became tone poems which ostensibly narrated an extra-musical source or text. This was not perhaps what Wagner envisioned, but the formulaic clichés of musical rhetoric that he helped make commonplace with the wider audience, and which were ultimately adapted as the foundation of film music, possessed none of the enigmatic meaning offered by the first generation of romantic composers such as Chopin and Schumann. For that earlier generation, the relationship of music to a story or source of inspiration was at best indirect, and triumphant in its assertion of music’s capacity to begin where language ends.

At first glance, these strangely affecting fairy tales seem ideal subjects for narrative musical treatment in the Wagnerian vein. The most famous example of this appropriation is of course in Hansel and Gretel (1894), the greatest opera by Wagner’s disciple Humperdinck. But fairy tales also lent themselves to another use, best expressed by the music of Gustav Mahler, who chose a fairy tale for his sole unsuccessful attempt at an opera, Rübezahl (1893). Tales reminiscent of Andersen and Grimm were a clear source of inspiration for some of his earlier symphonies and for such works as Das klagende Lied (1880/9). Indeed, Gustav Mahler set the tone for the way early nineteenth-century fairy tale material influenced the shape of fin-de-siécle music that does not necessarily have words or images associated with it. For Mahler, the fairy tale became a useful bridge by which music could ultimately emancipate itself from a Wagnerian dependence on words and images by directing music away from external narration to what he believed was its more proper task of inner expression. This may be the only instance in which he found an unlikely bedfellow in Stravinsky, who otherwise had little use for Mahler. For the young Stravinsky, the magical and exotic layers of meaning in fairy tales promoted music’s independence and self-contained logic; the widely ranging resonance of their generic symbols and archetypes (to use Northrop Frye’s term) provided precisely the latitude he desired for autonomous musical expression.

The four works on tonight’s program suggest the diverse applications that Andersen’s stories have undergone in music. Stravinsky’s Song of the Nightingale, based on Andersen’s The Nightingale, is perhaps the most famous work on tonight’s program. Less known but now increasingly embraced in a general renaissance of appreciation for Zemlinsky is The Mermaid, which shares a nostalgic, anti-modern undercurrent with Mahler. Paul von Klenau was a Dane, who was an ambitious but ambivalent modernist. He made the unforgivable choice of embracing the Nazis. Nazism glorified the folk tale with radically different consequences. Finally, the Czech composer Karel Husa brings us into the present age with his rendition of one of Andersen’s most famous and poignant tales. In the traditions of Czech music, the fairy tale has a strong place, particularly in the late work of Antonin Dvořák, such as his great opera Rusalka (1900) and his late tone poems based on Erben, a Czech Andersen.

It is interesting to reflect that there was one composer who resisted the allure of the fairy tale with its faux simplicity and Janus-faced ability to mesmerize children and adults alike, sometimes rather sadistically. That composer was Richard Strauss. Even Till Eulenspiegel (1895) is not a nineteenth-century fairy tale in the ordinary sense. Strauss possessed little nostalgia for early romanticism and was deeply skeptical about the grandiose claims made for music by Mahler and later Schoenberg. He had little use for the fairy tale exoticisms of Rimsky-Korsakov and early Stravinsky. His ambition was to try to find a way to make music that confronted the compromised complexity and density of the real dilemmas of life. He had little interest in hiding behind the façade of the primitive or the artificially innocent or symbolic archetypes of fairy tales—except when they occasionally underwent an almost unrecognizable metamorphosis by his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, as in Die Frau ohne Schatten. Strauss is a useful contrast through which to place the objectives of the composers on tonight’s program. The allure of Andersen in the hands of the composers on tonight’s program was, as a basis for a modernist inversion of the Wagnerian, rooted in music’s capacity to generate a radical revelation of the human soul. Their ambition was to use enchantment as a means of aesthetic inspiration (to allude again to Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment [1975]). By so doing they found a way to circumvent Wagnerian myth or Straussian realism.

An Operatic Rarity

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert An Operatic Rarity, performed on Feb 13, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The career of Emmanuel Chabrier (1841–1894) is intriguing. He ranks among the few notable exceptions among famous composers, such as Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Ives, who maintained professions outside the field of music. This dual career, as in the case of Ives in particular, has for some cast doubt on the technical proficiency of the music. This accusation cannot be leveled at Chabrier. Furthermore, many composers, artists, and writers have sought to maintain unrelated professions for a variety of reasons. Exigency has not always been the primary motive. In some cases what we might regard as a distraction or diversion was a creative necessity. Chabrier worked for many years in the French Ministry of the Interior as a respected civil servant known for his reliability and his elegant handwriting, a non-trivial skill in the context of public administration that is now entirely obsolete. Chabrier trained in music from the very start of his career, but only in 1881 (after nearly two decades of public service) did he devote himself wholly to music. In 1880, shortly before his retirement, he attended with friends a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Munich. Legend has it that he burst into tears at the opening A from the cellos. Five years later, Chabrier later composed what has been called the French Tristan, his opera Gwendoline (1885), with the distinguished writer Catulle Mendès.

Chabrier’s experience points to the pervasive allure that Wagnerism had for late nineteenth-century France. Wagner’s influence was not only a musical matter. The embrace of the Wagnerian began with Baudelaire’s essay, written in response to the scandal surrounding the Paris production of Tannhäuser in 1861. Wagnerian aesthetics inspired a new movement in art and literature in late nineteenth-century France. The irony of a movement of French national cultural renewal stemming from the work of an arch-German nationalist and proponent of racial thinking was never entirely lost among French participants and observers. Nevertheless, the Wagnerian penchant for symbolism and his conception of the relationship between the artwork and the viewer became crucial to the evolution of French poetry, and profoundly influenced the direction taken by French painters.

French cultural life, particularly in the mid-nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, notably in Paris, was marked by close relationships and collaborations among painters, writers, and musicians. Chabrier himself was a close friend of the painter Eduard Manet, as Vincent Giroud points out in his fine program note. By the time of his death, Chabrier had assembled an impressive art collection of works by contemporaries, as did his musical contemporary Ernest Chausson, who also had ambitions as a writer. Chabrier established himself as a remarkable piano virtuoso, achieving a level of dexterity and panache beyond that of most of his pianist-composer contemporaries, including Debussy. There are several portraits of Chabrier by Manet, but one very interesting, lesser-known portrait of Chabrier is the 1885 painting by Henri Fantin-La Tour, Autour du piano. The portrait depicts Chabrier at the piano surrounded by friends, among them the composer Vincent D’Indy. Chabrier’s other remarkable quality as a musician was his ability to write music in many styles, ranging from the Gallic equivalent of Tristanesque profundity to the humorous parody of contemporary operetta. Central to this mélange of style (much of it audible in Le roi malgré lui), is Chabrier’s love of song, which was perhaps the result of an abiding interest in and association with poetry.

For a composer living in Paris and associating with some of the leading artists of the time, Chabrier led a decidedly un-Bohemian life. He was married for most of his adult life. However, like Nietzsche, Chabrier had contracted syphilis, and it eventually killed him at age 53. Despite considerable success, Chabrier felt some bitterness toward the end of his life that his stage music had not be well enough received. Ironically, less than a year before his death, his Gwendoline had a triumphant premiere, but his mind was so far gone that he did not recognize the music as his own. Understandably, Chabrier’s musical output was not enormous. He is best known for an orchestral rhapsody called España (1883), and his piano music, including Habanera (1885), later arranged for orchestra, and the 10 pièces pittoresques (1881).

Chabrier died before Chausson completed his own operatic masterpiece Le roi Arthus, and just prior to a massive sea-change in French culture and politics. He did not live through the notorious Dreyfus affair, and did not experience the transformation of French musical language through the work of Debussy. Nevertheless, Debussy was one of Chabrier’s staunchest proponents, and as Steven Huebner has noted, Chabrier’s posthumous reputation is far greater than the standing he maintained during his lifetime. Debussy’s advocacy is not surprising, since Chabrier was one of the pioneers of the appropriation of the Spanish idiom among French composers, a tradition built upon later by Debussy and Ravel.

But it is interesting to reflect on the fact that Chabrier’s central ambition, like most of his contemporaries, was to achieve success as a composer for the stage. In part because of the unwavering allegiance to the Wagnerian, it is understandable that the premiere of his last opera Briséïs (1891; after Goethe), was premiered by Richard Strauss in Berlin, or that Felix Mottl, the great German conductor and Wagnerian, friend of Chabrier, and perhaps best known for his orchestrations of Schubert, completed the orchestration of one of Chabrier’s last works, the Bourrée fantastique (1891). Chabrier collaborated with another friend, the poet Paul Verlaine, on two operatic projects, only one of which was completed.

Gwendoline’s resemblance to Tristan (albeit transformed by a French sensibility), has unfairly excluded it from the repertoire of many opera companies. Briséïs has experienced somewhat of a modern renaissance, as has the comic opera L’Étoile (1877). The opera you will hear today, Le roi malgré lui, although revived only in 1929, has long been considered perhaps Chabrier’s most original opera and certainly one that shows the extraordinary range of his musical and expressive palette. Le roi contains some of Chabrier’s finest music at its most demanding, and its most charming. The opera has languished in relative obscurity because of its libretto, which has been proclaimed incomprehensible. It is for this reason that when the opera was revised by Albert Carré in 1929, substantial changes were made.

But the current opera revival that began in earnest during the last two decades has made it possible to reconsider long-held prejudices about the presumably failed repertoire of the past. All the lesser known operas of famous figures such as Mozart, Verdi, and Strauss have been revived, but the repertoire of great French opera written before World War I remains among the most neglected of genres. The American Symphony Orchestra embarked several years ago on a slow and painstaking effort to produce concert versions of great French opera. A concert performance of Paul Dukas’ Ariane et Barbe-bleue has led to a fully staged production at New York City Opera next season, and a 2000 performance of Chausson’s Le roi Arthus inspired a BBC broadcast and recording that will become available later this year. Other operas that merit revival include works by Lalo, D’Indy, and Magnard.

In an age dominated by the moving picture with sound, video art, and computer graphics, the relation between the opera stage and the audience has changed from what it was a century ago. The demand for immediate theatricality or plausibility of comprehension has been displaced. We no longer approach opera the way we still approach movies, where we expect to be seduced by the illusions of realism and therefore permit ourselves, much as Chabrier permitted himself, to be overcome by some form of psychological identification generated between the listener and the stage. Perhaps with the exception of contemporary opera, we attend the opera with a candid but indulgent embrace of its evident artificiality. One might think that the ubiquity of supertitles would bring opera closer to the act of reading or movie-watching, but it has not, for we cherish opera now precisely for its inherently anti-modern strangeness. It is perhaps the only pre-modern art form that cannot be adequately represented through technological reproduction, whether CD or DVD. It is an art form that thrives on simultaneity, unpredictability and lack of routine. It therefore requires live performance and human presence on both sides of the proscenium. This holds for both staged and concert performances. Because of the self-consciousness and objectivity imposed by time and changing culture, we need not demand a rigorous verisimilitude in opera stories. We do not even require that the text of the libretto be particularly memorable. Our encounter with opera is as an experience of drama and engagement that is carried overwhelmingly by the musical shape and content. This includes not only great moments but the “long line” of musical form that opera creates (to borrow a favorite expression of the great French pedagogue Nadia Boulanger). This is precisely what Le roi possessed in its original incarnation. More than a century after its premiere, there is no longer a need to revise the original version. It is this version you will hear this afternoon, performed as its composer intended. Much of what audiences in the past may have found odd is, in retrospect, delightful and engaging and quintessentially operatic. In Le roi “Chabrier the inspired composer of song” merges with “Chabrier the Wagnerian” in the integration of language and music. His ambition in this opera was to create a musical and dramatic fabric in which music carries the day, a rather appealing approach for the post-post-modern age. This is an opera that truly deserves a place back in the repertory of the world’s opera houses.

Revolution 1905

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Revolution 1905, performed on Jan 16, 2005 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

This concert engages the question of how music can inform our understanding of history. Today’s program is divided into two distinct parts. Three of the works, Glazunov’s Song of Destiny, Miaskovsky’s Silentium, and Stravinsky’s Fireworks come from a short period in the history of Russia in which the most significant event was the so-called Revolution of 1905. In the second half of the program, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, subtitled “1905” but completed in 1957, forces us to reflect on how we conceive of, interpret, and remember history. In looking back, we can be influenced not only by the elapse of time but by the momentous changes that can seem to exceed the particular temporal distance. Consider for example, America in 1950 and the America of 2000, or more poignantly, the America before the assassination of Kennedy in 1963, and the America on the eve of the 2004 election. In what ways will our children and grandchildren commemorate and understand September 11, 2001?

The world in which the 1905 Revolution took place was one of radical economic progress for Russia. In terms of industrialization, Russia could be counted in 1900 among the most backward of European nations. It was the last European nation to abandon the feudal practice of serfdom. It was plagued by massive illiteracy, an enormously powerful state-supported church, a corrupt, landed aristocracy, and an obsolete form of monarchy. Nevertheless, during the last two decades of the nineteenth century through the first fifteen years or so of the twentieth century, Russia became the object of enormous capital investment, comparable in some ways to China of today or Korea and Japan in the second half of the twentieth century.

With Russia’s rapid economic development came a fast-growing middle class and rise in the cosmopolitanism of the nation’s urban centers. This all took place alongside dramatic increases in personal wealth, in the standard of living, and in expectations for the future, particularly in St. Petersburg and Moscow. At that time, the western part of Russia included part of modern-day Poland. The cities of Russian Poland also experienced the boom, such as Warsaw and Lodz, which became a burgeoning center of textile manufacture. Among the expectations that emerged was one of political reform, the demand for which was driven by a need to expand the possibilities for economic development.

This economic and social transformation should be further understood in the context of a long nineteenth-century history of tension between the Russian intelligentsia (both in Russia and expatriated) and the Russian monarchy. Ever since the execution of the Decembrists during Pushkin’s generation in the early nineteenth century, the Russian monarchy and its policies were the object of intense criticism. Restrictions on liberty forced not only the creation of exiles but underground movements within Russia, as well as generational strife. The novels of Turgenev and Tolstoy reflect this. In addition, Russia’s ambivalence in terms of its national identity in regard to the West in the nineteenth century became a rallying cry for vying camps of intellectuals and artists. There were those who believed in the unique Russian tradition, and those who wanted modern social progress on a Western model. Gogol and Dostoevsky expressed the known conservative view of Russia’s character. The older Tolstoy enigmatically engaged both; toward the end of his life he was an outspoken utopian social radical, but also a Christian believer whose faith led him to challenge the virtues of modernity and the traditions of high culture. In music, the division between the Westernizers and Russophiles who saw Russia more natively Eastern is well documented. In this conflict only Tchaikovsky emerged as holding a middle ground successfully.

Peter the Great’s ideals of Westernized modernization continued throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before the October Revolution of 1917, but they were persistently contested. The period from the 1890s to the outbreak of World War I came to a dramatic and notorious end with the Russian Revolution and, shortly thereafter, ultimate victory of the Bolsheviks led by Lenin and Trotsky. This dénouement followed decades of internal unrest, assassination (most notably of Czar Alexander II), the popularity of anarchism, and the operation of prison systems so eloquently described by Dostoevsky in From the House of the Dead (1860). This prison system laid the groundwork for the gulag of the Soviet era. The tensions between Westernization and an anti-Western Russian nationalism, between a vision of an industrial and a rural Russia, between a cosmopolitan embrace of notions of democracy and freedom and a more communitarian Russian Orthodox vision of a unified people, did not disappear after 1917. Stalin’s success was one of both strategic brilliance and of terror and cruelty. He understood that if there was a way to combine the idea of communism with that of nationalism and patriotism, a more successful and stable Soviet state could be developed. He was less committed to the idea that the Russian Revolution would be a first step in a global communist revolution in which nations and politics would disappear.

Many Americans do not even realize there was a revolution in 1905 which was brutally suppressed. That revolution coincided with Russia’s humiliating defeat at the battle of Tsushima in its war against Japan. The defeat of the Russian fleet was especially symbolic given the heritage of Peter the Great’s longstanding dream of Russian naval power. The unrest resulting from these events inflamed the movements among the urban population for better work conditions and representation in the government. The monarchy was forced to institute some reforms including a parliament, or Duma, but a genuine constitutional monarchy never came into being. However, during this brief period of liberalization, there was enormous optimism. It is in this period that the greatest Russian art collections, particularly of French impressionists, were amassed. Russian theatre and painting flowered. Some of the masterpieces by Russian painters may be seen in the Russian Museum in St. Petersburg and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow. Russia developed not only a middle class but its robber barons and super-rich as well. Education and culture blossomed. The earlier works on today’s program are examples of the energy, sophistication, and originality in this period. Glazunov and Miaskovsky were master craftsmen whose achievements easily match the technical attainments of their contemporaries in Europe and North America. Young Stravinsky, who studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, would later draw upon his Russian training and roots to set one of the major directions for twentieth-century music.

But World War I and the 1917 Revolution brought this hopeful time to an end. In the mid-1920s, after the Civil War and the war with the new independent Poland, there was a huge emigration. Paris was the favorite destination, as it had been for the emigrating intelligentsia since the early nineteenth century. It was there that Serge Diaghilev and Stravinsky found themselves among a fabulous group of colleagues in all fields of art and culture. The “White” Russian emigration included such famous names as Nabokov, Milstein, Heifetz, Rachmaninoff, Chagall, and the young Prokofiev. During the first decade of the Soviet Union, there was also still some limited travel to Russia. Communication was maintained between the musical and visual avant-garde from the West and composers and artists in the young Soviet Union. Art and architecture were also beneficiaries of this early modernist enthusiasm. Shostakovich came of age with the October Revolution. (The 1905 Revolution occurred before his birth and was central to his parents’ generation.) While in his twenties as a student, Shostakovich heard Berg and Hindemith. He encountered innumerable performers concertizing in the new Russia. His own early music, including the opera The Nose, expressed an optimism about modernity and the possibility of new art for a socialist utopia. This lasted until the composition of his Fourth Symphony.

With Stalin’s gradual accretion of power, artistic freedom was restricted and debate ended. The modernists and the left-wing proletarian simplifiers were both taken to task. In 1936, Shostakovich’s second opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtensk, was publicly censured. A new relationship between the state and the artist became entrenched. Painters and architects were now understood as serving Stalin’s new vision in which a sense of Russian history and nationality were to be combined with conservative traditions of art-making, all accessible to the masses. What was deemed wrong was condemned as “formalism.”

In this context, Glazunov’s oeuvre was quickly judged to be old-fashioned and bourgeois. Glazunov had been one of Shostakovich’s teachers (as well as a legendary consumer of vodka); ultimately he emigrated. The somewhat younger Miaskovsky, however, took a different path. Based in Moscow and one of Prokofiev’s champions and mentors, Miaskovsky continued to teach and write. His initial optimism turned into a quiet pessimism, but he remained in his homeland and never flagged in his output of music of extraordinary quality, including twenty-nine symphonies, today all underperformed. Miaskovsky played the game with restraint, and in 1940 received the Stalin Prize for his Symphony No. 21. He became a grand old man who salvaged the opportunity to continue composition in the Soviet state.

Shostakovich’s situation was more complicated. He was the most talented of the new generation and became the greatest Soviet artist in any field of endeavor. His First Symphony made him world famous. His second opera resulted in brutal attacks. He adjusted to the criticism, and redeemed himself with the famous Fifth Symphony. The Seventh Symphony once again attracted worldwide attention for its expression of the suffering and heroism of the Russian people during the great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. But in 1948, he again earned Stalin’s censure, only to rehabilitate himself a second time by writing the music for the film The Fall of Berlin and traveling to New York to attend an international congress of culture. This was presented in defense of the aesthetics of the Soviet state under Stalin and of socialist realism against the modernism of the West.

Shostakovich’s relation to Stalin has been the object of scrutiny and controversy. But it cannot be doubted that he was at one and the same time a patriot and loyal son of the country, and a tortured and conflicted artist who had no illusions about the tyranny of Stalin and the price people, including artists, paid. He witnessed Stalin’s crimes, including his final campaign of terror against the Jews that culminated in the notorious Doctors Plot.

With the death of Stalin and the process of de-Stalinization begun by Khrushchev, another era of optimism, reminiscent perhaps of 1905 and 1914, came into being. This was cut short in the early 1960s, even while Khrushchev was in power. By the mid-1950s, however, Shostakovich’s position was secure because of his international fame. For the last twenty years of his life he was not only honored by his nation but served in a wide variety of official capacities on behalf of the state.

This sketchy description of this complex and multi-faceted period of history only suggests the challenges facing great artists writing music. Symphony No. 11 has been interpreted variously in terms of its meaning. What is beyond doubt is that from the perspective of the post-Stalin era, the 1905 Revolution took on new significance. It was not only understood as a precursor of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; it was also remembered as the event that began a period of political reform, greater openness, and prosperity. It symbolized a period in which the arts, especially music, flourished in an atmosphere of greater freedom and material well-being.

Perhaps the ambiguity of Shostakovich’s intentions in the Symphony concerning the way 1905 could be recollected half a century later is an indication of both the Symphony’s power and its so-called purely musical qualities. Like other works of instrumental music, Symphony No. 11 has the merit of being able to break free from its origins and the intentions of its composer. Contemporary listeners do not need to be aware of the 1905 Revolution or the composer’s troubled life and politics to fashion a rewarding sense of the music. This is part of the allure that instrumental music holds for listeners. When faced with tyranny, music becomes a refuge, a protected oasis for the freedom of the imagination. When personal liberty and freedom is under attack, it can be understood as a steady means of escape and detachment. In this sense, music always possesses the plausible capacity to be read in reference to the self. At the same time, however, Shostakovich was committed to writing music that communicated with a large public. It is clear that he was after something more than mere entertainment. That challenge continues to be relevant. What values, ideals, and aspirations can the making of art take up and protect in periods dominated by political disappointment and fear, and in the presence of danger and restrictions of freedom and intolerance of dissent? Although one does not need to know the historical context or references of Shostakovich’s Symphony in order to be affected by it, it is illuminating to reflect on the connection between the Symphony’s genesis and the internal and external political developments and aspirations with which Shostakovich and his listeners struggled. The 1905 Revolution and its memory suggest that there is an inevitable connection between music and history, particularly the political reality which the artist and his or her public share. The complex dynamic between music and citizenship is itself a challenge that no artist can afford to ignore. This admonition holds for all generations, including our own.

Beethoven’s Pupil

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Beethoven’s Pupil, performed on Nov 14, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Throughout the last decade, the American Symphony Orchestra has sought in its programming to challenge the boundaries of music history. It has tried to do so largely through a two-part approach. The first has been to reclaim for the concert stage the greater part of the repertory from the past that is no longer frequently performed. When one looks at concert life in the past, one discovers that there was a tremendous amount of music once often played and revered that has since disappeared. The second part of the Orchestra’s approach centers on providing an historical logic for each concert, some basis that makes sense of performing three or four pieces together, something which stimulates the first-time listener, the occasional listener, and the connoisseur to experience the music in a new and provocative manner. Sometimes that historical framework has to do with the history of music itself, and sometimes the logic of a program may be derived from politics, literature, or the visual arts.

Tonight’s program is perhaps among the most unusual we have ever undertaken. All the music was written by one individual, Carl Czerny (1791–1857). Even more eyebrow-raising than the choice of Czerny as the basis for an entire concert may be the fact that three of the four works have never been performed in North America, and of some there is no record of having been performed at all. They were selected in partnership by me with Dr. Otto Biba, the archivist of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, where the papers and manuscripts of Carl Czerny are housed. These works were in manuscript form, and required a herculean effort by the American Symphony Orchestra library staff with the assistance of the Gesellschaft der Musikfruende to create new scores and parts for the musicians.

But Carl Czerny is a perfect example of why we present the programs we do. There are few cases of comparable historical influence to the great classical tradition, and such neglect. For the past two hundred years, there probably has not been a pianist in the western world to whom the name Czerny is not familiar. For many, the name conjures up arduous, mind-numbing exercises for the keyboard and the dreaded boredom of hours of practicing. But any pianist knows that without Czerny, piano technique as we know it today would not exist—or at least not be accessible to so many. The name Czerny has become associated with repetition, routine, predictability, and the most mechanical definitions of musical skill. But Czerny, at a pivotal point in the instrument’s history, created the basics of technique so that the average student and future piano owner could play. The irony of his voluminous output of exercises is that there are among the exercises works worthy of comparison with the etudes of Chopin and Liszt. The technical exercise for an instrument can in fact be a noble artistic form. Such exercises and their requirements can be compared to the rules for writing odes and sonnets. Each musical exercise functions to teach the user to use some aspect of the instrument. Given that indispensable criterion, making the acquisition of a particular skill at the same time aesthetically engaging becomes a challenge that can bring out the most imaginative and inspired ideas from a composer. Writing exercises for any instrument that are pedagogically effective and engaging is no laughing matter and is not a task that is easily accomplished. There are many Czerny exercises that are worthy of being heard in piano recitals.

This state of affairs led us to the purpose of tonight’s concert, which is intended as an overdue act of reputational reparation. Czerny was a great musician and prolific composer whose fate it was to be remembered only for his exercises. But during his lifetime Czerny was a significant, if not towering, musical figure of serious composition.

As his birth and death dates suggest, he spanned the classical and romantic eras. His music makes this clear as well. He was a pupil of Beethoven, and not just a nominal one either. Beethoven judged Czerny to be extraordinarily talented. The virtuoso took lessons with Beethoven twice a week for nearly three years between the very young ages of 8 and 11. Czerny maintained his close relationship with Beethoven ever after, and was one of the most avid performers of Beethoven’s music. He was said to have been able to play all of Beethoven’s music by memory. Indeed Czerny is one of the most reliable contemporary witnesses of Beethoven as a composer; his writings on the performance and meaning of Beethoven’s works are still standard and indispensable guides.

Despite the fantastic pianistic virtuosity that Czerny displayed, it was not as a performer that he became best known. Partly influenced by Muzio Clementi (1752–1832), Czerny took up teaching. He counted among his pupils Beethoven’s nephew Karl, and most famously, Franz Liszt. The list of his important pupils includes great pianists right through Robert Schumann’s generation. Schumann spearheaded the new romantic generation of composers. He waged a critical war against the new popularity of piano playing and composition. In that context, Schumann’s denigration of Czerny as a composer did a great deal to ruin Czerny’s posthumous impression.

One of the greatest prejudices against Czerny arose from his prolific output as a composer. There is an apocryphal story that Czerny maintained a series of stand-up desks, on each of which was composition of a different genre of music. One desk was dedicated to secular choral music, one to sacred choral music, one to symphonic music, one to exercises, and so on. Czerny was said to move from one to the next effortlessly each day, composing several pieces simultaneously in this manner. In Czerny’s lifetime, performance and composition were inextricably intertwined. Performers wrote their own music and composers performed. But in Czerny’s case there are so many works for all sorts of occasions and ensembles that the number of published items is in the hundreds, not to mention the many manuscripts that have not been published. Add to this Czerny’s many arrangements of music of others, and then also the numerous significant treatises on performance and composition that he wrote, including his pioneering work on the performance of pre-classical music from the Baroque. In the end, his reputation suffered for his apparently boundless energy and devotion.

But tonight we hope to show that this need not be the case. Czerny’s contributions to music took many forms. He was very generous to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, and therefore indirectly to his native city of Vienna. An important legacy left by Czerny’s generation was the popularization of musical culture, particularly through the piano, the instrument most closely associated with him and nineteenth-century musical culture in Europe. The place Czerny occupies in history is in some measure due to his own role as a pedagogue of the transformative generation after Beethoven. It was in this era that virtuosi became popular figures and an active concert life in European cities and towns took shape. Aspiring middle-class Europeans bought pianos and tried to play them, and piano manufacturers, much like the manufacturers of personal computers in our own time, competed with one another not only in the development of better (and less expensive) hardware and mechanics, but of better software, as it were, with easier systems of fingering and methods of learning how to use the keyboard. Czerny stands at the birth of the modern piano and musical life and helped to usher in an aesthetic logic into the musical culture of the nineteenth century. As a child prodigy, Czerny played the fortepiano. He witnessed expansion of its range and sonority. By 1857, the year of his death, the piano that we now recognize was well on its way to realizing its final form. It would be only six years later at the Paris exposition of 1863 that the American Steinway would take Europe by storm with its new industrial-age components, structure, and mode of manufacture. Tonight we hope the audience will come to think of Czerny as more than the nightmarish author of childhood piano lessons, and appreciate the many shapes and influences of his contribution to music. Perhaps we will be inclined to give the composer his due, and perhaps even come to appreciate the beauty of those exercises upon which the art of the piano was built.

Complicated Friendship

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Complicated Friendship, performed on Oct 15, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Conducting as an autonomous profession in music was essentially unknown until the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Even then, however, conducting was not so much a profession as a skill acquired in the course of a musical career that extended beyond the art of conducting. The most frequent impetus for learning to conduct was composition. Throughout the nineteenth century, composition was an integral part of any instrumentalist’s or musician’s work, but it developed a special connection to conducting through the necessity of training orchestras and ensembles to perform new and contemporary music that increasingly was composed for large forces. One hundred years ago, concert music was not the museum-like enterprise it now is; then, music was connected to the central direction of culture, including literature, painting, philosophy and politics. While orchestras performed old masters, performers and audiences expected to encounter the extension of tradition through new music as well.

Among early nineteenth-century composers who were also famous as conductors were Mendelssohn, Weber, and Spohr, who was actually far more historically important as a violinist. Two of the best known mid-century figures were Berlioz and Wagner, who did not possess outstanding skills on an instrument. By 1900, nearly all conductors in Europe and America, even the lesser known, were fine instrumentalists who also engaged in composition. Well into the twentieth century, performers like Fritz Kreisler were virtuosi who relished writing their own material much as a comedian or a particularly gifted vocalist today writes his or her own jokes and songs. From its origins, conducting was a task that required some skills in organization and leadership—the putting on of concerts, the care of finances and the building of institutions. Musical life in America would have been far poorer, for example, had it not been for the organizational talents of Theodore Thomas, whose influence can be felt today particularly in Chicago and New York.

Even today it is a mistake to consider conducting a discreet and separate profession within music, on par with being an instrumentalist or composer. There is technique that must be acquired in training, but as the late Hans Keller put it with affecting derision, conducting was one of three phony musical professions, along with playing viola and writing music criticism. His point was not that these three pursuits were unnecessary, but rather, to do any one of these things successfully, it cannot be done all by itself. Under the skin of a great violist can be found a great violinist; indeed that is where many violists start. Underlying great criticism are often achievements in some other form of music-making or in the field of literature, as the writings of Ezra Pound and George Bernard Shaw suggest. And as for conducting, its roots often reach deep into an ambition to become a composer or instrumentalist, and in more recent years (especially in the field of early music), a scholar. The great conductors of the recent past did something else in music very well. Boulez and Bernstein are recent cases of composer-conductors, in the line of Strauss, Mahler, Markevitch, and Kletzki. Among instrumentalists, we can find Barenboim, Ashkenazy, Rostropovich, and Levine, who have distinguished themselves in that role. Andre Previn, Esa Pekka Salonen and Lorin Maazel are instrumentalists and composers. Among the conductors of the past, Munch, Ormandy, and Koussevitzky were all accomplished string players. George Szell and Bruno Walter were pianists and composers.

In the case of Bruno Walter (1876–1962), a promising compositional career was rather abruptly cut short by the conductor’s acute sensitivity to criticism and a lack of support among those who should have encouraged him. But this sensitivity to criticism should not be misunderstood as being a weakness in some misguided definition of conductorial machismo. Walter did not have the brash, arrogant exterior and manner of Toscanini, Szell or Reiner. He considered himself a great conductor of Mozart and found himself drawn to Lieder of the early romantic age, to the intimacy of communication that music makes possible. He was one of the great vocal accompanists of all time as a conductor and as a pianist.

Other contemporaries of Walter, such as Klemperer, Furtwängler and Weingartner, felt themselves to be unfairly neglected as composers. They wanted to be remembered not for their performances of the music of others but for their own music, which they felt lay undeservedly overlooked. These conductors continued to write music throughout their careers, despite infrequent performances and less than enthusiastic critical response. But Bruno Walter, like George Szell, was an ironic exception in this regard. These two men were, in terms of composition, perhaps the two most naturally gifted of that generation of conductors, and yet they were the ones who stopped composing. One composer/conductor who had been successful in an earlier era was Gustav Mahler, but he did not support the careers of people very close to him. Two victims of his tyrannical megalomania were his wife Alma, and his closest acolyte, Bruno Walter. Mahler may not have thought much of Schoenberg’s music, but on principle in defense of the young, supported him. But Schoenberg was not a confidante. Mahler also suspected that Schoenberg could do little else but teach and went so far as to buy all of Schoenberg’s paintings when they came on view. It is at best unclear if Mahler thought Schoenberg was a worthwhile composer beyond his utility as a warrior for the new and young. But Mahler had no encouragement available for those directly dependant on his good word. And unlike Schoenberg, Walter could do something else and did it very well. He could conduct brilliantly, both from the opera pit and the orchestral stage.

Americans, and particularly New Yorkers, who remember Bruno Walter remember him as a benign and fatherly figure, a distinguished émigré conductor whose name was so well known that he was considered the closest rival of Toscanini during the 1950s, the age of long-playing records. Walter was the gentle, methodic central-European placed as a contrast in the market against the fiery Italian. Indeed Toscanini and Walter crossed paths all over the world, including New York. Both had a close association with the New York Philharmonic. But Walter emerged more as an intellectual and a deeply conservative thinker (despite his years in California in the famed circle of friends shared by Schoenberg and the other notorious central-European exiles).

Regardless of their own compositional ambitions, the great conductors of the past were advocates of the music of their own time. Toscanini allied himself with the cause of Puccini, and Reiner with Bartók, Strauss, and Weiner. Koussevitzky and Stokowski championed a wide range of contemporary music. Furtwängler championed Hindemith, and Answermet and Monteux championed Stravinsky. Walter is strongly associated with his teacher Mahler (whose most effective podium advocate was actually Wilhelm Mengelberg), but when Walter came into his own, the composer whom he supported and performed frequently was Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949). Despite his public advocacy of this contemporary, however, Walter today is associated almost exclusively with the music of the past, especially the “three Bs” and his mentor, Mahler. When we think of Walter today, we do not readily associate him with the name of Pfitzner.

Indeed Pfitzner is not often heard at all these days, which is remarkable if one considers that Pfitzner was a prolific composer as well as conductor, and that after the untimely death of Max Reger, he was the only rival to Richard Strauss as a figure of importance in German-speaking Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. But Pfitzner was not only a powerful composer. He was also a polemicist. He engaged in bitter wars of pamphleteering against a new school of modernist composition. From his pen flowed scathing denunciations of the music and ideas of Busoni and Schoenberg. It was Pfitzner that inspired Alban Berg to write one of the most eloquent defenses of the modern in music. Pfitzner made himself a very controversial figure, not because of his music, but through his aggressively conservative if not reactionary musical ideas. Strauss, in contrast, kept a low profile on such matters, choosing to hold most, if not all, writing about music in contempt. Pfitzner wrote a lot, including books on the idea of musical inspiration and genius. He believed in a non-linguistic dimension of spontaneity in musical inspiration that became seminal to his critique of music that seemed to derive (in his view) from abstract reasoning and puzzle-making and solving. Pfitzner believed music was a truly romantic act of human expression, not based in rationality but in a sensibility beyond logic. Despite similarities in their views, however, Pfitzner was not a neo-Wagnerian. He was attracted also to what he considered to be lost traditions in early German Romanticism. One of his heroes was, oddly enough, Max Bruch, about whom he wrote an excellent and appreciative analysis.

It does not stretch the imagination to realize that in the context of the aesthetic wars of the first three and a half decades of the twentieth century, Pfitzner’s views easily could be understood as being sympathetic to a reactionary set of political cultural values. Indeed, Pfitzner was hailed by Thomas Mann in 1915 as signaling the artistic future of Germany against the corruptive counter-traditions from other western cultures. In German nationalism, cultural superiority always played a significant role. The prizing of “true” cultural values, the spiritual as experienced particularly through the appreciation of philosophy, music and poetry, was lost on the stylized and fashion-conscious French, the dry and restrained British, the barbaric and violent Slavs, or the materialistic Americans.

Despite his notoriety and recognition (partly the result of Walter’s advocacy) during the interwar era, Pfitzner was an unhappy figure. He was a constant object of hostility among modernists including Schreker, Schoenberg, and the pupils of Busoni. Angry and embittered, he considered himself to be unappreciated. He felt he was playing second fiddle, as it were, to Richard Strauss, who among the more conservative figures had an unrivaled preeminence as both composer and conductor. He was smart enough to know that Strauss, with whom on many levels he was ideologically aligned, had little use for him and did not like him or his music. Consequently Pfitzner was consumed with envy for what should have been his traditional ally, and for the success of the new generation. Like a match to kerosene, Hitlerism was the perfect ideological solution, and Pfitzner became a genuine Nazi. He signed letters “Heil Hitler” and maintained a friendship with the notorious Hans Frank, the Nazi official in charge of Warsaw who would be condemned to death and hung. Among his contemporaries, Pfitzner stands out in his embrace of the Nazi party. Strauss was an opportunist but no Nazi. He saw himself above politics and while he had his hand in the till, as it were, his own ego made him express his superiority and contempt for the Nazis and their ideas. Furtwängler was not a very strong personality when it came to politics. He was sufficiently ambitious to engage in rationalizations. Pfitzner, however, was an energetic proponent who also was determined to exploit the regime for his own benefit. His enthusiasm even got on the nerves of the Nazi hierarchy. His involvement with the Nazis did not, however, satisfy his chronic sense of neglect that in part led him to Hitler in the first place. Even when he was a favorite son of the regime, he would complain that he was not getting his proper due. Perhaps there was no more just fate than surviving the war and dying in obscurity and disgrace.

Throughout most of his career, Bruno Walter had been one of Pfitzner’s most ardent champions and admirers, and premiered Pfitzner’s greatest single work, the opera Palestrina (1917). Walter had been born a Jew but beyond that was not actively Jewish. Regardless, there was no way for him to mitigate his friend’s behavior during the war, as there might have been for Furtwängler or Strauss. Despite his strong internal sense of allegiance and generosity of spirit, Walter distanced himself from Pfitzner. In the letters they exchanged after the war, there is heartbreaking sadness on both sides, but Walter, ever sentimental, mourned the loss of his friendship and even offered to help Pfitzner financially. Pfitzner lost in Walter the best and strongest chance he had to have his music performed and remembered. Pfitzner’s music is extraordinary, as Walter recognized, but he is a great composer whose work, particularly in postwar Germany, has for political reasons been consigned to the dustbin of history.

Distasteful as it is, one needs to set personality and politics aside and acknowledge that there is a considerable amount of worthy, if not great music written by Pfitzner. Bruno Walter had good reason to take such an active role on Pfitzner’s behalf. At least we can acknowledge but set aside Pfitzner the contemptible man, and be grateful for the music he left behind.

In light of Walter’s advocacy of Pfitzner, it is fascinating to turn back to Walter’s Symphony. Written under the spell of Mahler, it suggests that Walter might have taken a different direction as a composer had he continued. As in the case of Szell (with whom Walter can be compared as a compositional talent) his music shows an enormous skill and intuition. There is a voice here that should have been nurtured, a gift much stronger than that exhibited by Furtwängler or Klemperer. Walter, the great and troubled advocate of Pfitzner, was himself in need of an advocate that was never found. We are proud this evening to be able to sponsor the third performance in history of this work, the first not conducted by Walter himself, and the premiere in North America. Walter’s place in the musical history of both America and New York is significant enough to merit a re-examination of his legacy not only as a performer, but as a composer.

The complex relation between Walter and Pfitzner reminds us today that musicians are the guardians of their profession. It is their responsibility to champion the music of their contemporaries rather than be satisfied with the relatively narrow list of masterpieces found in any orchestra’s repertoire. Conductors may still fulfill their duties best if they do engage with music in multiple ways. A modern trend toward constraining specialization often prevents many from crossing into other musical disciplines, but such deterrence should be ignored. Mahler was pilloried by contemporary critics as being a “summertime” composer. One of the most distinguished critics of Mahler’s generation, Richard Wallaschek, also an eminent scholar and teacher, writing in the New Yorker of Vienna, Die Zeit, consistently urged Mahler to give up punishing his listeners with his amateur attempts, to leave composition to professional composers and stick to conducting. Mahler suffered but carried on, and future generations are the beneficiaries. We have also benefited from John Adams and before him Aaron Copland, whose conducting helped generate the cross-fertilization between the new and the old in performance that results in a living art. Walter was, in part, a great conductor because he thought like a composer. Perhaps tonight’s performance will make us wonder what treasures we might now have if he had also remained a composer.

Spiritual Romanticism

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Spiritual Romanticism, performed on June 6, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The year 1848 marks a watershed in the history of nineteenth-century Europe. The first half of the century was characterized by the rapid rise of industry, urban life, and the crystallization of a reading public and therefore a public for culture. All this occurred after the fall of Napoleon, in a period of political reaction. Concurrent with this reaction were radical revisions to the conceits of the previous century’s Enlightenment, as well as the emergence of a kind of middle-class domesticity that assumed stylistic attributes known as Biedermeier. In everything but furniture design and architecture, that term is understood as pejorative. However, particularly in German-speaking Europe, beneath the expansion of an urban, educated middle class obsessed with respectability, there was after 1815 also a desire to find some way around the harsh strictures of political repression and dynamic economic change. This undercurrent of resistance can be sensed in the dreams and achievements of the young Robert Schumann (1810-1856) and in the entire first generation of musical Romantics. With political liberty denied, the subjective self and the limitless, cloaked world of the imagination afforded by music possessed few rival claims on the souls of artists, poets and writers who came of age after the fall of Napoleon.

As Romanticism developed as an aesthetic sensibility and personal credo during the first half of the nineteenth century, it co-existed with serious considerations of church and state in the revolutions of 1848. Indeed already during the Napoleonic era, the reaction to the Terror and the excesses of the French Revolution had inspired a revival of religious feeling. The nineteenth century turned out, in fact, to be a period of renewed religiosity and the creation of a sense of spiritual inwardness quite antithetical to the attitudes of artists and philosophers of the previous century. The skepticism of Voltaire was superseded by the religious ruminations of the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who felt music was integral to religious sensibility. With the revival of religious emotionalism, the nineteenth century also witnessed a spiritual redefinition of national identity. The universal was subordinated to the particular and the differentiated. Discussion of the universal rights of human kind was left almost exclusively to socialists and communists, as the educated middle classes of Europe increasingly found themselves drawn to an awareness of themselves as part of an indigenous community where land, language and history took on mythic proportions. The marriage of nationalism and religiosity that took shape in the nineteenth century eventually bequeathed to the twentieth that nightmarish replay of the bloody strife of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But, despite Karl Marx’s quip that history repeats itself as farce not tragedy, during the twentieth century the internal strife in Europe after 1914 far outstripped anything perpetrated by the Hundred Years’ War.

This is an admittedly simplified account of the historical context for today’s concert. But it is crucial to locating the connection between spirituality and Romanticism. The works on the program are not ordered in a precise chronological manner, since Wagner wrote Das Liebesmahl der Apostel three years before Mendelssohn completed Lauda Sion. But aside from that detail, the sequence is historically proper. Felix Mendelssohn was born in 1809 and died in 1847. He never wavered in his belief that reason and religion could be reconciled. Despite his enormous contribution to the expressive vocabulary of the personal self through music—primarily in his chamber music, piano music, and concert overtures—the spirituality that Mendelssohn possessed was, despite its aesthetic Romanticism, rooted in an allegiance to neoclassicism and eighteenth-century philosophical ideals. In this sense, Mendelssohn was the musical equivalent of Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841), the great architect of early nineteenth-century Berlin. Lauda Sion not only expresses the deep religiosity of Mendelssohn and his devout Christianity but the underlying universalism that for him rendered the distinction between Protestant and Catholic insignificant. A widely embraced tolerance also extended to the Jews for whom Mendelssohn never lost his sense of solidarity. That solidarity had special urgency for him precisely because of his awareness that a new form of German nationalism was on the horizon. It first made its appearance when he was a child in 1819 and grew in strength throughout the 1830s and 1840s. Mendelssohn abhorred this aggressive form of political and cultural nationalism. Both he and his sister Fanny died before they could witness its triumphant arrival in German politics and culture. Appropriately, therefore, the concert opens with a work for the Catholic liturgy written by a converted Jew, the most important contemporary composer of Protestant church music, and who was married to the daughter of a prominent Huguenot minister.

The concert then turns to an early work by Richard Wagner (1813-1883), rarely performed in the United States. The rage for Wagner has not abated over many years. Concert-goers all over the world travel to the remotest places to catch a Ring cycle, and the number of Wagner’s devotees seems never to diminish. Conventional wisdom holds that Wagner was a revolutionary both politically and aesthetically. Together with Liszt he became the acknowledged founder of what came to be known as the “new German school.” Wagner saw himself as the true heir of Beethoven; he extended the dramatic in classical music into a new form, the music drama, a total work of art that integrated sound, word, and picture.

Wagner also became one of the nineteenth century’s most articulate modern anti-Semites, a theoretician of race, and a rabid nationalist. He had an extremely bizarre and ambivalent relation to Christianity, which appears most strikingly in Tannhäuser and Parsifal. Wagner, like Berlioz, was also a compelling writer who used the power of the pen to control the reception of his own works and his place in history. Like most autobiographers, he wrote in order to cover tracks he hoped no one would find, to guide future commentators, critics, and audiences toward a preconceived conclusion that omitted something important but embarrassing in his personal and artistic development. Wagner’s hidden skeleton in this case is the enormous debt his music owes to Mendelssohn, whom Wagner hated and against whom he held a personal, ill-grounded grudge. Wagner claimed to have been snubbed by Mendelssohn when in all likelihood nothing of the sort ever happened. But Mendelssohn was everything Wagner wasn’t: rich, tremendously talented, naturally adept, and generous of spirit. The work on today’s program not only foreshadows the familiar Wagner, but also surprisingly sheds light on Wagner’s early ambition to rival Mendelssohn on Mendelssohn’s own terms. An 1836 performance of St. Paul deeply impressed the young Wagner, who became determined to try to set biblical scenes into music as Mendelssohn had done so brilliantly. Das Liebesmahl der Apostel thus evidences the continuities rather than the divergences between Wagner and Mendelssohn. At the same time, however, there is no question that the mature Wagner opened up new vistas of compositional technique, musical expression and sonority. In this early work, we can hear the echoes of the male choral tradition of the late 1830s and early 1840s that would blossom into a nationalist medium, and reappear prominently in Parsifal and in the male choral moments of Götterdammerung. Although written in 1843, this work prefigures the dominance of nationalist religion in musical aesthetic after 1848.

The last composer on today’s program, Franz Liszt (1811-1886), was one of the most protean, complex and contradictory figures in the history of music, owing to his long life and the distinct phases in his career. Liszt belongs both to Mendelssohn’s world and to Wagner’s. As a virtuoso and composer he participated in the admiration for Beethoven evinced by Schumann and Mendelssohn. He was a champion of Berlioz, Chopin, and Meyerbeer. He was, as many turn-of-the-century German writers on music noted, almost a French composer because of his close personal intellectual associations with Paris in the 1830s. The next phase of his career brought him to Weimar, where he presided over the most important musical theater in German-speaking Europe during the mid-century, the place where Lohengrin had its premiere. He became a champion of Wagner—and ultimately Wagner’s father-in-law. Wagner had at first been skeptical of Liszt as a composer, but he soon came to be an eloquent defender of the creation of symphonic music written along the lines of poetic narrative. The second phase of Liszt’s career therefore can be considered an integral part of the German tradition of music-making. It is not surprising that the most prolific Liszt scholar of the twentieth century, Peter Raabe, was an ardent Nazi.

At the same time, however, Liszt was Hungarian by birth and by lifelong allegiance. In the last phase of his life, despite his close association with Wagner, he became a devout Catholic and an outspoken defender of the Hungarian national revival. Indeed, the Academy of Music that Bela Bartók attended bears to this day the name Franz Liszt. Liszt was eager to become a Hungarian national hero as an artist, educator, and philanthropist. The Mass performed on today’s concert is not only a great innovative setting of the Catholic liturgy by a composer who renounced his past as a virtuoso and Lothario and entered the Church, but it was also a widely acknowledged act of Hungarian patriotism. He was the nineteenth century’s greatest Hungarian musician and the Mass was designed to celebrate the newly found stature of the distinctly Hungarian Catholic Church.

In Liszt, the Romanticism of the early nineteenth century and the aesthetic transformation associated with Wagner (that utilized Liszt’s own remarkable musical innovations) were turned to the service of the nationalist revival that became commonplace throughout Europe after 1848. But today’s program also offers an opportunity to hear Liszt as an innovator in musical compositions and aesthetic ideals. If Wagner was eager to hide what he learned from Mendelssohn, he was equally loathe to give credit to Liszt for finding ways to make music augment the visual and poetic. It is somehow apt, therefore, that of the three composers, Liszt had the longest life. He died nearly forty years after Mendelssohn and he survived his son-in-law by three years. Indeed, if any composer mirrors the entire nineteenth century, inclusive of its transformations from the classical and rationalist to the spiritual and nationalist, it is Franz Liszt.

Victorian Secrets

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Victorian Secrets, performed on April 2, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

“It is imperative therefore to convince the German people that its enemies of yesterday and today, the foes of its superiority, will remain its enemies tomorrow—eternal enemies! Let us take a closer look: the Englishman in principle and in practice—the Magna Carta for himself, the noose around their necks for the other nations; his house is his castle, but everybody else’s house is his as well—offers no insight into this arid, depraved breed of mankind. England and true culture are as inimical as venality and probity. There is nothing more loathsome, nothing more nauseating, than the Englishman who, his prey safely in his lair, changes his tune and protests allegiance to humanity, culture, and religion…having only yesterday bitten the hand generously outstretched to him by German scholars…Oh what a miserable toad the Englishman is!…Let the German people be guided by history and what history has to tell us through our superior thinkers, artists, and historians; let them especially learn the lesson of the World War and so construct a true picture of the other nation, i.e. the Anglo-Saxon…then they will discover that these peoples all lack power of creativity at the highest level of genius. Genius is possessedness, demonic nature…No Anglo-Saxon…could ever carry in her womb…a Bach, a Mozart…Of all the nations living on the earth today, the German nation alone possesses true genius…”

These startling words were published in 1921 by Heinrich Schenker (1868-1935), the most influential and original music theorist of the twentieth century, in an essay entitled “The Mission of German Genius.” The rest of Schenker’s essay is even more virulent in its attack on the culture and institutions of the non-German western world. The French take the most sustained beating, and Americans are dismissed as being unable to “attain the intellectual and moral ascendancy needed to contribute to the higher goals of mankind.”

The nationalities surrounding Germany, particularly to the east, and the French to the west, were keenly aware of this form of German cultural arrogance before 1914. But there had always been the appearance of greater respect between the Germans and the English if for no other reason than that the royal house in England was of German origin and that Shakespeare had been appropriated as a nearly German classical author. Americans are certainly unaccustomed to viewing England as a peripheral nation in terms of culture. Anglophilia has been a dominant feature of American literary and intellectual traditions. It is also unsettling to realize that Schenker’s views are perilously close to those of the Nazi ideologists of the 1920s and 1930s. The fact that Schenker, an observant member of the Viennese Jewish community, adhered to these views and propagated them indicates how deep-seated the sense of German cultural superiority was and how widely it was internalized, particularly in the field of music. For Schenker and for Schoenberg, German music was universal. All other national traditions were marginal and derivative. Of all the non-German composers Schenker discussed, he found positive words only for select pieces by Chopin and Smetana.

Lest one think that these outrageous polemical views were confined to Germans, one needs to recall that the English and the Americans, until World War I, were themselves enthralled with the idea of German superiority in music and accepted it. American composers and performers routinely traveled to Germany for their training. During the nineteenth century the English also looked to Germany first for musical inspiration. For Edward Elgar (1857-1934), hearing Parsifal and listening to Brahms were seminal experiences. One of the most influential figures in turn-of-the-century English concert life was Hans Richter, Wagner’s disciple and the first Bayreuth conductor. It was England that bestowed honorary degrees on Max Bruch (the teacher of Ralph Vaughan Williams) and Johannes Brahms. Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) deeply admired not only Richter but Hans von Bülow. Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) had his first success as a composer during his stay in Leipzig as a conservatory student.

In France, the sway of German music focused on two figures: Beethoven in the time of Berlioz, and later in the century, Wagner (after Baudelaire’s embrace of Wagnerian aesthetic). In England, the dominance of German influence can be dated far earlier. Nineteenth-century Britain was captivated by Felix Mendelssohn. He was without question the most beloved composer of the young Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert. But even before that, the eighteenth century in England was dominated by the rivalry between the Italian and the German musical influences. Even the Italianate style was partially mediated through Germans like Handel and Haydn.

The irony of all of this is that among the audiences and amateur performances of music in Europe, England possessed perhaps the most lively, extensive and engaged. Music had a central role in English culture as far back as the Regency. There is not a Jane Austen novel in which music does not figure. The English middle classes embraced music education and concert life with an enviable enthusiasm. England developed one of the most extensive and enduring choral traditions. Great works such as Mendelssohn’s Elijah to Dvořák’s Requiem owe their existence to the English public of listeners and vocal amateurs. Even Beethoven toward the end of his life toyed with the idea of moving to London. The great violinist Joseph Joachim toured England regularly with his quartet and regarded his visits among the most satisfying experiences of his career. In contrast to France, the power of the Mendelssohnian tradition and non-Wagnerian music from the late nineteenth century (the more conservative tradition of German composition) flourished in English concert programs and in domestic music-making. Wagner, as Bernard Shaw’s advocacy suggests, had his staunch English admirers, but so did Brahms, for whom the French never felt great enthusiasm.

Given the richness of English music life before 1914, it is fascinating to consider the ongoing perception of the apparent absence of great composers in the many decades that followed the death of Henry Purcell in 1695. Indeed the first Englishman to gain significant international recognition after Purcell was Sir Edward Elgar, and only quite late in his career. Even so, despite the acknowledged greatness of Elgar’s music in the accepted pantheon of great composers, he still occupies a subordinate place. His music is celebrated as the best of fin-de-siècle English music, but still overshadowed by contemporary German parallels.

Therefore with the exception of Elgar, most American audiences remain unfamiliar with the achievements of English musical composition from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is only in the twentieth century with Benjamin Britten that English music regained some of its prominence on the concert and operatic stages. Even Gilbert and Sullivan, who enjoyed phenomenal success in the musical theater, have now been relegated mostly to amateur high-school and college productions. How many are aware that Arthur Sullivan wrote music independently of W.S. Gilbert? Stanford was a close contemporary of Elgar; their relationship was delicate and strained. Stanford’s position in English musical life was extremely powerful, yet none of his music is really present in the repertory. Frank Bridge (1879-1941) is held in high esteem among connoisseurs, but to many his is a name even less known than that of Stanford.

This traditional, condescending assessment of Elgar and his contemporaries suggests a problem of national perception. No matter how good English music may be, it cannot approach the heights of German music. Whether we like it or not, we think more like Schenker than we might wish. But precisely this persistent Schenkerian prejudice gives us an interesting insight into the tradition of British music. Tonight’s program suggests that England was not exempt from the search by composers from most non-German European countries in the late nineteenth century for a distinctive national voice in music. English composers, like their compatriots in other lands, often incorporated what they believed to be distinctly native sources and traditions in their art. In the English case, it was Anglo-Saxon and Irish. Stanford’s “Irish” Symphony is comparable to the symphonies of Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. In the effort to construct a distinctly national style, Frank Bridge’s Isabella is akin to the work of his French contemporary Claude Debussy. Elgar’s Sea Pictures can perhaps be set alongside the orchestral songs of Gustav Mahler, who, although German-speaking, understood himself as not essentially German. English music experienced the same impulse as other European musical movements of the time—to try to express in music a distinctive national heritage. In this sense, English music during the later nineteenth century took the same path as its continental counterparts outside of Germany. But in all these efforts, as the music on tonight’s program reveals, the compositional tradition and strategies identified by Schenker as German, left their indelible mark.

However, the English view of English culture—its perception of its national heritage—was exceptional. Consider the other cultural accomplishments in Britain that are contemporaneous with tonight’s works: the innovations of William Morris, John Ruskin, and the pre-Raphaelites in the visual arts and essays; the outstanding achievements in prose and poetry of Arnold, Browning, Tennyson, Hardy, and Wilde. England was also a dominant economic and imperial force, at the height of its power and conquest even though the rivalry of the French, Germans, and Americans was considerable. As Schenker slyly implied, the English, precisely because of their empire, appropriated everything in the world as their own. What he perceived as the derivative and imitative elements of British culture indicated for him a British impulse of absorption and mastery. Indeed, if Sullivan’s superb treatment of Mendelssohnian and Italianate traditions, or Bridge’s engagement with the Lisztian and post-Lisztian forms of symphonic essays inspired by poetic narratives are an indication, the British were indeed masters. But no British composer more quintessentially represented the British outlook than Elgar, whose work, despite its debt to German influences, reflects an idealized British character and optimism that perhaps never really existed but remains recognizable and resonant.

This certainty and security in Britain’s national identity may seem in the present era of post-colonial critique to express the arrogance often associated with imperialist nations. It has come to typify the popular perception of the Victorians. But in music it also had a related manifestation that suggests a more complicated relation to those cultures that presumed to eclipse British accomplishment. Elgar, for example, held a deep conviction that music was ultimately a universal language beyond national barriers. He may have been strongly influenced by Brahms, but in return he wished to impart the richness of his own heritage to the rest of Europe. Thus he himself commissioned translations of the English texts of Sea Pictures for French and German performances. Much of his greatest music was tied to Anglicanism and invested with considerable patriotism, but like many English contemporaries, he turned the pride of being citizens of the greatest empire on earth, the heirs of the language of Shakespeare, into a blithe embrace of the best of other national cultures and the offering of his own for others. In this respect, British musical culture in its eclecticism finds its real distinction. Unlike the composers literally on the periphery of Germany—the Czechs, the Polish, and even the French—as well as the American composers before the First World War, English composers were not concerned about the stylistic definition of their own identity as British. The political, economic, literary and scientific dominance of Britain made it, in the absence of a home-grown Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, take Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner to itself. Thus alongside British conceit one can sense in these composers a surprising receptiveness to ideas and a desire for exchange that at the time distinguished them from many nationalist composers on the continent. With the fading of the empire, this certainty also faded, resulting in an intense questioning and fear of “foreign influence,” but at least at this moment in time, these Victorians revealed a secure and successful approach to global music-making. The music on tonight’s program may reflect a hierarchy of values in which originality is subsumed by command of craft and refinement. It is well to remember that an allegiance to this credo marked the ambitions and achievements of two of Schenker’s favorites: Haydn and Brahms.

Opera Scandal 1920s

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Opera Scandal 1920s, performed on March 5, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The impetus for tonight’s program is the need to revisit the career of one of the twentieth century’s most influential composers. Paul Hindemith was one of the most prolific composers in recent history, as well as one of modernity’s most important teachers. Born near Frankfurt in 1895, he began his public career not only as a composer but also as an instrumentalist. He was an accomplished violinist who rose to the position of concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra at the age of twenty-two. But his real reputation as a performer came primarily with his turn to the viola, an instrument for which he wrote an enormous amount of music and on which he was one of the leading practitioners of the day. Hindemith also distinguished himself from the beginning as a composer. His principal teacher was Bernhard Sekles, the eminent German-Jewish composer.

Hindemith first burst onto the scene in the post-World War I period. He quickly came to be regarded as a leader of the post-War avant-garde, but the fame which he had acquired during the Weimar Republic came to haunt him when the regime changed in 1933. The Nazi campaign against “degenerate” music was directed not only at Jews but at modernists, the symbols of the progressive aesthetic experiments associated with the Weimar period. Despite his Aryan background and the nationalists’ celebration of him as a great German talent, Hindemith was not exempt from the Nazis’ ire, especially that of Joseph Goebbels. The Nazi attack contained more than one aspect of inconsistency. As the 1920s progressed, Hindemith’s accomplishments were increasingly in harmony with the right-wing call for a renewal of active music-making and of a national cultural revival based in populist amateurism, singing, and instrumental playing. This movement disparaged the arcane and oblique language of the avant-garde. Hindemith, who embraced the “new objectivity [neue Sachlichkeit],” held views that could have been perceived as compatible with this cultural agenda. In this sense his compositional ambitions went in a different direction from those pursued by the Berlin-based Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils. But despite all this, Hindemith’s reputation from the early 1920s as a radical and confrontational figure was not effaced. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler tried to intervene with the Nazi authorities on behalf of Hindemith. Furtwängler was convinced that Hindemith was the most important young composer of the age. In 1933 Hindemith occupied himself with writing the opera Mathis der Maler from which he also extracted a symphony. The first performance of the Mathis der Maler Symphony in 1934 in Berlin was a great success. However, Hindemith continued to be attacked and although Furtwängler went to great lengths to protect him (including an audience with Adolf Hitler), the composer was forced to emigrate.

In 1935 Hindemith found himself in Turkey, from whence he traveled to Switzerland. He ultimately emigrated to the United States. From 1940, he taught both at Tanglewood and at Yale University. Among his pupils were Easley Blackwood, Lukas Foss, and Harold Shapero. In his “American period,” which lasted until the early 1950s, Hindemith emerged as an extremely tough and conservative personality. He was not only legendarily hard on his pupils and critical of their abilities, but his music became more traditional in its ambitions. He struggled hard to maintain high standards of compositional craft against a tide of what he considered to be undisciplined fashion in the continuing avant-garde of the post-war era. As a result he published extensively on music theory and the art of composition. He called on performers and composers alike to command a formidable range of musical skills. By the end of the 1950s he moved back to Switzerland. He died suddenly in 1963.

In the near half-century that has elapsed since his death, most of Hindemith’s music has disappeared from the active repertory. His most performed orchestral works are the concerti he wrote for instruments for which the concerto literature is thin, such as horn and viola. Occasionally, one may find a performance of the Symphonic Metamorphoses after Themes by Weber (1943) or the Mathis der Maler Symphony (1934). But Hindemith’s long career was so evolutionary and varied that these great works provide only a partial view of this composer’s output and achievement. Tonight’s program focuses on the first period of his compositional development. To many observers it is precisely the early Hindemith, works written before Mathis der Maler, that is the most compelling. This phase of his career includes all of the Kammermusik pieces as well as the brilliant opera Cardillac (1926) and several other works for the stage, including Hin und zurück, Op. 45a (1927) and Neues vom Tage (1929).

The three one-act operas presented tonight catapulted Hindemith to notoriety. The last of these to be composed, Sancta Susanna, seemed so outrageous at the time that even as progressive a man as Fritz Busch declined to perform it. In middle age, Hindemith himself suppressed it. His is not the first case of a composer reconsidering the ethical and moral character of earlier works. In the 1960s Shostakovich brought his maturity to bear on the youthful bravado of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1932), for example. The source of anxiety in Sancta Susanna, however, was never the music, but the libretto. The same is true of the sadistic depiction of sexuality in Kokoschka’s play, which Hindemith set with minimal alteration, and of the cruel humor of Das Nusch-Nuschi, in which the comedic music contrasts sharply with the subject matter of castration and the orientalist depiction of an inhuman society and irrational fate. It may seem incredible to some of us today that these operas shocked audiences through their audacious subject matter.

But in order to understand why Hindemith was so deliberately scandalous, one must remember the historical moment of these operas’ composition. As Professor Giselher Schubert rightly points out, the 1920s was the time when a generation was staggered by the senseless brutality and carnage of World War I. The claims of reason, assertions of political ideologies, and high-minded moralizing of official religions inevitably provoked a pervasive cynicism when “civilized” Europe enthusiastically embraced a war that appeared to have little purpose or rationale. The rage at those in power and at the cultural values of the educated and elite classes who displayed such smug confidence in 1914 was palpable throughout Europe. It provided a source of profound artistic energy and ambition. The shock of Hindemith’s triptych, like many other works of the time, was an attempt to articulate the hypocrisy of the traditional beliefs that mandated such a catastrophic war. The operas force the issue of how such concepts as romantic love, fidelity, and spiritual obedience could possibly continue to be taken seriously. But as in all immediate responses to tragic destruction, when time passed and Hindemith’s world rebuilt itself, his early operas seemed to him unnecessarily stark and provocative, and he renounced them. Nevertheless, they remain musically brilliant, and provide a fascinating perspective on the early life and creativity of a great composer.

Psalm 21, v.5 (on music by F.J. Haydn) (1865)

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Jews and Vienna, City of Music, performed on Feb 8, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Salomon Sulzer was born in 1804 in Hohenems and died in 1890 in Vienna. He was the chief cantor (Oberkantor) of the Viennese Jewish community for nearly three quarters of a century. His career bridged the pre-1848 culture of Vienna and the late nineteenth-century period that was marked not only by Brahms and Bruckner, but by a massive Jewish immigration to the city that began in the late 1860s. Hired by the elite and privileged Jewish community of the late 1820s, Sulzer radically reformed the Jewish liturgy and created the basis of the Viennese rite that in turn influenced synagogue cantors all over the world. When Sulzer came to Vienna, he found a city in which Jews and non-Jews, particularly in the area of music, shared common public and private spaces. Sulzer was highly respected as a singer outside of his cantorial role and also taught at the Vienna Conservatory. He commissioned Schubert to set a psalm in Hebrew. He befriended Lizst, Meyerbeer, Paganini and Schumann. Sulzer also wrote secular music, setting the texts of the Austrian poet Nikolaus Lenau. Sulzer’s son Joseph, who helped edit later editions of Sulzer’s monumental compilation and arrangement of Jewish liturgical music, Schir Zion (Song of Zion), became principal cellist of the Vienna Philharmonic. Sulzer’s fame extended well beyond the confines of the Jewish community.

In order to understand this unusual and gifted man, it is important to note that the Habsburg monarchy, which in 1867 had become a dual monarchy because of the Austrian defeat by the Prussians, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, was until its dissolution, a dynastic enterprise. Its politics and culture were dominated by an Imperial presence and an aristocracy. The Emperor for most of Sulzer’s life was the venerable Franz Joseph, whose attitude toward Jews was benevolent. The Emperor (as the pro-monarchist and the nostalgic Austrian Jewish writer Joseph Roth never tired of reminding his readers), was distinctly resistant to anti-Semitism. He considered Jews to be his loyal subjects treated them like all the other cultural and national groups in his vast realm: all were equally subordinate. In return, the Jews of the monarchy revered the Emperor and Empire.

Loyalty to the Habsburgs, the imperial city, and pride in one’s Jewish faith were for Sulzer’s generation entirely compatible. This rare symbiosis is best exemplified in Sulzer’s music. The first work on the program is a bittersweet picture of the confidence his co-religionists felt as Habsburg subjects. It is sharp with irony for the modern listener. From Schir Zion, this is a setting of the Habsburg imperial anthem written by Franz Josef Haydn: “God Preserve the Emperor.” Sulzer intended it to be used in the Sabbath service, much in the same way as today in most reformed and conservative synagogues, there is a prayer for the United States of America and for the leaders of the government. Sulzer’s interpolation of a verse of a Hebrew psalm into his setting of the hymn resonates with the optimism and security of the integrated nineteenth-century Jews in Vienna. That this hymn was taken up in Nazi Germany does not delegitimize its prior history or its presence here. It is a grim reminder not of what might have been, but what should have been preserved.

The Hymn is followed by a setting of Psalm 111. The musical language is distinctly influenced by the style of early Romanticism of the generation of Schumann and of Schubert and Mendelssohn. The westernizing of what was at that time considered an “oriental” tradition, a Mediterranean if not Eastern religious faith transplanted into Europe, was pioneered by Sulzer and later in northern Germany by Lewandowski. It would of course come under fire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the rise of radical anti-Semitism in German-speaking Europe. The synthesis of Judaism and western culture that Sulzer personified came up against two currents widespread in later generations. His form of modernization and accommodation was challenged on one hand by the embrace of an Eastern European tradition, including Hassidism, as the authentic and uncorrupted tradition of Jewish autonomy and spirituality, and on the other hand by Zionism, which sought a political future for European Jews outside of Europe. But for many, including the great theorist (and practicing Jew) Heinrich Schenker, a friend of Joseph Sulzer and like Eduard Hanslick an admirer of Salomon Sulzer, Salomon Sulzer’s musicality and aesthetic were not concessions, but instead compelling symbols of Jewish achievement.

Jews and Vienna, City of Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Jews and Vienna, City of Music, performed on Feb 8, 2004 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Today’s program represents a collaboration with two exhibits, one in Vienna organized by the Jewish Museum of Vienna that opened in May 2003 as part of the Vienna Festival, and its English-language counterpart that has just opened at Yeshiva University Museum at the Center for Jewish History in New York. These exhibits chronicle the relationship between the Jews and the musical culture of the city of Vienna from the early nineteenth century through the period of emigration, deportation and murder that began in 1938 and ended in 1945. One of the most striking aspects of these exhibits is their demonstration of the diversity and multiplicity of identities that fall legitimately under the rubric “Jewish.” There were many responses among Jews over several generations to the challenges of integration, acculturation, and assimilation, and while this concert does not pretend to be comprehensive, all of the music you hear today bears a relation to the complex range of the Jewish experience in Vienna. Perhaps the most noticeable omission is in the massive arena of popular music and operetta. Viennese popular music, from the waltzes of Johann Strauss to the operettas of Emmerich Kálmán, was decisively influenced by the Jewish presence in the city. But assuming that many modern listeners are already familiar with the idealized vision of Vienna promoted by those genres, we have decided to concentrate on some of the more intriguing and complicated aspects of Jewish musical life on the banks of the Danube.

For instance, one Viennese Jew on this program did not consider himself a Jew at all. Franz Schreker (1878-1934) was a Catholic and perceived to be a Jew only by the Nazi definition. His case uncomfortably reminds us that sometimes our definition of who is a Jew bears the insidious influences of the views of anti-Semites. It is common to acknowledge that Ludwig Wittgenstein, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Franz Schreker were Jews when in fact from the vantage point of religious faith and communal membership they would be the last to so define themselves. Schreker, however, who had moved from Vienna to Berlin after World War I, was stripped of his position in 1933 and his work banned because of his Jewish origins, despite his perception of his own identity. Schreker had been perhaps the most successful composer of operas after Richard Strauss in central Europe, and he was a leading protagonist of a new modern music in the early twentieth century. Anti-Semitic critics of the early twentieth century and their Nazi successors, however, found something “Jewish” or exotic in Schreker’s music. Indeed, as Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern (neither of whom were Jewish) would discover, cosmopolitanism and modernism were already deemed “Jewish” phenomena in turn-of-the-century reactionary criticism—an ironic reversal of the logic proffered by Richard Wagner’s mid-nineteenth-century polemics concerning anti-Semitism and a music “of the future.”

The program opens with a Jewish composer and performer whose status as a Jew was beyond doubt: Salomon Sulzer (1804-1890), the chief cantor of Vienna and the leading figure in liturgical music. This robust declaration of Jewish identity is followed by a work by Anton Rubinstein (1829-1894), representing a historical complication of the issue. Anton Rubinstein, one of two famed brothers, was a great pianist and popular composer of the late nineteenth century. He was in no sense an “official Jew.” He was adored by the Viennese public. Eventually his popularity led to his appointment as Director of the Concerts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in the early 1870s, a position he would eventually turn over to Johannes Brahms upon deciding to devote more time to his international concert career. Rubinstein’s place on this program points to an important development in the demography and culture of Vienna from the late 1860s to the mid-1920s. When mobility and open access to residency was made possible by the constitutional reforms of 1867, the result was a steady influx of Jews from the eastern provinces of the Empire and from Russia. By 1900 the percentage of Jews in Vienna rose well above 10% of the total population. In terms of enrollment into the Conservatory and participation in music-making and concert attendance, by the time the most famous Jew in Viennese musical life, Gustav Mahler, took over the Court Opera in 1897 (an imperial appointment for which conversion was necessary), Jews made up arguably between one-third and one-half of the audience for concerts and opera. As the career of Rubinstein suggests, by the early decades of the twentieth century, the number of all Viennese, including the Jews who had actually been born in the city, constituted a minority. In this immigrant, polyglot, modern city, music thus became the crucial vehicle for creating an artificial cultural center, a common ground for the fashioning of a myth of a local tradition and authenticity. Membership in a shared culture bases on a myth that extended back to the era of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert was rendered plausible through music.

Karl Goldmark (1830-1915) represents the compromise between isolation and assimilation. He came from Hungary before the turmoils of 1848, but unlike Mahler or Schoenberg, he never converted. Furthermore, he maintained a synthesis in his music between the two warring aesthetic camps of Brahms and Wagner. Goldmark’s most famous work was in fact an opera of an essentially biblical, if not Jewish theme, The Queen of Sheba (1875), with a libretto by fellow Viennese Jew Salomon Mosenthal. Goldmark had a brilliant career and was highly respected throughout his long life. He was even sought out by the young Sibelius as a teacher.

The program concludes with a masterpiece by a great composer and conductor, the one-time lover of Alma Mahler, a friend, teacher, and brother-in-law of Schoenberg, the protagonist of a new generation of composition, and also a winner of the coveted Beethoven prize—a composer whose promise was acknowledged by the highly critical but decidedly philo-Semitic Johannes Brahms. Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) demonstrates a more obscure dimension of Vienna’s Jewish community. The dominant Jewish part of his family was Sephardic; he came of age in the large Turkish Sephardic synagogue in the second district on the Zirkusgasse. This was the same community in which the violinist Felix Galimir and his sisters were raised. Zemlinsky, however, became fully assimilated, and apart from some psalm settings, he made his name as a composer particularly of operas and vocal music. He enjoyed much of his career in Prague and Berlin but with the onset of fascism he was ultimately forced to emigrate, an elderly and nearly forgotten man. He died in obscurity and penury in Larchmont, NY in 1942, a few years after his arrival.

As the exhibits and this concert attempt to demonstrate, the idea of Vienna as a city of music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is unthinkable without acknowledging the participation of its Jewish citizens. The two figures most closely associated with this claim now certainly receive their share of performances in concert—Mahler and Schoenberg. It is only relatively recently that scholars and audiences have turned their attention to the effects of the destruction of the Viennese Jewish community and the persecution of many artists and composers, a process that began ominously with Austro-fascism after World War I and occurred decisively with the Anschluss of 1938. The record of Jewish contribution that was obliterated extended not only to composition, amateurism and audience participation, but also to music criticism, concert management, music education, and music publishing. In 1922, a famous book was published by a Viennese journalist Hugo Bettauer, who was born a Jew but like Schoenberg, converted to Protestantism as a young man. The book was entitled The City Without Jews: a Novel of the Day after Tomorrow. A kind of anti-utopian fantasy, the novel describes a Vienna without a Jewish population. Bettauer was assassinated in 1925, but his assassin was acquitted.

Bettauer’s prediction became a reality in the 1940s. In comparison to its previous history, postwar Vienna was a sterile, dreary place. Indeed for years after the war, the few surviving Jews who sought to return were not made to feel welcome. There was no decisive postwar engagement in Vienna with its and Austria’s enthusiastic participation in the activities of the Nazis against the Jews. The acceptance by Vienna’s conservative audience of Leonard Bernstein in the 1970s marked an awkward and ambivalent beginning to the opening up of the past. Today there has been some remarkable work done by Austrian scholars and institutions on behalf of those who were persecuted and forgotten. This concert and exhibits are dedicated to the achievements of the past as well as to the efforts of new generations who have fought during the past two decades, not only to recover the historical facts but to restore to the concert stage the works of composers whose careers were irreparably damaged and cut short. Their ambition is to make it impossible to sentimentalize Vienna as the city of “Wine, Women, and Song” without recognizing both the Jewish contribution and the fate of the Jews. If this sounds like an overstatement, consider that when the Nazis entered Vienna in 1938, one of their first actions was to falsify certain records of baptism and marriage in the city’s cathedral, St. Stephen’s. The Nazis knew very well that Johann Strauss, the composer of that quintessential emblem of Vienna, the “Blue Danube” Waltz (1867) by Nazi law had to be defined as a Jew. Is there a more compelling example of the vicious distortions of Nazi anti-Semitism than the altering of the Catholic Church’s records in order to preserve the Viennese spirit as an “Aryan” achievement? The joint project of the exhibits and performances in New York and in Vienna represents one step in a long overdue effort to reconstruct the historical debt Vienna owes to its Jewish population of the past.

The Neoclassical Mirror

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Neoclassical Mirror, performed on Nov 21, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

As time passes, our perception of past events undergoes revision, and sometimes a discrepancy emerges between the self-conceptions of the notable protagonists of history and our retrospective assessment of their accomplishments. Reputations and aesthetic judgments change dramatically, constantly recasting the significance and value of principal actors in history. Of the composers represented on tonight’s program, two died after World War II in relative obscurity. Respected by their contemporaries, both Leó Weiner and Ernst von Dohnányi ultimately ended their careers in the shadows of their more prominent countrymen, Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály. But today, Kodály’s achievement has receded into the background, though the music of Bartók has remained central to twentieth-century repertory. Of our three composers, Igor Stravinsky is clearly the best known. But even in his case, his achievements, once thought akin to those of Picasso in their breadth, variety and consistent brilliance, no longer play such an overwhelmingly dominant role in our conception of the history of music in the last century. As time recedes, we discover attributes and achievements we have overlooked. The works of Dohnányi and Weiner constitute striking discoveries.

The irony in observing the changing reputations of these composers rests in the fact that they themselves were obsessed with history and their place within a tradition of musical composition. This concert explores an impulse on the part of many composers from the first half of the twentieth century to come to terms with the legacy left by composers before them, particularly those who dominated the golden age of nineteenth-century romanticism. Neoclassicism is a term often loosely applied to a wide range of artistic strategies. In the first instance, it describes precisely a tendency in musical composition that took hold between the two World Wars. It is thus used here to describe a particular view of history, through which these composers defined their work. Neoclassicism, or the deliberate use of antique models in music that predate romanticism, represented a critical reaction by these composers to their own culture and historical period, and had much broader philosophical implications than one might at first think. In all cases, neoclassicism can be understood as a reaction to modernity. Indeed, the astringent, crystalline clarity of the textures employed by Stravinsky and Weiner mirror a sound ideal characteristic of modernity: direct, non-reverberant, clean and almost reminiscent of the directional focus of a loudspeaker, as opposed to the reverberant acoustic space of a nineteenth-century opera house.

In order to grasp what it was about the nineteenth century that affected them so deeply, we need to confront how that century itself used history. That pattern is most clearly revealed in the example of architecture, for today we can still see how nineteenth-century buildings are often based on styles of design and decoration adapted from Greco-Roman classicism, the baroque and the Renaissance. Late nineteenth-century buildings can look like temples, medieval buildings, or baroque and Renaissance palaces, but they are larger, grander, more opulent. They are triumphs of modern construction technology. And what were the functions of these grand buildings? They were not really temples or palaces, but the banks, houses of parliament, stock exchanges, concert halls, and apartment buildings that line the major boulevards of European and American cities. Antiquity and tradition were used to glorify not the past but the future; to lend a sense of endurance and legitimacy to these monuments that embodied progress and technology. In the nineteenth century, the dominant spirit was one of pride in achievements of science and industry, a conscious sense of living in a “modern” age that was the high point of civilization. The use of historical models was therefore never a matter of slavish imitation, but rather, an appropriation of history into the triumph of modern progress.

In music, the Romantics from the early part of the century, particularly Schumann and Mendelssohn, could admire Beethoven and Bach to the point of obsession, but they always saw themselves as innovators, not imitators. They did not copy from models; they experimented with inherited forms, such as the sonata and symphony. But the most radical assertion of the priority of modernity came with Richard Wagner. His interpretation of Beethoven epitomized the perspective of the second half of the nineteenth century. He expounded a progressive theory of aesthetic development with an almost Hegelian notion of how history and progress interconnect. For him the art of the future, although the necessary result of history, must be greater than the art of the past.

In this way, the idea of progress in commerce and science worked their way into the arts. As a result, new instruments were invented, better pianos were designed, and new acoustical standards were formulated. The music written for the operatic stage and concert hall achieved a comparable monumentality and novelty in scale and sound to the buildings of Paris, London, and Vienna after 1850. A similar scale, innovation, and density are reflected in the rise of giant prose novels such as those by Tolstoy, Eliot, and Gottfried Keller.

This notion of progress involved a distinct shift in aesthetic ambition on the part of composers. In the eighteenth century, beauty and goodness in the ethical sense were thought to be closely related. Moral duty, like art, was not only a matter of form, but explicitly aligned with what was alluring and sublime, making beauty a species of truth. Astonishment as a result of an aesthetic experience could be an act of moral recognition. In the nineteenth century, what was beautiful began to be separated from universal ideals of goodness and truth, and music began to veer away from formalism. Music came to be seen as an instrument of human consciousness, an expression of individual meaning rather than a demonstration of some external truth. Musical communication was powered by intense expressiveness and emotional impact on the listener. Successful music was expected to transport the listener out of the mundane. Music emerged as an instrument of individual and collective subjective consciousness, which is why it could be appropriated by nationalism. Consequently, instrumental music began regularly to suggest an emotionally evocative storyline and to use hyperbolic gestures and spectacle to help engage the listener’s sympathies, much like the larger-than-life cinema of today, which takes a comparable pride in technological progress and innovation. The sheer power and intensity of late nineteenth-century musical emotionalism even influenced Johannes Brahms, who was deeply suspicious of the Wagnerian celebration of the new and the monumental. But all this came to an abrupt end with the outbreak of World War I. Two of the last of these highly charged, epically proportioned compositions were Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, which premiered in 1913, and Stravinsky’s The Firebird (1910).

After 1918, the idea of progress seemed implausible. Although Stravinsky never lost his admiration for his great compatriots Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, their musical strategies seemed exhausted and obsolete. Stravinsky and Weiner both felt the nineteenth century had taken the wrong path by making music dependant upon subjective and transitory extramusical frameworks, rather than on the more significant and enduring potential autonomy of art and consciousness. They found themselves attracted to an idea that preceded the Romantic age, an idea that music could be linked to objective notions of beauty and truth, and therefore emancipated from the ephemera of the historical moment. That belief itself was a vibrant response to contemporaneity. Both composers became concerned with the logic of music and its formal implications as an independent system of expression, distinct from any visual or literary narrative. Yet they rejected late nineteenth-century aestheticism with its narcissistic ideology of “art for art’s sake.” Rather, they aspired to the aesthetic values of Haydn and Mozart, who shared the notion that there was some parallel between aesthetics and ethics. Both Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto and Weiner’s Concertino reflect two twentieth-century neoclassical ambitions. The first was to rehabilitate music’s capacity to speak as music in a formalist sense and to direct the listener away from symbolism or narration. The second was to use an almost miniaturist historical model to puncture the nineteenth century’s artistic hubris.

These two works suggest some irony, and even satirical humor. Both composers reveal an unmistakable originality as they appropriate and adapt the past. In these works they try to fashion artworks adequate to a notion of modernity that is independent of any claim of technological progress. At the same time, there is little doubt that the music mirrors the experience in space and time of modernity, particularly its pace. But novelty and grand scale are not prized for their own sakes. Indeed, the works aptly demonstrate one of the hallmarks of this post-war era of neoclassicism: a reaction of almost ascetic leanness and transparency. These two works emphatically reverse the Wagnerian premise that small forces and pre-Romantic musical forms were obsolete.

There was of course a wide range of reactions against the extremes of romanticism. Weiner and Stravinsky chose to return to what they felt was the source: the Classical and Baroque eras. Others, however, sought a different source entirely; namely, atonalism and radically progressive experimentalism. Edgard Varése, the futurists, George Antheil and Charles Ives are examples. Stravinsky and Weiner were in no way less modern, but they felt they were acting as correctives. But many contemporaries saw them as deeply conservative. Even so, these composers cannot be called reactionary or nostalgic. They did not reject the world after 1918, nor did they idealize the earlier ages. For them, history provided the best means for commenting on the modern world, and for retaining a critical perspective on the spirit of the age. By rejecting the arrogance of the nineteenth century that had led to unprecedented destruction, they sought to chart a new path.

Ernst von Dohnányi, however, represents a different view. His neoclassicism was the result of his steadfast allegiance to the accomplishments of the nineteenth century. Weiner and Stravinsky used sources from classical and baroque music composed before the Romantic era, but Dohnányi saw himself as an exponent of the best of late nineteenth-century music-making—not of a Wagnerian kind, but in the tradition of Brahms. For the young Dohnányi, Brahms was a seminal figure. Dohnányi’s early music is a kind of homage to Brahms and reveals a profound mastery of the Brahmsian tradition. Brahms was as obsessed with history as anyone in the late nineteenth century, but he did not possess the Wagnerian optimism about progress. Brahms was an avid historian of music, and deeply interested in baroque and Renaissance repertoire. He shared with Wagner a strong sense of his own historical contribution, but unlike Wagner he did not believe himself to represent the starting point of a new age. Indeed Brahms felt himself to be the last exponent of a dying tradition of great composition.

Dohnányi was best known in his lifetime not as a composer, but as a pianist and conductor. As a composer, he remains staunchly conservative and rooted in the language of music he learned early in his career. His First Symphony of 1900 is one of the great examples of the Romantic symphony. The work on tonight’s program is written in somewhat the same vein, although composed much later. But it is important to note (and this links him to Stravinsky) that in the context of momentous political and economic changes around him, Dohnányi wrote a work that includes an homage to Bach. However, unlike Stravinsky’s use of Bach, the last movement of Dohnányi’s symphony is more reminiscent of Reger’s use of counterpoint and history, or Brahms’s “Variations on a Theme of Handel.” Dohnányi’s work is a plea not to reject romanticism, but to retain its significance. Unlike Weiner and Stravinsky, it is not a reinvention of the eighteenth century, but a defense of the late-nineteenth. It is not a work of critical neoclassicism, but an affirmation of continuities with the recent past. Its neoclassism, from the perspective of the mid-1950s when it was completed, expresses itself in the assertion that Brahms was himself a classical model and that all the fashions of the twentieth century—experimentalism, atonality, astringent neoclassicism, and folkloric nationalism—are not the art of the future because they represent superficial distortions of the great compositional traditions of Western concert music.

Unfortunately for Dohnányi, the composition of his Second Symphony occurred at a time when such assertions of continuity and affirmation of late nineteenth-century aesthetics could not be posited without the implication of awkward and difficult political overtones. Unlike those of the other two composers on tonight’s program, Dohnányi’s politics have consistently remained a subject of controversy. Of Weiner’s politics we know very little except that he lived and worked under several regimes, including (like Kodály) the Cold War under communism. He had always been, perhaps primarily, a great teacher. Among his most distinguished pupils was Fritz Reiner, one of the few conductors to perform his work. Stravinsky’s politics are better known. They were marked by anti-communism and later in life, religiosity. But of Dohnányi, unresolved questions abound. While composing the first draft of the Second Symphony, he was living and working in fascist Hungary, even when the dictator Salaszi came to power and when Eichmann, with the assistance of the Hungarians, began to liquidate the Jewish community of Budapest. Dohnányi was seen by many as a collaborator. In the immediate aftermath of the war, he fled to Austria where he encountered suspicion from the Allied Administration that he had been a nazi sympathizer (even though his son had been executed in Germany on suspicion of conspiring against Hitler). If one believes the shockingly pro-fascist and profoundly racist biography by his second wife, Ilona von Dohnányi, A Song of Life (recently reissued by Indiana University Press without any attempt to point out obvious factual errors and misstatements), Dohnányi, unlike Bartók, indeed failed to distinguish between the good and the evil. However, he was not a collaborator even in the sense that Strauss had been. Even through the tainted lens of the repellant perspective of his widow, Ernst von Dohnányi turns out at best to have been a hapless figure, naïvely imperceptive of his current historical moment.

Dohnányi eventually ended up in Florida and was on the brink of a comeback as a pianist at the time of his death. Of all three composers, his life was perhaps the most tragic. His deep attachment to history did not assist him in understanding the events of his own life. In attempting to disengage his music from politics and the characteristics of the moment, he fell headlong into them, perhaps showing quite poignantly the impossibility of ever composing music that is completely without politics. One could argue therefore that although his Symphony was at one time properly considered old-fashioned and nostalgic, it actually comments upon the age in which he lived. Like most forms of nostalgia, its rebellion against the present is among its most powerful and revealing aspects. In this sense the musical language of Dohnányi’s youth, resisted by the composer in his later years, sounds to us perfectly appropriate to express the anguish of his maturity.

The Artist’s Conscience

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Artist’s Conscience, performed on Sep 28, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Many of our preconceptions about music as an art form date from the late eighteenth century, when music-making in the courts and urban centers in its secular forms achieved high intellectual and social prestige. This period in music history has come to be known as the Classical era. The term classicism seems appropriate. First, music in the age of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven thrived in the context of a rebirth of interest in classical architecture, philosophy, and literature. This intense preoccupation with Greco-Roman culture and art was associated with the Enlightenment, an age traditionally (but not altogether accurately) linked to the cause of reason, empiricism, and a conscious modeling of thought and ideas on the ideals of antiquity. The Enlightenment was also the age of the American and French Revolutions, a period when ideals of democracy and freedom as rational objectives flourished. The second justification for calling late-eighteenth-century music “classical” is that western secular art music was a relatively younger sibling to painting and literature. Comparative history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often paralleled the founding phase of late-eighteenth-century music to Pericles’ Greece and Cicero’s Rome.

Part of the logic for this comparison was classical music’s assertion of a universal aesthetic, of normative values and standards. The rules of musical composition were thought to be objective and naturally evident, as it were. For example, the organization of pitch and the system of western tonality were understood as inherently logical and indicative of proper formal procedures and compositional structure. What constituted good and bad music, the beautiful or sublime and the ugly or vulgar, were not merely matters of taste or prejudice; they were fixed categories deduced from prescribed aesthetic practices. But as the nineteenth century progressed, this notion of a rational, objective aesthetic and a universal language of music was met with increasing skepticism. An important source of this skepticism derived from nationalist movements that used culture as politics. Nationalists favored the specific and peculiar attributes of a constructed community (usually defined by a mythic and endangered rural past) as the basis of deciding what was valid in musical expression. Music for these nationalist schools of composition was no longer based on a universal paradigm. There was a new objective in the expression of a singular ethnicity or culture. This tendency was strong both in smaller nationalist groupings under the thumb of larger powers as well as in the leading imperial nation states of Europe. The challenge to the ideal of a universal, rational aesthetic was also a hallmark of romanticism in which the unusual and original were prized. The exercise of freedom and subjectivity marks the achievement of the hero of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (1868). Walther, in his “Prize Song,” renders music truly expressive for his contemporaries by breaking all the rules. By the end of the nineteenth century, nationalism and a late-romantic sensibility in music dominated the concert stage, the dance hall, and the theater in both opera and operetta.

Romantic music, favored by the urban elites in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg and Milan, is often richly textured, lush, and highly chromatic. In orchestral and choral music, large forces and long durations became the rule. This was, in part, the legacy of a reaction against the austere rationality of classicism. However, late-nineteenth-century romanticism was itself destined to become the object of attack by subsequent generations. In the twentieth century, in the wake of the carnage of World War I, the poverty and suffering of the Great Depression, the inhumanities of World War II, and the anxiety generated by the atomic age and the Cold War, the excessive emotionalism associated with romantic music seemed trivial, artificial and self-indulgent. There was also growing concern among composers during the first half of the twentieth century about commercial and popular music. There was too much “easy listening” music that seemed derivative and manipulative. This debate raised an important issue for composers who sought to reconcile their art with their political beliefs. They worried about the ways in which a public art form like music could be used for good or evil in a social and cultural system that seemed at best utterly mundane, and at worst responsible for egregious horror and suffering. In other words, many socially-conscious composers were confronted with the following question: how could music inspire the public to resist oppression and intolerance or to instill ethical responsibility into modern life? Conversely, how might their music, composed in the name of beauty and aesthetic standards, inadvertently support political regimes like Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, or Stalin’s Russia?

Thus in the last century, aesthetic choices often became explicitly political and philosophical. At the same time, composers in the early decades of that century searched for a way out of the shadow of Richard Wagner and his followers. Wagner after all was a perfect example of how uncomfortable the connection between aesthetics and politics could be. Debussy, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg in their own respective ways drifted back toward the ideals of classicism. In doing so they offered an implicit denial of the dubious achievements of modernity. They adopted an aesthetic that predated the French Revolution and romanticism and even the Age of Enlightenment. In the 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg developed an entirely new system of music, the twelve-tone method. This self-referential construct of how pitch is organized offered composers a way to compose that was free of any express complicity with the evils of contemporary society. The twelve-tone method was for Schoenberg the equivalent of the classical rules of composition that late romanticism had abandoned. A new rational, universal aesthetic that defended the aesthetic and ethical autonomy of music could be asserted. Schoenberg’s modernist innovation, precisely because of its rational structure and novelty, became closely associated with anti-fascism. His disassociation from the luxuriant indulgences of Wagner and romantic traditionalists was a vivid refutation of the official aesthetic of fascist Germany and Austria; his intense, nonconformist music became a symbol for artistic and social freedom. Radical modernism in music became synonymous with the spirit of resistance to oppression.

The two composers on today’s program are two undisputed giants of this tradition of modernism. They are also two of the greatest Italian composers of the twentieth century. The older of the two was Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975). He was in his twenties when, after years of enthusiasm for Wagner, he discovered Debussy. By the early 1930s he had become aware of the Viennese school associated with Schoenberg and his two most prominent disciples, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Dallapiccola, not unlike many well-intentioned European intellectuals, held a relatively mild and sympathetic view of Mussolini in the early 1930s. But he later became a staunch opponent of fascism. He was horrified by the Spanish Civil War, anti-Semitism and the war in Ethiopia.

In the aftermath of World War II, Dallapiccola’s politics and aesthetics became entirely integrated. He used the twelve-tone method of composition as a basis for his work. He sought to express through music a profound anxiety concerning the state of liberty and the human condition in the contemporary world. It is important to note that Dallapiccola’s engagement with Neoclassicism was already audible before World War II, yet Dallapiccola’s reputation as an important composer in the history of music stems from the works he wrote after 1939.

Dallapiccola is to Italian modern music what Alban Berg was to modernism in Central and Eastern Europe. His work combines a palpable emotionalism and individuality with the new techniques spearheaded by Schoenberg and adapted by Webern. It was a highly personal and charged mode of expression, particularly evidenced by the libretti and music of his operas Il prigioniero (1948) and Ulisse (1968). Dallapiccola’s spirit is partly mirrored by the philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their famous book The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The character of Odysseus figures prominently. His story is used both by Adorno and Horkheimer, and by Dallapiccola to challenge the conceits of reason and progress, of romanticism and the Enlightenment.

The first of the Dallapiccola works on today’s program, Canti di prigionia (1941) was written during the war, to texts from victims of oppression and arbitrary political power: the Scottish queen Mary Stuart, the philosopher Boethius, and the Florentine priest Savonarola who was burned at the stake. Incidentally, Dallapiccola himself was a long-time resident of Florence. The second, more optimistic, Canti di liberazione, completed in 1955, suggests the more reflective and interior dialogue characteristic of the generation of writers in France and Italy after the war, particularly Albert Camus and Eugenio Montale.

These works should, for the listener, justify a comparison between Dallapiccola and Berg. Like Wozzeck (1925) and Lulu (1937), Dallapiccola’s works are searing and powerful musical representations of the contradictions and sufferings peculiar to individuals in the twentieth century. Today, at the moment these works are being performed, it is perhaps not too excessive to suggest that American democracy is itself in a precarious state. Our freedoms in the post 9/11 environment are threatened by fear, the politics of fundamentalist religion and mass apathy. In the place of a healthy political debate we remain as a culture stimulated only by commercial entertainment. How else can we explain the continuing appearance of second-rate movie stars as political hopefuls? Perhaps we might take some inspiration from the integrity and unsettling beauty of Dallapiccola’s vision of the possibilities of freedom and his setting of the voice of the oppressed.

If politics played an important part in Dallapiccola’s evolution as a composer, they were the overriding element in Luigi Nono’s career. Nono (1924-1991) was twenty years Dallapiccola’s junior and died sixteen years after Dallapiccola. He was deeply influenced by Bruno Maderna and his evolution as a composer can be compared to contemporaries in post-war France and Germany, such as Boulez and Stockhausen. Nono saw in the second Viennese school the ideal synthesis of high aesthetic values and political virtue. He accepted its utility as a force against fascism and capitalism. Unlike Boulez, Nono never acquired the reputation he deserved in the United States; until relatively recently, his work was rarely performed in this country. My own first encounter with the work of Nono came through a strange circumstance when I was seventeen years old in the mid-1960s. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was asked for some inexplicable reason to be the official guide and host to a visiting painter, the Italian Emilio Vedova. He spoke no English and I spoke no Italian, but the three days I spent with him left a lasting impression. Language did not prevent Vedova from urgently communicating his thought that I should look into the music of his friend Luigi Nono. For Vedova, Nono represented the ideal integration of modernity with the politics of conscience and aesthetic inspiration. Nono was a member of the Communist Party; hence the rarity of his music in America. Indeed, one of the reasons the Arnold Schoenberg Archives, when they left the University of Southern California, ended up in Vienna (something Schoenberg himself probably would have viewed with horror) was that the daughter of Schoenberg was married to Luigi Nono. Nuria Schoenberg Nono may have harbored a long-term resentment against the United States for the obstacles it caused even in allowing Nono to visit this country.

Nono’s political radicalism went much further than Dallapiccola’s, but precisely this political commitment led Nono to experiment in modes of musical expression that went well beyond the mid-twentieth-century twelve-tone style. Very few of Nono’s works from the 1960s and 1970s are divorced from an engagement with the figures and events of the time, whether they be the Cuban Revolution, Malcolm X, or Latin American politics. Nono retained constant admiration for the radical philosophical and political theorists of German-speaking Europe including Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Bertolt Brecht, and Walter Benjamin.

The works by Nono on today’s program date from the 1950s and focus on the events of the Spanish Civil War. For the generations of both Dallapiccola and Nono, the Spanish Civil War assumed a symbolic importance as the pivotal moment in history when the civilized world that celebrated freedom and reason and the ideals of the Enlightenment could have proved itself to be true to itself and failed. Today’s revisionist views of Franco and the Spanish Republic notwithstanding, for Nono and his contemporaries, the Spanish Civil War represented a good and just cause that unmasked the hypocrisy of the western world. There have been many literary and artistic celebrations of the heroism of the defenders of the Spanish Republic and the horror at their defeat and destruction. Picasso and Casals are two of the most famous defenders of the Republican cause. The Epitaffi are the musical equivalent of Picasso’s Guernica.

The works on today’s program were intended by their composers to be more than depictions or reactions to past and present. These composers wanted to create works that could serve as a shock, a call to resist the consolidation of economic and political power in the hands of the few. In their view, art needed to inspire citizens to protect themselves against the suppression of freedom in the name of order and church and state authority. For both Dallapiccola and Nono, the answer to the question posed earlier of how to make one’s music relevant to and participatory in the social and political realities that influence every other aspect of life, is to offer highly personalized and riveting musical fabrics. Listeners may disagree and even object to their politics, but there is little doubt that the idealism and the ethical character of their aspirations are beyond reproach. Their music was designed to transform the listening experience. For them, music is never merely a matter of entertainment or cultural condescension. The concert experience should be one in which music and art serve the task of awakening in listeners a sense of value and significance as actors in the public realm. The works on today’s program affirm the possibility of each of us to stand up against uniformity, passivity, the absence of liberty, and the intolerance imposed not only from above, but from our fellow citizens.

The Circle of Shostakovich

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Circle of Shostakovich, performed on April 11, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

One of the most intriguing and confusing eras in the history of music occurred between the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the outbreak of World War II in Europe in 1939. In these two decades, the life of the artist, especially of the musician in Russia, was transformed. The vibrant tradition of composition and performance that had flourished during the last decades of the Czarist regime in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and indeed throughout the Russian empire, was forced to accommodate new political conditions. These conditions were unprecedented not only in ideological terms with the advent of Communism, but in terms of the personal judgments, methods and ambitions of the political leadership concerning the development of social consciousness through art.

Unlike many of its Western national counterparts, the new Soviet utopia did not perceive art and culture as peripheral or subsidiary. Quite to the contrary, the arts served multiple social functions. First, they were potently symbolic of collective human aspiration, primary vehicles for the expression of secular hope and idealism. Second, their cultivation was a tangible reflection of the progress of Socialism. Since the establishment of the first truly socialist government was supposedly a historically progressive step, the government initially sought to encourage art expressing the triumph of Socialism, art embodying a progressive rather than nostalgic spirit. Third, art was a medium for balancing the national and the international. It could proudly exhibit Russian artistic distinction and yet reach out to people of other nations, particularly the Proletariat. Art was the voice of Russia, communicating an ideal vision of a classless solidarity to the rest of the world. It was art for the common populace.

Ironically, however, this Soviet policy for the arts was enacted precisely at a moment in history when the arts across the Western World were relishing their radicalism and their break with tradition and convention, a movement we now identify as Modernism. The task of reconciling these two seemingly disparate aesthetic and political agendas presented a daunting challenge to Soviet artists. The revolutionary idea they were trying to represent in their work was supposed to promote the end of radical inequalities in political power and wealth, but this parallel revolution in the arts seemed to move in precisely the opposite direction, favoring an elite by privileging an aesthetic that the broader population found incomprehensible. By the end of the 1930s, therefore, the political requirements of the state explicitly stipulated a form of socialist Realism for the arts. In music, that meant a predisposition toward transparency and conservative harmonic and rhythmic strategies. Soon, the demand for an “official” art compatible with the state’s ideals grew into an attack on musical Modernism and what would be decried as “Formalism,” the making of art for art’s sake, or for the narcissistic, individualistic bourgeois conceits of the artist rather than for the education of the masses.

Within this framework, the chronology of the interaction between the Soviet state and its artists makes for terrifying study. Of those initial moments in the 1920s, when despite severe economic hardships there was a remarkable flourishing of experimentation, and the notion reigned of a progressive art for a progressive politics, there is no better symbolic example than the competition for the design of Lenin’s Tomb, that famous icon in Red Square. This utterly austere building stands as a monument to an ascetic, linear Modernism, placed in stark opposition to the walls of the Kremlin and the elaborate traditional architecture of its interior, the late nineteenth century arcade on the other side (later Gum), and St. Basil’s Cathedral. It is a striking comment on the early aspirations to reconcile Modernism and Communism. But Lenin’s death in 1924 marked the beginning of the end of this fragile symbiosis. The experimentalism represented by the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), the constructivist and modernist painters Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) and Natalia Goncharova (1881-1962), the director Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940), with whom both Popov and Shostakovich worked, had its parallel in music with composers like Alexander Mosolov (1900-1973), and Nicolai Roslavets (1881-1944). This modernist enthusiasm was in part a reaction against the academicism of an older generation of composers who continued to write in a very traditional idiom after the revolution, such as Nicolai Miaskovsky (1881-1950), Reinhold Gliere (1875-1956), and Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936). This Russian experimentalism of the 1920s was also seen as an alternative to another kind of experimentalist Modernism associated with that outspoken critic of Communism, Igor Stravinsky, and the development of atonality and the twelve-tone system, not to speak of Neoclassicism in Western Europe.

But this romance with the new was short-lived. As the government subsidized theaters, schools, publishing houses, orchestras, and opera houses, and supported formal organizations of composers and artists, it became acutely aware of and preoccupied with the relationship between the making of art and potential political criticism of dissent. That fear quickly eclipsed any desires for a coherency between Modernism and new political ideals. By the time Stalin solidified his power, what would become a Soviet pattern of internal criticism and the imposition of politically proper aesthetics was already being formulated. This was followed by a purging of dissonant artists by Stalin, which took the lives of many prominent writers, musicians, and artists. Between 1917 and 1939 there was a steady emigration from the Soviet Union that included Glazunov as well as younger talents including Vladimir Horowitz and Nathan Milstein. Western Europe and America became the beneficiaries of an ever-growing group of émigrés who joined an earlier generation of exiles. Russian artist expatriates believed that the necessary freedom for artistic integrity could not exist in post-revolutionary Russia.

This concert focuses on three composers who, during the 1930s, came to grips with the rapid transformation of the Soviet artist’s condition from optimism to oppression. Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) and Gavriil Popov (1904-1972) came of age as young artists immediately after the Revolution. They represented the first new generation of socialist Russian artists. They were profoundly enthusiastic during the 1920s about what seemed to be a utopian system of patronage and encouragement. Some of Shostakovich’s greatest music was written during this period of idealism and possibility, including his opera The Nose. But as the wind turned colder, survival and conscience became locked in an irreconcilable conflict. Shostakovich, the man and his music, would be marked all his life by the contradiction between “official” artist and private person. Debates still rage concerning the relation between his music and his ambiguous political position. In the 1930s he was severely chastised and then adjusted, but came in for considerable criticism again after World War II. When one looks back on Shostakovich’s career, he was triumphant as an official artist, the winner of numerous Stalin prizes and a holder of key positions. Indisputably the greatest of the Soviet era composers, he was not, however, the most enthusiastically official. He carried his political obligations with considerable discomfort (unlike many of his celebrated contemporaries, including Khrennikov, Khachaturian, and Kabalevsky). If he buckled under the pressure exerted by Stalin, who seemed to have had a very clear idea of appropriate music for the socialist state, it does not make the matter of figuring out what Shostakovich really believed any easier. At the end of his career he joined a long list of prominent artists and musicians condemning Andrei Sakharov.

Like Shostakovich’s controversial opera Lady MacBeth of Mtensk (which was suppressed), Gavriil Popov’s Symphony No. 1 was initially condemned and withdrawn, only to be briefly reinstated after its first performance and then once again consigned to obscurity. It was not revived until Perestroika in the late 1980s. But unlike Shostakovich, Popov never discovered a way to carry on with the promise that this remarkable symphony shows. The bold and innovative character of the First Symphony seems to find no further expression in Popov’s later work. He had a career and won prizes, but his music never regained its claim to real distinction. Perhaps the intervention of state and the atmosphere of terror and constraint permanently damaged this remarkable talent. This Symphony, considered Popov’s masterpiece, dates from the waning years of aesthetic freedom and experimentation in Soviet Russia.

If Popov can be considered a victim of the system whose one great work was an inspiration to Shostakovich, and if Shostakovich can be viewed as a genius who found a means to reconcile success in the Soviet system with the writing of great music throughout his career, then the third composer on tonight’s program, the equally famous Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953 [ironically he died on the same day as Stalin]) is still the most enigmatic of the three. Prokofiev voluntarily returned to Soviet Russia from the West during the 1930s at Stalin’s invitation, when the dictator’s policies and practices were well understood. Prokofiev had acquired a great career and reputation in the West, yet he chose to return, and his first wife would end up spending many years in prison as a result. Prokofiev apparently had no difficulty in composing official music in praise of Stalin. The last years of his career from 1930 to his death saw him write some of his greatest works. Like Shostakovich, Prokofiev seemed to thrive under Stalin. That is not to say that everything was especially easy for Prokofiev. To his credit, he was one of Popov’s staunchest defenders, pushing to have the First Symphony performed in the West and defending the work against its Soviet critics. Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 4, commissioned by a wealthy Westerner, Paul Wittgenstein, actually premiered in the West under the baton of Martin Rich three years after Prokofiev’s death. Unlike Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony, but like Popov’s First, it never maintained a public presence the Soviet era.

Though we can never know everything that happened during those dark years of Stalin’s artistic agenda, we can certainly draw some intriguing conclusions. As Popov’s symphony reveals, there is an enormous wealth of composition by composers whose names are still unfamiliar to the West. What wonderful works are still waiting to be re-examined? We tend to think that the political context was so reprehensible that it stifled creativity, but perhaps there was more to it than that. An abundance of fine music is now being discovered, written by individuals whose opportunity to be heard outside of Russia was restricted both by Soviet authorities and Western prejudices against the Soviet Union. Because of the Cold War, there are over sixty years of music-making to which we have not been exposed and through which we must sift in order to have a truly comprehensive account of what was clearly, despite all its constraints, a great age of music-making in Russia. We certainly recall Oistrakh and Richter, among other great Soviet performers, without remembering that there was an equally vibrant subculture in composition that extends beyond the famous names.

When we, in the post-Cold War and postmodernist environment, encounter the music of Shostakovich or Prokofiev from the 1930s and 1940s, there are many ways in which we can choose to hear it. For some it is merely a form of neoclassical, twentieth-century music, and for others, simplistic nationalist expression. Some may argue that there is encoded meaning that lies underneath the officially sanctioned surface. Are we entitled to hear sarcasm, irony, parody, and despair within these lively forms? Was music in the hands of these masters a subversive art placed in an uneasy, surreptitious relationship with the state?

There is no doubt that as we continue to historicize the twentieth century, Shostakovich and Prokofiev will retain their prominence as we seek to understand and evaluate their music. The presence of the Popov reminds us how much there is to learn and to know now that the veil of secrecy has been lifted from recent Russian history. It has often been observed that instrumental music is one art that not only can survive intact but flourish under conditions of repression and censorship. The works on tonight’s program exemplify this fact, and the inclusion of Popov’s unfamiliar work starkly reminds us of the aesthetic inferences and concerns that Shostakovich and Prokofiev were forced to engage. All three works remind us that for the public in the Soviet Union, as well as for composers and performers, music throughout the Soviet era remained a vital, personal realm marked by intense engagement, commitment, and emotional power. In no other era in modern history did music so forcefully redeem its promise of a reminder of the possibilities of the human even under the most inhumane conditions.

Musical Autobiography

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Musical Autobiography, performed on March 14, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

On some level all music is autobiographical. This can be argued even for instrumental music since at least the late eighteenth century, when music was explicitly conceived as a medium to communicate sensibility and refined feeling. The idea of music as expressing the emotional was a fundamental principle of Romanticism, and later, after the mid-nineteenth century, music was thought of as a psychological mirror of the will, manifesting those portions of human consciousness that could not find proper expression in language. It assumed the status of a private or encoded form of communication that was simultaneously public. Not only was the inexpressible or ineffable capable of communication through music, but a popular notion evolved which held that music was more accurate than spoken language in reflecting the human condition and the essence of feeling. Although the distinction between absolute music and illustrative or narrative music was debated endlessly during the second half of the nineteenth century, the early Romantics, including Mendelssohn, cherished the idea that music was in some way the clearest and most precise means by which a human being could publicly and properly express his or her response to experience of life.

Scholars have found autobiographical implications and narratives in the work of practically all nineteenth-century composers including Beethoven, Chopin, Rossini, and Schumann. Perhaps the most famous exponent of autobiographical experience in music was Hector Berlioz, whose centenary is now upon us. His Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy are two classic works with autobiographical dimensions. A musical response to critical moments in life was also the impetus for such great compositions as Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage (1877), Berg’s Lyric Suite (1926), Janáček’s On the overgrown path (1901-8), Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 (1888-94), Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben (1898) and Symphonia domestica (1903), Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (1870) and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (1893). Even Schoenberg, in one of the sketches of his Piano Concerto Op. 42 (1942), chose autobiographical designations for each of the four movements.

In each of these cases, as well as for the pieces on tonight’s program, a particular autobiographical impulse or event may have been crucial to the composition of the work, but it is not indispensable for the listener. To appreciate and follow a work, one doesn’t really need to know about the intentional meaning or the circumstances that compelled it to be created. In this sense autobiographical music functions on more levels than that of the composer’s intention. However, in explicitly evoking an autobiographical dimension, the composer draws out and highlights each listener’s inclination to weave into the sound some sort of plausible imaginary narration. Even if the autobiographical element is as indirect as in Lehár’s case, there is an intensity and immediacy that is implied by the acknowledgement that the work is a reflection of personal history. Autobiographical music seems the polar opposite of commissioned or occasional music. It embodies art as generated by inner necessity. Its intimate subject matter somehow seems to imply heightened candor and a greater sense of the autonomy of the work of art.

But anyone who lives in the society of others knows that self-representation is often far from honest—not because it is deliberately deceitful, but because the very act of self-analysis and description ignites all the wishes and despair of unconscious ambition, desire, envy, and doubt. To describe oneself without falling into the trap of instead describing how one wishes to appear to or hiding that which may have been from others is exceedingly difficult. The rendering of subjectivity that was prized and strived for in all the arts of the nineteenth century, and of which music was thought the quintessential medium, was clearly a quicksand, diversely exploited by such writers as Flaubert, James, and Dostoevsky. What is not said or perceived is infinitely more revealing than one’s calculated revelations and perceptions.

In music this tension between truth and subjective impression can also exist. Autobiographical music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries regularly functioned as a vehicle through which the composer could define his or her originality. Individuality was a prized attribute in the Romantic tradition of composition. The “artistic personality” was privileged as a reflection of human autonomy and freedom. Autobiographical music offered composers an opportunity to distinguish their music from that of anyone else. The autobiographical works of composers are therefore often considered in retrospect to be their most characteristic. This is certainly true of Suk and Schnittke. For Lehár, as Morton Solvik aptly points out, the autobiographical dimension of the work on tonight’s program resided in its capacity to express an unfulfilled ambition. It does not reveal that for which we remember Lehár but rather that which he wished to become but did not. It is therefore not surprising that the fantastic and the heroic often come to the fore in autobiographical music. Nowhere is this more apparent and chilling as in Wagner, whose autobiographical fantasy of heroism and chronic megalomania found unbridled expression in music. Contrast him to Richard Strauss, whose Symphonia domestica shifts between the fantastic and the shockingly candid and puts forward the most mundane aspects of daily life without embarrassment. In the American tradition, perhaps the most unusual and fascinating reflection of the autobiographical impulse is exemplified by the music of Charles Ives—particularly his Three Places in New England, in which the listener is invited to share the consciousness of memory and loss, particularly of childhood.

But precisely because instrumental music is not linguistic and the specifics of any autobiographical narrative can never be pinpointed, sometimes the difference between truth and subjectivity can be expanded beyond the ordinary oppositions that are delimited by the written word. The autobiographical in music is offered as an emotional characterization of the composer that is inferred by the listener. In this sense, music perhaps possesses a great advantage over the written word in representing subjectivity. Not bound by the limits of linguistic description, composers have sometimes used the intimacy of the autobiographical and the subjective as a covert act of artistic freedom. For example, Schnittke, who lived and worked in the Soviet Union, used, as did Shostakovich, autobiographical elements to express a range of responses to conditions of life not permitted in painting or literature. For the composer, musical autobiography unfettered by descriptive clarity could publicize private impressions and sentiments without endangerment.

The biographical details of each of the composers on tonight’s program suggest different ways in which lives could intertwine with musical creation. Franz Lehár (1870-1948), for example, may be famous for his operettas, but happiness and merriment were not the hallmarks of his life. The Merry Widow (1905) was particularly beloved by Hitler. Lehár (whose wife was Jewish) conducted himself through the Nazi era with unheroic ambivalence. The Viennese operetta, of which he was the most famous practitioner after Johann Strauss, had been until 1938 nearly dominated by Jewish colleagues among composers and librettists. His own work was thus easily appropriated as the true Aryan, rare, uncorrupted form of a popular genre. He died in 1948, long after his greatest success, a wealthy but isolated figure from the past. Despite the fact that he never achieved the respect he sought in the public imagination as a serious composer (even though his music was far superior to that of many of his fellow operetta composers), he did gain the high regard of none other than Arnold Schoenberg.

Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) is widely regarded as the most successful and important composer of the Soviet era after Shostakovich. His music had an enormous currency and popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the West. Like Shostakovich he suffered the disapproval of the regime. In the 1970s he was persecuted by the head of the union of Soviet composers Tikhon Krennikov, and was almost entirely ostracized in his native country. In 1991 Schnittke moved to the West even though in the era of Perestroika his music had been embraced by a new generation of Russian musicians in the Soviet Union. Schnittke’s work was immensely influential in its austerity, irony, appropriation of historical fragments and models, and the composer’s determined desire to bridge the gap between the popular and concert genres. Schnittke fused a unique synthesis between modernism and post-modernism. Much of his music has, like the Viola Concerto, an explicit connection to narrative. Since his death his popularity has receded somewhat, but there is little doubt that despite the changing tides that often plague the posthumous reception of composers who enjoyed enormous success during their lifetimes, Schnittke’s music will remain a vital part of the canon of music composed during the second half of the twentieth century.

Perhaps the least known composer being performed tonight is Josef Suk (1874-1935). The name may be familiar to many concertgoers because of the violinist Josef Suk, the composer’s grandson, whose recordings and performances have earned him a place as one of the great violinists of the twentieth century. Music was a long and proud tradition in the Suk family. The composer’s father (also Josef) was a music teacher and choirmaster. The composer himself was also the second violinist in the famous Bohemian Quartet (also called the Czech Quartet). But Suk’s real ambition was to compose. Consequently he studied composition with Dvořák and went on not only to become Dvořák’s favorite pupil but also Dvořák’s son-in-law. Suk was himself a teacher of considerable importance whose own pupils included Bohuslav Martinů. Suk was also responsible for bringing Janáček to the attention of the writer Max Brod (who had written extremely laudatory essay on Suk’s music). Suk urged Brod to go to a performance of Janáček’s Jenůfa in Brno. As a result of that performance, Brod arranged to bring Jenůfa to Prague and ultimately to Vienna and Berlin, thereby launching the international career of the then sixty-year-old Janáček. Unlike many of his Czech colleagues, Suk’s relationship to folk elements was not very pronounced. He saw himself a multi-faceted composer in the European tradition. Among his finest works are the Piano Quintet Op. 8 and the String Quartet Op.11, both of which reveal the enormous craftsmanship at his command. In this regard he can be compared to his contemporary, the Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnanyi.

In many ways, Suk innovated on the training of his celebrated teacher and father-in-law. Like Schumann, Suk’s piano works often have a powerful and intimate quality and are deeply personal and autobiographical works. Most commentators, however, consider Suk’s orchestral music his finest, which makes it difficult to understand why so little of it survives the standard repertory. (His wonderful Violin Fantasy, Op 24 (1903) was performed by this orchestra at the Bard Festival in New York in 1993). After the Asrael Symphony, Suk completed in 1917 the other orchestral work, entitled Ripening, Op.34, that one might still find on the occasional concert program. But it is clearly Asrael that stands as his orchestral masterpiece, and for some, his greatest work in any genre. In this work, Suk integrated the finest traditions of the Lisztian tone poem with that of the symphony. This work represents a musical experience that can certainly hold its own alongside Strauss, Elgar and Mahler.

Music that reflects the deeply personal and autobiographical creates a form of intimacy between creator and audience that exploits the exclusive qualities of musical communication. In a way that is quite distinct from reading a novel, attending a play, or gazing at a painting, the listener can accept the candor and specificity of another person’s experience of life without being locked into the passive position of an observer. The sense of communication through the evoking of corresponding emotion allows for the translation of another’s sensibility into the listener’s own. As the works on tonight’s program make plain, the autobiographical in music depends on a kind of empathetic parallelism. It is this singular form of connection that makes instrumental music an utterly unique medium for autobiographical introspection and expression.

The Romantic Soul: Lord Byron in Music

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert The Romantic Soul: Lord Byron in Music, performed on Feb 9, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Few writers in any language at any time in the history of European arts and letters have so completely captured the imagination of a generation as did George Gordon, Lord Byron. A member of the second generation of English Romantic poets that also included Keats and Shelly, he was born in London in 1788 and died famously in the defense of the Greek national cause in 1824. During his lifetime Byron was a rather scandalous figure, beautiful, brutal, deeply intellectual, eccentric (he could not stand the sight of a woman eating), profligate, brilliant. He was generally regarded as a fallen angel, to be pitied and secretly admired. With his premature death Byron shared the apparently inevitable fate of a Romantic poet, but the fact that he literally sacrificed himself for those classical ideals (which in reality had little to do with the modern Greek state) that so infused his work gave his death a special resonance for European artists and thinkers, and he posthumously became a iconic figure of dark fascination, a compelling mixture of idealism and disillusionment, heroism and demonism, noble defiance and tragedy. In other words, his image after death merged utterly with that of his poetic creations and he himself became the quintessential Byronic hero. Today, although he retains his dominance as one of the greatest of the English poets, his work no longer engages a popular readership as it did throughout the nineteenth century. We live in a post-Romantic age; it is more difficult to relate to essential concepts of guilt, burning introspection, and sympathetic, sinful desire when we now expect a hero, if he is to die, to at least first use his fanciful technological weaponry to obliterate the enemy with assurance. The Byronic hero, all questions and no answers, has already lost before he begins, which does not make for a good market in action figures. Further, the events of the last century have given us a very different conception of the human capacity for evil and suffering than Byron could ever have imagined.

But the three composers on today’s program – Bennett, Liszt, and Schumann – were members of a generation captivated by Byron’s life and work, a generation for whom Byron embodied the painful ambiguities and perplexity of a changing, spiritually confused world. Of the three composers Schumann was the oldest, born in 1810. Liszt was born in 1811 and Bennett was the youngest, born in 1816. Schumann was the most articulate and literary, though Liszt was a close second. Schumann’s first love was literature. His father was a bookseller and a publisher, and Schumann, like his colleagues and every other well-read person of his time, was intimately familiar with the works of Byron. Indeed, Byron’s appeal to these three very different composers reveals the poet’s significant, universal influence during the nineteenth century. This common thread gives us an opportunity to explore not only Byron’s representation in music, but also the different ways these composers thought about the relation between words and music.

Schumann’s setting of Byron comes from a close reading of the text and a deep admiration for its poetic virtues, so much so that there were large sections of the text Schumann chose not to set because he found the verse itself overwhelmingly musical on its own. His response is not surprising when the original poem’s structure is considered. With its choruses and climactic monologues, it seems made for music in a manner similar to Goethe’s Faust (also partially set by Schumann). Schumann wished the text to be declaimed and then to move into song almost as in musical theater. This in itself reflects the symbiotic tension between the poetic and the musical in the aesthetics of the early nineteenth century, particularly in German-speaking Europe. The German Romantic poets of Schumann’s time tried to elevate poetry to the status of music and thus widen language’s power beyond its capacity for representation. They wished for a use of language that more nearly approximated the ineffable and the infinite. In the aesthetic views of Schumann’s generation, music was the highest of the arts for a Romantic sensibility precisely because it was not literal or representational. The transfer of Schumann’s ambition from the literary to the musical echoed the conceits of his hero Jean-Paul Richter, for whom music (which he called the act of improvisation with sound) was the deepest form of personal expression, outstripping the use of language.

Schumann, like Schubert before him and Brahms after, was a master of the merging of text and music through the form of the Lied. But as Mendelssohn (one of Bennett’s greatest defenders) discovered, the transition from songwriting to drama is difficult for a variety of factors, not the least of which is the epic greatness of the text to be set. The merging of the vocal with the dramatic is for Schumann only partially successful. There is one unperformed opera, Genoveva (1849) and the brilliant torso of a work, his setting of Scenes from Goethe’s Faust (1844-53). As his unsettled and provocative Manfred suggests, the beauty of Byron’s words and of Schumann’s musical expression were perhaps equivalent only in Schumann’s appreciation for both forms, but such an appreciation was not easily transferable for the composer. The story of Manfred is itself an ambiguous one. The hero, a man of fantastic powers living half in the human world and half in a world of spirits, laments his life and his terrible sinful nature of his love for his sister. In his wandering he meets numerous spirits, a deer hunter, the Witch of the Alps, and a kindly abbot who attempts to save him. He is ultimately swallowed by darkness both within and without, a figure both pitiable and cursed. The text is subtle and complex, invariably leading to the question of what a musical setting can do to elucidate it. In the partially staged version you will see today, we have tried to highlight the musical aspects to honor Schumann’s intention of using music to elevate language. Byron’s intention, of course, was never to have Manfred staged or publicly performed in any way.

Schumann’s colleague Liszt was a prolific author and wrote extensively on music (sometimes with not entirely discreet ghost writers). But Liszt was undoubtedly a polymath, and tirelessly energetic as a performer, organizer, conductor, politician, and teacher. Tasso is Liszt’s reworking of a first version of this piece orchestrated by his friend August Conradi, and a second version orchestrated by Joachim Raff, who went on to achieve considerable fame as a composer and teacher. Like Schumann, Liszt was enamored of the literary. But that love drew him to a very different conclusion regarding text and music. Instead of trying to set the text in a conventional sense as Schumann did, Liszt invented an instrumental form: the tone poem. Liszt deserves much more credit ultimately than Wagner for transforming the aesthetics of nineteenth century music. More than Schumann and Wagner, Liszt pursued the symbiosis between language and music with a truly innovative idea. That idea was grounded in his belief that instrumental music could carry language further than language could go on its own. Insofar as language reached the individual and transported the reader beyond the quotidian, it was music that could render that experience concrete, and rekindle the memory of that which was once read.

Schumann and his subsequent supporters, suspicious of what later became known as the new German school and “program” music, accused this approach of subordinating music to language and narration. But the opposite case can be strongly made. The tone poem Tasso has in fact very little to do with the story and certainly much less to do with any particularly poetic text. Byron’s poem is about the Italian poet Tasso, whose love for the Duke d’Este’s sister led to seven years in jail for the poet. But the listener does not need to be intimately familiar with Byron’s text to appreciate Liszt’s tone poem. The writing of tone poems is not altogether different from an operatic overture in the sense of Beethoven’s three Leonore overtures, despite what reductive theories of “program music and absolute music” suggest. The primary difference is that as in the case of a tone poem such as Tasso, the inspiration and structure are free-standing and self-sufficient. They are literary but one step removed; they are in fact meta-linguistic. The music emulates a literary narrative, but its impact is not at all that of reading. It does not require text because it is only remotely narrative. Music in Liszt’s treatment retains music’s infinite unapproachable quality and expressive rhetoric, despite the superficial ordering of the music along the lines of a dramatic story that has been mediated by poetic diction. (It is interesting in this light to consider why the only part of Schumann’s Manfred to survive in the repertory is in fact the overture.)

What inspired Liszt ultimately was not plot but poetic language. It is in this sense ironic that his initial inspiration was Goethe. On the hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth Liszt was due to write (as was common at the time) an overture to a new production of Goethe’s Tasso. But as Liszt himself said, he was inspired by “the most powerful poetic geniuses of our time, Goethe and Byron.” For Liszt, Goethe was the poet of “brilliant prosperity;” Byron, despite “advantages of birth and fortune,” was the symbol of “much suffering.” By Liszt’s own admission his tone poem was “more immediately inspired by the respectful compassion evoked by Byron…than by the work of the German poet.” What Liszt supplied in his own view was “the remembrance of the bitter sorrows of the protagonist of Byron’s poem.”

Liszt’s evocation of Goethe and Byron has its own historic irony. Goethe’s review of Byron’s Manfred, as well as his review of the English poet’s other works, reveals that Byron was the only contemporary poet with whom Goethe felt a keen competition and envy. Toward the end of his life, Goethe remained obsessed with Byron even though he had embraced a new neoclassicism distinctly in opposition to the Romantic movement in German poetry. In fact Byron, in his own way distinct from Goethe, bridged the classical and romantic in its conventional definition and was the inspiration not so much for Goethe but for European poets including Mickiewicz and Lermontov. The impact of Byron on composers ranges from the three composers on tonight’s program to the following list of composers, all of whom at one time or another set Byron to music either directly or indirectly: Busoni, Loewe, Mendelssohn, Mussorgsky, Joachim, Verdi, Schoenberg, Rachmaninoff, MacDowell, Nietzsche, Wolff, Donizetti, Berlioz, and Tchaikovsky, whose symphonic masterpiece Manfred remains one of the most well known efforts to render Byron into instrumental music.

The composer who opens today’s program was, appropriately, English. His approach to Byron is probably the most conservative of the three musical responses offered here. Bennett’s music shows a strong debt to Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn died in 1847 before the great breach in musical aesthetics that placed Liszt and Wagner on one side and Schumann and Brahms on the other. Most of Bennett’s output actually dates from Mendelssohn’s lifetime. In contrast to Schumann’s Manfred and Liszt’s Tasso, Bennett offers almost no apparent relationship between his music and Byron’s poem. We can appreciate Bennett’s adherence to the very early Romantic exploration of the connection between poetry and music if we remember his mentor’s overtures and music for plays. In the famous A Midsummer Night’s Dream overture, a mood and sensibility is evoked but no plot or narration. Instrumental music is left to its own devices, in contrast to the opera or oratorio form on the one hand and the innovative Lisztian tone poem on the other. A brief look at Mendelssohn’s Die shöne Melusine (1833) overture makes this point poignantly. Mendelssohn wrote it after seeing the Grillparzer play at which an overture by another composer was performed. After experiencing the play Mendelssohn was shocked at the inadequacy of the musical evocation, and so he wrote his own as a musical response to the dramatic experience but not the particular language or dramatic structure. So it is with Bennett’s Parisina. In contrast to Schumann or Liszt, there is no need to find specific connections between poetry and music in Bennett’s composition. It is only important to remember that to be inspired by Lord Byron and his poetry had become an obligatory hallmark of artistic authenticity for any aspiring composer or poet. It is indeed astonishing to see how one poet, arguably prolific and notorious in personality, could have so completely enraptured and influenced the course of music in the mid-nineteenth century.

Bruckner’s Journey

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert Bruckner’s Journey, performed on Jan 10, 2003 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

Anton Bruckner’s (1824-1896) birthplace is described by The New Grove Dictionary as “Ansfelden, nr. Linz.” This reveals a key factor in considering the career of this formidable Austrian composer—that is, that he was not a native of Vienna, or even Linz, but of a provincial place “nr. Linz.” The distinction between the “cosmopolitan and urban,” regarded as rich in culture and sophistication, and the “provincial,” regarded as some sort of hermetic backwater, is an old one; indeed it dates back to antiquity. Thucydides strongly implies such a distinction in the Funeral Oration of Pericles, where Pericles boasts of what could be called the “cosmopolitanism” of Athenian life and culture. Later in Europe, the arrogance of capital cities and their social elite as the standard bearers of value in everything from linguistic accent to literature to fashion flourished when the power of the feudal landed aristocracy began to wane. This sense of superiority through social taste and custom grew acute in eighteenth-century Vienna. Although Emperor Joseph II sought to centralize imperial administration at the end of the eighteenth century, a powerful, autonomous upper middle-class had not yet developed. Therefore the imperial court, as well as the homes of wealthy nobles, were the seats of formation of taste both in art and music, cultural forms maintained primarily through the patronage system. Esterhazy’s court at Eisenstadt and the Archbishop of Salzburg set artistic standards every bit the equal of the capital city of Vienna. Only towards the end of the century did culture begin to concentrate in royal cities, particularly in German-speaking Europe.

Paris and London of course were already advanced urban cultural centers earlier in the eighteenth century, because of a more progressive and aggressive economic and political climate. Haydn famously discovered the benefits of a more expansive, wealthier urban base of appreciation during his famous tours of London. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a very different view of urban elitism in his bitter critique of late eighteenth-century urban values and aesthetic taste as false progressive conceits of the fashionable ignorant. In this he prefigures the scathing, ambivalent assessment of Paris one finds in the pages of Honore de Balzac, who spares nothing in his savaging of Parisian pretensions with respect to journalism, and the resultant tastes in literature, painting, and music. However social critics felt about the quality of their aesthetic decrees, London and Paris by the mid-nineteenth century were the arbiters of culture for their respective homelands, much as Athens served for Pericles as the “school of Hellas.”

Such dominance over the countryside and smaller towns could not have occurred without the development of what scholars like to term “public space,” the forum for a new class with expanded privileges that overtook society in the early-nineteenth century. The dominant participants in this new public space were not landed aristocrats but civil servants, professionals, and commercial leaders that constituted a new consumer middle class. These individuals belonged to reading societies, subscribed to publications, bought books and attended concerts. In the twentieth century their power increased, and so did the process of centralization proportionately. New organs of dissemination, newspapers and journals, proliferated fashion and aesthetic taste beyond city walls into the landscape, and fortified the key cities’ positions as central authorities. Such dominance over the provinces, expressed in the snobbery and arrogance of urban dwellers, invoked a deeply ambivalent reaction. Provincial residents both admired and imitated their city cousins, as Emma Bovary illustrates, but there was also a fear and insecurity concerning the elitism of the big cities, and their inaccessibility for those not born there (as Emma discovers). A wonderful metaphor of such fear in American literature can be found in L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, in which the witches of the east and west represent the perils as well as the allures of New York and San Francisco.

But as Pericles pointed out long ago, cosmopolitan sophistication was not merely a function of civic wealth or political importance (consider how culturally moribund Washington and Brasilia are compared to other centers in the United States and Brazil) but precisely the openness and diversity to be found in dynamic urban environments. The notion that a great center of artistic culture was also a crossroads for a vast cultural (in its anthropological sense) spectrum became especially significant in Vienna. Its fin-de-siécle reputation as a great center of art, literature, and architecture as well as its importance as one of the first focal points of modernism were closely tied to the city’s function as a destination point of emigration. The economic boom of the 1860s, the World’s Fair of 1873, the subsequent financial crash and, above all, the political reforms that followed Austria’s defeat in 1866 in its war with Prussia, served to mushroom Vienna’s population. The growth consisted of immigrants from Moravia, Bohemia, Galicia, and the eastern parts of the Empire as well as the southern regions of the Habsburg monarchy. Vienna became a polyglot city. Its most distinctive minority was its Jewish population, which by the eve of World War I accounted for over ten percent of the city’s population.

The multi-ethnic and multi-national character of Vienna and other cities considerably complicated the distinction between the cosmopolitan and the provincial as Pericles defined it. City and country no longer equated with the snobbish sophisticate and his provincial cousin. Rather, the provincial came to signify the native inhabitant rooted in land and tradition, and the cosmopolitan the foreign-born, relocated neighbor, the natural and the assimilated. Modern nationalism and religious and ethnic differences became cross currents in a growing tension between the provincial and the cosmopolitan. A case in point (nearly contemporary to Bruckner’s life) was the writer Max Brod, a German-speaking Jewish polymath also fluent in Czech, who promoted the worldwide fame of the pan-Slavic provincial Czech composer Leós Janáček. The distinction here is not merely between Prague and Brno, or even Vienna and Prague, but between Czech and German, Christian and Jew. In the Habsburg monarchy before 1914, the cosmopolitan was often polemically confused with the anti-traditional, the infiltrative modern, the rootless and abstract. The provincial was viewed as pure, nationally centered, spiritual, and in touch with basic moral and conservative values. Populations outside of Vienna claimed to be uncorrupted by the blandishments and decadence of big city life marked by a largely non-Austrian community with an artificial polyglot culture. (This was the feeling in many of the urban centers; for example, as a young man Béla Bartók was suspicious of the high culture community of Budapest.)

This was the environment into which Anton Bruckner entered as a composer in mid-career in the late 1860s. The tension he felt between provincial and cosmopolitan was a formative principle in his career. The works on tonight’s program document the transformation that Bruckner underwent with a considerable degree of discomfort from an organist and musician in Linz to a major musical force in the capital city of Vienna. The Mass in F minor, first performed in Vienna in 1872, won the approbation of the great critic Eduard Hanslick (later a vocal skeptic of Bruckner’s symphonic achievement). By all accounts, Bruckner was a deeply religious and unpretentious man. When he came to Vienna, his skill as a master of counterpoint earned him the professorship of counterpoint at the Vienna Conservatory. His virtuosity as an organist and his capacity for improvisation that had distinguished him in Linz led to important posts in Vienna. But Bruckner never adjusted completely to Viennese life, nor to its urban cosmopolitan high culture. He wrote for the Vienna Men’s Chorus which itself increasingly became a bastion of nostalgia for the myth of a provincial, old Vienna without all the immigrants. His relations with the power brokers and the major institutions were tenuous, despite efforts on his behalf by Johann Herbeck and Hans Richter, both of whom wielded considerable power as conductors.

The widening gap between nativism and cosmopolitanism in Vienna between 1880 and 1896 was mirrored in the opposition between partisans of Bruckner and Brahms. Bruckner was seen as a champion of an authentic Austrian Catholic tradition with a nativist sensibility, and therefore the heir to Schubert. His music (despite its debt to Wagner) seemed to be a spiritual link to the past and an antidote to the facile cosmopolitanism one might encounter in varying forms from the music of Brahms to the operetta tradition pioneered by Johann Strauss. Bruckner succeeded in Vienna as a foil, not lightning rod, for conservative political and cultural sentiments. His music was enthusiastically endorsed by a generation of rebellious young students who sought to combat a reigning academic aesthetic enshrined in the Vienna Conservatory, where Bruckner taught counterpoint but not composition. Bruckner was not comfortable in society or with the Conservatory’s governing board or even its faculty as Brahms was. In addition, Brahms was a favored presence in the leading high-culture salons of Vienna. Bruckner was ill at ease in such situations. He embarrassed himself at one formal dinner party attended by nobility, leading business people and artists when he exclaimed his horror in his Linz dialect at being served raw fish eggs, that is, caviar.

Social maladroitness falls on the benign side of Bruckner’s fame in Vienna as an antipode to the cosmopolitan establishment. There were also darker implications. For example, he allowed himself to serve as the honorary chairman of a new academic Wagner Society—a different one than that to which Guido Adler and Gustav Mahler once held memberships. This new Wagner society had in its bylaws the explicit prohibition of Jews as members.

Predictably, since his death Anton Bruckner has been the subject of a fierce scholarly debate, especially concerning the editions of his work. This debate has been fueled by a pronounced desire to preserve his provincially pure standing and to protect him from such cosmopolitans as his own disciple Ferdinand Loewe, who was of Jewish origin. Bruckner scholarship in the last century became tainted by nationalists, and ultimately by national socialists. To this day the debate continues between a “loyal Bruckner” community of German and Austrian scholars and a more critically-minded assemblage of international scholars (including some young Germans and Austrians) who refute the traditional image of the composer, and seek to acknowledge the facts of his biography and the cultural politics of the city in which Bruckner lived, the Vienna that contained both the provincial and the cosmopolitan.

Tonight we offer two relatively rare and under-performed works, which date originally from Bruckner’s Linz period and his transition to Vienna. He reconsidered them from the retrospective of his own struggle to become established as a composer in the capital city. Some argue that Bruckner softened the provincial touches of his earlier versions and listened to arguments to imbue his music with a veneer that was more palatable to the sophisticated Viennese audience. He let his disciples suggest cuts and changes in instrumentation, and he himself revised aspects of the music in the 1880s and 1890s so that it would more likely win favor in Vienna. In fact, much of the critical revisionism of Bruckner in the twentieth century has been what might well be termed a misguided effort to return to the “original” Bruckner, as though the environment of Vienna and its standards of taste were a deleterious influence. The choice to perform the later versions of these two works is itself a comment on the danger of investing the tensions of the past with contemporary aesthetic value. There may be earlier, equally authentic versions of these works, but we have an opportunity to listen to a great composer who like all other creative artists absorbed the influences of his life sequentially without losing the distinctive fingerprints of his initial aesthetic vision. For whatever reason, Bruckner reheard his own music. This concert is a reminder that historical divisions in politics and culture possess a creative residue. This residue transcends the hate and mistrust and violence that descended on the modern world, in part in the service of a conflict between center and periphery not only over mores and taste, but wealth, privilege and standards of living.

American Originals

By Leon Botstein

Written for the concert American Originals, performed on Nov 17, 2002 at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.

The evolution of an American tradition in orchestral music has always been beset by an equivocal attitude to what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. As a former European possession and a nation of immigrants, the United States initially derived much of its high culture from the old world. At the same time, however, European art and culture came to be viewed beginning in the nineteenth century with increasing suspicion and resistance. European traditions smacked of elitist and aristocratic societies, and therefore did not seem compatible with American democratic ideals. Americans were proud of their national character, which is even today still often equated with the middle-class Protestant values of the first group of European immigrants to dominate the United States socially and politically. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American painters and writers (many of whom studied in Europe) were torn between emulation of European traditions and the desire to express an original American identity.

In music, this tension was especially acute because music was particularly affected by the massive and continuous European immigration after the Civil War. As the United States began to embody innovation and entrepreneurship in all fields from commerce and industry to design and architecture, distinguished Europeans visited America to learn and partake of American originality. But music was not part of the nineteenth-century conception of the American achievement of originality; Europeans did not come to learn about music in the new world but rather to supply it. Music differed from other disciplines in America in several respects. First, it was a performing art that did not present linguistic obstacles for the performers; second, its most established stars were Europeans with European training; and third, its audience was constantly replenished from the waves of new immigrants pouring into the United States who carried their cultural legacies with them. As a result, the United States became a dominant market for classical music from Europe in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, the American market for classical music in the half century before World War I can be compared to the Japanese and Korean markets for classical music after World War II. Every major European performer and composer from Anton Rubinstein to Richard Strauss traveled to America, lured by big fees and enthusiastic audiences. Among the most spectacular occasions in American music in the nineteenth century was Johann Strauss’s tour of America. Theodore Thomas, the legendary conductor and builder of American orchestras in the late nineteenth century was born and schooled in Germany. Many Italian, French, and Scandinavian performers and composers helped build America’s great orchestras, conservatories, and musical life. The first conductor to perform in the United States’ greatest concert hall, Carnegie Hall, was Tchaikovsky. When the Boston Symphony Orchestra was founded, its conductor and most of its players were imported. James Levine is in fact the first native-born American music director in that venerable orchestra’s history.

Therefore as Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, and Dickinson were shaping a distinctive American literary tradition, those musicians and composers who wanted to discover an American musical tradition were facing a particularly complex problem. Some American composers of the late nineteenth century, such as John Knowles Paine and George Chadwick, remained faithful to their European training, and wrote music that discreetly displayed American subject matter (Rip van Winkle, for instance) brilliantly ensconced within the finest European symphonic traditions. Ironically, it was Antonin Dvořák (with the help of Henry Krehbiel) who upon his arrival as the newly chosen head of the National Conservatory in New York in 1892 pronounced that America should look to its own native traditions for its musical identity. Adding to the irony, he specifically mentioned as sources for these traditions the descendents of the United States’ two largest involuntarily displaced populations: the native Americans and the African slaves. But what Dvořák of course was really advocating was that Americans follow a firmly established European tradition in which Dvořák himself excelled, that of exoticizing the classical tradition by applying folk-music elements. For Dvořák, African American music could have the same invigorating effect on a base of European classical form as Moravian and Bohemian music did. But these appropriations do not make a new musical identity. Their purpose is only to enhance the old, established tradition, which is why the folk elements used before World War I did not even have to be authentic, but only sound appropriately exotic.

The composer, however, who answered Dvořák’s challenge in an utterly innovative and unexpected way, indeed a way that succeeded in self-consciously legitimizing a distinct American identity in music was neither Paine nor Chadwick, but Charles Ives (1874-1954). In personality as well as artistic career, Ives was the quintessential New Englander. The son of a band leader, Ives lived out a dream of success as a pioneering force on Wall Street in the insurance business as well as eventually becoming recognized as a ground-breaking composer. He was a radical democrat without sacrifice to his commitment to ideals of capitalist entrepreneurship, patriotism, and freedom of thought and expression. But like many Puritan democrats, Ives’s America was the one in which he had been raised and the one that he just missed: mid-nineteenth-century Connecticut, a world that infused him with nostalgia and conservatism. Both nostalgia and conservatism in his complicated personality found expression in Ives’s music. As Dvořák had suggested, Ives appropriated elements from non-symphonic, distinctly American forms. For Ives these included tunes derived from the New England hymns, marching band music, Yale football songs, Stephan Foster, and church organ music with which he had grown up. His use of these tunes created a refracted image of American identity tied to the post-Civil War era on the southern New England landscape. However conservative the ideology of this identity created from these tunes may be though, the way in which Ives utilized them demonstrates his unique brand of experimentalism, the innovative freedom that he so cherished in the America he knew. Rather than exalting the American elements in a traditional symphonic rendering, Ives used a collage-like technique that breaks open notions of musical continuity. He layered rhythms and sounds in a manner that transformed the tunes, the form, and the harmony of orchestral music. Familiar tunes made unfamiliar evoke shadows of recognition, which are fragmentary and uncertain markers in a thrilling, unpredictable river of harmonies and dissonances. Ives used the most nostalgic elements of American life to experiment in a way unthinkable outside of the United States. He became the architect of American musical modernism. He stopped composing in the late 1920s, and it was only years later that his originality finally earned him his proper due. Ives had an enormous influence on Henry Cowell, Aaron Copland, Bernard Hermann, John Cage, and the young Elliott Carter. Ives’s Fourth Symphony waited until 1965 for its premiere by the American Symphony Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. It is thus a fitting selection for the orchestra’s fortieth anniversary season.

John Alden Carpenter (1876-1951) bears some similarity to Charles Ives. Carpenter also had a distinguished career in business as well as composing. Like Ives, his wealth and independence ensured a certain amount of license to do as he pleased. He was not an academic caught in a subculture bound by European tradition. He also shared Ives’s determination to find an original American voice in music. But for Carpenter, the basis of such a voice was not in a nostalgic, pastoral image of New England, but rather in the excitement of a country of advancement in industry and technology. Carpenter’s ideal America was located in its urban centers where astonishing varieties of cultures and classes mixed and new ideas formed, where the continuous work of commercial and social progress was made possible by the new buildings, spaces, and instruments of American invention. For Carpenter, the cultural universalism that existed no where but in the United States and which would come to dominate the twentieth century afforded the United States a stature equal to the greatest societies of Europe. That sentiment of equality with Europe informs his music. In a way, Carpenter is a mirror image in reverse of Charles Ives. Instead of transforming archetypal American themes within a radically new musical vision, Carpenter found American culture itself radical enough to invigorate a tired European tradition. Using contemporary and commercial elements, Carpenter tried to express what was different about modern American life; his originality rests in using American materials conventionally, thereby demonstrating the unconventionality of his America. (His efforts are distinguished from those of his nineteenth century predecessors who wished to show that American culture was as good as European culture because American arts resembled European art.) Carpenter however, partly because he was caught within a classical music tradition, never matched Gershwin’s achievements. Perhaps because of his reliance on ephemeral popular materials and conventional forms, he fell into obscurity. He is only now coming up for serious reconsideration, thanks to a timely new biography by Howard Pollack, who also wrote the leading biography of Aaron Copland.

Between these two counterpoints in American music, today’s program offers a third example of American originality in the work of Morton Feldman (1926-1987). Both Ives and Carpenter, though distinctly different in their approaches, were quite clear on what being an American meant to them. Privileged, successful businessmen, both expressed views of a society and nation created by their rebellious white Protestant ancestors. But for Morton Feldman, a product of the prolonged Eastern European Jewish emigration to New York, such a vision of the United States was distant at best. The intellectual environment created between the 1930s and 1950s by these immigrants, effectively described by such writers as Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe, was steeped in awareness of cultures, both European and American, which they did not find entirely satisfactory and sought to transform. The result in Feldman’s case, as in many others, was a radicalization based not in geography or nationalism but in temporality, a pan-national, pan-disciplinary idea of modernism. Morton Feldman was deeply engaged with the visual arts, and attempted to prove through his musical connection with abstract expressionism the theory offered so eloquently by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard in his great novelistic monologue Old Masters: ultimately it is impossible to separate the aural and the visual from informing one another. Feldman wanted to integrate the aesthetic ambitions of modernist painting into the writing of music; he went even further, and sought to invent a new way of visualizing and notating sound. Feldman’s use of time and sonority derived precisely from the notion of abstraction and non-objectivity that dominated the art and theory among the first generation of abstract expressionists, as well as their successors, the color field painters. If reading Emerson, Thoreau and Louisa May Alcott can help one understand Ives, then contemplating Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline and the writer Clement Greenberg would be as useful in appreciating Morton Feldman’s project as a composer.

Feldman’s generation included the first American artists and writers of Jewish origin whose work entered the canon of that which is now considered quintessentially American. Indeed the achievements of post-war American painting dramatically overshadowed the European visual arts and shifted the center of gravity in what defined twentieth century painting and sculpture from Europe to America. In this sense, through their appropriation and extension of modernism (not necessarily American), the painter, writers, and composers of Feldman’s generation created an American tradition as consciously and viably as did Ives and Carpenter. When we try to understand and compare their three very distinctive contributions to the emergence of American originality, we find ourselves asking not only what it means to be American, but what it means to be original. Is American originality based on some simplistic concept of “being American”—whatever that may mean to anyone—or is it perhaps finally a relative concept, always evolving and reinventing itself in order to respond constructively to a changing world in which idealizations of national identity and dreams of universal art still to play a role?