by Leon Botstein
Written for the concert Forged from Fire, performed on May 30, 2014 at Carnegie Hall.
It has now become commonplace to call the 19th century the “long 19th century,” owing to the fact that its beginning and end are marked not by round years but by events that defined its character and culture. The century is often thought of as beginning in 1789, the year of the French Revolution. The Revolution and its aftermath changed not only the perception of monarchical power that stretched back to the middle ages, but the nature of politics and our sense of history. The 19th century came to a close somewhere between 1918, at the end of the First World War, and 1919, the year of the negotiations at the Versailles Peace Conference.
2014 marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War I. Most Americans, when thinking about the history of the 20th century, focus on World War II as the defining and perhaps most brutal event of the century. The reasons are obvious. For the United States, World War II had fronts in Europe and Asia. It lasted approximately four years. But World War I was, for America, a relatively brief experience: the U.S. entered it only in 1917. American casualties were 117,000, as opposed to 417,000 during the years of fighting in World War II. But for Europeans, it was the First World War that was shocking, traumatic, and transformative, not only because both sides in Europe lost millions (England and France suffered more military deaths than in World War II) and the war delivered an experience of horror and death hitherto unprecedented in history, but also because, as Sigmund Freud noted as early as 1930, it laid the foundation for the next horrific war. For all the pacifism of the 1920’s, World War I was followed by economic instability, the depression, and fascism, lending little hope for a world at peace. World War I also made possible the October Revolution in Russia that brought in communism and ultimately the Soviet Union of Stalin.
If there is a legitimate notion of a “just” war, the Second World War might qualify. The Allies fought against obvious aggressors (Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany) and in at least one case—Nazi Germany—an unambiguously evil regime. Despite the devastating consequences of the Allied nations’ “blind eye” to the dangers Germany posed after 1933, it was soon crystal clear that Nazism was a radical and innovative incarnation of barbarism. The First World War, by contrast, began for reasons that still remain difficult to explain. What could have remained a minor conflict—reprisals for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand—exploded because of an intricate web of pacts, treaties, royal family relations, imperial conceits, and economic ambitions that meant little to the ordinary people who ended up doing the fighting and dying. Yet the populations on all sides were initially fired up by patriotic fervor. They embraced a jingoistic rhetoric of honor and glory, defending a constructed sense of national singularity against nebulous threats defined for them by massive propaganda campaigns that even evoked widespread enthusiasm among intellectuals and artists in France, England, Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Russia. In 1914, everyone expected the war to be short. But the glories of God and country rapidly lost their allure in the wake of the senseless destruction experienced in trench warfare. The war led to the “lost generation” and shattered ideals and cultivated hopelessness.
Although today the actual causes of World War I are still the subject of intense debate among historians, the analysis by the victors immediately following the war was revealing. World War I was of course laid at the feet of Germany’s imperial ambitions, and that country was humiliated economically (to the consternation of wiser heads such as John Maynard Keynes). Large parts of Central and Eastern Europe that were formerly in the Austro-Hungarian Empire were broken out into nations. Some were more heterogeneous than others, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. But the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Wilson’s emphasis on self-determination, gave a boost to a triumphant and essentialist nationalism in a reconstituted and independent Poland and a crippled Hungary—stripped, after the Treaty of Trianon, of what most Hungarians regarded as their legitimate territory.
Nationalism thrived, despite the carnage of the war, not only among the victors, but also among the defeated. Europe did not embrace Woodrow Wilson’s vision of international cooperation explicit in the League of Nations. The United States never even joined. Nations new and old in the 1920s internally cultivated political solidarity based on race, ethnic inheritance, religion, myth, and territory. While some celebrated the restoration of identity and autonomy once subsumed by dynastic empires (e.g. Poland), others burned with resentment about lands and resources taken from them. This outcome gave some historians pause, and a new revisionist assessment of the causes became widespread, in which the blame was shared. After World War II, new research shifted the blame back to Germany. But once again, after the fall of communism in the 1990s, historical opinion has shifted back to placing the responsibility on all the major European powers.
Very few foresaw the consequences of the war and its aftermath. Most of the resistance to the war at its start came from the left. From a Marxist point of view, the masses had little to gain and everything to lose from a war that was only about chauvinism and national rivalries. But not surprisingly, among those who were enthusiastic for war were the elites of those ethnic and national groups subordinated by the monarchical imperial political structures that dominated Europe for nearly two centuries before 1914. The minorities in the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire welcomed the war; it gave hope to their nationalist aspirations. For the Jews of Europe, the rise of nationalism after 1848 accentuated anti-Semitism, and the futility of establishing a place of safety and equality in Europe for Jews. The outlook for political and social equality dimmed throughout Europe, from England to Russia, and only seemed to deepen as the century turned. But World War I unexpectedly offered a ray of hope in two contradictory ways: by offering an opportunity for Jews to demonstrate their loyalty to the nations in which they lived, and by lending Jewish nationalism, in the form of Zionism, legitimacy.
Tonight’s concert explores the transformation of European culture that began with the outbreak of World War I. By the 1920s, in addition to a renewed nationalism, an entirely new cultural landscape was visible. The seeds of reaction against Romanticism, already present since the 1890s, blossomed into everything from Dadaism, Constructivism, and atonality. The poetics of Tennyson were displaced with those of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; the novel as perfected by George Eliot was supplanted by the achievement of James Joyce. This massive cultural shift was accelerated and in part inspired by the experience of the war. Indeed it might be said that in cultural terms, the 20th century can be understood as having been forged in the crucible of World War I. That claim holds true for music.
In order to illustrate this argument, tonight’s concert begins with a musical mirror of the power of patriotism among the populations within all the combatant countries. Max Reger’s Eine vaterländische Ouvertüre is no longer played because of its embarrassing political intent. Reger was one of the most celebrated composers at the turn of the century. He displayed an unrivaled mastery of counterpoint. He was considered, alongside Richard Strauss, as the great hope of German music. If Strauss was the heir to Wagner, Reger was viewed as the heir to Brahms. Reger’s complex, lush, and densely scored music has had its fierce partisans, including Adolf Busch and Rudolf Serkin. Yet it has receded undeservedly into the shadows, in part because Reger died suddenly in 1916 and because, as a patriot, Reger was unapologetic concerning his conceit that in music, Germany’s superiority over all other nations and cultures was undisputed.
Following Reger’s overture, Ernest Bloch’s Israel Symphony will be performed. Bloch was by birth a Jew from Geneva, Switzerland. Early in his career he came to the United States, where he taught and wielded enormous influence. Roger Sessions was among his students. Inspired by Wagner, Bloch tried to emulate the Master of Bayreuth’s success in expressing the German spirit through music. Bloch, beginning in 1913 and through the war, sought to write music that would exemplify a shared national identity among Jews. The Israel Symphony was finished just before 1917, when in the context of rising nationalism and plans to rewrite the map of Europe and the Middle East dominated by the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, Zionism found its most powerful source of international legitimacy: the Balfour Declaration. Balfour made clear to the world Europe’s intention to support the building of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
The rapid growth of the Zionist movement in the late 19th century throughout Europe in the face of rabid anti-Semitism crystallized during the war. England and other countries had an interest in sending its Jewish population elsewhere, and Jewish national aspirations concurred. These aspirations found their way into Bloch’s music. The Israel Symphony (along with Bloch’s other famous “Jewish” works: Schelomo, Three Jewish Poems, and the later Sacred Service) reveals a synthesis of European compositional traditions and a Jewish national sensibility located in liturgy and folk tradition.
The program then turns to Charles Ives, the eccentric, radical, modernist insurance executive who also was America’s most innovative and iconoclastic compositional voice from the early 20th century. Ives trained with Horatio Parker at Yale, but like Gustav Mahler (who was curious about Ives’s music), Ives developed a musical strategy that allowed him to use fragmentation to create a sort of musical assemblage, creating layers of contrasting sounds that juxtapose past and present and are often evocative of nostalgia and childhood. Inspired by the sinking of the Lusitania, Ives wrote the Second Orchestral Set, a startlingly courageous essay in musical form, one that in its third movement highlights America’s exceptional status and dramatic entrance into a transformative historical event. Ives, a sharp critic of politicians, became a fierce advocate of Liberty Bonds and called on fellow Americans to “fight this war out in a democratic way.”
The concert closes with the Third Symphony of Karol Szymanowski. Szymanowski saw himself as the true successor to Frederic Chopin. Indeed, Szymanowski became the musical voice of the Polish nation that was created after 1918. He became director of the Warsaw Conservatory. Szymanowski helped shape the vibrant modernist culture in independent Poland. Poland had been partitioned in the late 18th century by three monarchies: Germany, Russia, and the Habsburg Empire. The most significant public partisan on behalf of an independent Poland on the eve of World War I was another musician, Ignaz Paderewski. Poland may be the only nation ever to have had a great musician as its president (though Paderewski’s success in politics did not rival that of his musical career).
But it was Szymanowski, not Paderewski, who would define the cultural renaissance of Poland after the war. Szymanowski’s early music reveals the enormous influence of Richard Strauss. But Szymanowski moved on and incorporated into his musical language the sonorities and strategies of Scriabin and Debussy. During the First World War he perfected his own distinctive musical voice. The Third Symphony is one of Szymanowski’s wartime masterpieces (others are Myths and the first Violin Concerto) and reveals a decisive shift in harmonic language and the sense of form from his less well-known but equally impressive Second Symphony. Among those who believed deeply in Szymanowski’s importance and originality as a European composer were his close colleague, the violinist Paul Kochanski, who spent many years teaching in New York; the violinist Roman Totenberg (a younger protégé); and the great pianist (himself an ardent Polish patriot) Artur Rubinstein—all (ironically) highly assimilated Polish Jews.
This concert therefore reveals how politics and art interacted during a period of intense suffering, violence, and change. The First World War ushered in a new era. The effects of that era can still be seen in the politics of Europe today. And its echoes can be heard in the music on this evening’s program.
By Oberon's Grove Thursday March 27th, 2014 - The American Symphony Orchestra and The Collegiate Chorale joined forces for a presentation of Max Bruch's 1895 oratorio MOSES at Carnegie Hall tonight
Oratorios - basically operas without sets, costumes and with little or no dramatic inter-action between participants - became extremely popular in early 17th-century Italy; opera-lovers embraced the genre because of the Catholic Church's prohibition of spectacles during Lent. Oratorio reached its apex during the time of Handel. In the late 19th century, Bruch was one of a handful of composers to continue working in this field and though it now seems a bit passé, oratorio remained viable throughout the 20th century, with works by such diverse composers as Stravinsky, Honegger, Penderecki, Golijov, and Sir Paul McCartney coming to fruition. In the 21st century, to date, Einhorn and Satoh have written oratorios.
Bruch's MOSES seems in part to have been written - with the encouragement of Johannes Brahms - as a rallying cry against the flood-tide of Wagnerism. Although Wagner had been dead for twelve years (and thus the music of the future was already in the past) when MOSEShad its premiere (in 1895), music was already veering off in exciting new directions. To put Bruch's work in a bit of context, Mahler's 2nd symphony also premiered in 1895, and Claude Debussy had already writtenL'après-midi d'un faune (1894) and was at work on PELLEAS ET MELISANDE.
That oratorio still appeals to audiences today was testified by the large, attentive and enthusiastic crowd at Carnegie Hall tonight. Bruch's 'conservative' music shone beautifully in a finely-paced performance led by Leon Botstein. The American Symphony Orchestra and Collegiate Chorale lovingly embraced the work, and the three vocal soloists seized on the many opportunities for expressive singing which Bruch provided for them.
Bruch draws upon four chronological events from the life of Moses to form the four parts of the oratorio. In the first, Moses is seen as the spiritual leader of his people receiving the Ten Commandments (which are nowadays considered the Ten Suggestions) on Mount Sinai. The second part revolves around the worship of the golden calf by Aaron, with the angry Moses lashing out at his brother and his renegade people.
Following an intermission, we have the particularly impressive 'Return of the Scouts from Canaan' where the chorus and the male soloists did some truly impressive work. In the final part, commencing with a long funereal address by the Angel of the Lord, we witness the death of Moses who, having brought his people to the Promised Land, gives a final blessing to his followers; the oratorio ends with a choral lament.
There are three soloists: Moses (bass-baritone), Aaron (tenor), and the Angel of the Lord (soprano). The libretto (in German, natürlich) is a mixture of paraphrase from the Old Testament and quotations from the Psalms. The chorus, in the role of the people of Israel, hold forth in much the same style developed in Mendelssohn’s great oratorio ELIJAH. The organ plays a prominent role, both as a solo instrument for recitatives or woven into the orchestral tapestry. The overall effect is rich, soul-stirring, and falls ever-so-pleasantly on the ear.
Sidney Outlaw as Moses sang with dignity and increasing emotional power as the evening progressed; his baritone voice was able to successfully encompass the music which spans a wide range, including some resonant low notes. As the Angel of the Lord, soprano Tamara Wilson's strong, vibrant soprano proved also capable of some shiningpiano notes in the upper range. She was especially moving in the solo which opens the oratorio's final movement where she tells Moses of his impending death. Ms. Wilson's performance made me think she might be a wonderful Ariadne in the Strauss opera.
Tenor Kirk Dougherty made a particularly appealing vocal impression as Aaron; his voice is clear, warm and steady, filling the hall with expressive lyricism. He is able to generate considerable power without forcing and to develop a nice ping to the tone as the music rises higher. His big aria ("I go to the gates of Hell") in the oratorio's third part was the vocal highlight of the evening; as the text turns to pleading with Moses for forgiveness, Mr. Dougherty found a wonderful melancholy colour in his tonal palette, making me think what a very fine Lenski he might be. The aria even has a little 'cabaletta' which the tenor dispatched with élan.
Overall this was a very impressive evening: an opportunity to experience a rare work from out of the pages of musical history and to find its heart still beating and its drama still meaningful. In one ironic touch, despite the alleged 'antidote-to-Wagner' intent of the composer, I unmistakably heard a glimmer of a theme from - of all things - the Venusberg music fromTANNHAUSER...twice. This little ambiguity somehow gave me a secret smile.
by Leon Botstein
Written for the concert Moses, performed on March 27, 2014 at Carnegie Hall.
Bruch’s Moses is a powerful and beautiful oratorio, filled with drama, lyricism, intensity, and color. Its relative obscurity has many sources, not the least of which is the fact that the oratorio genre in which Bruch excelled—especially oratorios based on Old Testament subjects—was, by the time Bruch wrote Moses in 1895, considered to be old fashioned. The oratorio has since become, if not obsolete, then marginal. A few classic works such as Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1847) persist in the repertoire, but practically nothing from the vast and fine repertoire from the second half of the 19th century and even fewer from the 20th survives in active use. Amateur choral societies, like opera companies, stick to a small list of popular works that seems to begin and end with Handel’s Messiah (1741). In addition, owing to the extraordinary popularity of choral music in which amateurs could participate throughout England and German-speaking Europe during the 19th century, Bruch wrote an extraordinary number of fine oratorios, as Christopher Fifield points out in tonight’s concert notes. Moses is but one of several Bruch oratorios worthy of performance. Furthermore, although Max Bruch’s name is familiar, he is known for a few instrumental works—primarily the overplayed G minor Violin Concerto (1868) and Kol Nidre for cello (1881)—and not much else. The most important reason for our lack of familiarity with Moses lies in the brutal fact that it represents Bruch’s most ambitious foray into a 19th-century cultural conflict over the nature and character of music as a dramatic medium in which Max Bruch was distinctly on the losing side.
It is hard for modern listeners to imagine the depth of the divide between the adherents of Richard Wagner’s music, Wagner’s theories on drama, and his notion of music as a progressive force in history on the one hand, and Wagner’s opponents, who championed the legacy of classicism and early romanticism and what has come to be regarded as a more “conservative” approach to musical form and communication, on the other. Although by the time Moses was written Wagner had been dead for more than a decade, his influence was hardly on the wane. It was greater and more widespread than it had been during his lifetime. The most prominent living composer who opposed Wagnerian aesthetics during the early 1890s was Johannes Brahms. Though dismayed by Bruch’s decision to write this particular work, Brahms supported Bruch’s ambitious effort to revitalize a large-scale dramatic form that was not operatic or theatrical and which stood in explicit opposition to all things Wagnerian, particularly what they saw as the music drama framed by incessant leitmotifs continuously elaborated through chromaticism meandering over long stretches of time.
In the 1870s, the rage for Wagner had reached new heights from its already powerful beginnings in the 1850s. Brahms’s reaction in the 1870s to the rage for Wagner, especially among a younger generation that included Hugo Wolf and Gustav Mahler, was to turn his attention away from a nearly exclusive focus on chamber music towards writing large-scale symphonies. Bruch, after Brahms, was the next most prominent figure in the anti-Wagnerian camp, and an ally of Brahms. They had a mutual friend in the violinist and composer Joseph Joachim. Bruch chose to make his stand against Wagner with the oratorio. The thought was that, as with the symphony, music cast in a traditional manner, following models dating back to Mendelssohn and Handel, could remain the primary medium of an emotionally charged aesthetic experience for the concert going public, even when music was used to set words. In Bruch’s hands, the oratorio was not designed to become a “total work of art,” but rather to validate how music augments words and delivers a unique experience to listener and participant alike, distinctive in itself and explicitly evocative of a normative classical tradition of composition dating back to Bach. The aesthetic principle guiding the music-text relationship in Bruch’s oratorios derives in part from the art song, a genre brilliantly developed by the composers of Romanticism, from Schubert to Brahms.
That being said, the challenge represented by Wagner’s spectacular achievement left an indelible mark on Bruch’s music. In comparison to Moses, Bruch’s Odysseus (1872), his first successful attempt at the oratorio, (and one performed by Brahms in Vienna) is far more explicitly restrained in terms of drama and reminiscent of Mendelssohn and Schumann. Moses, in contrast, confronts Wagner explicitly with pseudo-Wagnerian means. Moses is quite operatic. The character of Moses is Bruch’s answer to Wotan, and Aaron might be heard as his Siegfried. The text and subject matter, as was the case with Odysseus, pay homage to a noble ideal of learning and culture (in German, Bildung) so cherished by the middle classes, the members of which formed the many choral societies, and grounded in a profound respect for biblical and classical sources rather than Germanic mythology. It is not that Bruch was not a German nationalist; like Brahms he displayed more than his share of cultural chauvinism. He was not particularly philosemitic, (a fact listeners find hard to believe given the popularity of his Kol Nidre). And neither was he (counter to a common assumption) Jewish. But Bruch and Brahms had a more liberal ideal—in the English sense—of what Imperial Germany ought to become than that cherished by Wagner and his supporters. This national liberal sensibility was shared by the author of the text of Moses, the brother of one of Bruch’s closest friends, Philip Spitta, the famous biographer of Bach.
Despite the fact that Bruch adheres in Moses to quite conservative compositional practices and retains a structure comprised of discrete numbers—arias, recitatives, and choruses—he nevertheless betrays, in a startling manner, the extent to which, despite himself, he absorbed Wagner’s redefinition of musical drama. This oratorio verges on the music drama, in a manner only suggested perhaps by Mendelssohn’s Elijah but realized in Moses—to great effect—in a way that reminds one of Wagnerian strategies. Bruch’s decision to choose episodes in the story of Moses that are not ones of triumph but of conflict and renunciation is suggestive of the trajectory of Wotan’s role in Der Ring. Although the people of Israel reach the Promised Land, Moses is denied. As in Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (1932), a great deal of emphasis is placed on the golden calf episode; and some of the finest music in this work, as in Schoenberg’s operatic fragment, is inspired by the rage and anger of Moses. The beauty of Aaron’s role is perhaps more closely comparable to that of Siegmund rather than Siegfried; but it is hard not to hear that it offers an explicit alternative to the sound of the Wagnerian “Heldentenor.” It is only in the handling of the chorus, which is masterful, that Bruch relies exclusively on the great non-Wagnerian oratorio tradition of the 19th century.
By the time Moses was performed, Richard Strauss had already become world-famous and Gustav Mahler was well on his way to joining Strauss as a representative of a new post-Wagnerian modernism in German music. The audience and supporters on whom Bruch counted, the enthusiastic amateurs and music-lovers in England and Germany who were not content to be relegated to the role of passive spectator as Wagner defined it and who appreciated the explicit historicism in Bruch’s work, were already finding themselves in the minority and outnumbered by the philistine pro-Wagnerians of the Germany of Wilhelm II (so brilliantly parodied by Heinrich Mann, the great novelist who will remain forever in the shadow of his more famous brother). Although the music of Moses seeks to accommodate late 19th-century Wagnerian musical and aesthetic expectations, it was already behind the times when it appeared.
For audiences in the 21st century, however, the cultural wars of the second half of the 19th century over music seem, if not inexplicable, then arcane. It is hard for us to fathom why there was so much enmity and conflict between the followers of Wagner and of Brahms. Nevertheless, Moses is a reminder of how sophisticated and important musical culture was, and how much seemed to be at stake in terms of issues of morality, ethics, and politics in quarrels over the nature of musical art. With the distance of time, we can put outdated polemics aside, and savor the brilliance, elegance, and the poignant drama of this powerful and moving rendering of one of the greatest of all biblical narratives. In Moses we confront a compelling and masterfully written synthesis of 19th-century musical rhetoric and expression that, long forgotten, merits a revival, particularly now, in the midst of an oversupply of excessive, CGI-adorned cinematic trivializations of the ancient stories from Homer, Herodotus, and the Bible.
by Leon Botstein
Written for the concert This England, performed on Jan 31, 2014 at Carnegie Hall.
The American concert-going public tends to acknowledge only two English composers after Henry Purcell: Edward Elgar and Benjamin Britten. Britten is the one English composer after Elgar who has secured a place in the repertory with a wide-ranging representative selection of works. In another category are unaccountably neglected composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose fame as an orchestral composer in the U.S. rests largely on a handful of works performed repeatedly by American orchestras. Consistent with its mission, the ASO has therefore chosen four eminent but even less well-known 20th-century English composers for this program. They frame the century that separates Edward Elgar from George Benjamin (one of England’s finest living composers) and mirror the powerful and rich heritage of English music that is today underrepresented in the concert repertoire, even in Great Britain.
As this concert will make apparent, it is unclear whether national categories are either justified or really descriptive of music, especially in the 20th century. Is there anything “English” here beyond the blunt facts of birth and citizenship? National stereotypes in music are hazardous at best and always the object of intense debate and conflict within nations—as the cases of Russia and France in the 19th century suggest. Why do we need them or use them in music, an art form whose materials cannot be differentiated quite as readily as languages are one from the other?
The case of England sheds a special light on this troublesome subject. For most of the 19th century in England—the most powerful economic nation in the world and the European power with the largest empire—Felix Mendelssohn was, with Handel, one of that nation’s most beloved composers. From the English perspective (including that of Queen Victorian herself), Mendelssohn represented the finest in all of “German” music. His status as a “Jewish” figure in English circles superseded his reputation as a German only at the very close of the 19th century. Liszt, Schumann, Bruch, Grieg, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Dvořák, and Wagner all were central components of English musical life in the 19th century without causing the English undue anxiety. After all, the British ruled the world and felt entirely at home consuming and adapting the finest things from all over the world. The made everything their own from tea to music. The suggestion that the composer Charles Villiers Stanford overtly emulated Brahms was as much a compliment as a criticism; it showed his discernment and taste. The English were not in need of a defensive nationalism until the beginning of the 20th century, when the hegemony of the Empire began its protracted decline. That reality and its attendant sensibility emerged with considerable force in the wake of the hard-won victory in 1918.
As the novels of Jane Austen, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot reveal, music flourished in 19th century England. As the novels of E.M. Forster attest, music continued its important cultural position into the early years of the 20th century. Its choral tradition was unrivalled, as were its orchestras and concert life. The composers on today’s program sought to make their careers in a vibrant and eclectic musical culture. Frank Bridge—the eldest in the group—never achieved public recognition his musical merits, even though his work consistently won the admiration of his colleagues for its craftsmanship and integrity. The next eldest, Arthur Bliss, was far more successful in his lifetime, but his posthumous standing has become modest at best. Most famous of the four was William Walton. A very few of his works remain in the repertory and, as Byron Adams observes in his fine program notes, Walton witnessed in his lifetime a striking and depressing decline in his reputation and popularity. The most obscure figure is also the youngest: Robert Simpson. His writings—notably on Bruckner—have consistently overshadowed his very substantial output as a composer.
Two of the four pieces on this program were written in 1934, at the beginning of what Churchill would later term the “gathering storm” that culminated with World War II. England had lost an entire generation in the trenches of World War I. A horror of war and an allegiance to pacifism were widespread. Frank Bridge and Robert Simpson shared these convictions, as did Bridge’s student Benjamin Britten. The works of Bridge and Bliss contain an element of unease if not anxiety regarding the prospect of yet another massive conflict—albeit not in the direct way Vaughan Williams’ 4th symphony from 1934 does.
William Walton’s second symphony was finished and premiered in 1960 during the era of visible and rapid decline in England’s importance in world affairs, after the 1956 Suez affair, during the de-colonization of Africa but before the Beatles—an era filled with an admixture of resentment and nostalgia. And the newest of the works, Simpson’s Volcano, was completed in 1979, the year Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, at a time that many regard as the nadir in Britain’s post-war history.
The genres on this program are as varied as are their musical styles. The program opens with an essay in film music, at a time when music promised to be more than a subsidiary illustrative medium in films, and when there was considerable optimism about the possibilities of film music. We then confront a variation on the idea of a piano concerto—a work with a suggestive title and program—written in a committed, tightly-argued, and personal modernist musical language. We then encounter Simpson’s essay in sonority. The concert closes with an ambitious and eloquent symphony, one that should be more often heard. But outside of England, even Elgar’s two superb symphonies have had a hard time getting their proper due until recently.
In the end, is there anything distinctly “English” about this music? Yes, perhaps, and perhaps no; it all depends on what one thinks is and sounds “English.” Rather, this music suggests the powerful variety of expression in 20th-century music, the vitality of English musical life and the prodigious skill of these English composers, each of whom appropriated and adapted the influences around them to fashion music well worth hearing.
Our first concert of 2014 raises basic questions about the fundamental mission of the ASO. In concert after concert, our audiences (and also our critics) want to know how we program our concerts. Why do we choose the works we play? And if most if not all of them are not in the standard repertoire, either because they were never in it or fell out of it, what justifies reviving them? These questions are particularly apt at a time when a fantastic array of works can be found on the Internet, on YouTube, and on CD recordings. Is it the case that everything “really great” is already out there, played often, and well known, and that works that require revival are somehow lesser and fall short of being first rate, and therefore less deserving of repeated performances? Is not therefore the standard repertoire simply the best music written? And if you can hear so called “lesser” works on recording, why play them? Is the ASO on an elaborate buried treasure or scavenger hunt, where the reward is the off-chance that we will stumble on an unknown work that will become standard and hailed as a masterpiece? (The answer to this is obviously no). Or is the ASO seeking to challenge the logic of contemporary concert life today, particularly its distortion of history—a distortion that robs the audience of the pleasure of encountering the vast riches of the musical past?
The answer to this complex set of questions is quite simple. First, a work of music, in order to be appreciated, has to be played and heard in real time and space. A recording is to a piece of music what a small photograph in a book is to a work of art or architecture. Second, the act of listening does not demand that the listener assume the role of judge in some sort of “beauty” contest that seeks to select winners in a virtual contest for the “greatest” works of music. Why compare one against another by some vague criterion of greatness? We do not read that way and we do not look at visual art that way. Lots of music merits frequent revisiting because all music, even the most popular, suffers from too much repetition. And extreme neglect of all but a few works narrows our habits of listening.
The question is not whether any of the works on today’s program is a “masterpiece” in someone’s opinion. Rather it is whether the music, much like a fine book, deserves to be revisited—played and heard—and whether it captures the imagination of listeners. In some cases, a work will do so with unexpected power sufficient to propel it into today’s repertoire. In other cases, a work will be rewarding to hear and cast new light on the era in which it was written and remind us of the immense unperformed worthy repertoire that has accumulated over more than three hundred years of musical culture.
The growing habit of erasing the past through ignorance or lack of curiosity should be resisted at all costs. All of the music the ASO programs was once admired by the greatest of composers and performers. In bringing neglected works to the stage, we do honor to their judgment. The Britten centenary has come and gone, but why leave the shores of Albion so quickly? British music has much more to offer.
By Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
The musicologist and conductor Leon Botstein has made a career out of championing works that have been overlooked or neglected. On Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall, he conducted a rarely performed one-act comic opera by Richard Strauss, “Feuersnot” (“In Need of Fire”), written 1900-01 as an indictment of Munich and what he saw as the provincialism of its inhabitants — a narrow-mindedness, he felt, that stood in the way of their appreciating both Wagner’s and his own genius.
The American Symphony Orchestra, the Collegiate Chorale, the Manhattan Girls Chorus and a large cast of terrific soloists offered an enjoyable performance of a work that is by and large entertaining. But they did not persuade me of any pressing need to add “Feuersnot” to the repertory.
The story is set “in the distant past” on the outskirts of Munich where villagers prepare to light bonfires to mark the summer solstice. The mysterious Kunrad steals a kiss from the mayor’s daughter, Diemut. Offended, she devises a way to ridicule him in public. In revenge, he extinguishes all the fires in the village, reveals himself as the heir of a certain master sorcerer, “Reichart der Wagner,” and declares that only a virgin’s love will make him rekindle the fires.
Egged on by the impatient townspeople, Diemut concedes, and the following orchestral interlude marks her deflowering with a climax every bit as graphic as a bloodstained sheet. The villagers cheer, and Diemut and Kunrad emerge professing ecstatic love.
In the pun-riddled libretto by Ernst von Wolzogen (a satirist and cabaret figure), all this is expressed in a mixture of Bavarian dialect (poorly rendered by this American cast) and that easily lampooned hodgepodge of alliteration and pseudo-archaic German of Wagner’s own librettos. “Maja maja mia mö,” sings the (excellent) children’s chorus over and over like a kindergarten of Valkyries in training.
Strauss shared Wolzogen’s disdain for the hysteria of the Wagner cult and retained a very turn-of-the-20th-century skepticism toward its transcendental aspirations. But as a composer, he kept his nose deep in Wagner’s pharmacopoeia. In “Feursnot,” Strauss used pastiche as a means to artistic self-discovery with results that range from over the top to all over the place.
Wagner-style “endless melodies” swell and pull back to harp-and-flute-sprinkled pianissimos, only to surge forward again, horns leading the charge. The orchestra played with them relish and a luscious sound. But there are also a couple of waltzes that prefigure Strauss’s “Rosenkavalier,” and Mr. Botstein shaped them with snarky panache.
The fluid way Strauss weaves solos, ensembles and choral passages into the score show him in full command of his technique. But the comic pacing grinds to a halt for Kunrad’s harangue, at over 100 lines a monologue of tedious length, with heavy-handed puns on Wagner’s and Strauss’s names only adding pomposity. Alfred Walker sang the part with a lean and powerful bass-baritone.
The soprano Jacquelyn Wagner brought a lovely clean and focused sound to the part of Diemut that effortlessly penetrated the rich orchestral score. Among the well-cast lesser roles, the soprano Micaëla Oeste and the mezzos Brenda Patterson and Cynthia Hanna stood out as Diemut’s gossipy girlfriends.
By John Yohalem
Each year, Leon Botstein leads the American Symphony Orchestra in a concert opera or two. His choices vary between two repertories: deeply obscure works or operas by Richard Strauss. On Sunday, at Carnegie Hall, the two circles of this Venn Diagram overlapped in a very rare display of Strauss’s second opera, Feuersnot(Need for Fire), in possibly its New York professional debut. Naturally, that drew quite a crowd.
Feuersnot is one of the innumerable “folk” operas that German composers—and others—felt called upon to write in the magnificent wake of Wagner’s derivations from medieval epic. Of all this music, much of it very fine, only Humperdinck’sHansel und Gretel and, perhaps, Dvorak’s Russalka entered the mainstream. Strauss had failed with his first operatic attempt, in 1894, the long and lugubriously “pious” Guntram, though he blamed the orchestra and not his own clumsy libretto for the flop.
Feuersnot, brief (one long act) but preachy, appeared in 1901, just as, thanks to his tone-poems, Strauss was ascending to the upper ranks of German composers, and at first it aroused interest. The Metropolitan Opera’s Board of Directors urged impresario Heinrich Conried to secure its American premiere, but the debacle of the Met’s Salome so outraged Strauss that he refused to have anything to do with the company for several years. Anyway, there was another game in town back then, Oscar Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera. He was awarded Salome and Elektra (both in French)—but showed no interest in Feuersnot. And, after Rosenkavalier, everyone forgot about the early piece.
The story is rather pagan than Christian. On Summer Solstice, a feast of light (with a slight nod to “Holy Hans,” John the Baptist, whose day it is, as you recall from Die Meistersinger), the people of Munich gather wood for celebratory bonfires. A local student of sorcery, Kunrad (pupil of a forgotten and disdained wizard, “Meister Reichart,” complete with Wagner quotations), pursues Diemut, the Burgomaster’s lovely daughter. She invites him into a basket (an elevator to the gallows) to reach her upstairs bedroom, then leaves him suspended over the street so everyone can laugh at his rejection. Kunrad, humiliated, puts a spell on the town that has scorned his magic: Every fire and light in town goes out. No more grilled sauerbraten!
The people entreat Diemut to save them, and she receives Kunrad through her window. (Does she really love him or does she take him out of pity? A more experienced composer/librettist would not have left this question hanging in the air.) After a suitably orchestrated interval, the bonfires burst into flame. No one in the tale is very deep, but the admirer of Strauss will notice in Diemut an early example of the sensuously blazing sopranos of his later catalogue. Kunrad’s jejune but ardent baritone may be a preview of Barak, though his self-righteousness reminds one of Jochana’an (Holy Hans) in Strauss’s next opera.
Besides these two, the biggest role in the opera belongs to the chorus of children gathering wood, rejoicing in bright lights, teasing the lovers, bewailing the dark. Theirs is a long and arduous part, one reason the opera is seldom revived. At Carnegie Hall, the Manhattan Girls Chorus performed with bright sound, impressive diction and musicality, and intricately various dynamics.
Diemut was sung by Jacquelyn Wagner, a singer new to me, and I fell head over heels in love. Imagine the soaring line called for by any Strauss heroine, but, unlike so many aspirants, rooted with no audible break in a deep, stirring middle voice seemingly capable of Fricka tones. She displayed a cool, alluring sound, a natural richness of timbre, a witty way with Diemut’s bitchy jokes. (This is a very sexist opera.) Withal, she is a tall, slim, fair-haired young woman. She sings a lot of Mozart around Europe and, quite lately, her first Arabella:
Kunrad is the opera’s principal role, and Strauss composed it with his usual lack of sympathy for male singers. This bass-baritone must range high and range low, make himself heard over a Strauss orchestra, woo and denounce with fervor and, at the opera’s climax, declaim an endless sermon while the rest of the cast—and all of us—listen, abashed and respectful, to his complaint. This ungrateful part was given toAlfred Walker, whose stardom I’ve been awaiting since he was in the Met Young Artists Program at the century’s turn. Nowadays he’s singing the Dutchman from Seattle to Luxembourg, plus many an Amfortas, Hoffmann villains, Don Quichotte, Telramund and Amonasro. The voice is supple and sizable, not enormous but effective and distinct, with personality. He was not shrill once when Strauss pushed him high, and his mid-voice was pure and resonant. His diction was crisp and the words had meaning; our attention did not stray.
Walker would make a likely Alberich. He sang a flirtatious quartet with three Munich maidens that made me think, This is how Rheingold might have gone, with plenty of canoodling and no reason for theft—but then the Ring would stop right there, eh? The ladies were Brenda Patterson, Cynthia Hanna and Micaëla Oeste, foreshadowing the delicious trios in Ariadne. The brief roles of the townsfolk were all of them well cast. Many of them had names and, no doubt, personalities, but Strauss gives them little of the epigrammatic individuality he would devise for quarreling Jews at Herod’s court, serving maids in Argos, attendees at the Marschallin’s levée. In a staged performance, perhaps costume would distinguish them, but I don’t recall them from the Manhattan School of Music production thirty years ago, either. (That may have been the New York premiere of the opera; if I’m wrong, I know which website to consult for apt and severe correction.)
The typical welter of a Strauss orchestra in full cry arose pleasurably from the ASO, and the score felt shorter than its clocked ninety minutes. The music seems to be working itself up, huffing and puffing, to a climax that Feuersnot does not achieve; the Solstice consummation sounds tame after Tristan (or if one thinks of the “consummation” that would open Rosenkavalier). This is an opera full of humanity but without humans other than Diemut and her didactic lover. Botstein, in his detailed notes, points out that Mozart, not Wagner, was Strauss’s favorite composer, but Strauss’s bumptious humor seems (as it does in Rosenkavalier andArabella) a lot closer to the beat-a-dead-horse-till-it-whimpers of Meistersingerthan the airy, humane wit of Figaro or Seraglio.
By David Hurwitz
Feuersnot is Richard Strauss’ revenge opera, an attempt to give Munich the musical finger after the failure of his first opera, Guntram, several years previously. Taking place on midsummer’s eve, the townsfolk are out celebrating around a bonfire. Kunrad, a sorcerer in training and disciple of the master Reichhart Wagner (get the hint?), who was run out of town previously for his unconventional views, is in love with the mayor’s daughter Diemut. She loves him too, but propriety forbids her from admitting their love to the stuffy citizens. So when he embarrasses her by grabbing a kiss in public, she attempts to exact revenge by hauling him halfway up to her room in a basket and leaving him there to be publicly humiliated.
Kunrad, furious, curses the town by putting out all of the fires. Appearing on Diemut’s balcony, he sings a long monolog in which he castigates the citizens for their conservatism, and for treating him just as badly as they treated his mentor Reichhart. The fires will remain quenched, he claims, until a virgin will give herself to him. Terrified, the townspeople beg Diemut to consummate Kunrad’s passion, which she feels pretty much inclined to do anyway. Strauss’ musical sex scene is unashamedly graphic, and at its pictorial climax the fires shoot up again to general celebration.
Musically the piece is mature Strauss. It was his Op. 50, composed in 1901, after most of the tone poems and just before Salomé and the Symphonia Domestica. The work’s humor is obviously an acquired taste, and the politically incorrect handling of the relationship between Kunrad and Diemut seems to have insured that productions would be few and far between. The opera’s brevity, about 90 minutes, is also an issue, especially when you consider that it calls for 14 solo roles plus an extensive, really extensive, part for children’s choir. Opera-goers generally hate children’s choirs, and for good reason. They always hang around too long and nothing they sing has anything to do with the plot. Feuersnot offers a case in point, even though the Manhattan Girls Chorus sang excellently.
Finally, the title is practically untranslatable. “Not” in German means “need”, in the sense of a lack of something, but it can also mean “emergency”. So “Fire Shortage” might work, but the possessive construction, “Fire’s Need”, also suggests Kunrad’s unquenched passion, and it’s used both ways in the text, which is tough enough to understand given that it employs Bavarian dialect. I do also wish that the stupid German nonsense words sung by the ubiquitous children’s choir had not been translated into stupid English nonsense words (“Inky Dinky Do” and so forth) in the otherwise critically helpful English libretto that was thoughtfully supplied with the program. This was a very generous move; the only prior English translation was made in 1904 in connection with publication of the original piano/vocal score, and it is horrible in ways I can’t even begin to explain, starting with the title: “Beltane Fire”.
The piece works very well in concert, being consistently mellifluous, no longer than a Mahler symphony, and is actually quite fun to listen to. Leon Botstein’s performance was splendid. I have to confess that I had very low expectations, given that my last experience of Botstein and the ASO (Mahler’s Eighth and Ives’ Fourth) was an unmitigated catastrophe. Here he provided exemplary accompaniments, excellently paced and considerate of the singers. The orchestra played very well, and if the sex scene could have been perhaps a bit sexier, well, that’s Botstein. There was really nothing to quibble about.
The cast was also largely superb, especially principals Jacquelyn Wagner as Diemut and Alfred Walker as Kunrad. Wagner has a lovely soprano voice that rides easily over the orchestra without ever turning harsh or shrill. She’s a real Strauss singer. The role of Kunrad is Strauss’ first great essay for baritone (he hated tenors), and Walker has a dark timbre that lent an impressive gravity to the part, yet with an impressive upper extension that managed the high notes comfortably. The minor roles, including Diemut’s three girlfriends, the mayor, and the various townspeople, were almost all cast from strength, and where they weren’t it didn’t matter.
The audience went nuts at the end, and with good reason. It was a terrific concert of a work that does not deserve its neglect. Botstein has pulled off a triumph.
by Leon Botstein
Written for the concert Strauss: Self-Portrait of the Artist, performed on Dec 15, 2013 at Carnegie Hall.
Our conception of a composer’s life and career does not always correspond to the image the composer has of himself. The discrepancy is particularly acute in the case of Richard Strauss. Conventional wisdom has it he was a Philistine, a superficial man endowed with an incredible musical gift. Posterity has praised him for the music he wrote toward the end of the nineteenth century that was once considered modern and daring. That period in Strauss’s compositional life is understood as coming to an end with the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier (1911). The pinnacle of Strauss’s achievement in this view is Elektra (1909). After that, Strauss was regarded as an aging master repeating himself, someone who achieved only glimpses of his former brilliance, mostly during an “Indian summer” after 1945 when he produced a few acknowledged masterpieces.
It is quite clear that Strauss harbored no such view of himself. And in fact the conventional account is mistaken. The one-act opera in this afternoon’s program is key to a more accurate and perceptive understanding of the composer. The historic neglect of Feuersnot (1901) is in part responsible for the prevalence of the distorted view of the composer described above. In the first place, Strauss’s aesthetic remained quite consistent. Mozart, not Wagner, was always at the core of his ambition and his notion of beauty in music. Second, like Haydn and Mozart, Strauss was incapable of writing inferior music. Just because the music he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s was out of fashion when it appeared should not prevent us from perceiving its power and worth.
Feuersnot has remained obscure in part because its libretto seems so provincial, and the fairytale tradition with which it is associated seems so terribly German. Furthermore, although Strauss perfected the form of the one-act opera of a duration sufficient for an entire evening in Salome and Elektra, this work is just short enough as to render it an orphan on the opera stage. This is a pity, since the work is at once brilliant, funny, and affecting. Unlike Weber’s Der Freischutz, there is nothing in the plot that is unfathomable. More importantly, the opera represents the moment when Strauss openly signals his affinity to Mozart.
Perhaps the most helpful way to approach the work of Richard Strauss is indeed to consider the striking similarities between Mozart and Strauss. Both excelled in writing for the stage. Yet both were equally successful at composing instrumental music. This quite rare achievement resulted from the fact that Mozart and Strauss both possessed an uncanny and startling facility in the handling of musical materials. They were virtuosic in their ability to think with music. Although Strauss never exhibited the same level of precocity, there is little doubt that like Mozart he thought first in music, through its grammar and syntax, and then in language. Mozart may now be thought of as profound and Strauss still derided in some quarters as a superficial “note spinner,” but we should remember that there was a time in the nineteenth century when Mozart’s music was dismissed as largely decorative.
But what links the two composers above all is their sense of humor, exceptional within the pantheon of composers. Haydn certainly displayed a sense of humor, but it was largely confined to music and it remains subtle if not dry. Beethoven seemed to have no humor at all. One suspects that the only people who found Wagner funny were his family and inner circle. Mozart and Strauss possessed more than mere comicality. Because they perceived the world first not through the mechanism of language but through the temporal structures of music, they developed a sharp but forgiving sense of human fallibility and a deep sense of irony. Their capacity for humor, as expressed in music, was laced with a humane capacity for lightness. They delighted in satire. In their music, they revealed an understanding of forgiveness, a sense of longing and a sympathetic recognition of the human condition. The last scenes of Der Rosenkavalier have their mirror image in the closing sections of The Marriage of Figaro.
Mozart and Strauss are two composers who possessed true wisdom. They shared with their listeners the ability through music to cope with the disappointments and sufferings that come inevitably with mortality. Although Wagner’s ghost inhabits Feuersnot, this rarely performed one-act opera already reveals the direction Strauss would take during his long career, and his basic artistic credo. Owing to the influence of his father (as Christopher Gibbs suggests in his note on today’s concert), but also to that of Hans von Bülow (who converted from Wagner into an ardent proponent of Brahms), Strauss’s fundamental instincts as a young man leaned toward the classical style. He was indeed always more like Mozart than like Wagner. This should come as no surprise. Wagner possessed genius but little in the sense of sheer facility. Strauss, like Mozart, possessed facility and like Mendelssohn (Wagner’s arch rival in his own mind), displayed both facility and genius.
Although it is undeniable that Strauss came under the influence of Wagner and recognized Wagner’s extraordinary creation of a musical language adequate to the demands of narration and sufficient to meet the expectations generated by the aesthetics of realism, Strauss remained skeptical regarding the explicit philosophical and implicit metaphysical claims about music and its power and meaning that Wagner popularized. For all of the evident aspects of Wagnerian influence, the allures of sonata form and thematic transformation dominate the famous tone poems of the 1890s. In Feuersnot, the compositional technique owes as much to Brahms as it does to Wagner; the musical logic relies on strategies distinct from Wagner’s use of repetition and harmonic color. Strauss pokes fun at Tristan und Isolde in Feuersnot, and he pokes fun at the need in the Wagnerian ambition to appear profound and its reliance on potions, magic, and myth as elements of the drama.
Strauss adored Wagner’s only successful comedy Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868). But in truth there is very little to laugh at in that opera except in a cruel, bullying way. Die Meistersinger is a comedy only because it has a happy ending. Wagner, unlike Strauss, was incapable of laughing at himself. Feuersnot takes aim at many things, but among its targets are not only Wagnerian pretensions about opera and music but Strauss himself.
In the period immediately following the composition of Feuersnot, Strauss turned to myth but not to Germanic myth. Working with the literary genius of Wilde and Hofmannsthal, he found a way to create a searing human drama in Salome and Elektra. In his instrumental music, the Symphonia domestica and later An Alpine Symphony, he pushed music’s potential as an instrument of realist narration to its farthest limits. And then, in 1911 with Der Rosenkavalier, he without reserve embraced the eighteenth century and its pre-romantic aesthetic of clarity and grace. For the rest of his career, it was not Wagner but Mozart who became his explicit model. And it is ironic that it was Mozart whom Brahms (Wagner’s antipode) also revered. In his last operatic works, Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio, Strauss mused on the nature of music and its relation to language and everyday life. He also made one last effort to render myth human and accessible in a way that Wagner never did. If Tristan hovers over Feuersnot in an affectionate and admiring manner, Tristan also is the object of contrast in Strauss’s last attempt at grand opera, Die Liebe der Danae, whose subject is—as is the case in Feuersnot—love and desire.
In order to understand Strauss’s personal idea of love, one has to consider that although he was inexplicably devoted to his wife Pauline (despite the fact that she was universally regarded as overbearing), the great love of Strauss’s life occurred before his marriage, in the person of Dora Wihan, a young woman of Jewish extraction who was married to the cellist Hanuš Wihan, a friend of Strauss’s father. Needless to say, Strauss’s parents disapproved of this liaison. Strauss’s trip to Egypt seemed to have coincided with an abrupt break with Dora. All the letters between them were destroyed, and the entire affair is shrouded in mystery. Strauss’s unabashedly autobiographical Intermezzo (1927), which contains a depiction of his wife that she along with many others found unflattering, may suggest that after this searing but traumatic passion early in his life, reminiscent of Tristan and other star-crossed lovers, Strauss, like many artists, could express the intensity of love and desire as well as the sense of loss and longing only through music. This allowed him to make peace with an unapologetically conventional life style.
It is the Mozartean sense of humor, the Mozart-like recognition of the delightful and painful self-delusions surrounding love, that explains the composer’s lifelong regret at the neglect of Feuersnot. This work is more than a harbinger of Strauss’s later achievements. It is the first full-blown and successful example of Strauss’s greatness as an opera composer. It reveals his capacity to use modern, musical language and technique to achieve Mozartean grace, irreverence, formal beauty and unspeakable eloquence.
As is the case with all great comedies, Strauss in Feuersnot is deadly serious. The expectations that surround love and desire and the place of the artist play a central role in the comedy. Far from being a Philistine, Strauss was deeply reflective. He was a keen reader of literature and philosophy, and was possessed of a skepticism that helped justify egotism, detachment, and a callous disregard of the political evil around him. The mask behind which he hid is suggestive of a deep pessimism about modernity. Yet In Feuersnot we encounter a passionate young Strauss whose capacity for affectionate irreverence speaks volumes for who he was and how true he remained to himself as a composer until his death at the age of 85.
By Paul J. Pelkonen
New York's own Elliott Carter was the dean of modern music in this country, an artist whose vast output spanned orchestral works, songs and even opera. His music always looked relentlessly forward, breaking new ground even in his last works. On Sunday afternoon at Carnegie Hall Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra celebrated the memory of this great composer, who died on November 5 of last year at the age of 103. The carefully curated program offered six of Carter's pieces, spanning eight decades of his output and giving a glimpse at the wide variety of styles and music created over a long compositional career.
The first piece on the program was from Pocahontas, a ballet score written by Carter in 1939 and later revised by the composer as a four-part suite. With heavy slab-like chords and liberal use of Native American percussion, the score is a sort of North American answer to The Rite of Spring, steeped in vast sonic tableaux that depict the new American wilderness and the first, almost disastrous encounter between explorers from the Jamestown and the Powhatan tribe.
Stravinsky's Rite was a huge influence on Carter's stylistic development. (He attended a performance of the piece at Boston's Symphony Hall conducted by Pierre Monteux when he was just 15.) and he returns the favor by quoting the Procession from that work in the slow, solemn march of the the tribal chief. Violent tone clusters depict the torture of John Smith and John Rolfe, and a flute and harp suggest the sweeter ministrations of Pocahontas. The finale is a long Pavane, summing up the work's ideas in an Elizabethan dance filtered through Carter's 20th century sensibility.
The program jumped forward to 2007 for Sound Fields. This piece for string orchestra was one of the highlights of the evening--seven minutes of perfect musical stasis played by the strings alone. Mr. Botstein maintained an atmosphere of perfect surface tension for this immersive, almost ambient work, which was inspired by abstract expressionist art that consists solely of blocks of color.
The Clarinet Concerto, with featured soloist Anthony McGill (of the MET Orchestra) is from 1996, representing a peak of creativity from the composer. The central movements each featured a different section of the ensemble, with the composer demonstrating orchestral wizardry as he wrote accompaniment for percussion alone, small hushed squadrons of brass and wind and finally, the whole ensemble in tutti. Mr. McGill's thrilling high-wire performance was laced with grace and good humor. Unusually, there was a spatial effect as the clarinetist played his solo part from different positions around the orchestra.
The second half of the program featured two orchestral song settings from 1943.Warble for Lilac-Time recasts the Walt Whitman poem as a virtuoso aria, with soprano Mary Mackenzie taking virtuosic flight over a lush and melodic orchestration. This was followed by "Voyage", a setting of the Hart Crane poemInfinite Consanguinity. Sung by mezzo Theresa Bucholz. This song was almost ritualistic, with throbbing bells providing a stately rhythmic backdrop for Ms. Bucholz' firm, plush mezzo.
The genial song settings stood in stark contrast to the 1969 Concerto for Orchestra. Carter's most famous large-scale composition got a brilliant, virtuosic treatment from the skilled players of the ASO, from the charging parts for brass and woodwind to the long elegiac solo for double basses that is a central component of the Scherzando. Mr. Botstein was in his element here, leading a sparkling performance that was the perfect exclamation point to this celebration of the late composer's long musical legacy.
By Steve Smith
When it comes to ambitious, fearless orchestral programming, there is Leon Botstein, the music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, and then there is everyone else. Say what you will about Mr. Botstein’s esoteric tastes, professorial inclinations or limitations as a conductor. It’s all been said before, endlessly, and it’s not indicative of the edifying experiences his concerts tend to be for anyone whose tastes extend past the safety zone in which most other orchestras huddle.
That said, in some ways the concert Mr. Botstein and the orchestra presented at Carnegie Hall on Sunday afternoon seemed more than usually quixotic. The program included music by Elliott Carter, the towering American modernist who died just over a year ago at 103 — and nothing but.
For all the rowdy ovations and newfound acceptance that Carter earned during the efflorescence of his final decades, for most concertgoers his name still causes unease. Serving up his music in the generous portions that Mr. Botstein favors is already a tall order for a Sunday matinee. And the orchestra, while undeniably fine, is a freelance ensemble with limited rehearsal time: not a condition that lends itself to the kind of precision needed to make Carter’s music sing.
Turned out Mr. Botstein could not have been more thoughtful in his planning. The program started with Carter’s 1960 suite from the ballet “Pocahontas,” written in 1936 and orchestrated in 1938-39. The music is brash and colorful, brimming with folksy melodies and vivacious rhythms. Opening with it showed where Carter started before he became the composer we know while also offering reassurance to an audience of respectable size, most of which remained in place throughout the afternoon.
“Sound Fields,” from 2007, showed a side to Carter that even his admirers might not have encountered before. Its near-motionless flickers and sighs for strings conjured a color-field canvas dominated by limited hues, with minute gradations.
Carter’s Clarinet Concerto (1996) is less a grandiloquent showpiece than a sequence of succinct conversations between the soloist and various small instrumental groups.Anthony McGill, a brilliant young principal clarinetist of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, wandered the stage animatedly, pausing here and there to burble alongside drummers or melt into a muted-brass lullaby.
The concert’s second half brought two elegant vocal works from 1943. “Warble for Lilac-Time,” a vernal Walt Whitman setting, featured sweet, gracious singing by the soprano Mary Mackenzie; “Voyage,” based on Hart Crane, benefited from the mezzo-soprano Teresa Buchholz’s luscious tone. At times I wished for stronger projection from Ms. Mackenzie, firmer diction from Ms. Buchholz and a subtler touch from Mr. Botstein, but on the whole the works were admirably done.
The program ended with the Concerto for Orchestra (1969), a virtuosic piece in which Carter imposes order upon chaos with an architect’s rigor and a poet’s imagination. Whatever Mr. Botstein and his orchestra may have lacked in machine-tooled precision, they made up with commitment and heart, as well as a bravado that any orchestra might envy — and ought to.
by Leon Botstein
Written for the concert Elliott Carter: An American Original, performed on Nov 17, 2013 at Carnegie Hall.
If there was ever a persuasive instance for thinking about the appropriateness of the analytical category of “late” style it can be found in the case of Elliott Carter. His longevity and vitality were extraordinary. Few have been blessed with such a dignified and productive old age. Much has been written about Carter. It is hard to avoid being intimidated by the length, consistency, versatility, and centrality of the composer’s career. He was one of the towering figures of twentieth-century music, certainly in America, and for decades was considered by many this country’s greatest living composer. What made Carter’s career so central and interesting, however, is the extent to which it stands at the crossroads of a century-old fractious and intense debate about the nature and place of music in the modern world.
That debate began as the “long” nineteenth century came to an end, during Carter’s early childhood. It has been commonplace to locate the public recognition of a generational reaction against the compositional practices, musical culture, and habits of listening developed between 1750 and the end of the nineteenth century in the year 1913, when Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was premiered in Paris and a “scandal” concert took place in Vienna on which music by Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg was performed. It is ironic that after World War I, when the emergence of competing approaches to writing new and “modern” music deemed adequate to a radically changed world became most evident and apparent, the pioneer of American musical modernism, Charles Ives, had for the most part fallen silent as a composer.
For Elliott Carter, the initial encounter with the music of Ives (whom he met while still in high school), Stravinsky, and Schoenberg would be crucial in the development of his approach to composition. But in contrast to Roger Sessions, his older contemporary (whom he admired) and fellow Harvard alumnus, Carter exhibited few signs of his genius and talent early. He was no prodigy, no wunderkind in the way many other great composers, from Mozart to Korngold, were. What Carter did reveal from the start was the remarkable and wide range of his intellectual abilities. He taught at St. John’s College in Annapolis, where he was required to teach not only music but also Greek, philosophy, and mathematics. In the impressive set of collected essays by Carter, there is an affecting and eloquent defense of music as a crucial component of liberal learning. Carter displayed a natural affinity to literature and language. He credited his interest in addressing through music the competing constructs and experiences of time to Proust and Joyce. Poetry held a central, if not growing role as a constituent of his musical imagination.
With uncanny discipline and patience Carter pursued his compositional career. Although he taught composition, on and off, at Peabody, Columbia, Cornell, Yale, Queens College, and Juilliard, Carter devoted his time essentially to composing. His leap to prominence took place in the 1950s with the First String Quartet. From then on a series of commanding works followed, including the Variations for Orchestra (1956), a second quartet (1960), the Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano (1961), the Piano Concerto (1967), the Concerto for Orchestra (1970), a third quartet (1973), the Symphony of Three Orchestras (1977), and Syringa (1978), as well as many smaller works. All this was done before he turned 70.
Carter, like Copland, was generous to colleagues. He accumulated a wide range of colleagues and friends, ranging from nearly contemporary composers (including Wolpe, Piston, Sessions, Petrassi, Boulez, and Lutoslawski) to performers (Charles Rosen, Ursula Oppens, Fred Sherry, Gilbert Kalish, Daniel Barenboim, and James Levine), composer-performers (Heinz Holliger and Oliver Knussen), and younger composers (Frederic Rzewski, Richard Wilson). Between age 70 and age 100, an astonishing series of works came into being, including songs, chamber works, an opera, and concertos for oboe, the violin, and for horn, as well as numerous works for orchestra.
Throughout all these years Carter sustained the modernist project that came into being in his youth. That project was to extend but yet confront the inherited traditions of musical composition in ways that seemed consonant with the distinctive and seemingly discontinuous features of modern twentieth-century life. Modernism sought to continue musical culture and musical expression and communication along a trajectory that was understood to be progressive in the ways in which it corresponded with, or perhaps responded to, the historical moment. That moment, from 1913 to the mid-1970s, when modernism began its retreat, witnessed a mix of tragic and transformative events. In the light of modern experience, Carter’s impulse was never either restorative or nostalgic, even during the period between 1939 and 1944 when he wrote the ballet Pocahontas and the Holiday Overture. Neither was his approach rigidly ideological.
If there was something quintessentially American about Carter it was his pragmatic approach to influence. As if by trial and error, he absorbed and adapted ideas around him to generate a unique way of composing. By teaching himself and resisting the role of being someone else’s disciple and heir, he fashioned the means to lend his music a distinctive character. From Ives he took the fascination with the experience of simultaneous hearing and the intersection of aural memory and experience as well as the practice of combining discrete contrasting but continuous elements, not mere fragments, and weaving them into a single fabric within the frame of a composition. In one Carter work, the listener confronts disparate and changing constructs of time and of regularity and irregularity.
From Schoenberg and his followers Carter adapted the idea of construing all the pitch elements of the tempered scale as equivalent to one another and without normative priority and therefore without implied hierarchical relationships. He accepted the idea that tonality had run its course and that the dissonance had been truly emancipated. What he developed was an elaborate and intricate catalog of note sequences that could be combined into chord groupings, ranging from three to twelve. These could be manipulated in ingenious and nearly inexhaustible ways. For those not given to cowardice, one can find these pitch groupings painstakingly outlined and analyzed in Carter’s book on harmony. Carter seemed to select a particular pitch grouping as the raw material for a single composition. In the most dense of the orchestral works, a twelve-note grouping often defines the material.
Varèse’s influence on Carter can be found in Carter’s attention to sonorities. Stravinsky left his mark in the interaction between materials and form in relationship to elapsed time. And Bartók’s impact might be found in the vitality of rhythmic patterns and development and Carter’s acute sensitivity to time duration within clearly defined movements. Inspired by all three of these masters, Carter pursued the intimate connection between pitch groupings and particular sound color, developing correspondences between structural elements in pitch and rhythm and the specific use of instruments in a single work. In the end, however, Carter invented himself without propagating a school, a system, or training a group of imitators. He was a meticulous builder, an engineering experimentalist with an uncanny sense of practical utility.
The respect accorded Carter has not been without controversy. Together with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, he was heralded as a composer concerned with the possibilities of new music as a self-contained logical system, a self-referential act of the human imagination distinct from ordinary language and meaning. In Richard Taruskin’s five-volume tour-de-force account of Western music, Carter’s music is understood as not carrying any intent to express some “extra”-musical meaning—to narrate or illustrate to one’s public in one’s own time. There is as little residue of the Wagnerian in Carter as there is in Stravinsky. Rather, as Carter suggested in a 1984 interview, he saw himself as a contemporary analog to Haydn, a composer whose powers of musical invention per se were prodigious and who wrote for an audience that could follow the intricacies of musical thought and did not expect or require any presumed translation into verbal narrative or visual imagery. Carter knew that the audience he faced was by and large unable to respond to him the way Haydn’s audience could to every new work.
Indeed, as Charles Rosen has argued, Carter wrote for a select few, primarily musicians and those who are willing to learn how to understand and follow music. The task of the listener is not to reject what seems at first encounter irritatingly “unintelligible,” but rather to stick with the new as if it were a new language, and learn its order and logic and then derive pleasure from it. For Rosen, all great music demands this kind of time and energy if it is to be understood and loved. But for Taruskin this notion is quite possibly inherently meaningless, in the sense that the distinction between the purely musical and the extra-musical is artificial and a conceit. If music is a form of life, which it is, it has an inevitable connection to speech and sight. The writing of music that demands close study, seems impenetrable and meaningless, and is dauntingly counterintuitive and complex, may be an act of elitism, requiring the creation of an exclusive club of cognoscenti and true believers who share a common delusion. If appreciation depends on exclusive and arcane knowledge, we must abandon, either tacitly or explicitly, the commonplace claims regarding the social importance of music, its universality, its humanistic essence—all claims held dear by many who would argue how central the traditions of concert music are to culture and society. In any event, the public is dismissed as a legitimate arbiter of quality. American musicians and composers, most notably Copland, inspired by the populism of the New Deal and the artistic and democratic vision of Walt Whitman, rejected the extreme conceits of modernism. Accessibility and comprehensibility became requirements of the craft of composition and not markers of debased cultural standards.
The debate between Rosen and Taruskin over the character of Carter’s music may in fact not be as central as the protagonists believe. Whatever may be true of other modernists, perhaps Carter’s music, despite its aggressive allegiance to modernism, like the music of Berg, can win the affections of the public. Whether one speaks of Bach or Mozart, Beethoven or Chopin, Stravinsky or Bartók, or Ives or Copland, there are many different but compatible ways of listening to and enjoying the music. Each of the aforementioned composers has won adherents and admirers from among the entirely untutored and the literate professionals in the public. What the late music of Elliott Carter suggests is that even the most dense and complex of Carter’s finest mid-career works can succeed with the wider audience because his music works on many levels.
Take the Concerto for Orchestra, which is among Carter’s most demanding scores. I have had the honor of conducting this work before with the American Symphony Orchestra at a concert that the composer attended. At a distance, taken as a composite experience, the work engaged and reached an audience that most likely “knows” nothing about music in Rosen’s sense. Given the acoustic environment we live in and the unparalleled eclectic range of musics we hear unintentionally and willingly, the work strikes listeners as dramatic, arresting, original, powerful, and lyrical. And for those curious to dig deeper, there are certainly depths to plumb. The culture wars of the 1950s and 1960s, which Taruskin discusses so deftly and insightfully, are long over. They have receded into history, together with the Cold War. No doubt, Taruskin is right when he observes that there was at a minimum an irony in the anti-Communist Cold War-era support for a forbidding modernism celebrated by a very few. Today’s audiences are beyond these quarrels. The eclecticism of the last thirty years has spawned an unusual tolerance among listeners. Young players now listen to all kinds of music, be it Western, non-Western, rock, or classical music. Old-time snobbery is on its way out, and there is no more persuasive sign than the success of Alex Ross’ And the Rest Is Noise.
What drove audiences of the past mad, beginning with the pre-World War I concerts featuring the music of Schoenberg, was the sense that they, members of the audience, were being insulted. For decades after that, it was fashionable for composers to heap contempt on the musical judgment of avid amateurs and music lovers and to deride the taste of the bourgeois concert-going public. The traditional audience of the past felt at best condescended to. This dynamic has, with the passing of generations, largely vanished, in part because today’s audiences are neither so conceited nor so invested in their connoisseurship. Managements may be conservative but audiences are not. They are far more relaxed and catholic in their tastes. Given the types of things they hear and listen to, they are unlikely to be startled and put off. They are happy, in a world that celebrates near subjectivity with alarming ease as a sufficient basis for action, to make what they can of something they hear on first encounter and to find a way to enjoy it. Because there is so much genuine richness in Carter’s music, it has a real chance for success with the audiences of today and tomorrow.
Perhaps what makes Carter great is that he, through painstaking discipline and concentration, invented music that works the way the music of the great masters from the Classical era did and that reaches across a wide range of listeners. Carter’s music has, in the end, an emotional necessity behind its existence. It is therefore neither academic nor polemical. Its surface of modernity is not artificial but human in a unique introspective, dramatic, and elegant manner: what is unexpected and seemingly unintelligible has emerged in an uncompromisingly modern manner akin to Mozart, Haydn, and Chopin, leading listeners to trust what they hear.
The suspicion that this might be the case emerges not exclusively from the music. The materials of Carter’s biography reveal integrity, kindness, and an almost naïve generous enthusiasm for and devotion to music as a vital medium of personal expression. Carter’s response to the predicaments of a life fully engaged in the paradoxes and contradictions of modernity was to write music honestly, from within himself. That disciplined candor, ambition, and obsession are and will remain audible and alluring no matter how difficult Carter’s music appears or may be to perform. But has there ever been any music to which we wish to return that, in the end, is easy to perform?
By Leon Botstein
Written for the concert New York Avant-Garde, performed on Oct 3, 2013 at Carnegie Hall.
The Armory Show of 1913 may have been a watershed moment in the history of American visual arts—the moment when European modernism burst onto the scene, even if its influence was not immediately apparent. However, as far as the musical culture of New York and America was concerned, its Armory Show moment, when the public and the newspapers in New York confronted an “ultramodern” radical assault on accepted canons, occurred only after World War I, in the early 1920s. That 1913 did not witness a transformative event in New York’s or America’s musical life is ironic. In the history of music in Europe, 1913 was a momentous year. In the spring of that year, two unrelated events revealed to the public what appeared to be an audible assault on nineteenth-century inherited aesthetics. In March, a legendary concert took place in Vienna that resulted in a near riot and intervention by the police. Held in the city’s main concert hall, the Musikverein, the concert featured, alongside a work by Gustav Mahler, music by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton von Webern, the triumvirate of the so-called Second Viennese School, whose music would exert a significant influence in America first in the 1930s, and even more so after 1945. In May, Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had its premiere in Paris with the Ballets Russes. The performance caused astonishment and open conflict (largely on account of the choreography, not the music). The media circus surrounding it assured Stravinsky lifelong notoriety and fame. However, a decade would pass before the more adventuresome music of the Rite, with its stylized evocations of the primitive, was heard in New York.
Perhaps the 1913 Armory Show and the furor it generated concerning new developments in the visual arts set the stage for comparable breakthroughs in music during the 1920s. Alluring as this might sound, what the absence of synchrony in the careers of art and music in New York reveals are independent and distinct historical trajectories of development, obvious points of comparison notwithstanding. The art world of New York in which the Armory Show came to occupy a legendary status was smaller than the city’s world of high-art musical culture. Art connoisseurship was more restricted to an elite of wealth than was the parallel involvement with and attachment to music. Since the 1880s, New York boasted a thriving music scene, framed by a busy concert life, many venues for music instruction, music publishers, instrument manufacturers, an opera season, and resident orchestras that reached an astonishingly wide segment of the population of the city, including but extending beyond an elite of patrons, a few of whom were also leading art collectors.
The public, critics, and patrons in New York who flocked to the Armory Show in February 1913 (including those who bought work from the show) were, if not concert goers, at least opera enthusiasts. There was a substantial overlap between art and music in terms of the public, far greater than that which we encounter today. However, as the design of Carnegie Hall, New York’s primary concert venue, suggests, the distribution of the audience for music was tilted in favor of a middle class. They constituted the backbone of an extensive civic musical life. Carnegie Hall had 2,800 seats, a minority of which were expensive parquet and box seats. A similar distribution was visible in the cavernous horseshoe auditorium of the Metropolitan Opera. And yet these venues were filled night after night, for nine months of the year, year after year.
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, New York had established itself as a vital center of amateur music making and a prized destination in the international concert circuit. The leading virtuosi, conductors, and composers of Europe either came to New York or had their music performed there. What we now amalgamate into the misleading rubric “classical” music helped define the public realm of nineteenth-century New York. This mirrored the extensive amateur activity, patronage, connoisseurship, and criticism that emanated from the massive immigration from Europe to New York, primarily from German-speaking and eastern Europe. William Steinway, of Steinway & Sons, whose forebears from the 1850s typified the German immigration to New York, was prominent in civic affairs and part of an elite that laid the foundations for much of the city’s economic and cultural life.
Participation in the most elite aspects of musical culture did not require great wealth, only enthusiastic amateurism. Musical literacy followed on the heels of the expansion of general literacy. The interest in playing music, in reading about music, and the resulting importance of music extended well beyond those who had access to the thousands of public concert seats available each week during the concert season. New York’s two concert seasons before and after the Armory Show (in five major venues), 1912–13 and 1913–14, reveal the vast scale of New York musical life, as well as its dominant German and Central European character. In 1913, the Metropolitan Opera had a full season with world-class artists from Europe, guest conductor Arturo Toscanini first and foremost among them. The seven-month concert seasons in the years 1910 through 1914 included events by a Russian symphony orchestra as well as dozens by German-language choral and concert societies. New York was home as well to a lively array of German-language light opera and musical theater venues.
The Armory Show’s roster of artists reveals the striking contrast between the French-centered art world and the Central European sources from which the concert life of New York and America took inspiration. The Armory Show had no examples of the work of German artist Max Klinger or Austrian artist Gustav Klimt, and no representatives of the Secession movements in Munich, Berlin, or Vienna. But their equivalents in music—Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler, Felix Weingartner, even Edward Elgar, an English composer highly influenced by German traditions—had a considerable presence in New York by 1913. Although the leading composers of the fin de siècle in France, represented by Jules Massenet, Vincent d’Indy, Ernest Chausson, and Claude Debussy, had made their way to New York by 1913, they remained in the shadow of their German contemporaries.
When the Armory Show opened in 1913, New Yorkers already believed that they had confronted the “modern” in music. The modernism they had heard was Russian and, above all, German, and only peripherally French. The hallmarks of this fin de siècle modernism were advances in harmonic usages (for example in the music of Alexander Scriabin), the distortion of surface structure (in Mahler), and the extensions of orchestral sonorities in the service of an extreme realism in musical illustration (in Richard Strauss). The only French modernism that had made headway in New York was a perceived attenuation of formal expectations in favor of color and atmosphere (in Debussy), highlighted by the New York premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande at the Manhattan Opera House in February 1908.
What differentiated musical culture from the visual arts in the years leading up to 1913 was that the “new” music from Europe had already earned the epithet “modern.” It was defined by the music of Mahler, Max Reger, Strauss, Ferruccio Busoni, and, to a lesser extent, Scriabin and Debussy. The high point of the first generation of musical modernism was the 1907 New York premiere of Strauss’s opera Salome. No doubt, as in the case of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2), the subject matter and content of the opera produced the most astonishment. But the harmony, the sonorities, and the formal innovations in the composition did not go unnoticed. The second most memorable facet of this early form of the “modern” in music was the almost three-year tenure of Mahler at the New York Philharmonic, from 1908 to 1911, during which his programming of his own music as well as that of his contemporaries sparked dissent.
Despite the controversy Strauss and Mahler garnered, their modernism was understood as a manipulation rather than a rejection of the rhetorical conventions of late Romanticism. Indeed, the music of the entire first wave of modernism was received as ultimately compatible with an allegiance to the power of the late-Romantic idiom audible in the works of Saint-Saëns, Elgar, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. These latter composers’ works could be heard with regularity in New York in the decade in which the Armory Show was held. Their popularity helped consolidate a widespread attachment to the grammar and syntax of a nineteenth-century musical prose that was assumed by an enthusiastic educated public to be normative, and certainly the musical equivalents of late Romantic realism in painting and sculpture. American composers before World War I were overwhelmed with new European achievements. They struggled to overcome a lingering sense of backwardness and fought to be heard in concerts.
A comparable revisionism in music—a movement away from the German to the French—started with the musical modernists of the 1920s. These composers were organized into the League of Composers, which came into being in 1923, and the International Composers’ Guild, organized by Edgard Varèse in 1921. Though pitted against one another, the two organizations represented the key advocates of a new brand of avant-garde music. Their concerts and publications inspired contempt, enthusiasm, outrage, and a discourse of partisanship regarding tradition, modernity, and the nature of beauty in music comparable to the controversy surrounding the Armory Show.
Overt rejection of the fundamental premises of Romantic musical procedures and classical forms in the 1920s arrived not exclusively in the music of Europeans, but equally in the work of Americans such as Ives and Carl Ruggles (who was also a painter), whose idiosyncratic and quirky landscapes of sound seemed to have no European precedent. The 1920s also brought into public view America’s first international success in music: jazz. Jazz, whose evolution had been audible in the popular culture before World War I, became wildly popular and found its way into the concert music of younger Americans and Europeans. This second wave of musical modernism in New York of the 1920s may have been radical, and most closely analogous to the aesthetics of the Armory Show. But its most striking aspect was that it was assertively American, and if indebted to European influences, to French not Central European traditions. Modernism in the 1920s connected music, for the first time in New York, to the visual arts.
By 1930 the defense of the new and modern in music assumed a posture of superiority and progressiveness (as it had in 1913 in art). Attacking contemporary music was condemned as a philistine allegiance to German Romantic and classical traditions. Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the compositions of a new generation of homegrown American “moderns” such as Ruggles, Cowell, Virgil Thomson, George Antheil, Copland (the last three with close ties to Paris), and Ives (although he was a much older figure) were heard as signs of progress. But the counterintuitive surfaces of the new music—the absence of easily comprehensible continuity, the distortion or rejection of tonality, and the angular sonorities—never became popular within the audience for music. The high modernism of the 1920s began as, and remained, the passion merely of an elite. This would spark an aesthetic crisis of conscience for many young modernists, including Copland and Cowell, who in the 1930s retreated from the radical stylistic break with tradition with which they had started their careers. Motivated after the Crash of 1929 (as were contemporaries in Europe and the Soviet Union) by socialism and progressive politics, they came to view the idea of a principled formalist and radical musical aesthetic that had no resonance within the broad public as repugnant.
What makes the Armory Show an important historical moment in the history of musical culture in America, however, is the fact that the exhibition and its modernity marked the beginning of a century-long rise to dominance of the visual arts in American culture. Music was displaced gradually from the center of New York’s cultural life as visual modernism in painting, sculpture, architecture, and photography created a truly mass audience for art. Despite its heralded and momentous appearance in the 1920s, modernist music failed to create among Americans a new or expanding audience. To the contrary, the modernism of the 1920s accelerated a process of disengagement and alienation that had begun before 1913 and by the end of the twentieth century pushed “classical” music to the margins of American culture. In art, the modernism first widely visible in 1913 at the Armory Show soon came to be accepted by the general public. In music, the equivalent second wave of modernism of the 1920s played a decisive role in reversing the expansion of the audience for concert music; it fundamentally challenged the audience’s conceits and its amateur habits. Musical modernism helped create a widening division within American musical culture. The audience for music slowly split in two, with one large sector in which anything new, even of a conservative character, assumed a marginal place, and a far smaller segment committed to contemporary and modernist developments. In the vacuum created by the marginalization of musical modernism in classical music came the burgeoning world of American popular music, from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway, forms that exploited the habits of entertainment shaped by late nineteenth-century musical traditions.
Modernist music from the first quarter of the twentieth century failed to win the hearts and minds of the public for music. No equivalent in musical life and culture of the Whitney Museum of American Art or the Museum of Modern Art came into being. A century after the Armory Show, the paintings and sculpture that created the greatest furor are considered priceless; and when they are on display, they draw millions of viewers. Their most exact musical counterparts, whether in terms of chronology (in America), or aesthetic agenda remain at the margins of what people listen to today. They are, with singular exceptions (such as Stravinsky), at best accorded respect and sustained by scholarly attention. Cowell and Antheil, for example, are largely forgotten.
Musical modernism from the early twentieth century, except for jazz, has still not become beloved by the mainstream of enthusiasts of art and music. After World War II, in the wake of the movies, television, and color photography, visual culture replaced the dominance of musical culture once maintained by music as an arena of passive cultural spectatorship and amateurism and assumed a prestige as high art in the world of the economic and social elite, particularly in New York.
Classical musical culture around 1913 therefore may be regarded as a precursor to the centrality achieved by visual culture and high art during the twentieth century. That rise to popularity of the visual was led, from the Armory Show on, by modernism.
The full version of this essay may be found in the New York Historical Society’s catalogue The Armory Show at 100: Modernism and Revolution (ed. Marilyn Satin Kushner and Kimberly Orcutt) for its exhibit The Armory Show at 100: Modern Art and Revolution.
By Leon Botstein
Written for the concert Hungary Torn, performed on May 2, 2013 at Carnegie Hall.
The consequences of the rise of fascism in the 1930s and the Second World War have continued to command our attention, despite the passage of time. The reasons are largely obvious. During the war, millions of civilians were systematically selected by racial criteria, brutalized, and murdered. The destruction of the population and culture of the Jews of Europe was the result of fascism (particularly Nazism) and the war. The German initiative and widespread European complicity stand as reminders of a specifically modern barbarism. It revealed how hollow was the character of what was once understood as progress. The perpetration of violence and hate against innocent men, women, and children was the work of civilized, literate individuals living in an advanced industrial civilization. Terror, death, and dehumanization were justified by highly educated individuals, ranging from jurists to scholars, artists, university professors, and musicians. Dissent and resistance were minimal.
In recent decades attention has been given to what happened to musicians who suffered, died, and were persecuted. There have been many studies of emigration and exile. There has been also a systematic excavation of the music of composers who died in the concentration camps. The names Viktor Ullmann and Erwin Schulhoff have now become somewhat familiar to concert goers and performers.
The focus of these investigations has not only been on victims, but on patterns of collaboration. It is odd that some cases quickly became quite well known—as in the examples of Hans Pfitzner, Richard Strauss, Walter Gieseking, and Wilhelm Furtwängler—while equally egregious cases were left in relative obscurity and led to no consequences in the post-war years—as in the cases of Karl Böhm and Carl Orff.
However, as the above list indicates, the primary focus has been on events in German-speaking Europe. Tonight’s concert goes beyond that frame, to Hungary and its history between the wars and during the Second World War. For most Americans, Hungarian history (with the exception of the Revolution of 1956) is less known. The Hungary that emerged from World War I was not only broken away from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire in its post-1867 legal incarnation, but it did not include all Hungarian-speaking peoples. Like Germany, a reduced Hungary felt betrayed by what were regarded as punitive peace settlements, particularly the Treaty of Trianon of 1920.
By the late 1930s, in order to appease Nazi Germany, Hungary had passed its own restrictive laws against Jews. In the interwar period, Hungary witnessed its own brand of fascism in the form of the Arrow Cross movement. In 1940, the Hungarian government became allied with the Axis powers. In 1944, German troops occupied Hungary and the Arrow Cross took control. This led to the rapid deportation of Hungary’s Jews and mass killings, as well as the heroic efforts at rescue by the legendary Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg.
In 1918, Hungary’s capital, Budapest, was legendary for its high percentage of Jewish inhabitants. (It still boasts the largest Jewish population of any city in central Europe outside of Russia.) The percentage of the population in 1918 that was Jewish reached 23%, inspiring German-speaking anti-Semites (German was the city’s second language until 1945) to dub the city “Juda-pest,” the “Jewish plague.” Yet Hungarian Jews, particularly in Budapest, assimilated with relative ease within Hungarian culture and society in a manner comparable to the German Jewish experience before 1914. Their contributions to science, art, and culture were disproportionately high.
For tonight’s concert, the young musician and scholar Péter Bársony has unearthed from the archives music by four Hungarian composers who suffered in this history. Three of them perished in the war. One, Ödön Pártos, emigrated to Palestine where he played a major role in the development of the musical life of Israel. And it should be noted that after 1945, Hungarian Jewry continued to contribute to the nation’s musical culture, as the post-war careers of Leó Weiner, György Ligeti, and György Kurtág, Hungary’s greatest living composer, suggest.
Most concerts of music by victims of the Holocaust become memorials. The ASO wanted to honor the music of these lesser-known victims by placing it in a concert format that went beyond the status of a eulogy for the composers as victims. For that reason, we have chosen to end the concert with a great unknown work by perhaps the least-known figure within the legendary triumvirate of Hungarian composers of the 20th century. That triumvirate consisted of Béla Bartók, Zoltän Kodály, and Ernő Dohnányi. Bartók emigrated to America in 1940. He was a staunch opponent of fascism and resented the attempt during the 1930s to appropriate his path-breaking ethnographic work on folk music and his uses of folk sources in his own music on behalf of a racialist nationalism which he, a true patriot, did not share. Kodály remained in Budapest, sought to protect Jewish colleagues, and was arrested by the Gestapo, but lived to become Communist Hungary’s most celebrated composer and a pioneer in music pedagogy.
Dohnányi, the oldest of the three, suffered from a mix of bad luck and poor judgment. He stayed in Budapest until late 1944, when the city became a war zone. He was photographed shaking hands with the notorious head of the Arrow Cross movement. He concertized during the war in Germany. But he was truly a man of little political sense. He opposed anti-Semitism in the 1920s and 1930s; but he wished to remain as long as he could in his homeland as a practicing artist, despite the politics.
After the war, Dohnányi went through a trying de-Nazification investigation. He was not only a truly gifted composer but a great pianist and conductor. However, his reputation was damaged and he was forced to leave Europe. After a sojourn in Argentina, he relocated in 1949 to the University of Florida in Tallahassee, where he worked as a teacher until his death in 1960. Ironically, he died just as his career as a pianist was enjoying a renascence as the result of his remarkable recordings of the late Beethoven sonatas. But his standing as a composer still awaits its proper recognition. Over the years, the ASO has pioneered in this effort, performing in concert his two symphonies and his Konzertstück for cello and orchestra, and recording his Harp Concertino with ASO’s own principal harpist, Sara Cutler.
The placing of Dohnányi’s magnificent Mass as the final work on tonight’s program is intended to return the music of those who were victims to its proper context—as part of a noble 20th-century tradition of high art music within Hungary, a country with a keen national sensibility, and a Catholic majority, as well as a significant Calvinist minority. The Mass, composed in 1930, also points out the vulnerability of traditional culture, religion, and communal feelings of national solidarity when faced with the aggressive, reductive, and cruel politics of prejudice and xenophobia, and with the rejection of democratic practices that secure freedom and dissent and which protect us from the tyranny of the majority and of a single ideology.
One might have hoped that these dangers would in the 21st century be merely matters of historical memory. But apparently the lessons of history have not yet been learned quite as well as we might wish in contemporary Europe, including in the new democracies that came into being after the collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War.
By Leon Botstein
Written for the concert The Vampire, performed on March 17, 2013 at Carnegie Hall.
The great novelist Vladimir Nabokov ridiculed the common impulse to find symbolic meaning, particularly of a Freudian kind, in any narrative or witnessed event. But he might have made an exception for the long-standing fascination in Western culture for vampires. Of all the manifestation of the supernatural, vampires have had the most enduring and adaptable symbolic value for the last two centuries. Without accounting for this utility, it would be difficult to understand why otherwise intelligent people would be so obsessed by what Bram Stoker called the “undead” : individuals who have been infected by like-minded individuals with a need drink blood, who rest by day in coffins, are afraid of light and (in some versions) of garlic and mirrors. They can be killed (or re-killed) only by driving a stake through their heart or by exposing them to the light of day.
The vampire stories are a clear case in which the symbolic completely trumps any literal meaning. It is possible to trace the various features of the legend to popular (and not unwarranted) fears, such as being buried alive, the mysterious powers of blood and of the moon, etc. But the development of the story through the 19th century suggests that first and foremost it is about the connection between sex and death. It reminds us that our sexual drive, when realized, forces a confrontation with our own mortality. In the Christian narrative, the loss of innocence triggers two forms of consciousness: the recognition of mortality and the recognition of desire and sexuality. In Western culture, love and death are strange but inseparable bed fellows. Therefore, love and death are not surprisingly the only subjects that make for great opera. Whatever the operatic plot may be, the potential for love and death must be present even if not realized. Despite its obvious adaptability to the worst kitsch and the silliest of teenage entertainment, the vampire story has, like opera, offered a powerful analogy to our complex responses to love and death, two of the most powerful sources of meaning in life.
Another analogy offered by the figure of the vampire, especially after Dracula, is our ambivalence toward those who are outside society, either because they possess unique qualities or because they romantically suffer from a tragic affliction. They are greeted with both desire and fear. The magnetism of the ordinary person to the vampire is an attraction to taboo-breaking freedom, deviance and dissent from the usual rules. Much like the “other,” the non-European that Europe created in fanciful tales of the East, the vampire is compelling precisely because his or her presence calls into question the vapid, oppressive rules of society. It is no wonder that the vampire’s most compelling embodiment, Dracula, was a product of the Victorian age, and that in refining his vampire, Stoker decided to displace the folktales of his native Ireland to Romania, then a remote border region next to the Turkish empire. For 19th-century Europeans who were dulled by routine and industrialized urban life, the vampire is the ultimate figure of the artist and thinker who doesn’t play by the rules and is impossible to ignore. In that respect, the dangerous vampire offered the same vicarious, passionate experience that audiences sought in the operas of Wagner, full of larger-than-life figures who suffered, created, used magic, and dared the gods. The rebellious power of the vampire is perhaps nowhere better acknowledged than by the dictator Ceausescu’s banning of Stoker’s book in Romania. The Romanian government found the novel to be insulting, but clearly a story about breaking the rules and defying conformity would not find favor with the tyrant. Incidentally, Dracula was one of the first books translated into Romanian after Ceausescu’s fall.
The most resonant and complicated taboo symbolized by the vampire, however, was and is sexuality. In earlier vampire stories such as Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Stoker’s countryman, the vampire is female, and clearly represents a familiar story about the fear of female sexuality. But later accounts often have a central male figure who may or may not have female companions trailing behind him. Scholars such as Eve Sedgwick have argued that this shift in focus to male vampires suggest that the real sexual tension in vampires stories is not between the vampire and his female victims, but between the vampire and the mortal men who defend the women. In other words, the focus of sexual fear for an implied male reader has moved from female sexuality to male sexuality. Modern readers familiar with Dracula films are often surprised to find that the novel is mostly about how the vampire invokes a deep bond between the male characters pledged to protect the nearly invisible young woman. The vampire of our opera, Lord Ruthven, is, as Thomas Grey points out in his fine notes to this concert, a relative of Don Giovanni, whose devastating attractiveness derives from his aesthetic refinement and poetic sensibilities. Ruthven-Giovanni mirrors late 18th- and early 19th-century notions of the masculine, in which aesthetic sensibility, refinement, and elegance were more important, as they were for Lord Byron, than brawny insensitivity and a disposition to warlike behavior, a distinction to the ideal of masculinity which we have inherited from the later part of the century. Marschner’s libretto also points forward particularly to Wagner in its emphasis on the relations between men. Nominally Tristan und Isolde is about the love between Tristan and King Mark’s intended bride. In order for Tristan to love Isolde he must betray King Mark, but that betrayal is made possible only by a magic potion, not Tristan’s free will. Tristan’s transgression is in his unfaithfulness to his male friend (thus the greatest music—between King Mark and Tristan—comes at the end of Act II). In today’s opera, Aubrey’s seemingly incomprehensible adherence to an oath made to Ruthven even to the point of endangering his fiancée suggests how compelling the male relationship is.
The vampire story can invoke such possibilities and offer tantalizing alternatives to staid, acceptable European mores, but in the end, those mores and the rules of society must prevail, and so the vampire must die. But he has shown that he will always return. He has been embraced as an enduring image in popular culture over generations, especially in cinema and television. This may explain why he has not been seen more in operas like this one, where he perfectly embodies so many of the themes and symbols so cherished in operatic stories. Today’s opera is a tribute to the imagination and literary gifts that flourished in the early 19th century. He is too much a favorite of the most puerile media—from Dracula to Count Chocula. But who can tell? Perish the thought, but perhaps someday we may see an operatic treatment of The Twilight Saga.