Joseph Horowitz's Blog

Bernstein and Shostakovich — A Rosetta Stone?

The new online issue of “Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs,” the newsletter of the Leonard Bernstein Office, publishes an essay of mine suggesting that Bernstein’s relationship to Dmitri Shostakovich is a “Rosetta Stone” in the Bernstein odyssey. It’s a glimpse of my book-in-progress: “Bearing Witness: The American Odyssey of Leonard Bernstein.” You can read the whole thing here. What follows is an excerpt:

Twenty-eight years [after Leonard Bernstein took the New York Philharmonic to Soviet Russia], the expatriate Russian pianist Vladimir Feltsman talked to Bernstein about his impressions. “Bernstein’s visit to Russia was very important at that particular time — the scent of freedom was beguiling and irresistible,” Feltsman remembered, and added: “His most precious memory was meeting Boris Pasternak.” But Dmitri Shostakovich’s validating handshake proved a more lasting influence.

In the long view, Bernstein’s significance is broadly humanistic. An exemplary cultural missionary, he served a function never as necessary as today, and never before as absent.

Bernstein the humanist was acutely prescient. He prophetically understood that classical music would dissipate from the American experience unless or until it struck deeper New World roots. He foretold the erosion of the American arts. He fought the erasure of American cultural memory. The demise of the Kennedy White House, in which he had been a guest, tarnished his American dreams. Then came Vietnam and Watergate. His signature concerts included memorials for JFK and RFK. . . .

As Bernstein appreciated earlier than others, Shostakovich’s ultimate genius was to bear witness. The Bernstein odyssey, in its many dimensions, equally bore eloquent witness to a twentieth century of American ferment and travail. In the Bernstein saga, the Bernstein/Shostakovich nexus is a neglected Rosetta Stone.

What’s An Orchestra For? – Mulling Salonen’s Resignation and a Dispiriting San Francisco Sequel

Esa-Pekka Salonen

Among my most-read blogs is “What’s An Orchestra For?” – Mulling Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Resignation from the San Francisco Symphony.” I posted it on March 26, 2024, and it still attracts readers practically every day. The topic is the abrupt departure of a genuine music director propagating a tangible and timely artistic vision. I wrote that this story was “dominating classical-music news because Salonen made no secret why he quit: a falling out with the board over his elaborate artistic plans and their cost.”

That would seem a terminus but alas there is a sequel. Because my daughter Maggie happens to live in San Francisco, I went on the web the other day to have a look at the San Francisco Symphony’s upcoming season. What I think I discovered was a dispiriting provincialism driven by evident or imagined desperation. 

Desperate orchestras hug three survival strategies. They engage big-name soloists with enormous fees. They program a bloat of standard repertoire. They schedule as many pops events as their institutional conscience can tolerate. Cumulatively, this is a short-term fix that risks destructive longterm consequences.  

San Francisco’s biggest stars for 2025-26 are Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Joshua Bell, and Yuja Wang. Meanwhile, the orchestra is conducting a music-director search. There are 24 guest conductors, many of whom are young (it matters little these days that conductors ripen with age). One who is not, Jaap van Zweden, has the most assignments. Judging from his brief New York Philharmonic tenure, he is not a likely cultural leader.  

Though a plethora of magnificent silent films invite live orchestral accompaniment, the San Francisco Symphony’s countless movie nights include not a single ambitious choice. Here’s a sampling: Vertigo, Barbie, Home Alone, Pirates of the Caribbean, Crouching Tiger– Hidden Dragon. (The South Dakota Symphony this season screens the 1929 Soviet classic The New Babylon with a pit orchestra performing Shostakovich’s hilarious yet shattering score, surely one of the most formidable ever to mate with the moving image.) 

For San Francisco’s subscription concerts, the major repertoire at hand includes:

–Tchaikovsky Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5 plus the Violin Concerto and First Piano Concerto

–Grieg’s Piano Concerto

–Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

–Beethoven Symphonies 2, 5, 7, 9

–Mozart Prague and Jupiter Symphonies 

–Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Symphony No. 7, and Cello Concerto

–Berlioz Symphonie fantastique

–Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade

—Gershwin Piano Concerto and An American in Paris

–Mahler Symphonies 1 and 9

–Brahms Symphony No. 2

I lived in the Bay Area during the early 1970s, when the San Francisco Symphony and (especially) San Francisco Opera were civic signatures, hosted with pride. Kurt Herbert Adler managed to assemble casts comparable to the Met’s in New York. The house specialized in Wagner, typically under-rehearsed yet ignited by a first-rate East German-based conductor, Otmar Suitner. The singers included Birgit Nilsson, Leonie Rysanek, Jess Thomas, Thomas Stewart.  I less often attended Seiji Ozawa’s San Francisco Symphony concerts, but remember Arnold Schoenberg’s massive Gurrelieder – a bolder undertaking than anything today’s San Francisco Symphony attempts over the course of nine months. 

Before and after Ozawa, the orchestra’s music directors included Pierre Monteux, Josef Krips, Herbert Blomstedt, Edo de Waart, and Michael Tilson Thomas. San Francisco today – a software mecca — is not the San Francisco I once knew. That may be the main story here. And yet Salonen’s were very likely the most sophisticated programs of any American orchestra. That legacy isn’t just being ignored; it’s likely to be erased.

As for the San Francisco Opera, its season is drastically shorter than half a century ago. But they’re presenting a new production of Wagner’s Parsifal – compared to the Symphony’s diner menu, no small feat. And if there are no glossy names, that may be a sign of health. 

Maggie has never had an opportunity to attend Parsifal. I told her that it was the one San Francisco musical event she couldn’t afford to miss.

To read my previous blogs about Salonen and San Francisco, click here, here, and here.

To read a blog questioning the Chicago Symphony’s decision to engage Klaus Makela as “music director,” click  here .

Re-Encountering George Kennan — and “From the River to the Sea!”

I felt impelled to write the long essay that follows after discovering Frank Costigliola’s acclaimed new biography of George Kennan. The initial topic is “the most extreme display of public effrontery I have ever encountered” — Kennan excoriating my fellow students at Swarthmore College in 1967, then refusing to take questions. My eventual topic is today’s students, whom I compare unfavorably with my sixties generation. I conclude: “Pace Kennan, at Swarthmore we ‘rebels’ never disrupted classroom instruction with chants. When I hear ‘From the River to the Sea!’, when Zionism is equated with colonialism, I become Kennan and Allan Bloom both. French Indochina was an example of colonialism. Israel – whatever one makes of its implementation or of its sorry fate today – was created in the wake of the holocaust, a logical beneficiary of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. What, exactly, does today’s chant of the moment signify? ”

The most extreme display of public effrontery I have ever encountered was on December 9, 1967 — the day George Kennan came to Swarthmore College. The entire student body was required to attend. We duly proceeded to Clothier Hall to hear him anathematize us as lazy and stupid. When that was over, he took no questions and was whisked off campus while we gaped and shouted on the sidelines. Then approximately one-third of the student body (the total enrollment was only 1,200) converged on the administration building. The campus engineer appeared and said that if we did not vacate the second floor common room, the floor might collapse. As this was not a ruse, we left in a rage. 

Not until the publication of Frank Costigliola’s new biography – Kennan: A Life between Worlds – did I realize that the Swarthmore speech of America’s most famous and influential Cold War foreign affairs officer was subsequently published in the New York Times Magazine. Or that a book ensued – Democracy and the Student Left – reproducing the speech in tandem with two addenda: 39 letters written in response, mainly by students and teachers from 21 institutions of higher education (not including Swarthmore), and a 100-page essay, “Mr. Kennan Replies.” 

Re-encountering Kennan’s address, now titled “Rebels Without a Program,” I find it even more obnoxious than I remembered. But the greater surprise is Kennan’s “reply” — his discontents with America and with Americans, I discover, were substantially more profound than ours had been during the years of Vietnam and Watergate. And these anxieties and misgivings – he clearly foresaw the depredations of contaminated air and water, of media and social media, of politics and government — were prescient, even prophetic.

As I now appreciate, that “Rebels Without a Program” misdescribed his Swarthmore audience mattered not in the least to Kennan. His ostensible topic was a smokescreen. Neither then nor afterwards did he seriously attempt to ascertain who we were or what we thought. He had received a timely invitation to help celebrate the opening of the new Swarthmore College library. And his agenda was already set.

It’s a truism that each generation debunks the next as callow. Kennan subscribed to that axiom in 1967. And so do I in 2025. I cannot help it.

                                                ***

With “Rebels” at hand, I can succinctly document its contents. 

We violated a university ideal: “the association of the process of learning with a certain remoteness from the contemporary scene.” In place of self-possession, we manifested “screaming tantrums and brawling in the streets.” We brandished “banners and epithets and obscenities and virtually meaningless slogans.” Our eyes were “glazed with anger and passion, too often dimmed as well by artificial abuse of the psychic structure that lies behind them.” We were “full of hatred and intolerance and often quite prepared to embrace violence as a source of change.” We threw stones, broke windows, overturned cars. As for those of us who were “hippies” and “flower people,” Kennan expressed “pity . . . not unmixed, in some instances, with horror.” Whereas we indulged in “certain sorts of stimuli” provoked by “chemical agencies,” only “through effort, through doing, through action – never through passive experience – [could] man grow creatively.” Kennan even disavowed “civil disobedience” as an instrument of protest in democratic societies. He concluded: “I know that behind all the extremisms – all the philosophical errors, all the egocentricities and all the oddities of dress and deportment – we have to do here with troubled and often pathetically appealing people, acting, however wisely or unwisely, out of sincerity and idealism.”

Of this list of attributes, the only ones recognizably pertinent to Kennan’s Swarthmore audience, I would say, were the widespread use of “chemical agencies” and the prevalence of  “oddities of dress” – neither of which interfered with a regime stressing reading, writing, and talking. In fact, never since have I encountered a community as fundamentally benign as my Swarthmore classmates.

In his “reply” to the 39 letters, Kennan added his own reminiscence of his Swarthmore visit: “I came away from the podium . . . feeling that I had done my best to speak honestly about matters that might be presumed to be on the minds of other people present. But no sooner had I emerged from the stage door of the College’s auditorium that I was made aware – by the presence there of a group of angry young men, mostly bearded, who hissed their disagreement and resentment at me like a flock of truculent village geese – that I had stepped on some tender nerves.” 

I was one of those. What trampled our nerves was less his speech than his refusal to engage in the very “process of learning” he had preached. Had he done so, he might have absorbed from our testimony that, notwithstanding its reputation of as the nation’s pre-eminent liberal arts institution, Swarthmore in 1969 was languishing in a state of advanced obsolescence. In my four years of study (notwithstanding my beard, I graduated in 1970 with Highest Honors), I did not have a single teacher who was not a white male. Though I majored in American History, there was no mention of Fredrick Douglass or W. E. B. Du Bois or Crazy Horse. Though my interests were broad, no interdisciplinary majors were permitted. Though I minored in Music, played the piano, and sang in the chorus, no academic credit was allowed for creative pursuits. As of 1967, neither the Political Science nor the Philosophy Department offered courses in Hegel or Marx.  The Sociology/Anthropology Department was new and weakly staffed. The Frankfurt School did not penetrate the curriculum. So far as I could ascertain, the college’s major asset was its student body. The biggest personalities on campus were not the professors. 

The administration was not insensitive to the challenges at hand. In 1966, it had convened a Commission on Educational Policy (C. E. P.) with a mandate to recommend specific proposals for change. But implementation proved slow and obtuse. I remember being interviewed about the “intellectual content” of playing a musical instrument. That the arts contribute to character and personality, to emotional and psychological well-being, was deemed irrelevant. Though the C. E. P. determined that “artistic activity is intelligent activity,” dance and film were exempted from this finding, and credit for work in the creative arts was only sanctioned on a limited basis. In 1969, two years after Kennan’s speech, Swarthmore African-American Students Society (SASS) lost patience and occupied the admissions office to demand that the college enroll more Black students (there were 47), Black teachers (where was one), and Black administrators (there were none). This was a considered act of civil disobedience, sans violence or threats, fortified by extensive discussion and negotiation. 

Spring 1970 was a time of nation-wide student strikes and teach-ins. At Swarthmore, a new hire in the Philosophy Department took charge. He was a Socratic Hegelian – and Hegelian epistemology, rejecting Anglo-American empiricism, proved a Swarthmore intellectual epiphany (I still treasure my densely marked copy of his Philosophy of History). A handful of students dropped out and migrated to the militant far left. On campus, the only individual who advocated violence was an outsider doubtless in the employ of the US Government. Though many skipped final exams, the Kennan critique remained mostly irrelevant – our political arousal was also formidably intellectual. The chairman of the Sociology Department counselled that we return to the classroom, oblivious to the absorbing sociological phenomenon of a popular uprising at hand. I was myself delegated to propose to the Political Science Department that a course in Marxism be offered. I was informed by a sneering Associate Professor that a mini-course for one-quarter credit might be considered – and expanded if there was anything left over to teach. Notwithstanding a Thermidor during which dissident faculty members were purged, the students ultimately prevailed. A 1986 history of the college painstakingly concluded that “it is generally agreed that Swarthmore had not . . . done enough” – that SASS, in retrospect, was an agent of necessary change. 

                        ***

Looking back, were we “Rebels without a Program”? We were right about Vietnam and right about Richard Nixon. But we were also undeniably callow: we lacked a long view. This was George Kennan’s calling card: his signature as a foreign policy analyst steeped in historical learning and philosophical repose. When he wasn’t being short-sighted and presumptuous, he became reflective and wise. It’s all in Democracy and the Student Left. 

Pondering the 39 letters, Kennan at first remained maddeningly supercilious. As if the letters – in fact, a miscellany of self-appointed responses – furnished empirical corroboration, he redoubled his ostensible observations. “Today’s radical student” is “anxious, angry, humorless, . . . over-excited and unreflective . . . His nostrils fairly quiver for the scent of some injustice he can sally forth to remedy.” The writers at hand manifested “the lack of interest in the creation of any real style and distinction of personal life [which] enters into manners, tidiness  . . and even personal hygiene.” Their avowal of civil disobedience furnished further evidence of immaturity: “I am affected, I must admit, by an inability to follow the logic of pacifism and nonviolence as the bases for a political philosophy.” With astounding presumption, Kennan even inferred: “The politics, like what one suspects to be the love life of many of these young people, is tense, anxious, defiant and joyless.” In sum, the Rebels Without a Program did not belong in any place of learning. “If the respect for intellectual detachment . . . is really as small as it would seem to be from these letters . . . , then the contemporary campus is no place for the odd man who might like to devote himself to the acquisition and furtherance of knowledge.” Addressing the rebels directly, he inquired: “What in the hell – if we might be so bold as to ask – are you doing on a university campus?” What is more: “They jump to the conclusion that they ought to run the place.”

Other assertions are simply counter-factual. Though opposed to the war in Vietnam, Kennan inferred that “the alternative to our effort there would be the subjection of the South Vietnamese people” to a “dictatorship ruthless, bloody and vindictive.” Is that what Vietnam became? And Kennan loftily asserted: “It is not an exaggeration to say that an abandonment of the draft would alone cure a large part of the troubles of the present generation of students.” At Swarthmore, we did not greatly fear being drafted – we knew there were ways out.

Then Kennan asked himself whether there were further, underlying maladies at hand. This inference of “some inner distress and discontent” at first seems patronizing. But 216 pages into Democracy and the Student Left, it ultimately powers an authentic inquiry so impressive as to practically redeem the book. Adopting a different tone – virtually a different persona – he extrapolates five “dangers within ourselves, within our civilization, that cast  . . . a cloud over the future of our society.” 

The first is “the question of what is happening, physically, to the natural environment necessary not only to sustain life in this country to but to give it healthfulness and meaning. . . . As the world’s greatest industrial nation, as the possessor of the largest single component of its industrial machinery, also as its most wasteful and industrially dirty society, and finally as the world’s foremost nuclear power and one which has yet to give any very satisfactory explanation of the manner in which it disposes of its nuclear wastes, we have a very special responsibility here.” This 1968 warning also references the destruction of topsoils, the slashing of forests, the exhaustion of fresh water, the poisoning of ocean beds, and the destruction of the ecology of plant and inset life.

Second on Kennan’s list is the extent to which advertising has permeated “the entire process of public communication in our country.” Mass communication, he writes, is made “trivial” and “inane.” “We will not, I think, have a healthy intellectual climate in this country, a successful system of education, a sound press, or a proper vitality of artistic and recreational life, until advertising is rigorously separated from every form of legitimate cultural and intellectual communication – until advertisements are removed from every printed page containing material that has claim to intellectual or artistic integrity and from every television or radio program that has these same pretensions.” He advocates “a revolution in the financing and control of the process of communication generally” – even if that means “bringing in the government.” 

The third danger is the private automobile. “It is a dirty, noisy, wasteful, and lonely means of travel. It pollutes the air [and] ruins the safety and sociability of the street. . . . It has already spelled the end of our cities as real cultural and sical communities. . . . Together with the airplane, it has crowded out other, more civilized and more convenient means of transport.” And it creates a problematic dependency on oil.

Fourth: “the state of the American Negro,” the nation’s “greatest social and political problem.” “I see the possibilities for progress . . . much less in the concepts of integration – much less in the possibility of creating a homogenized society – than in some sort of a voluntary segregation and autonomy for large parts of the Negro community.” He is surprised to find common cause with advocates of “black power” whose “methods and spirit” he otherwise abhors.

Finally, addressing the American political system, Kennan decries “the bloated monstrosity and impersonality of the federal government” and the related decay of state governments. He favors “new regional organs of government.” He wants to reduce the cost of running for public office. He deplores “the tone and rhetoric of American public life.” He wishes for a third national political party that would be content to remain a minority, and “place ideas and convictions ahead of electoral success.” 

The totality of Kennan’s prescriptions for America could readily be dismissed as the pipedream of a disenfranchised aristocrat. Not only is he a man in love with the past; the past he idealizes is European or Russian. He identifies not with Jefferson, Adams, and Madison, but with Tolstoy and Chekhov. His diagnoses are more impressive than his proposed solutions. Even so, the timeliness of this culminating jeremiad is stunning. An America weakened in spirit, shallow in feeling, Kennan warns, is an America at risk. “I fear the loss of our liberties through a descent into fascism in strict accordance with law far more than I fear the protesting ‘lawlessness’ of our youth. . . . Majorities are not to be trusted. They are apt to resign their powers to the tyrant.” 

As for today’s collegiate youth, are they not victims of the fundamental conditions that Kennan extrapolated in 1967? When – setting aside pompous complaints about rebellious attire and deportment, violence and drugs — he decries a “world of gadgetry” that captivates the young, when he paradoxically finds them “more childlike than students of an earlier and simpler age,” when he worries that they are manipulable, adrift from cultural memory, crippled by shallow pleasures, I discover myself morphing into George Kennan. And I am further reminded of Allan Bloom, whose Closing of the American Mind aggravated my generational loyalties in 1987 – but now seems prescient. Subtitled How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Bloom’s polemic was a national sensation, a trigger-point for debate over the legacy of the sixties and its “counter-culture.”

No less than Kennan in 1967, Bloom in 1987 caricatured my generation. His disparagement of listeners to rock music (“it artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of the greatest endeavors”) and devotees of recreatinal drugs (“their energy has been sapped and they do not expect their life’s activity to produce anything but a living”) were instantly notorious. He maintained that a generation out of touch with great music, great literature, great traditions of philosophic thought – all unabashedly Western – was a generation afflicted with “closed minds” and “impoverished souls.” Swarthmore in the late 1960s was nothing like that. 

But no less than Kennan, Bloom – read today — extrapolated fatal longterm trends – unwanted, unanticipated consequences of “rebellion” at hand. Debunking “cultural relativism,” Bloom fingered what we now call identity politics and a linked discourse stigmatizing “cultural appropriation” – a discourse that, to many my age, seems more impoverishing than nourishing for students’ souls. He discerned that a mounting failure to appreciate Western traditions was eviscerating the academy. He deplored a tendency to ecumenically equalize all cultural endeavor, old and new, East and West. He foresaw an exaggerated regard for the other and otherness fracturing democratic community. Even Saul Bellow’s introduction to The Closing of the American Mind reads as if written yesterday: “The heat of dispute between Left and Right has grown so fierce in the last decade that the habits of civilized discourse have suffered a scorching. Antagonists seem no longer to listen to one another.”

            My own writing and research, these many decades, has concentrated on the institutional history of classical music in the United States – asking the question: what went wrong? I long ago foresaw the marginalization of orchestras, once essential civic bellwethers in American communities large and small. I eventually absorbed, to my surprise, that the story I was tracking peaked in the closing decades of the nineteenth century – decades of elevated public discourse and immense entrepreneurial achievement. And my findings, I have discovered, are buttressed by others who study cultural and intellectual history. Nineteenth century Americans were gluttons for ideas and ideals. Books, magazines, and newspapers proliferated, and the spoken discourse, judged by what was being written and read, was both vigorous and ambitious. By the late Gilded Age, these frontier energies underwent refinement – but remained energized. Here – one specimen among many – is the philosopher Josiah Royce in 1899:

When foreigners accuse us of extraordinary love for gain, and of practical materialism, they fail to see how largely we are a nation of idealists. . . . Wherever you go, you find the typical American sensitive to ideas, curious about doctrines, concerned for his soul’s salvation, still more concerned for the higher welfare of his children, willing to hear about great topics, dissatisfied with merely material objects, seeking even wealth rather with a view to more ideal uses than with a mere desire for its sensuous gratifications, disposed to plan great things or his country and for his community, proud of both, jealous for their honor, and discontented with the life that now is. . . . He encourages science and learning. He pauses in the midst of the rush of business to discuss religion, or education, or psychical research, or mental healing, or socialism.  

The subsequent democratization of culture during the interwar decades – crucially, a commercial enterprise, superintended in music by David Sarnoff’s NBC and RCA — thinned substance and degraded discourse; here, Kennan’s impatience with “advertising” is overwhelmingly pertinent. In our twenty-first century, the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa uses the term “social acceleration” to describe an “unbridled rush” of accelerating technological and societal transformation. The juggernaut of accelerating change knows no answer, no countervailing force. It breeds a condition of pastlessness and shortness of attention. My colleagues in music tell me that it is no longer possible to teach sonata form – this basic ingredient of musical structure depends upon remembering what has gone before. And student listeners today do not feel the pull of harmonic trajectory; mainly, they attune to rhythm. 

Pace Kennan, at Swarthmore we “rebels” never disrupted classroom instruction with chants. When I hear “From the River to the Sea!”, when Zionism is equated with colonialism, I become Kennan and Bloom both. French Indochina was an example of colonialism. Israel – whatever one makes of its implementation or of its sorry fate today – was created in the wake of the holocaust, a logical beneficiary of the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire. What, exactly, does today’s chant of the moment signify? 

                                                ***

That George Kennan was an enigma is the starting point of many an attempted portrait. A shrewdly knowledgeable and far-signed diplomat, he is equally a study in the undiplomatic. His personal turbulence was such that even in old age he retained the prejudices of another era. He mistrusted Jews. He disparaged homosexuality. He retained notions of racial purity.

The petulant spectacle of Kennan at Swarthmore College in 1967 remains a bewilderment. The most influential foreign policy strategist of his generation, a man of high purpose and complex erudition, he succumbed to the perversity of his many demons. We shared his aroused concern for the fate of the nation. We were not immune to the worldliness of his Russian heroes Tolstoy and Chekhov– we knew and read them, all of us. We were susceptible to intellectual instruction. He could readily have sought common cause.

He delivered the wrong speech.

Remembering Leopold Stokowski

Last Friday’s “Wall Street Journal” carried my review of a new memoir by Nancy Shear: “I Knew the Man Who Knew Brahms.” Its central topic is Leopold Stokowski, whom Shear knew intimately for decades. I write in part:

One of the most annoying claims ever uttered by a symphonic conductor came from the lips of Riccardo Muti in 2017. “The level of orchestras in the world has gone up everywhere,” he said. Anyone familiar with old recordings – especially of live performances—know that’s not true. During the interwar decades, at least five American orchestras regularly sustained a degree of hyper-commitment, evincing passion and love, today mainly to be found only in the ranks of the Berlin Philharmonic. What is more, each commanded a distinctive musical identity.

The most acclaimed American orchestra was Arturo Toscanini’s New York Philharmonic, which set new standards for songful precision. The least acclaimed, because taken for granted, was the Metropolitan Opera orchestra superintended by Ettore Panizza and Artur Bodanzky: an Italian powderkeg. The Boston Symphony boasted an incomparable string choir that Serge Koussevitzky made “varm!” In Minneapolis, the raw energy and sinewy musculature of Dimitri Mitropoulos’s orchestra was unnervingly unique. But the most mysterious, most controversial American orchestra was Philadelphia’s, where Leopold Stokowski went his own way. A sonic sybarite who ignored or altered every composer’s intentions, he evinced no known tradition or lineage. And he was himself cloaked in secrecy. No one knew where and when he was born, or to whom. Though he sometimes claimed Polish parentage, his actual parents were British, with his father a cabinet-maker. Even his spoken accent – never British or American — was purposely untraceable.

Nancy Shear has long owed us a book about Stokowski. For decades, she was his librarian and assistant. Her relationship to him was itself elusive. He was an employer, a father figure, at times virtually a lover. Her new memoir unpacks both the eccentric methodology of the conductor and the odd loneliness and insecurities of the man. And it brandishes a trove of anecdotes. . . . 

Of [Stokowski’s Philadelphia successor Eugene] Ormandy she writes that “of all the conductors I worked with, [he was] the one I most disliked, both personally and musically.” Because he regarded loyalty to his predecessor as disloyalty to himself, she had to hide from Ormandy her continued professional relationship with Stokowski. . . . In the 1960s, when Stokowski was finally permitted to guest conduct in Philadelphia, “he’d write memos on the official Philadelphia Orchestra stationery that bore Ormandy’s name at the top, invariably turning the sheet upside down.” Travelling by train, he would lower the window shade when passing through Philadelphia. In a rare outburst, he once commanded Shear to “sit down!” – and proceeded to inform her “why I left the Philadelphia Orchestra!” “His voice rising with outrage, he told me about being denied the authority to program substantial amounts of contemporary music and to take the orchestra on foreign tours. ‘They dared to tell me what I could and could not do!’” This story matters, because replacing Stokowski with Ormandy – a move partly engineered by the musical powerbroker Arthur Judson – instantly diminished Philadelphia’s significance as a cultural hub. . . .

I write extensivelly about Stokowski in my books “Classical Music in America: A History” and “Artists in Exile.”

To read a pertinent blog — “Stokowski and Ormandy: What Happened in Philadelphia? — click here .

Alfred Brendel (1931-2025)

In the wake of the death of the pianist Alfred Brendel on June 16, I notice a sharp uptick in viewers of my 2016 “Wall Street Journal” review of Brendel’s collected writings, my main interest being Brendel and Franz Schubert. I reproduce an excerpt from my review below. You can read the whole thing here:

In the Schubert essays here collected, Mr. Brendel hones a metaphor that ceaselessly illuminates this protean composer: the “sleepwalker.” Using Beethoven’s decisiveness of form and sentiment as a foil, he showcases Schubert’s waywardness—a defining feature long misread as weakness. As opposed to Beethoven’s “inexorable forward drive,” Schubert can convey “a passive state, a series of episodes communicating mysteriously with one another.” As opposed to Beethoven the “architect,” Schubert “strides across harmonic abysses as though by compulsion, and we cannot help remembering that sleepwalkers never lose their step.” Next to Beethoven’s “concentration,” Schubert ”lets himself be transported, just a hair’s breadth from the abyss, not so much mastering life as being at its mercy.”

These observations will strike home to anyone who has listened closely to the Schubert sonatas or whose fingers have grappled with them and experienced at close quarters their chronic resistance to definitive formulation. Their ambiguities of sentiment and interpretation excite feelings of vulnerability. The A major Sonata, D. 959—for some, Schubert’s supreme achievement for the keyboard—begins at least three times. Only with the dreamy second subject, a Lied, does the first movement attain a recognizable expressive state. The second movement shatters into atonal chaos. An endless finale gradually establishes the first movement’s song mode as an anchoring poetic ingredient. Translating this music into words, Mr. Brendel finds “desolate grace behind which madness hides.”

One corollary, as with Mahler, is a musical state of existential duress unknown to Beethoven, a condition of unease or terror prescient of world horrors to come. Mr. Brendel: “In such moments the music exposes neither passions nor thunderstorms, neither the heat of combat nor the vehemence of heroic exertion, but assaults of fever and delusion.” Schubert presents “an energy that is nervous and unsettled . . . ; his pathos is steeped in fear.” An “impression of manic energy” points to “the depressive core of [Schubert’s] personality.”

Mahler himself wrote of Schubert’s “freedom below the surface of convention.” Mr. Brendel: “The music of these two composers does not set self-sufficient order against chaos. Events do not unfold with graceful or grim logic; they could have taken another turn at many points. We feel not masters but victims of the situation. . . .”

For a related blog on “Schubert and the Music of Exhaustion,” click here .

Will Europeans Curate Our Receding Cultural Past?

My 2022 book Dvorak’s Prophecy has just been published in German (by Wolke Verlag) with a new Foreword for German-language readers: “The European/American Transaction.” I take note that the recent Charles Ives Sesquicentenary “was mainly celebrated in Europe”; that it is in Europe “that every city boasts a jazz scene engaging Americans who cannot find American gigs beyond a few major cities;” and that my novel about Gustav Mahler “sells far more briskly in Germany than in the United States.”

A few weeks ago I was apprised of Ingo Metzmacher’s remarkable Ives tribute in Hanover last June 8 featuring Thomas Hampson, the NDR Radio Philharmonic, a university orchestra, and nine choirs, plus running commentary by Metzmacher. Would that a major American orchestra would even consider something of this kind.

Here’s how my new Foreword ends:

“Among the reviews greeting Dvorak’s Prophecy, my new paradigm was most personally embraced not by a musician or music critic, but by a prominent African-American arbiter of  American mores: John McWhorter in the New York Times. ‘Horowitz has taught me a new way of processing the timeline of American classical music,’ McWhorter wrote. Addressing Porgy and Bess, he added: ‘Horowitz teaches us to stop hearing [it] narrowly, as a Black opera, or as some sideline oddity called a folk opera. It is what opera should be in this country, with our history, period. Under this analysis, the scores to Copland’s Billy the Kid and Rodeo, for all their beauty, are the fascinating but sideline development, not Porgy and Bess.’ More informative, in its way, was an unsigned review in Publishers Weekly by a writer so impatient with my book that he obviously skimmed parts of it, misidentifying Arthur Farwell as a Black composer and summarizing: ‘Horowitz’s preoccupation with long-forgotten, avant-garde critical controversies make this interpretation of America’s protean musical development feel dated.’

“Precisely. The quest for a usable literary past once undertaken by Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, and F. O. Matthiessen, the useless musical past once proclaimed by Copland and Thomson, were mainstream intellectual events, not ‘avant-garde.’ If in fact they are ‘long-forgotten’ and ‘dated,’ so much the worse for us. Equally informative, I would say, is that a publication kindred to Dvorak’s Prophecy, in the form of a provocative piece of historical fiction, was concurrently undertaken not by an American writer, but by Christian Much, who was born in Luxemburg and writes in German. .  . . 

“A related perspective: the recent Charles Ives Sesquicentenary (he was born in 1874) was mainly celebrated in Europe. And so is jazz (so vital to American identity): it is in Europe that every city boasts a jazz scene engaging Americans who cannot find American gigs beyond a few major cities. I am reminded that when the American West was initially documented, among the first prominent professional artists to portray Native America happened to be Swiss: Karl Bodmer. The most celebrated painter of Rocky Mountain landscapes was German-born: Albert Bierstadt. The German-Russian painter Louis Choris was an important early chronicler of the Pacific coast. The most important chronicler of musical New York, in its fin-de-siecle heyday, was Henry Krehbiel, a bilingual product of German immigrant parents. . . .

“Will Europeans, in decades to come, prove necessary custodians of the American cultural past? I can only hope so.“

Combating American Isolationism with Cultural Diplomacy

My unforgettable experience touring South Africa with the University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra and their conductor Kenneth Kiesler is the topic of my most recent NPR feature and also of three previous blogs in this space. (Above: Karen Slack singing “My Man’s Gone Now” in Cape Town, photographed by Patrick Morgan.) Today, “The American Scholar” publishes my further reflections online . I write in part:

“Cultural exchange was once a high-profile foreign policy priority for occupants of the White House. A pivotal instance was the 1959 visit to Soviet Russia of Leonard Bernstein and his New York Philharmonic. Bernstein brought Ives and Copland to the USSR, but also performed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. His interpretation—with a sped-up ending—was embraced by Shostakovich himself. This startling exercise in mutual understanding was not so different from the University of Michigan musicians setting down their instruments and singing the beloved Xhosa hymn “Bawo, Thixo Somandla.” But MAGA signifies a new isolationism—a go-it-alone toughness. The cancelation of the Voice of America, of Fulbright scholarships, of USAID are all part of this picture. And so is the new hostility to hosting Chinese students.

“My own experience of Chinese students is meager but unforgettable. One was hearing and meeting a 20-year-old Chinese pianist: Yifan Wu. His favorite composers are Robert Schumann and Paul Hindemith—a singular pairing. For his all-Schumann recital in New York City, he brought (from China) his own piano bench (he sits low). He improvised between pieces. His interpretation of Schumann’s Kreisleriana was the most compelling I have ever heard. In conversation, he is voluble and cosmopolitan. The kicker is that to date Yifan Wu is wholly trained in China, by Chinese teachers. Then there was the pair of Chinese students my wife and I encountered at a neighborhood restaurant. We were astonished by their poise and maturity—and the alacrity with which they spoke critically (and not) about conditions in China. 

“China, right now, is exercising immense influence in South Africa. To keep young Chinese out of the United States, or to discourage study in China, makes so little sense that retaining soft diplomacy, sans governmental support, becomes a patriotic initiative. It also sustains the arts in a world at risk. And—a related goal—it sustains basic American ideals of individual freedom. . . .”

Juxtaposing “the gaudy AI imagery of dueling elephants and murderous crocodiles that I encounter on my YouTube feed” with the same animals we glimpsed coexisting in real life in the Pilanesburg National Park, I conclude:

“Doubtless the University of Michigan tour was conceived as a showcase for its exceptional orchestra, abroad and at Carnegie Hall. Its higher purpose, deserving even greater applause, was to combat metastasizing American isolationism—and, commensurately, the growing insularity of young Americans entrapped by circumstances and technologies now being inflicted upon them. “Doubtless the University of Michigan tour was conceived as a showcase for its exceptional orchestra, abroad and at Carnegie Hall. Its higher purpose, deserving even greater applause, was to combat metastasizing American isolationism—and, commensurately, the growing insularity of young Americans entrapped by circumstances and technologies now being inflicted upon them.” 

Our sunset safari at the Pilanesburg National Park, as captured by Patrick Morgan

“A Service to the Nation” — The University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra Tours South Africa

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the Oval Office with United States President Donald Trump

My most recent More than Music documentary on NPR ponders the South African tour of the remarkable University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra, led by Kenneth Kiesler. The tour happened to coincide with inflamed relations between South Africa and President Donald Trump. I conclude: “During the long Cold War decades, the US sent musicians abroad to countries where we were competing for influence with other major powers — where we were insufficiently known or not sympathetically understood. South Africa is such a country today – right now. The University of Michigan tour showered credit on the university and its young musicians. It also, I would suggest, performed a service to the nation.” 

A recurrent theme, in the show, is the rule of law – and an impression, in South Africa, that at present it’s more reliable there (where ex-President Jacob Zuma was tried, convicted, and imprisoned) than in the United States. Another is that the Trump Presidency, for some South Africans, triggers memories of the apartheid decades.

Andries Coetzee, who accompanied the tour, is a University of Michigan Linguistics professor who was born and raised in South Africa. He testifies to the urgency of exposing American college students to other cultures, and the commensurate importance of welcoming foreign students at American universities. And he told me a startling story about a meeting at the University of Western Cape, which has long partnered the University of Michigan. Once a Black university under apartheid, University of Western Cape is now “a powerhouse in South African education, representing the country as a whole,” Coetzee said. “What was very moving to me . . . was when members of the leadership team turned to us, representing the University of Michigan, and said: . . .  ‘Now you are in a situation in the US where higher education is under severe duress and oppression. . . .  We have a lot of experience over decades on how to exist under such conditions. How can we now help you?’’”

Another participant in the NPR show is Christopher Ballantine, South Africa’s pre-eminent music historian and, at 82, a veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle. Like Coetzee, he  acknowledges the formidable challenges South Africa faces today, including rampant Black unemployment. Like Coetzee, he’s optimistic about the country’s future.  Chris regularly reports on South African opera for the British journal Opera. He told me that my recent experience of Aida in Cape Town – the subject of a previous blog — was a truthful experience. 

“What’s made South African opera so rich in Black vocal talent is the long tradition of choral singing in South Africa. Thousands of choirs. . . . When this Black singing talent is brought into the opera house, before audiences that are unfortunately still largely white — although that’s slowly changing — then you do get this bridging. The rapturous applause is not just rapturous applause at superlative singing, it’s also rapturous applause because people are coming together in a way that never used to be possible. You see that all the time. Not only at concerts. . . . If you go to important sports matches in South Africa – the rugby world cup, for example, which South Africa has now won on the last two occasions — there’s an enormous sense of national pride and national unity around that.”

I asked Chris Ballantine if classical music in South Africa is stigmatized as “colonial.” He replied: 

“There is of course a keen awareness of the colonial legacy here. But it’s not used in any kind of punitive way. And that’s unlikely ever to occur. If you think of the fact that South Africa is one of the most multi-cultural countries in the world. The constitution guarantees cultural diversity. It guarantees the right of all 12 official languages to exist side by side. What that means is that this recent nonsense about white genocide in South Africa is just that. It’s total fabrication.”

I also chat with South Africa’s leading classical music impresario, Bongani Tembe, who runs the orchestras in Durban and Johannesburg, and in 2022 founded a national South Africa orchestra with government support. 

In two previous blogs, I deployed video clips to document the transformative impact of the young Michigan musicians in Soweto, Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Cape Town. On the NPR show, you can sample their performance of one of the peak achievements in Black classical music: William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony (1932). It’s a piece I’ve written about a lot. Kiesler’s reading, in South Africa, was the strongest I’ve ever heard, superior to all the commercial recordings. As I remark on NPR: “These highly skilled pre-professional musicians comprise one of the least jaded, most engaged symphonic ensembles I’ve ever come across” – a topic that connects to my recent report, in the New York Review of Books, on Aida at the Metropolitan Opera (and its jaded musicians). 

In my NPR show, I award the last word to the orchestra’s remarkable conductor. Ken Kiesler had no idea, when he chose South Africa for his orchestra’s first tour abroad, that the visit would coincide with the expulsion of South Africa’s ambassador to the US. It made the tour all the more meaningful, Kiesler said.

“Isn’t cultural diplomacy the sort of natural result of simply being authentic and sharing ourselves with others and receiving how they are with respect, even with admiration and love? When we remove what happens between governments, and government leaders, it’s just people listening to each other. Its such a beautiful experience that connects us .  . And I think we should do more of it, all of us.”

Kiesler added that he initially considered taking his orchestra to the major halls of Europe. “It didn’t inspire me, and I knew it was the wrong thing.” South Africa “felt like the right place and the right time.”

P.S. – As my NPR colleague Jenn White observes, More than Music is no longer supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities – allocated funds were cancelled. WAMU, our host station, is currently seeking alternative sources of sponsorship.

To hear a pertinent More than Music show on cultural diplomacy click  here .

My pertinent book, on the cultural Cold War, is “The Propaganda of Freedom.”

LISTENING GUIDE (to hear the show, click here):

3:00 — Kenneth Kiesler on the Soweto experience

7:25 — Andries Coetzee on the Soweto experience

12:00 — The University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra surges through the first movement coda of the Dawson symphony

14:30 — Kiesler on the Dawson symphony and South Africa

15:45 — The UMSO plays “Hope in the Night” — movement two of the Dawson symphony

21:00 — Bongani Tembe on classical music in South Africa today

26:30 — Christopher Ballantine on South African pride

28:30 — The UMSO nails the ending of the Dawson symphony

31:00 — A dozen at the District Six museum describes a disappointing visit of Columbia University students

32:00 — Coetzee on the urgency of global engagement

39:00 — Coetzee on the University of Western Cape’s offer to help the University of Michigan

42:00 — Final observations from Kenneth Kiesler

“Aida” in South Africa: a Sonic Earthquake

Photo: Oscar O’Ryan

Never in an opera house have I thrilled to such a sonic earthquake as the wall of sound produced by the Cape Town Opera in its current production of Verdi’s Aida. In the triumphal scene, the stage is packed with robust Black voices, all functioning at full throttle. A decibel more would be painful to the ears. 

A crucial ingredient – the reason nothing comparable is possible at the Metropolitan Opera – is the scale of the house: 1,487 seats, versus the Met’s 3,800. And the acoustics (as experienced from row G in the orchestra) are terrific.

Cape Town has a long history of opera, including many distinguished Italian visitors. Today, the singers are South Africans. The company remains a vital component of the city’s cultural life. Aida is being given five times and the entire run seems sold out. The audience (overwhelmingly white) is expectant, appreciative, warmly enthusiastic. The company (overwhelmingly Black) is a company, an ensemble, populated by “house soloists.”

Nobulumko Mngxekeza, singing Aida, was introduced to music when she joined her high school chorus. She later studied voice at the University of Cape Town College of Music – a trajectory that has in recent decades produced countless South African operatic artists now featured in Europe and the United States. She commands a rich-hued soprano of good size. Her previous roles, all lighter, include Bess, Pamina, and Micaela.

The company’s pit orchestra is the Cape Town Philharmonic, a practiced full-time professional ensemble. The Aida conductor is the company’s music director, Kamal Khan. Though I found his reading unexceptional, the house’s vivid pit acoustic insures high impact, especially from the low brass. 

The Aida director, Magdalene Minnaar, is a South African soprano who also serves as the company’s artistic director. She has conceived an “Afro-Futurist” production, strangely set and costumed. To my eyes, it contributed little but rarely got in the way – excepting four robotic supernumeraries whose rapid mechanical gait at all times violated the music. The contributions of the choreographer, Gregory Vuyani Maqoma, were both more telling and more original.  

What I most appreciated was the buoyancy and informality of the occasion. (I am told it is difficult even to purchase a suit and tie in cosmopolitan Cape Town.) Of opera as an elite pastime there is not even a whiff.  The season to date has notably included a festival of short operas (with piano accompaniment), including new works plus Schoenberg’s Erwartung and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle. The Barber of Seville and The Magic Flute are coming up. 

“A Tale of Two Cities” — Music and Race in Boston and New York

My latest installment of “More than Music” on NPR explores racial attitudes in Boston and New York at the turn of the twentieth century. During Antonin Dvorak’s historic American sojourn (1892-95), he was classified by Boston’s music critics as a “Slav” – a rung below Anglo-Saxons like Beethoven. The leading Boston critic, Philip Hale, also called Dvorak a “negrophile” and decried his influence on Boston’s leading composer, George Chadwick. Hale considered African-Americans “barbarians.”

As this line of thought – hierarchizing race – was once ubiquitous, we may be shocked but unsurprised. It is the New York response to Dvorak that is truly surprising. When New York’s critics assessed Dvorak, racial hierarchies were never invoked. In fact, no less than Dvorak when he espoused “Negro melodies,” many New Yorkers looked to Black America for musical instruction and guidance. 

It was at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden Concert Hall that Dvorak led an inter-racial orchestra, an all-Black chorus, and two stellar Black soloists in his arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” in 1894. Three years later, William Randolph Hearst rented the Metropolitan Opera House for a fundraiser featuring the Black vaudeville stars Bert Williams and George Walker alongside excerpts from Aida and Rigoletto. Those events were unthinkable in Boston.

In short: New York was a city of immigrants. In Boston, you were an American if your forebears descended from the Mayflower. My own writings – in particular, comparing Boston and New York in Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005) – have long explored the surprising fluidity of race in late Gilded Age New York. 

A comparable perspective, also sampled on “A Tale of Two Cities,” is detailed in Dale Cockrell’s remarkable 2019 book, Everybody’s Doin’ It — Sex, Music and Dance in New York: 1840 to 1917. Cockrell’s methodology was to scour the reports of undercover agents working for a well-heeled vigilante group: The Committee of Fourteen. They infiltrated saloons, hotels, dance halls, and brothels. The “disorderly behavior” they successfully terminated was specifically inter-racial: music, dancing, and sex. Segregation set in just after World War I. Harlem’s famous Cotton Club, where Black musicians entertained white audiences, was one result. 

“I don’t know where this myth got established,” Cockrell says of Gilded Age stereotypes emphasizing snobbery and privilege. Applied to musical New York, “it’s just wrong.” 

As I remark on NPR: “The iconic image is Edith Wharton’s account of going to the opera, in her 1920 novel The Age ofInnocence – a world of snobbery, wealth and fashion. But look again and Wharton is only describing one stratum of the audience at the Academy of Music: the boxholders. We know from other accounts that the Academy’s opera audience was roiling with boisterous Germans and Italians. During intermissions, they would congregate with the singers, amid clouds of cigar smoke and liquor fumes, in a basement lager beer cavern.” 

To read my “Wall Street Journal” review of Dale Cockrell’s book, click here.

To read a review of “More than Music” in the Boston Musical Intelligencer, click here.

LISTENING GUIDE (to hear the show, click here):

PART ONE: Dvorak sets “Old Folks at Home” in New York; Music critics hierarchize race in Boston

PART TWO (12:00) : Celebrating Boston’s George Chadwick — “the most maligned and misunderstood American composer”

PART THREE (29:50) : Boston debates Arthur Nikisch’s Beethoven 5; Dale Cockrell expounds racial fluidity in NYC before WW I