Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 18

“Porgy” and Race — continued

Conrad L. Osborne, whose incisive critical scalpel cuts through present-day distractions and obfuscations with magnificent precision, has written another must-read blog: “The Racial Moment and Opera.”

He begins by revisiting the memorable “Porgy Exchange” in this space – the PostClassical Ensemble zoom chat in which Conrad, George Shirley, and Kevin Deas opined that it makes artistic sense for gifted white baritones to undertake the demanding role of Porgy in Gershwin’s imperishable opera. 

In what follows, the addition of boldface is mine, not Conrad’s. He writes:

“Recently, as my regular readers know, I was enlisted in a Zoom chat on the subject of Porgy and Bess, having written at some length about its production at the Metropolitan last season. The chat was organized well before the upheavals related to the George Floyd murder and other police depredations, but took place just as they gathered steam. One of the topics on the agenda was the question of whether or not it is permissible for a white artist to assume the role of Porgy, and the example we used was that of Lawrence Tibbett, who was in fact the first singer to record the principal excerpts from the part, even as the original production (1935) was underway.Two distinguished African-American singers, Kevin Deas and George Shirley, were on our panel. They both stated that the wonderful music of Gershwin’s score is the property of every singer, of color or not. But that is different from actually undertaking the role in the theatre, and when I asked how they felt about that, they were in agreement that this, too, was allowable for a singer with the appropriate skills. That would, presumably, require the use of makeup.

“Near the end of our amiable discussion, a viewer protested that no white singer, not even Lawrence Tibbett, should be cast as Porgy. Her argument was that whereas white singers have the entire classical repertory at their disposal, and with a preferential advantage, black singers have only this one often-produced piece that accords them preference, and that preference should be reserved to them so long as this situation prevails. Kevin and George quickly agreed with her, and George spoke of his wish that there may soon be more operas of Porgy‘s staying power that show us the variety of black life. So a reversal of attitude had taken place, and this had happened because the viewer’s statement had switched the discussion’s premise from one of an openness based on considerations of unusual artistic quality to one of exclusivity based on considerations of social justice, of equality of opportunity. 

“It was this exchange, viewed against the unfolding events of the subsequent weeks, that was the proximate cause of this attempt to think through the tension between these premises and the implications of The Moment for the High Culture in general, and opera in particular. But the case of Porgy and Bess is not one from which we can easily generalize. It is unique, and Tibbett was unique—an extraordinary singing actor with a bent for assuming ethnic identities, including the African-American one. Unlike our viewer, I would pay premium-seat prices to see him do this role, and pass the line of protesters to do so. But though we have had several great white American baritones since his day, I can’t think of another one I would be eager to see and hear as Porgy, in preference to any of a number of African-American singers. It requires a rare talent to make the prospect palatable, and cultural norms have shifted since the 1930s in a way that makes it unlikely that even such a talent would find the space to develop along the necessary lines.” 

Conrad also writes:

“Great art is in itself a social good, for all, and in the arts that must be performed to take life, the greatest social good is achieved when the artwork is most allowed to be itself, to realize its own uniqueness with power and integrity.”

He ends:

“It is the interpreter’s ethical imperative to pursue the creator’s vision, to enable a given work to speak its own truth to us. The interpreter’s personal identity, beliefs and opinions, hopes for society, worries about how he or she will be perceived, idiosyncrasies of behavior, etc., must be submerged in the world of the work and the subjective experience of the character. That includes skin color and all other signifiers of ethnic identity. Just as authors and composers must be free to write about any world they can imagine, so must interpreters be allowed to play and sing any roles for which they are held to be more qualified than their competitors—provided they agree to the creators’terms and conditions. The Met and other opera companies should rescind their bans on cross-race makeup, and instead require it . . .” 

I will myself be undertaking an understanding the “racial moment” and the arts in a forthcoming piece on the arts and the pandemic for The American Scholar.

The Artist and the State: Mexico and “Engineers of the Soul”

Advocating a more “civilized” United States – and simultaneously fighting a cultural Cold War — John F. Kennedy implausibly proclaimed that only “free artists” functioning in “free societies” could produce important art. In the same breath, Kennedy denied the legitimacy of political art. Delivering words written by Arthur Schlesinger, he maintained:

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. . . . In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not [as Stalin put it] ‘engineers of the soul.’ It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”

This breathtaking assertion was doubtless aimed at the Soviet Union and its “enslaved” writers, composers, and film-makers. Notoriously, Kennedy had no ear for music – perhaps he was deaf to the achievements of Shostakovich. But he was a reader and thinker. Could he possibly have been unaware of the historic Soviet cultural eruption of the 1920s? Of, for instance, the seminal ideological film-makers Eisenstein (Potemkin), Pudovkin (Mother), and Dovzhenko (Earth)?  Well, the USSR was the enemy. 

But what about Mexico? The Kennedy Administration had ceremoniously initiated an Alliance for Progress with the nations of Central and South America, dedicated to fresh efforts at respectful understanding and support. How did Mexico’s artists and intellectuals respond to a cultural Cold War propaganda campaign impugning political art as false and craven?

Mexico’s towering twentieth century muralists were nothing if not “engineers of the soul,” intent on igniting social and political change. And its towering composer — Silvestre Revueltas, long championed by PostClassical Ensemble – was surely the most formidable political composer of concert music produced in the Western hemisphere. 

Revueltas also scored the iconic film of the Mexican Revolution – Redes (1936), with hypnotic cinematography by one of countless artists on the left for whom Mexico was a cultural magnet: Paul Strand. PostClassical Ensemble’s Naxos DVD of Redes, with Revueltas’s score newly recorded by PCE led by Angel Gil-Ordonez, has been hailed in Mexico and Spain as a landmark achievement. And our latest “More than Music” film – “Redes Lives!” – explores the pertinence of Redes today.

Redes espouses revolutionary change from below — and yet, as the historian John Tutino explains in our film, was supported by the Mexican government. Certainly one lesson Redes imparts is that, pace John Kennedy, enduring art can be both aesthetically bold and potently political. In fact, a recent sequel “More than Music” zoom chat took as its topic “The Artist and the State.” We explored the reasons Mexico, historically, has been a home to political art — and why the US has not.

We began with an 18-minute presentation – which I have shared above — by the inimitable Gregorio Luke, who brilliantly summarized the achievements of the three iconic embodiments of Mexican mural artistry: Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. As Gregorio notes, their art espoused views both aligned with the state and critical of it. But all three practiced a popular, populist, public art bristling with hortatory political content.

Of Rivera, Gregorio states, ‘”Never before had an artist been able to [so] change the way Mexico saw itself and how Mexico was seen by the rest of the world.” If Rivera swung from the left, Orozco’s was a critical voice mistrustful of all ideologies, for whom the swastika, the hammer and sickle, and the cross were quite visibly consigned to “the same trashcan.”

I especially recommend Luke’s riveting treatment of Siqueiros, a Communist who notoriously attempted to kill Leon Trotsky. He was also “one of the most influential artists in the United States, even though nobody knows that.” Gregorio is referring not only to Sequeiros’s tutelage of Jackson Pollack, but his influence on the heroically proportioned renderings of proletarian heroes by Marvel Comics and Walt Disney. He was also the victim of a “deliberate [US] policy to destroy the Mexican school of art.” He denounced modernists for whom visual art became an “intellectual game between artists and wealthy collectors.”

In our chat, John Tutino memorably argued that the Mexican muralists were part of a centuries-old tradition of instructive public art beginning with the art and artifacts of the Mexican Catholic Church. The entire conversation dramatized disparities in the role of the artist in Mexico versus the US. It is no wonder that Aaron Copland, upon discovering Mexico in the thirties, wrote: “I was a little envious of the opportunity composers have to serve their country in a musical way. When one has done that, one can compose with real joy. Here in the U.S. A. we composers have no possibility of directing the musical affairs of the nation – on the contrary, I have the impression that more and more we are working in a vacuum.” Two decades later, William Faulkner opined that “the artist has no more actual place in the American culture of today than he has in the American economy of today, no place at all in the warp and woof, the thews and sinews, the mosaic of the American dream.” As President Kennedy said: “It may be different elsewhere.”

I explored the vexed relationship between the arts and the American national experience in a couple of earlier More than Music blogs:

“The Arts in America — Is the Pandemic a Perfect Storm?” — click here

“The New Deal, the Arts, and Race” — click here

More than Music will return to this topic when we consider Copland the populist in November. Coming up next: “Dvorak’s New World Symphony — A Lens on the American Experience of Race” (streaming September 13). The sequel zoom chat on September 23 will incude comments from students at Howard University, where More than Music films are being used in remote classroom instruction — to sign up for the chat, register here.

PostClassical Ensemble’s More than Music films, and related blogs, may be accessed here.

More than Music is PCE’s distinctive response to the pandemic. Rather than streaming concerts, we are turning our past concerts, CDs, and DVDs into documentary films. This initiative comes easily, because our concerts are cross-disciplinary and tell stories. That orchestras should behave as “humanities institutions” (as museums do) is my diehard conviction, and never more so than today.

Are Orchestras “Better than Ever”? — What Not to Tell a Young Musician

Two summers ago I had occasion to spend a week with gifted high school musicians at the Brevard Music Festival – an idyllic cultural retreat in the mountains of North Carolina.

Jason Posnock, Brevard’s artistic administrator, is not only a superb violinist but a reader and thinker and believer in humanities-infused programing and pedagogy. Thanks to Jason, I was entrusted with a multi-media Bernstein Centenary program that explored Bernstein’s thoughts about the history of American music. The same high school musicians upon whom I was inflicted comprised the orchestra for that concert.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by one of them and invited to talk about my career in music. His name is Aaron Lipsky and he produces the “Forte Podcast” via his chamber music company Clarinet and Friends. 

I remembered meeting Aaron and his mother and was happy to accept his offer. We wound up talking for eighty minutes – all of it recorded by Aaron, and posted on the Forte Podcast.

What ultimately imparts purpose and direction to this rant is that my interlocutor is all of seventeen years old and an aspirant classical musician. So I found myself being asked to offer advice.

Three years ago, in this space, I felt the need to challenge Ricardo Muti’s assertion that “orchestras are better than ever.” My response was a three-hour webcast during which Bill McGlaughlin and I sampled recordings pre-dating 1950: one-of-a-kind readings by Nikisch and Koussevitzky leading the Boston Symphony, by Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Orchestra, by Toscanini leading the New York Philharmonic, by Mitropoulos leading the Minneapolis Symphony, by Bodanzky leading the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra . 

The same topic came up with Aaron – but took a new direction. The following is verbatim from our conversation, beginning 13 minutes from the end.

AARON: Classical music is dying, literally. Almost all audiences are old. How do you get young people to love classical music?

JOE: I’m a parent, I have two kids, and yet I’m very discouraged by young people today. They’re crippled by social media and other factors that impinge on their lives and on their attention spans. I don’t believe in catering to them. I think that an orchestra that’s too invested in pleasing young people may lose its soul. If they come to me [i.e., the concerts I produce in DC and elsewhere], that’s great, nothing could be more gratifying. . . . This is a problem that depresses and perplexes me. 

AARON: You say you don’t believe in catering to young people. And I understand that.  

JOE: Well what about the young people that you know? What about the young people at Brevard? When you were at Brevard I gave five talks – do you have any thoughts about their impact? Because I know a lot of people your age, when they hear me talk, they’re not very interested in what I have to say.

AARON: I obviously remember almost everything you said. I was moved by almost everything you said. But can an orchestra really survive on the select few people who go to the Brevard Music Center?

JOE: I mention Brevard because this is a cross sampling of young musicians. It’s the musicians who have to figure out that orchestras are in trouble, that orchestras need a different footprint, a different identity, a different mission. That American musicians need to curate the American musical past. That they have to do more than rehearse and perform . . . If the musicians don’t figure these things out, nobody will, and that’s why I’m asking you about your cohort at Brevard . . . Because they’re already there, responding to the music. They already love it. So you don’t have to introduce them to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. But do they simply want to be in a great orchestra and play Beethoven’s Seventh? If that’s what they think — that’s hopeless. . . . 

Do you think that young musicians in your experience understand the magnitude of the challenge that they’re facing?

AARON: I do not. Because of rhetoric like “Orchestras now are better than ever.”  Because that’s the message that we hear constantly. We feel we’re part of a general ascension.

JOE: Let’s stick with this idea . . . First of all, how do you define an orchestra? Is an orchestra just what transpires Tuesday night at the concert hall? That’s not an orchestra. An orchestra is an institution. A cultural institution. And as such it does more than perform concerts. It functions within a community in a variety of ways. . . . 

“Orchestras are better than ever” – if you mean that, literally, you mean that in terms of the role the institution plays in Minneapolis or Philadelphia or Boston, it has a bigger and more important role than it’s ever had in the past. . . . Anybody who says that – they don’t know what an orchestra is. 

So this is a dangerous thing to tell young musicians. It will breed complacency and insularity. It’s the last thing they need to hear.

AARON: I agree that it’s a bad message. So what would you say to young musicians?

JOE: What I believe in imparting is whatever I managed to impart to you that week at Brevard. I think it’s important to understand something about the institutional history of the orchestra in the United States if you want to become an American orchestral musician. Learning about the context of what you aspire to do. I think that’s the first step – knowledge. Knowledge of history.

The foregoing exchange came at the end of a long discussion in which I had occasion to summarize the “knowledge of history” in question – and also to suggest some of the ways orchestras can most vibrantly behave as cultural institutions today.

As I told Aaron: 

The two most influential figures in the history of American classical music were Theodore Thomas and Henry Higginson. Thomas’s itinerant Thomas Orchestra implanted the notion that “a symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community.” Higginson single-handed founded and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra; he also built Boston’s Symphony Hall. They are the individuals most responsible for making the concert orchestra an American specialty, versus the pit orchestras of Europe. 

Classical music in America peaked in the decades before World War I; orchestras throughout the Northeast and Midwest truly embodied “the culture of the community.” After that, the popularization of classical music among the “new middle classes” was commercialized by a Eurocentric “music appreciation” movement. Concurrently, modernism furnished a new aesthetic indifferent to new listeners. The net result – unforeseen by Thomas, Higginson, and other visionary pioneers — was a failure to consummate an American symphonic canon.

The exemplary orchestras of Serge Koussevitzky (in Boston), Leopold Stokowski (in Philadelphia), and Dmitri Mitropoulos (in Minneapolis) established singular sonic and institutional identities. But these were exceptions, and American roots for an American classical music were never sufficiently secured. In particular, the Black musical motherlode was squandered. After 1950, symphonic concerts grew increasingly formulaic. Cultural visionaries sought other fields of endeavor.  

Orchestras must find new ways to counteract shrinkage. And they must welcome and engage the participation of their own musicians in this necessary task.

“Redes” Lives! — The Iconic Film of the Mexican Revolution and what it says to us today

In his most important speech about the place of culture in the national experience, delivered at Amherst College mere weeks before his death, President John F. Kennedy said:

“In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not ‘engineers of the soul.’ It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.”

Is that necessarily how artists best serve the nation? Truly, it is “different elsewhere.” Outside the US, artists may successfully aspire to become – in Stalin’s phrase – influential “engineers of the soul.” In our hemisphere, the first names to come to mind may be Mexican: Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, powerful and impactful muralists on the left, defining and espousing Mexican identity, agitating with their art for social and economic reform.

It’s a pity that Silvestre Revueltas is not at least as well known as Rivera. I would unhesitatingly call him the supreme political composer of concert and film music produced in the Americas.  His music combines ideology with personal understanding. This is what Octavio Paz meant when he wrote extolling Revueltas:

“All his music seems preceded by something that is not simply joy and exhilaration, or satire and irony. That element is his profound empathy with his surroundings. He occupies a place in our hearts above that of the grandiose Mexican murals, that seem to know all except pity.”

Revueltas’s peak achievements include his singularly arresting score for the film Redes (1936), in which impoverished Mexican fisherman unite to storm the bastions of power. That this film isn’t as celebrated as it deserves to be is partly because until recently it seemed impossible to obtain a decent print. PostClassical Ensemble’s Naxos DVD Redes not only features a pristine print, courtesy of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project; it also features a newly recorded soundtrack by PCE (and its inimitable principal trumpet, Chris Gekker) led by Angel Gil-Ordonez. The impact of Revueltas’s score, in combination with Paul Strand’s lyrical cinematography, is fully realized for the first time.

PostClassical Ensemble’s latest More than Music film (you can screen it above), remarkably embellished by Peter Bogdanoff’s visual presentation, explores the significance of Redes and Revueltas today; we call it “Redes Lives!”

The distinguished Mexican composer Ana Lara beautifully sums it all up by saying (at 1:01:38): “It’s unique in film music, that you can have his very revolutionary music – wonderfully written, wonderfully orchestrated – and at the same time it throws you into the deepest feeling of the human being.” 

To which Angel Gil-Ordonez adds (at 1:00:40) that, because Revueltas combines political militancy with empathy (“always on the side of those who are suffering”), he bears comparison with Shostakovich.

Why did Aaron Copland say: “When I was in Mexico I was a little envious of the opportunity composers have to serve their country”? 

Why did the Mexican government decide to back a film espousing revolutionary change? (The historian John Tutino has the answer at 51:09.)

What impelled the Mexican music historian Roberto Kolb to deny that Mexican composers “were running around in loin cloths”? (46:42)

Is Redes today a call for action? Yes, affirms Lorenzo Candelaria, a leading Hispanic educator and dean of Vanderbilt’s Blair School of Music (58:35).

Midway through Redes, Strand admires the pride and resilience of challenged fishermen, hauling their nets in unison, bringing in the catch. His camera feasts on the elemental grandeur of Mexican sky and water – and discovers, in the veins of the fishermen’s muscled arms, a visual metaphor for their rope nets, themselves a metaphor for entrapment. Revueltas does not accompany this sequence; he comments upon it with a chorale. I cannot think of a film clip that more memorably marries music with the moving image 

Reviewing our Naxos DVD, Spain’s pre-eminent contemporary novelist, Antonio Munoz Molina, wrote in El Pais: “The beauty of image and  of sound register as never before. . . . It is like experiencing a masterpiece of painting cleaned of centuries of grime. The exhausted and disillusioned Silvestre Revueltas of his final years would never have imagined such a posthumous tribute.”

A follow-up zoom chat — “The Artist and the State: Political Art in Mexico and the US” – will include a terrific presentation by Gregorio Luke on the Mexican muralists. Also Ana Lara, Roberto Kolb, John Tutino, Lorenzo Candelaria, and Ix-Nic Iruegas Peon of the Mexican Cultural Institute. To register, click here.

For more on “More than Music,” click here.

Coming in September: a More than Music film on Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony as a lens on the American experience of race.

The Arts in America — Is the Pandemic a Perfect Storm?

In 1987, my Understanding Toscanini was the most discussed, most reviled book about classical music to have appeared in recent memory. Its subtitle was “How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music.” I used Arturo Toscanini — for decades, the most famous and influential classical musician in the US, hailed as a “priest of culture” and “prophet of enlightenment” – as an illustration and metaphor for the post-World War I failure to generate a distinctively “American” classical music. To this day, American orchestras mainly program European symphonies. American opera companies mainly program European operas. My Cassandra warning was that the United States had proudly acquired a musical high culture built on sand. 

Many found my warning risible.

Eighteen years later, my Classical Music in America: A History of its Rise and Fall, with warnings even more dire, provoked mere ripples of vociferous dissent – including oppositional harangues from within the American symphonic community. This reception made my point: between 1987 and 2005, the American audience for serious books about classical music had diminished exponentially. And American orchestras, with aging templates and aging European repertoires, were still unwilling or unable to innovate. 

After that, our Western cultural inheritance came under general attack as elitist, sexist, and racist. The precipitous marginalization of American classical music I had long predicted accelerated at a pace that took even me by surprise.

And then came the pandemic – a perfect storm. At a moment when culture could vitally contribute to national pride and resilience, the arts are newly challenged financially: concert halls and museums are closed; ticket revenues are nil. The reverberations, internationally, disclose a  sudden, naked disparity in the role of long-inherited culture as a component of the national experience in the US compared to attitudes abroad.

All this was the topic of a recent trans-Atlantic zoom chat sponsored by PostClassical Ensemble and The American Interest. If that sounds important, please consider spending eighty minutes watching and listening to what was said. Here is the link.

Days before our chat, the British government announced a $2 billion infusion into the arts sector. Prime Minister Boris Johnson said: “The UK’s cultural industry is the beating heart of this country.” Months before, governments on the European continent had moved decisively to buttress their signature cultural institutions. 

In the US, the silence remains deafening. When the UK government response initially proved sluggish, warnings from Sir Simon Rattle, music director of the London Symphony, and Sir Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director of the Barbican Center, were heard and heeded. In Washington, nothing remotely resembling a Culture Ministry exists to listen.

Traditionally, Americans have believed that the arts should pay for themselves. In practice, this has meant (in contradistinction to Europe) heavy reliance on private donations, supplemented by box office and by gifts from foundations and corporations. But the charitable foundations that once supported classical music – Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Knight, among others – have given up on orchestras in particular. There are some good reasons for that, and some not so good reasons. In the opinion of Jesse Rosen of the League of American Orchestras, the new emphasis on inclusivity and diversity is unlikely to allow an emergency round of symphonic  grants.

As for government support: Washington has twice undertaken a policy of massive arts subsidies. The first, during the Depression, was initiated by the New Deal and subsidized American artists at home. The second, during the Cold War, was initiated by the CIA and State Department and sent American performers abroad. The pandemic – a third such crisis – will according to Rosen not inspire a third such response. In our chat he said that the notion of an activist central government serving “the public good” has been “seriously eroded and continues to be eroded.” A federal infusion of arts subsidies comparable to the New Deal’s WPA, or to European initiatives today, seems to Rosen “completely off the table. This is deeply unfortunate, but by no means surprising.”

Rosen also points out that tax code changes enacted in 2017 reduce incentives for private giving. He might have added that new wealth is less disposed to sponsor the arts than disappearing old wealth.  

The New Deal historian David Woolner, in our chat, emphasized that FDR’s notion of the arts was aggressively democratic, that the WPA and kindred agencies regarded the arts as a “cultural right” for all Americans. “The whole idea was to create American art,” to “integrate art into the community.” 

As I proceeded to remark, this was a clear instance of a guided federal policy trumping free enterprise. The interwar “music appreciation” movement, called by Virgil Thomson “the music appreciation racket,” was an entrepreneurial commercial initiative. Its most conspicuous leader, David Sarnoff of NBC and RCA, was a genuine visionary. But his vision was parochial: great music, for Sarnoff, meant dead European masters. It took Roosevelt, and such federal art initiatives as Pare Lorentz’s classic documentary films The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River, to creatively celebrate America and American achievement. In the long view, I suggested, it proved too little too late.

(In the 1930s, Sarnoff and William Paley of CBS were instrumental in staving off an “American BBC” that would likely have nurtured a more progressive American arts audience than the NBC/RCA instructional bibles and recordings. Both Sarnoff and Paley were succeeded by network executives less invested in culture and education – a little-known story I tell in Understanding Toscanini.)

Our chat, hosted by the historian Richard Aldous, concluded with an excerpt from PostClassical Ensemble’s Naxos DVD presenting The Plow that Broke the Plains with Virgil Thomson’s score newly recorded by PCE led by Angel Gil-Ordonez: the film’s ending, for which Thomson superimposes a divine tango on a parade of sad cars fleeing the dustbowl. “There you go, Joe,” quipped Nick Kenyon. “It ends in the major!” 

And so it might, if – as some of our panelists predicted – the pandemic will paradoxically ignite new thinking.

Here is PCE’s More than Music film “FDR’s New Deal and the Arts: The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River– what can they teach us today?”

And here’s an index to the entire 80-minute conversation:

1:38 – JOE HOROWITZ (Executive Producer, PostClassical Ensemble; author of 10 books about the American musical experience):

The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) are classic documentary films exemplifying government-sponsored artistic endeavor during the New Deal, in response to the Great Depression. How will governments support the arts in response to the pandemic?

4:00 – JESSE ROSEN (President of the American Symphony Orchestra League):

Massive federal support for the arts during the pandemic “is completely off the table.” The need to rely instead on the private sector is “deeply unfortunate but not surprising.” Related federal initiatives incude PPP loans, supplemental unemployment insurance. Meanwhile, the foundation community believes “orchestras have failed to adapt” to changing demographics; “they painted themselves into a corner,” were “extremely slow to acknowledge what was going on.” But there are “some promising signs.” “An intense period of learning” has been engendered by the pandemic and fraught race relations. If not “optimistic,” Rosen is “hopeful.”

22:16 – SIR NICHOLAS KENYON (Managing Director of London’s Barbican Center, formerly Director of the BBC Proms):

The pandemic has powered “some real soul-searching about what orchestras are there for.” “Civic engagement” will matter more. International travel will matter less. Their motto might be: “We will be back, but we will be different.” The recent UK arts bail-out “will get us through to the next stage,” but is not a long-range plan. “We woke up in time” but need “a whole new model” for the arts and their civic role. Before Sir Simon Rattle and others rang the alarm, the government’s pandemic agenda had ignored the arts even though “over 70 per cent of visitors to London” say they come primarily for cultural fare, to which other economic props – e.g., restaurants – are attached.

32:16 – ETTORE VOLONTIERI (Switzerland-based artists’ manager whose clients include Gianandrea Noseda):

The tradition of major public funding for arts institutions remains intact in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland. Unlike the UK, these countries responded to the pandemic with “firm and clear measures [of arts support] from the very beginning,” mainly in the form for subsidizing salaries even when artists are not working. In Austria, the Vienna Philharmonic is already resuming major concerts with 100 players onstage. The Salzburg Festival is on track to open August 1, albeit with socially distanced audiences. Because the Vienna Philharmonic is self-governing, the musicians can take responsibility for their own affairs – and the risk is theirs as well.

44:05 – ANGEL GIL-ORDONEZ (Music Director of PostClassical Ensemble, formerly Associate Conductor of the National Orchestra of Spain):

Government support is absolutely vital – but it matters who is in charge and what criteria are applied. Similarly, individual philanthropy – not part of the European model – is indispensable. A “hybrid model” would be ideal. Washington needs to be “much more committed to culture.”

47:13 – JOE HOROWITZ:

In response to the pandemic, PostClassical Ensemble has crafted a distinctive response – More than Music. We are not streaming concerts, but creating films in which past performances and recordings are embedded. This comes easily to PCE, because all our concerts are thematic – they tell stories. And our films will also be used in remote classroom instruction, e.g. at Howard University. 

48:58 — Sampling the most recent PCE film, “FDR’s New Deal and the Arts”: the opening sequence of The River, with the soundtrack freshly recorded by PCE conducted by Gil-Ordonez. James Joyce praised this New Deal film for featuring “the most beautiful English language prose” he had encountered in a decade. It won a first prize at the 1938 Venice International Film Festival.

52:05 – NEIL LERNER (film-music historian, Davidson College):

And yet the US Film Service was terminated in 1940, opposed by Congress and Hollywood. “I marvel that it happened at all.”

57:05 – DAVID WOOLNER (New Deal historian, Roosevelt University)

The creativity of the New Deal was something new in American government, predicated on the notion that “government has a responsibility to support the public good.” Roosevelt envisioned a program of New Deal arts subsidies in response to a suggestion by the artist George Biddle, who cited the Mexican muralists of the twenties. Roosevelt realized the New Deal could propagate its social values via artistic endeavor.

59:58 – JOE HOROWITZ

Classical music in America was “built on sand.” Today, the arts remain a vital part of the national experience in European nations. In America, the place of the arts is threatened as never before.

1:02:12 – DONATO CABRERA (Music Director, the California Symphony and Las Vegas Philharmonic):

“We’re all re-imagining a different path forward.” By “really engaging with the community,” the California Symphony has realized increased subscription sales for the last for years. It also maintains a bi-lingual website because 35 per cent of the population of Contra Costa County is Hispanic.

1:06:07 – DELTA DAVID GIER (Music Director, South Dakota Symphony):

Because of community engagement initiatives like the Lakota Music Project, the South Dakota Symphony is “ahead of the game.” “The community is stepping up” — SDSO has raised over $500,000 more than a year ago. The US is the only country in which Gier encounters no Ministry of Culture – “I can’t even get US funding for American culture abroad.” “The gap has always been there – Americans are anti-elitist at our core. . . . The vast majority of Americans will bristle at the notion that there might be something higher or better than something else. . . . It is a hard road to hoe.” 

1:12:03 – DAVID WOOLNER

The New Deal challenged notions of elite art. To FDR, “art belonged to the people.”

1:15:23 – JOSEPH HOROWITZ

The arts were both subsidized and guided during the New Deal – an improvement over commercialized “music appreciation.” “A clear case of the government not only being generous, but enlightened.” 

1:18:48 – The closing sequence from The Plow that Broke the Plains(1936), with PCE led by Angel Gil-Ordonez. 

Porgy and the White Police

Lawrence Tibbett sings Porgy (1935)

Though a prominent British reviewer of what became the hit Met production of Porgy and Bess called Gershwin’s landmark 1935 opera “a period piece,” it loudly resounds today. Consider the first act confrontation between a white detective and a black community. 

“Race is critical to Gershwin’s conception,” observes the Gershwin scholar Mark Clague in the most recent “PostClassical” webcast, pursuing a Gershwin thread originating with our film “The Russian Gershwin.” Porgy, Clague continues, “is an activist work about race.” In act one, the vibrancy of Catfish Row is silenced by the entrance of a white policeman who speaks rather than sings. The caustic demeanor of this character provokes discomfort – both for black victims of the law onstage, and for present-day audiences. But the invariable practice of exaggerating the Detective’s racism backfires in performance – he would be more unsettling if for once he was not rendered as a cartoon.

To hear what Clague is talking about, go to 36:46 of our webcast and sample Trevor Nunn’s famous Glyndebourne production.

Conrad L. Osborne, whose indispensable Porgy blog I proceeded to quote on the air, comments:

“In Porgy, the character who can most reliably be counted on to come across as a stereotype is the Detective. . . . It’s not that The Detective will ever exactly win our sympathies. . . . But consider his job. Two murders are committed on Catfish Row. He does need witnesses, and while the community is willing to ‘fess up about the fugitive Crown, it closes ranks around Porgy. The Detective’s suspicions about who saw what are entirely justified. When he accuses first Serena, then Porgy, of lying, he’s right, and he’s seen all this before. The man given this assignment is not going to be Mr. Sensitivity, but if played by an actor of weight who’s taking his job and the circumstances seriously, his scenes can have a lifelike texture. His work would then have to be countered with much more grown-up acting than I’ve ever seen done by his fellow thespians in these sequences, with their musical-comedy innocence-feigning shtick. That is stereotyping, and embarrassing, not as much for people of color as for professional singing actors.”

A flood of careless commentary has deplored “stereotypes” in Porgy and Bess. Osborne writes:

“There is no way . . . that one can take in the words, music, and dramatic functions of any of the more prominent characters [of Porgy and Bess] and label them stereotypes. They’re fleshed-out, living people. Nonetheless, they have been vulnerable to attack from the not-good-for-African-Americans p.o.v., which from its more extreme angles objects to the very presence of unpleasant or even morally conflicted characters. It’s tantamount to saying you can’t represent black people, disadvantaged people, poor people, unless it’s to ennoble them, as in a patriotic pageant or on a valorizing mural. That’s not a valid artistic principle.”

Certainly performers are partly to blame here. John W. Bubbles, the original Sporting Life, insisted that this demonic character be – as with any competent Mephisto — “charming.” Otherwise, Bess is greatly diminished when she succumbs to him. Today, Sporting Life’s malignancy is incautiously savored. Can he instead charm? Here is Bubbles.

But the chief obstacle to a truthful rendering of Porgy and Bess is the present-day compulsion to make Porgy more “dignified.” It’s the same careless impulse that would make the Detective more evil. Once Porgy stands erect, on crutches, he can no longer undertake the opera’s great trajectory of a cripple made whole. 

If you’re interested in a memorably dignified Porgy, try Lawrence Tibbett, who was the first person to record Porgy’s songs in the studio (under Gershwin’s supervision), in 1935. As Osborne eloquently observes (6:27 of our webcast), Tibbett was the supreme American operatic singing actor. He also happened to be white. On our webcast, Kevin Deas and George Shirley share impressions of Tibbett’s Porgy – and also reflect on the status of African-American opera singers today.

We are still taking the measure of Porgy and Bess -– and the same (alas) goes for Gershwin generally. In his lifetime, he was dismissed by American-born classical musicians (but not those born abroad) as a gifted dilettante. I call this “the Gershwin threat.” It is over now — I call that “the Gershwin moment.” It’s ongoing.

In our webcast, Mark Clague has something new to say about An American in Paris -– by citing details in the original, unabridged version of this fabulous score, he explores the sophistication of Gershwin’s manipulation of musical structure and texture. After that, Angel Gil-Ordóñez takes a fresh look at Gershwin’s irresistible Cuban Overture, and discovers compositional subtleties arising from the composer’s investigation of both Caribbean and Andalusion strains. 

Gil-Ordóñez’s own performance of the Cuban Overture (at 21:56 of part two of our webcast) is nothing short of revelatory. 

We still await a comparable performance of Porgy and Bess.

A LISTENER’S GUIDE TO THE WEBCAST:

PART ONE:

1:22 – Lawrence Tibbett sings “I got plenty o’ nuttin’” (1935)

4:52 – Gershwin and race: “The Abraham Lincoln of Negro music” (J. Rosamond Johnson)

6:27 – Conrad L. Osborne on Tibbett (“The foremost singing actor America has produced”)

10:17 – Tibbett sings “Oh Bess, oh where’s my Bess?” (1935)

13:43 – George Shirley and Kevin Deas on white baritones singing Porgy (“music belongs to everybody”)

21: 00 – The critic Irving Kolodin opines that George Shirley “doesn’t look the part of a French nobleman”

29:02 – Tibbett sings “De Glory Road” (1935)

34:12 – Mark Clague on white policemen in Porgy and Bess

44:40 — George Shirley sings Mozart: “Un aura amorosa”

48:23 – Kevin Deas sings Bach: “Ich habe genug” with PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez (Igor Leschishin, oboe)

PART WO:

1:46 – Joseph Horowitz on “the Gershwin threat” and “the Gershwin moment”

3:11 – Mark Clague on the original version of An American in Paris

11:35 – Angel Gil-Ordóñez on Gershwin’s CubanOverture

21:56 – Gershwin: CubanOverture performed by PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Gil-Ordóñez

40:06: Finale of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F performed by Vakhtang Kodanashvili with PCE conducted by Gil-Ordóñez

The New Deal, the Arts, and Race — and Today

FDR’s New Deal included the Works Progress Administration, which generously supported the arts in unprecedented ways. Employing writers, composers, visual artists, and performers via Art, Music, and Theater projects, the WPA was a massive employment agency — and the closest Washington had come to emulating European arts subsidies. 

The Music Project alone gave 225,000 free or popularly-priced performances, attended by 150 million people, many of whom had been strangers to live concert music. 

At the same time, the New Deal made a devil’s pact with race – and the WPA was no exception. For political reasons, it did not challenge Jim Crow.

PostClassical Ensemble’s latest More than Music film is “FDR’s New Deal and the Arts: The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River — What can they teach us today?” It takes a close look at a pair of New Deal-sponsored documentary films that became classics. The musical soundtracks, by Virgil Thomson, are iconic Americana. Praised by for their spoken prose by James Joyce, the documentaries embody a rare synthesis of word, image, and music.

In the excerpt at the top of this column – which comes 47 minutes into our 65-minute film – the late George Stoney describes an experience he endured as a New Deal public information officer stationed in the south. He was censured for having touched hands with a black colleague on the steps of a post office in Montgomery, Alabama. And his colleague was warned he risked being lynched. 

In our film, that story is subsequently pondered by the New Deal historian David Woolner, who references a series of compromises beginning with the U.S. Constitution and its treatment of slavery..

You can access the full film here. Other topics include:

7:58: The influence of Sergei Eisenstein and montage

18:59: Finding new ways to employ film music, contradicting Hollywood practice

25:50: The New Deal and the arts – and the implications for today’s pandemic-related funding crisis 

Produced for PCE by Behrouz Jamali, “FDR’s New Deal and the Arts” features clips from PCE’s best-selling Naxos DVD (“revelatory” – Phillip Kennicott, The Washington Post), in which The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) are presented with the soundtracks newly recorded by PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez.

It investigates the present-day pertinence of twin inspirational government-funded documentaries which engaged the arts to address a national emergency. Today’s national emergency — the pandemic — is also a funding emergency for many orchestras and opera companies here and abroad.

A follow-up Trans-Atlantic zoom chat, at 3 pm (ET) on July 9, will address government arts funding during the pandemic in the US and Europe. The participants include Woolner, film-music historian Neil Lerner, Sir Nicolas Kenyon (UK), Ettore Volontieri (Italy/Switzerland), and Jesse Rosen from the League of American Orchestras. To register, click here.

“FDR’s New Deal and the Arts” is part of PostClassical Ensemble’s More than Music initiative.  

Porgy Takes a Knee — “Porgy and Bess” and the American Experience of Race

“It’s interesting that Gershwin chose as his protagonist a person who’s on his knees. ‘Taking a knee’ has never been more relevant.”

That’s Kevin Deas, a distinguished exponent of Gershwin’s Porgy, talking a few days ago on PostClassical Ensemble’s “Porgy and Bess Roundtable” zoomchat alongside another eminent African-American singer: George Shirley.

“I’ve been thinking about it the last couple of days,” Deas continued. “There is an automatic sense of empathy with someone who is on their knees. It’s the difference between walking up to Bess with a cane [or a crutch, as in the current Met production], and actually viewing the world from below. I’ve done concert versions of Porgy and Bess with the New York Philharmonic, with all the major orchestras in this country. But it wasn’t until I got on my knees [acting the full role abroad] that I understood Porgy.”

In the same two-hour chat, Angel Gil-Ordóñez and I were joined by Conrad L. Osborne, a supreme authority on opera in performance, and Mark Clague, who heads the Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan. Bill McGlaughlin, who hosts our PCE webcasts, presided.

We auditioned an unforgettable 1935 performance of “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess” by Lawrence Tibbett – whom Conrad plausibly called the greatest of all American singing actors. Moreover, Tibbett was a singer with extensive experience performing popular songs (including spirituals) in dialect. (On another occasion, Osborne observed that Tibbett’s Porgy sounds “blacker” than that of Todd Duncan, who created the role.) You can hear that great Porgy performance, and the response it engendered, on the video clip at the top of this blog.

“How do you feel about a white baritone singing Porgy?” Bill asked.

George Shirley – the first African-American tenor to be assigned leading roles at the Met – responded:

“If you can sing it, if you can make it believable with your voice with honesty, as I believe Tibbett does, then sure. I believe music belongs to everybody. And that if I’m going to sing the Duke in Rigoletto I’ve got to sing it with respect for the style, the music, the history. And if someone can sing Porgy who’s not black and approach it with respect, then of course he can sing it.”

Kevin Deas: “Yes, music doesn’t belong to any one group. I’ve been fortunate that most of the music I do comes from the European tradition. So I’d hate to think that my color would disqualify my from that repertoire.”

Conrad asked: What about make-up?

George Shirley: “Theater is theater. When you go to the theater, you know you’re not in Paris. It’s called the suspension of disbelief. That’s what the costume person is about, the wig mistress, the make-up. You use it. Opera is first of all about the voice: to make you believe through the singing. If the singer can do that, and move you, that voice has a right to move you on stage.”

Kevin Deas: “I feel a lot is being lost in the modern operatic world because the priority is looks. Think of all the amazing sounds that would have been lost if you had to look pretty.”

George Shirley: “I would rather sing La traviata with Montserrat Caballe [as he did] than with someone who looks like they’re dying of tuberculosis, and sounds like it. I sang a lot of Salomes with Birgit Nilsson. She didn’t look like Salome, but she could sure make it sound like Salome. Let me share with you an incident  . . . “

If you’d like to know about the incident in question, involving a prominent New York music critic who objected that George Shirley didn’t “look the part of a French nobleman” in Massenet’s Manon, click on the video at 16:12.

About an hour into our chat, the singer/teacher Susan Gregory commented: “I loved hearing Tibbett sing Porgy. But I would not buy a ticket to see him on the stage — because of the times we live in. My fellow artists, who are black, barely can find work.”

George Shirley: “When asked in the past how do I feel about Porgy and Bess being reserved for blacks, I’ve said: fine – as long as black artists are [equally] considered for roles that are normally considered ‘white.’ Until that happens, I would say that restriction should stay in place.” 

Kevin Deas: “I agree with George, absolutely. It provides income for a lot of my colleagues. We just have to change the industry. If anything comes out of the George Floyd tragedy, I hope that all of culture, including those people in charge of presenting opera, will take a broader, more inclusive look at African-Americans being part of it. I never thought that I was any less qualified to sing a Mozart role than a blond kid from Iowa. But when you walk on stage, the first thing that identifies you, sadly, is: ‘There’s a black singer.’ And you can’t get around it. I never thought that would be something that would be of any concern for me. But I know that’s the initial reaction: ‘Oh, he’s singing in German.’ It’s like: Why are you here?” 

The Gershwin Estate has long insisted that, in honoring the wishes of the composer, only African-American singers should be cast in Porgy and Bess. Recently, the ban was controversially violated by the Hungarian State Opera. There have been other productions in Eastern Europe with white singers. So far as I am aware, the first Russian performance of Porgy and Bess (Russians having long pursued a love affair with Gershwin) took place in 1945 – with Russian singers.

It bears mentioning that a crucial trajectory in the opera – that of a cripple made whole – transcends race. That this redemption parable (which invites comparison with Wagner’s Parsifal) is rarely clinched in present-day performances is a problem I have persistently belabored – as in my American Scholar review of the Met Porgy and Bess last season. 

To see Lawrence Tibbett sing (and act) “De Glory Road” (one of his signature numbers), click here.

To watch PostClassical Ensemble’s More than Music film “The Russian Gershwin” (with a one-of-a-kind “Rhapsody in Blue” plus historic recordings), produced by Behrouz Jamali, click here.

To see Kevin Deas sing the spirituals of Harry Burleigh in PCE’s More than Music film “Deep River: The Art of the Spiritual,” click here. 

PostClassical Ensemble’s next More than Music film, to be released July 5, will be “FDR’s New Deal and the Arts: ‘The Plow that Broke the Plains’ and ‘The River’ —–What can they teach us today?”

The follow-up Trans-Atlantic zoom chat, on July 9, will address government arts funding during the pandemic in the US and abroad.

For more information on “More than Music,” including zoom chat registration, click here.

The Gershwin Threat/The Gershwin Moment

Paul Rosenfeld, whose writings on American modernist composers were once regarded as insightful and prophetic, detected in George Gershwin the Russian Jew “a weakness of spirit, possibly as a consequence of the circumstance that the new world attracted the less stable types.”

Rosenfeld (whose own lineage was German Jewish) also wrote of Gershwin: “His compositions drowse one in a pink world of received ideas and sentiments. The Rhapsody in Blueis circus-music, pre-eminent in the sphere of tinsel and fustian. In daylight, nonetheless, it stands vaporous with it second-hand ideas and ecstasies.” 

Rosenfeld believed Aaron Copland’s jazzy Piano Concerto – music I would call ersatz — an improvement on Gershwin’s “hash derivative” Rhapsody. Copland himself denigrated Gershwin as a gifted dilettante. So did Virgil Thomson. Olin Downes’ New York Times Gershwin obituary summarized: “He never passed a certain point as a ‘serious’ composer.”

My friend Ben Pasternack, a wonderful American pianist, has a different view – that Rhapsodyin Blueis evergreen, the most beloved of all American concert works. And I know from Pasternack that his teacher Rudolf Serkin once advised him to learn Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F – “that’s a good piece.”

These observations summarize what I have long called “the Gershwin threat” and “the Gershwin moment.” The Gershwin threat was seemingly felt by all American-born classical musicians: they feared his genius. European-born classical musicians weren’t threatened, and the list of Gershwin admirers includes Otto Klemperer, Jascha Heifetz, Dmitri Shostakovich, Fritz Reiner, Arnold Schoenberg, Maurice Ravel, etc., etc.

The Gershwin moment is right now. Music historians study and esteem him (they never did before). We no longer segregate Rhapsody in Blue on pops concerts (as the Boston Symphony did until 1997). 

These themes feed “The Russian Gershwin,” the latest installment in PostClassical Ensemble’s “More than Music” initiative. This 60-minute film (embedded above), hosted by Bill McGlaughlin with commentary by Angel Gil-Ordonez and yours truly, centers on a memorable performance of Rhapsody in Blueby Genadi Zagor, a Russian virtuoso who improvises. It also includes three of my favorite historic Gershwin recordings – by Otto Klemperer, Ruby Elzy, and Lawrence Tibbett. Behrouz Jamali has added a wealth of historic photographs. We are pretty proud of it.

If you’d like to chat about Gershwin, “More than Music” follows up our PCE videos with zoom chats. There will be two, both hosted by the inimitable McGlaughlin:

On Thursday, June 4 (6 to 7 pm ET), “A Gershwin Roundtable” features a live performance by  the fabulous jazz artist Karrin Allyson – plus Angel, myself, Genadi Zagor, and Mark Clague, who heads the Gershwin Initiative at the University of Michigan. The main topics will be Rhapsody in Blue, the (much underrated) Cuban Overture, and An American in Paris (which Mark will explain was originally ambitiously cast in something like sonata form).

On Wednesday, June 10 (6 to 7 pm ET) we will tackle the American composition upon which the most nonsense and ignorance has been lavished, and which in my opinion is the highest American achievement in classical music: Porgy and Bess. Our participants will include George Shirley, the first African-American tenor to sing lead roles at the Met; Kevin Deas, one of today’s pre-eminent exponents of Gershwin’s Porgy; and Conrad L. Osborne, a supreme authority on opera in performance. Also Mark Clague, Angel, and myself. The topics at the table will include: should white singers sing Porgy?

To sign up for June 4, click here.

To sign up for June 10, click here.

To read my American Scholarreview of the Met’s Porgy and Bess, click here.

To read Conrad’s review, click here.

To see what Kevin Deas has to say about Porgy (“don’t sing it standing up”), click here.

To see what George Shirley has to say, click here.

To be continued . . .

Why Did Shostakovich Join the Party?

One of the most controversial acts in the ever controversial life of Dmitri Shostakovich was his tortured decision in 1960 to join the Communist Party – a decision that has variously been portrayed as cowardly, politically pressured, or basically volitional. It is not mentioned in Testimony (1979) – the composer’s influential memoirs, collaboratively written with Solomon Volkov. But Volkov offered his own view, for the first time, in a Zoom chat the other day produced by PostClassical Ensemble as a sequel to the PCE “More than Music” video “Shostakovich and the State.”

As is well-known, Nikita Khrushchev had established a Russian Composers’ Union additional to the longstanding Soviet Composers’ Union established under Stalin – and offered Shostakovich the position of General Secretary. But Shostakovich had to join the Party in order to say yes. Was this essentially a ploy to secure Party membership for the most famous Soviet composer? Volkov says:

“It gives us some insight into Shostakovich’s thinking. He was a very public person, he was very active in Soviet musical life. And he wanted to participate. . . . He really hated this [decision]. But he joined because, I believe, he really wanted to shape and influence Soviet musical policy.” 

Khrushchev, too, was a complex and sometimes inscrutable actor. On this occasion, he was apparently seeking to strengthen an alliance with the post-Stalin intelligentsia. 

Shostakovich’s son, Maxim, recalled that the decision reduced Shostakovich to tears and that he told his wife that he had been blackmailed. There are also reports that Shostakovich was suicidal. His musical response was the Eighth String Quartet, which – as Testimony makes clear – is (among other things) a morbid musical autobiography. (An exceptional performance of Rudolf Barshai’s string orchestra version of the Eighth Quartet, conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez, is a component of PCE’s “Shostakovich and the State” video.)

An essential factor in the entire episode, long underestimated in the West, is Shostakovich’s potent role as a Soviet musical policy-maker. A recent book by Marina Frolova-Walker,  Stalin’s Music Prize: SovietCulture and Politics, affords Western readers a more sophisticated, more comprehensive picture of Soviet musical life, and of East/West contradictions and resemblances revealed or concealed by the cultural Cold War. For first-place composers, the Stalin Prize conferred publication, performances, and 100,000 rubles – a lavish sum. (Manual workers averaged 300 rubles a month, heads of university departments 1,500 rubles monthly.) The winners were recommended by a consultative panel comprising both musicians of distinction and Party bureaucrats.

Stenographic records of the proceedings survive. Studying these documents, Frolova-Walker made two discoveries, neither predictable. The first was that the decision-making process, though multi-layered and subject to Stalin’s approval, was as much bottom-up as top-down; when musicians and bureaucrats disagreed, the outcome could go either way. The second was that ideology was not necessarily determinant. Though the bureaucrats applied rigid Socialist Realist criteria, some compositions nevertheless won purely on musical merit. At the same time, it was frequently observed by the deliberators that the prize did not designate “best piece”; rather, its intention was to designate the best piece fulfilling criteria insisting on communal uplift and popular appeal.

So it was that the first three first-prize compositions, in 1941, included Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, a neo-classical work bereft of social or political connotations; it was accurately assessed as a major contribution to the Russian chamber repertoire that warranted acknowledgement. Shostakovich won a first or second prize four more times – in 1942 for the Seventh Symphony, in 1946 for the Second Piano Trio, in 1950 for The Song of the Forestand the film score The Fall of Berlin, and in 1952 for Ten Poems for chorus. The 1950 prize, following the Party’s notorious 1948 anti-formalist decree, was purely political; Shostakovich himself, as a panelist, actually requested that these works not be honored. Two Shostakovich compositions that were passed over, the Eighth and Tenth Symphonies, were of far greater consequence. The debate on the former work was so charged that the composer was invited to supply an additional piano performance of his own (which was found more ideologically appealing – more “tragic,” less “pessimistic” in tone — than Evgeny Mravinsky’s premiere performance with the Leningrad Philharmonic). Both symphonies were criticized – not unintelligibly — for their discouraging density, complexity, and darkness. (The Second Piano Trio, though a winner, was also predominantly dark, but was considered more tuneful.) 

One learns from Frolova-Walker that Shostakovich thought the Stalin Prizes a bad idea: an intrusion. But once he became an active participant in 1947 – a tenure interrupted while he was in disfavor from 1948 to 1951 — he was singularly outspoken and controversial. He did what he could to instill integrity, to “both play the game and remain true to himself.” He sometimes succeeded, and sometimes – as with his efforts to secure a prize for the Jewish Mieczysław Weinberg, who deserved one – did not. 

Frolova-Walker summarizes that the Stalin Prizes – awarded in Musical Composition, Musical Performance, Musicology, and “Non-Musicians in Production or Performance,” as well as a host of non-musical fields — played “a crucial role” in shaping Soviet cultural life. Of Shostakovich she concludes: 

“Hearing Shostakovich’s voice at the [Stalin Prize] meetings can leave us asking the same questions that we pose after listening to his music. Was he being sincere or ironic? Principled or cynical? Fearless or cautious? It seems he was, at various times, all these things. But the one thing he never did was to keep silent. He could have done so . . . Shostakovich’s interventions . . . give us a glimpse of a fiery public temperament that could not conform to professional etiquette or delicacy, nor to hypocrisy or tedium. Shostakovich clearly had a strong desire to participate in public life, and following this compulsion sometimes allowed him to make a principled stand, or to help out friends, and at other times drew him into shabby compromises . . . Once he had accepted the mantle of a public figure, he could not slip it off and on at all. But it was surely that same public temperament that shaped much of his music. Without that innate need to speak up, to interfere, whether to take a stand or to find official approval, we wouldn’t have had either the Seventh or the Thirteen Symphony [protesting anti-Semitism via Yevtushenko’s ‘Babi Yar’], nor, on the other side, Song of the Forests or the Twelfth Symphony [“The Year 1917”]. “

Shostakovich’s Western antipode Igor Stravinsky, a free man in Los Angeles, claimed to relish and require his autonomy. But at times he contemplated leaving: he commensurately resented and deplored his invisibility.

The next PostClassical Ensemble More than Music video, “The Russian Gershwin,” will be posted on Sunday, May 31. The follow-up Zoom chat will be a Gershwin Roundtable with myself, Angel Gil-Ordonez, and guests, hosted by Bill McGlaughlin – on Thursday, June 4 at 6 pm. The fabulous jazz artist Karrin Allyson will be joining us to sing some Gershwin songs.

To register in advance for the Gershwin Roundtable, click: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMldOuuqj4pGdRnVRtkCU6s6gp5rnwYjZLm 

For an archive of “More than Music” videos, click here.