Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 18

FDR, Radio, and What’s Wrong Today

“I can recall walking eastward on the Chicago Midway on a summer evening. . . . Under [the elms] drivers had pulled over, parking bumper to bumper, and turned on their radios to hear Roosevelt. They had rolled down the windows and opened the car doors. Everywhere the same voice, in old Eastern accent, which in anyone else would have irritated Midwesterners. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by. You felt joined to these unknown drivers, men and women smoking their cigarettes in silence, not so much considering the President’s words as affirming the rightness of his tone and taking assurance from it. You had some sense of the weight of trouble that made them so attentive and the ponderable effect, the one common element (Roosevelt), on which so many knowns could agree.” 

Thus Saul Bellow, in 1983, remembering one of FDR’s fireside chats. The radio, at the time, was the first and only medium of instant mass communication. It centralized the American experience to the same degree that Americans – and the justly reviled “media” — are fractured today.

During the Depression, during World War II, FDR and radio bonded; he was even, as Murray Horwitz remarks in a recent American Purpose zoom chat (posted above) “the biggest star of old-time radio.” 

Another pair of stars were Norman Corwin, with Orson Welles the king of radio drama, and Bernard Herrmann, who working with Corwin and Welles both was the supreme radio composer; this was a seedbed for the supreme Hollywood scores Herrmann composed for Welles and Alfred Hitchcock.

When Corwin and Herrmann created their 1941 salute to the Bill of Rights, “We Hold These Truths,” the listening audience totaled 63 million – nearly half the American population. These were families gathered in the living room, not people cooking or eating or texting. 

Three years later, Corwin and Herrmann created another classic World War II radio drama: “Whitman.” As readers of this blog know, a new Naxos CD features PostClassical Ensemble in the world premiere recording. We’ve also produced a film– “Beyond Psycho: The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann.” The American Purpose zoom chat was a sequel to all that, focusing on a pair of urgent topics: What do Whitman’s ideals of democracy say to us today? What can we learn from radio’s early decades as we struggle to piece the United States back together? The result was a memorable hour-long conversation, led by the historian Richard Aldous, which gathered force as different voices weighed in.

What follows is a kind of listener’s guide:

Setting the table, the Whitman scholar Karen Karbinier observed that America’s “pre-Civil War angst was very similar to what we feel right now.” It provoked Whitman’s “efforts to unite Americans” and also governed Corwin’s ingenious selections from Whitman’s poems in fashioning a patriotic paean magically inflected by Herrmann’s orchestra.

Murray Horwitz, who knows a lot about radio past and present, began: “We’ve lost something – with consequences for democracy in America.” FDR’s radio chats “made Americans feel they were one nation.” “Broadcasting,” Murray continued, is a term borrowed from agriculture: “Early radio people saw themselves as cultivators, bringing American values up from the grassroots to be unified at the top.” Today we have “narrowcasting – instead of “e pluribus unum,” one out of many, ever narrower shards of demographics.”

Aldous, a native of Britain, opined that “the BBC still has that kind of punch-through ability to speak pretty much to the nation.”  

This got me started on a story I tell in detail in Understanding Toscanini– how the specter of an “American BBC” was defeated by CBS’s William Paley and NBC’s David Sarnoff. Their strategy was visionary: to implement programing so intellectually and artistically ambitious as to make the BBC model superfluous. These high ideals translated into the contributions of Corwin, Herrmann, and Welles – and also Herrmann’s CBS Symphony, which championed Ives and brought in Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Bartok as studio guests; Sarnoff’s NBC Symphony under Toscanini, and a plethora a kindred initiatives leading, in early TV days, to the NBC Opera and Leonard Bernstein’s music lessons. All of that ended long ago, and NPR and PBS proved no substitute. (Compare the hand-crafted radio and TV productions of Corwin or Bernstein to “Live from Lincoln Center.”)

I further observed: “We have no capacity now, even hypothetically, to bring the nation together or to experience culture as we once knew it, as a bonding agent: to seizing what had been our cultural roots” – “and the arts, if you haven’t noticed, are being erased from the American experience.” 

And yet, Richard Aldous pointed out, “Whitman seems to retain a very broad resonance.” Karen Karbinier took up this thread, opining “we are hopefully going ‘in and out’ . . . “a rejuvenation of the arts” could happen.

Not so fast, I replied with sinister glee. “I don’t feel comforted. I wish I did.” I added that nearly every review of our Herrmann/Whitman CD, celebrating iconic American masters, was published abroad. “Sad to say,” confirmed Angel Gil-Ordonez, who conducted the music, “the most profound analyses come from Europe, that’s a reality.” 

Then Angel said this: “I’m a son of the generation of the Civil War in Spain. Walt Whitman – in the middle of a civil war he’s trying to unite everybody. That was not the case in Spain. A civil war – that’s the worst thing that can happen to a country. It’s frightening that something that happened to a country over a century ago is still alive. In Spain it’s also the case.”

But Aldous persisted that, from the perspective of a historian of the US born and raised abroad, America and its institutions are notably “resilient.” He invoked de Tocquville. He then invited Murray to comment on “patriotic” cable news services that aspire to “speak to the nation.” Murray would have none of that: “Hogwash – I think it’s all commercial. You make more money by dividing the American people.”

The stage was set for William Sharp, who eloquently recites Whitman on the radio drama recording. “Whitman asks who we are, who do we think we are, who are we really? When I learn and interpret what Whitman said, I find it inspirational, but also aspirational. ‘This is what I believe we are’ – but read between the lines: ‘This is what we should be, what we want to be. It isnt’ what we are.’ And that’s painfully clear.”

Bill added that, as a teacher at the Peabody Institute, he has students that “live in a world that is very different from mine. But those people give me hope.”

My parting sally: Jill Lepore’s bracing new 800-page history of the US, These Truths, contains not a single sentence about the arts. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Aloneand The Upswing, both of which analyze a crisis in diminished “social capital,” do not look to the arts as a bonding agent. (I embellish these observations in a forthcoming essay for The American Purpose.)

Angel had the last word: “Everybody loves music. It’s the arts on which we need to be focused right now.” 

The Pandemic and the Arts: A “Climate of Fear” and “Radical Upheaval”

The current American Scholar includes my 8,000-word essay on the impact of the pandemic on the arts in the US. It seems to me a terribly important topic — please find time to read the whole thing.

Here’s a readers’ guide:

I begin by contrasting the European rush to “rescue our cultural institutions” to an eerie American silence. I write: “Why is no one in Congress or the White House talking about protecting vital cultural interests, echoing discussions abroad? For three centuries, Americans regarded Europeans as cultural parents; we would emulate, learn, and grow. Where does that relationship stand today? Are we still growing up? Reverting to infancy? Opting out?”

I note that the pandemic, which has already devastated employment in the arts, also exacerbates a new, ongoing crisis within the arts sector, arising from the propulsion of social justice priorities:

“Its most vivid public manifestation, as of this writing, is ‘We See You, White American Theater,’ a coalition whose twenty-nine page manifesto, released last July, was signed by 300 artists, and then thousands more online. ‘We See You’ calls more than half of Broadway’s theaters to be renamed after artists of color, for term limits for theater leaders, for more than half the actors, writers, directors, and designers employed by theaters to be persons of color ‘for the foreseeable future.’ 

“No one disputes the urgent need for redress. But this new, peremptory tone has instilled a climate of fear unknown in the arts since the Red Scare of the 1950s. An actress in a prominent company says: ‘We are performing plays right now that would never have even been considered before – badly written, poorly conceived. And if you speak up, you’re denounced and shunned – within the company.’

“A leading figure in a prominent political-theater company says, ‘We are in a moment of radical upheaval, of destabilization, of internal warfare and re-alignment, accelerated by the stress of the pandemic. We all know we can’t go back to the way things were. But that doesn’t mean we should burn everything down.’ . . . 

“The issue becomes one of means. In classical music, new priorities have impelled a disorganized scramble to perform works by Black composers. . . . An informed effort to curate the entirety of American symphonic music, prioritizing ‘Black classical music,’ is here an overdue antidote.”

(I have pondered why classical music in the US “stayed white” in a previous American Scholar essay.)

Another “pre-existing condition,” afflicting orchestras, is “a labor-management schism between musicians and administrators that impedes new roles orchestras could explore to expand their civic footprint.” . . .

“The strategic response, to date, has too often been reductionist: diminishing the percentage of white faces on stage, in the office, and in the audience more attacks a symptom than a cause. While undeniably pertinent – they can be a necessary first step — quota-based remedies risk myopia.”

I here propose the South Dakota Symphony as “the American orchestra that has most dramatically succeeded in championing social justice” – and consider the reasons why.

A big chunk of my piece is devoted to remembering how the federal government poured money into the arts during the Depression and the Cold War – in many respects, emergencies comparable to the Covid epidemic. That will not happen again. And yet: “No one disputes the outcome of Cold War cultural diplomacy. It worked. It ameliorated tensions between two great states – and at a cost miniscule in comparison with expenditures on defense and intelligence during the same period. If the arts, backed by government, proved healing during the Cold War, what might be surmised about their possible role in today’s fraught and fractured United States?” 

I cite the views of half a dozen others, including the historian Allen Guelzo, who points out: “As late as 1870, Boston had 250,000 people and 50,000 horses. Yet we had surprisingly deep levels of cultural cohesion: Lincoln could quote Shakespeare, Byron, and the Federalist, people sat up to wee hours in remote farmsteads debating free will and determinism. The century between 1870 and 1970 transformed the world as no other century has, and all in the direction of ease, safety, and comfort. We no longer haul fifty gallons of water from the pump to wash and drink; we no longer chop cords of wood to heat ourselves; we no longer regard a trip of twenty-file miles as equivalent to an entire day’s journey; we have no need of our neighbors. In other words, we live in a fairy-tale world of instant supply at the click of a mouse; we live in a phony milieu where our chief pleasure is denigration. If it’s too much to get off our sofas, it will be too much to listen to Beethoven. In fact,culture is now understood to be a political weapon, and any attempt to speak of it with any authority is set down at once as a gesture of dominance. We are on the verge of suggesting, in the name of social justice, that orchestras staff themselves by quota. Now is a time to rethink.”

I write in conclusion: 

“The pandemic is a diagnostic – and discloses a self-critical, self-confrontational United States that feels newly inchoate. We no longer hug a common cultural pantheon: [Henry Wadsworth]  Longfellow and [Frederic] Church are irrelevant; [Frederick] Douglass and [W. E. B.] Du Bois remain in a waiting room (and the formidable, formidably wronged Crazy Horse in a lobby). We are at work fashioning a national cultural inheritance that fits our needs and hopes today.

“Compared to nations abroad, we are not even secure in asserting that culture matters. In this fragile moment, Covid will be a catalyst or obstacle whose impact on government and politics, on the environment and the economy is already undergoing relentless scrutiny. At the very least, culture must become part of this conversation. Perhaps we can hope for more and allow culture to help us find the way.”

***

My article had just gone to press when Ari Roth announced his resignation as artistic director of DC’s cross-cultural Mosaic Theater Company, which he founded in 2014. His ouster was forced by complaints of “white supremacist behavior.” In October (over Roth’s objections), the Mosaic had posted a response to the “We See You” demands reading in part:

“We have programmed without consistent cultural competency, leading to harm of audience members and artists. . . . We have been complacent in validating a siloed and singular leadership style based on the comfort of routine. We have upheld white leadership to the detriment of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and People of Color] artistry and expertise.”

In a detailed letter of resignation, Roth wrote of “theaters that have been trying to become a truer reflection of their diverse communities”: “How do we manifest a new Anti-Racist ethos meant to disrupt and reduce harm, while not abandoning foundational commitments to the value of IDEA [Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Accessibility] that have been achieved, with palpable significance, and have created much more good than harm? Can a conjoining of paradigms be made without disqualifying, or fatally denigrating, the work (and workers) have have come before, and that remain the binding agents in our crucial, multi-racial alliances and common cause?”

Bernard Herrmann’s “Whitman” — A Subversive Yet Inspirational Entertainment for Today

In 1944, Bernard Herrmann collaborated with the producer Norman Corwin on “Whitman,” a half-hour dramatic presentation invoking America’s iconic poet to rally the home front during World War II. It was heard by millions of listeners. It’s a classic exemplar of a forgotten creative genre: the radio drama. 

The clip at the top of this column samples a moment of hypnotic eloquence: Herrmann’s treatment of Whitman’s famous meditation on the graveyard grass – witness to Civil War dead, young and old. This derives not from the original broadcast, with Charles Laughton, but from a new PostClassical Ensemble Naxos CD, featuring William Sharp as Whitman and PCE eloquently conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. The remarkable visual treatment, by Peter Bogdanoff, derives from PCE’s latest “More than Music” film: “Beyond Psycho– The Musical Genius of Bernard Herrmann.”

Here is the entire film, which features commentary by Angel and myself — plus Whitman scholar Karen Karbiener, Murray Horwitz on radio drama, Dorothy Herrmann on first seeing Psycho with “Daddy,” and Alex Ross on Herrmann’s insufficiently appreciated legacy. 

Here is more on the CD, which also features terrific performances of Herrmann’s Clarinet Quintet (my favorite chamber work by any American) and his Psycho Narrative for string orchestra (not to be confused with the better-known, and far inferior, Psycho Suite) – a portrait of Herrmann “in the round.” As readers of this blog may recall, I consider Herrmann the most under-rated 20thcentury American composer. Here is something Alex Ross says in our film:

“Bernard Herrmann was absolutely one of the most original 20th-century composers of any country. I’m very happy that this CD is expanding our sense of Herrmann’s achievement, bringing a little known score to light . . . What strikes me about this combination of Herrmann pieces is that the emotional range is huge. It’s a very great talent that’s on display here, one that we’re very far from appreciating and celebrating in full.” 

Here is something Murray Horwitz says in our film:

“In 1944, radio was IT – the first instant mass medium. Corwin’s radio dramas reached as many as 60 million listeners – that’s nearly half the American population. . . . This confluence of fine art and a mass medium is something we’ve lost today.” 

And here, from the film, is Bill Sharp:

“When I hear Whitman’s words illuminated by Herrmann’s music, I really find it quite overwhelming. It speaks to us today on so many levels – when you hear ‘The President and all the government are here for you, not the other way around.’ . . . It’s just incredibly beautiful. I think that for modern audiences and presenters, it could be a magically wonderful thing to hear, very different from what audiences expect.”

And, finally, here is Walt Whitman, supported by Bernard Herrmann, extolling American democracy, “a teeming nation of nations” – words that today sound both inspirational and  subversive:

“Nothing Left to Lose” — My First Orchestra Job, etc.

I was delighted today to join my friend Donato Cabrera for his latest “MusicWise” youtube show. We talked about Dvorak and Revueltas, about PostClassical Ensemble’s “More than Music” films – and about my own professional odyssey, which I traced back to feeling “disillusioned” and “betrayed” as a young New York Times music critic in the 1970s. 

After that, as I told Donato, I wrote Understanding Toscanini “as an act of therapy.” At the end of that once notorious book, I identified Harvey Lichtenstein’s Brooklyn Academy of Music as a place with a hungry and sophisticated audience – a place where classical music might be renewed. Harvey took me out to lunch and informed that the Brooklyn Philharmonic, in residence at BAM, had lost over two-third of its subscribers in two years. Would I be interested in taking over? I said yes – providing I could do what I wanted. And what is it you want? Harvey asked. Having had the experience, at the 92ndStreet Y, of curating cross-disciplinary festival programing, I said that was what I wanted. Harvey said OK – he had nothing left to lose.

So that was how I happened to wind up CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic and turned it into a humanities institution with NEH funding (and tripled BPO audiences). Donato wanted to know more and I told him about the origins, at BAM, of my first “Dvorak and America” program, based on recent research by the music historian Michael Beckerman. 

I met Donato when he was assistant conductor of the New Jersey Symphony. This was post-BAM, when Larry Tamburri, the adventurous NJSO CEO (and someone who reads books), entrusted me with an annual winter festival. One such festival was “Dvorak and America.” I then had occasion to meet with some NJSO musicians, including Donato. I inflicted my usual Dvorak quiz, playing a little of the F major Humoresque and asking people to guess the composer. The point of this quiz is that the invariable guess is Gershwin – which proves my point that the American Dvorak sounds “American.” Donato ruined the quiz by becoming the first person ever to correctly guess “Dvorak.” He’s now music director of the California Symphony and the Las Vegas Philharmonic. We’ve collaborated twice in Las Vegas: on “Dvorak and America” and “Copland and Mexico.”

The Copland/Mexico program ignited one of the most memorable post-concert discussions in which I’ve taken part, starting off with a woman raising her hand so eagerly she could not be ignored. “I HATED it!” was what she needed to say. Donato and I were delighted. Forty-five minutes later, when we disbanded, she came to the lip of the stage to talk some more with Roberto Kolb, who had joined us from Mexico City as the world’s leading Revueltas scholar. Others in the audience (as recalled today by Donato) were exceptionally moved to encounter a symphonic program extolling the revolutionary political art — on the far left — of 1930s Mexico.

Our chat is punctuated by some of my favorite excerpts from PCE’s recent “More than Music” films, with their extraordinary visual presentations by Peter Bogdanoff. “Groundbreaking,” says Douglas McLennan of Arts Journal. The next MTM film, on Bernard Herrmann, streams this coming Friday.  Here’s a glimpse: William Sharp on playing “Walt Whitman” for the 1944 radio play “Whitman,” hypnotically scored by Herrmann.

Dvorak and the American Experience of Race — An Antidote to “Checkbox Diversity”

“I know there has been a lot of discussion about how we can make a difference by programing one African-American composition per concert,” says Lorenzo Candelaria, the incoming dean of Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.  

“I call that ‘checkbox diversity.’ What I’ve found to be far more impactful is to take a piece and really live with it for a while, sit with it, talk about it  — contextualized programing. I’d think that would be a far richer experience in the concert hall. I think we’d be a better country for it, because the concert hall is one of the few spaces in which we can all connect together as a community.”

In this excerpt from PostClassical Ensemble’s latest More than Music film, what Candelria is thinking about (at 1:15:11) is Dvorak’s New World Symphony, which he terms “a flashpoint for a broader discussion . . .  transformative music that could be having a lot of impact right now.”

Dvorak’s symphony may not have been the work of a Black composer. But Dvorak embraced the African-American experience to a degree that would be controversial today. He undertook a “Black voice” in his Largo. Even more controversial: he endeavored to embrace the Native American experience via Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. The resulting composition is a minefield for the cultural appropriation police. And yet it remains the most beloved symphony ever composed on American soil.

What accounts for the enduring appeal of the New World Symphony? It’s our awareness, however subliminal, that Dvorak was – as JoAnn Falletta (the admired Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic) so eloquently expounds (at 1:17:45) – “one of the greatest humanitarians.”His symphony surges with compassion for the African-American, victimized by the bitter legacy of enslavement, and for the Native American, in 1893 still facing possible extermination. 

We owe our knowledge of the Dvorak-Longfellow connection mainly to the music historian Michael Beckerman, who more than anyone else has exhaustively explored alignments between Dvorak’s symphony and Longfellow’s poem. What to make of The Song of Hiawatha today? In our film, the literary historian Brian Yothers, in a tour de force of contextualization, tells us what we most need to know in ten minutes. “Was it a worthy model,” he asks, “or something more like fertilizer, the necessary manure out of which something like the New World Symphony could grow, but not particularly valuable in itself?” Yothers’ answer is copious – you can listen to it for yourself (at 33:00).

Central to our film is the Hiawatha Melodrama I co-composed with Beckerman in 2013, with orchestrations by Angel Gil-Ordonez. We here sample our world premiere recording on Naxos (named one of the best CDs of the year by Minnesota Public Radio). Combining the spoken word (verses from Longfellow) with music (passages from the New World Symphony and two other examples of the American Dvorak), the Melodrama makes an indisputable case both for the presence of Hiawatha in Dvorak’s symphony, and the eloquence of Dvorak’s response. It’s been performed, in whole or in part, by more than a dozen orchestras. 

The performers here are Kevin Deas and PostClassical Ensemble, with Angel Gil-Ordonez conducting. You can judge for yourself the caliber of commitment and understanding. For our film, the visual artist Peter Bogdanoff has culled pertinent American paintings and added artwork of his own. I believe that applying visual content to a symphony is in most cases a terrible idea. Here, it’s a logical idea: the cultural vocabulary of Dvorak’s America is reclaimed. JoAnn Falletta testifies (33:00): “As a young conductor, studying Dvorak’s symphonies, they were very Bohemian, coming from the heart of Europe . . . But there’s a completely hidden heart in [the NewWorld Symphony] – and I since I’ve known that I have be never been able to hear [it] in the same way. I hear it in a much richer way, a more sinewy way, a darker way, a more painful way, a way that’s somehow more important and moving.”

Finally, our film investigates the present-day pertinence of Dvorak’s ecumenical vision of the American experience – not least in teaching the story of American music. In fact, our follow-up zoom chat, on September 23, will feature commentary by students at Howard University, who this week are experiencing our film in remote classrooms. You can register for the chat here.The other participants will include Howard faculty members, plus JoAnn Falletta, Lorenzo Candelaria, and Mark Clague from the University of Michigan. Their filmed commentary was so rich I did not have room for all of it. 

Here (below) is another story told by Candelaria, which ended up on the cutting room floor. It’s about failing to persuade a major charitable foundation to support touring a program of African-American spirituals (with Kevin Deas) to unincorporated Mexican-American colonias in West Texas. This attempt to forge “pathways to higher education through music” was received as “culturally insensitive.” “I was told, ‘You’re trying to take African-American music into a largely Hispanic community.’ I was floored. We’ve stopped talking about the broader human story that anyone can tell.” The human stories told by the New World Symphony are truly inexhaustible.

On “Wagnerism” by Alex Ross

In this weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” I review Alex Ross’s important new book “Wagnerism.” I write in part:

Great works of art are so powerfully imagined that their intent and expression mold to changing human circumstances. But the operas of Richard Wagner are arguably unique in this regard: No other creative genius in the Western canon so unerringly holds up a mirror to time and place. . . . Thomas Mann’s claim that Wagner “was probably the greatest talent in the entire history of art” cannot be dismissed as hyperbole.

Alex Ross’s “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music” takes up Wagner’s protean impact with unprecedented scope. In other writers’ accounts, Wagnerism ends with World War I in Europe and America and, slightly later, in Soviet Russia . . .  But in Mr. Ross’s wide-ranging chronicle, Wagner’s influence outside the world of music keeps on going . . . No previous writer has so copiously chronicled the sheer ubiquity of Wagner in important novels, poems and paintings. The result is an indispensable work of cultural history, offering both a comprehensive resource and a bravura narrative.

While the existing Wagner literature is vast and defies generalization, the best-known studies range from passionate advocacy to equally impassioned denunciation. Mr. Ross, who came late to Wagner, is a centrist—a circumspect, at times even diffident, Wagnerite. He writes: “The behemoth whispers a different secret in each listener’s ear.” Mr. Ross . . . is able to become many listeners. Relatedly, there are limits to his degree of engagement—and Wagner is about commitment, however dangerous or misguided. These limits frame and modulate Mr. Ross’s extraordinary book. . . . 

The author upon whom Mr. Ross lavishes the most attention is Willa Cather, whose Wagnerism—in her life as in her fiction—was an explicit leitmotif. . . . Cather’s achievement, [he] summarizes, “was to transpose Wagnerism into an earthier, more generous key. She offered grandeur without grandiosity, heroism without egoism, myth without mythology. Brünnhilde stays on her mountain crag, hailing the sun: no man breaks the ring of fire.” 

But is that all? In the early 20th century, most American Wagnerites were women, for whom Wagner was an antidote to lives marginalized in a man’s world of work and money. And so it was with Cather, whose most insightful Wagner commentary diagnoses Kundry, in “Parsifal.” One of Wagner’s most original creations, Kundry oscillates between extremes of submission and domination. Cather’s Kundry, at the Met, was Olive Fremstad, a Wagner soprano, Callas-like in veracity and intensity, with whom Cather became friends. Of Fremstad’s Kundry, Cather writes that it “is a summary of the history of womankind. [Wagner] sees in her an instrument of temptation, of salvation, and of service; but always an instrument, a thing driven and employed. . . . She cannot possibly be at peace with herself. . . . A driven creature, [she is] made for purposes eternally contradictory.”

Mr. Ross cites this commentary without comment. But read Cather, and read about Fremstad (who twice married abortively, identified with Ibsen’s women and chopped wood in Scandinavian forests), and it all fits together. Wagner, for Willa Cather, was more than an inspirational artistic model: He was a therapist, a medium for self-understanding and empowerment. 

This dimension of the Wagner experience is equally inescapable in considering the vexed topic of Wagner and the Jews. . . .

The peculiar intensity of affinity Wagner could arouse in Jews was perhaps most notably evinced by Hermann Levi, who conducted the premiere of “Parsifal” at Bayreuth. To his father, a rabbi, Levi wrote: “The most beautiful thing that I have experienced in my life is that it was granted to me to come close to such a man, and I thank God daily for this.” 

Or take the case of Gustav Mahler, who, as Mr. Ross observes, once argued that the devious dwarf Mime, in “Siegfried,” was “intended by Wagner as a persiflage of a Jew.” Mahler then added: “I know of only one Mime, and that is me.” There is, however, more to this aside. Mahler also said: “No doubt with Mime, Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews with all their characteristic traits . . . the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested; but for God’s sake it must not be exaggerated and overdone. . . . You wouldn’t believe what there is in that part, nor what I could make of it.” For Mahler, Wagner exquisitely understood the Jew in Mime.

Mr. Ross ventures in a useful direction in considering the “special appeal” of “Lohengrin” for Jewish listeners: “The opera romanticizes the figure of the itinerant outsider who stands apart from the ‘normal’ community, much as many Jews perceived themselves within German society.” 

As a lifelong Jewish Wagnerite, I would go the distance: Wagner is the supreme poet of homelessness, the master musical portraitist of marginality. He is Siegmund, an orphan of ambiguous parentage, who exclaims: “I am always unpopular. . . . Misery is all I know.” He is Wotan and Tristan, who drop out. He is Hans Sachs, a lonely philosopher of pessimism. He is the cerebral Loge, whose irony is quick and irredeemable. As for Wagner himself, he suspected his actual father to have been Jewish. He fled the law as a political exile. He was always in debt. His enemies were numerous and powerful. His health was poor. 

That he was himself a paradigmatic outsider explains many of the most impassioned, most therapeutic manifestations of Wagnerism, beginning with his appeal to gays and women, to whom he seemed, as to so many Jews, “one of us.” And so he is also Parsifal, who may be read as androgynous; or Senta, Sieglinde and Brünnhilde, driven to flout convention because of oppressive circumstances—because of a brutish husband or clueless father. . . .

“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.