Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 23

Jonas Kaufmann vs. the Orchestra of St. Luke’s

 

My father, who grew up on the Lower East Side, probably never heard opera until – like other Jews of his generation facing American quotas — he went to medical school in Vienna in the 1930s. His only prior exposure to full-throated singing, I imagine, came in the synagogue: cantorial tenors.

When I was very young and precociously amassing LPs of Beethoven, Brahms, and Wagner, my father collected recordings of the operetta tenors from his medical school years, singers whose high temper and juicy high notes connected with Jan Peerce singing “Kol nidre,” or Richard Tucker in the Yiddish songs of Goldfaden. Richard Tauber and Joseph Schmidt were his favorites. So I grew up with songs of Vienna and Berlin ringing in my ears.  And they’re still there.

Jonas Kaufmann, who must be today’s most celebrated operatic tenor, commands a wide repertoire in German, Italian, and French. But for his Carnegie Hall concert last Friday night, Kaufmann presented selections from his 2014 “Berlin album” — “You Mean the World to Me.” I read in the Carnegie program book that this cross-over CD “made it onto the pop charts.”

Having never heard “You Mean the World to Me,” I looked forward with excitement and mild trepidation. I imagined that a brainy singer – and Kaufmann assuredly is that – might bring self-conscious artistry to this repertoire, now nearly a century old. I was expecting something a little synthetic.

But Kaufmann made no attempt to sound like Tauber or Schmidt – any more than they had sounded like one another. Instead, he gloriously found his own way into the tradition they embodied.

Certainly Kaufmann’s chocolate tenor is darker in timbre, and heftier in weight, than the instruments once associated with “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz” or “Wien, Wien nur du allein.” But it rings on top. And it’s wonderfully susceptible to the crooning head voice that was a Tauber signature.

We heard selections by Lehar and Kalman, by Ernst May and Tauber himself, by Robert Stolz and Mischa Spoliansky – songs composed between 1925 and 1933 for operetta and for early talkies. Somehow, the bewitching Tauber combination of spontaneity, intimate charm, and vocal fireworks was renewed. The evening climaxed with a heroically robust rendition of “Dein ist mein ganzes Herz.” Kaufmann made the songs his own.

The dimensions of this feat were inadvertently magnified every time the singer departed the stage, and we were left alone with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Jochen Rieder. Never have I heard so clueless a performance of a Central European waltz as the St. Luke’s treatment of Lehar’s divine Ballsirenen from The Merry Widow; a lilt was not even attempted. But the evening’s nadir was the waltz from Giuditta. Whatever time was allotted to rehearsing this number (surely very little) would have been better spent inviting the instrumentalists to audition Hilde Gueden in “Meine Lippen sie Kussen so heiss” via youtube (I am perfectly serious). They showed no more familiarity with the pertinent style than they might have performing an Indian raga or a Javanese gamelan number.

My wife, who is Hungarian, said she would have preferred “the Budapest postal workers’ orchestra.” We were both reminded of hearing the Kronos Quartet attempt Bartok back in the 1990s: a harbinger of things to come. Musical performance devoid of context.

So it was a weird evening at Carnegie Hall. Rarely have I listened to an orchestra with such discomfort. Never have I responded to a tenor with such gratitude.

The penultimate encore was a classic Old World torch song: “Don’t Ask Me Why.” I’m not claiming that Jonas Kaufmann’s performance eclipsed my father’s Greta Keller LP. But it was damned good.

 

 

Stokowski and Ormandy — What Happened in Philadelphia?

 

As I write in Understanding Toscanini (1987):

“In 1932, in a minor cause celebre, Wilhelm Furtwangler was discovered likening American orchestras to ‘pet dogs’ (Luxushunden) in a speech honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the Berlin Philharmonic. To Furtwangler, whose rapport with the New York Philharmonic’s ‘dog owners’ had not been smooth, the absence of government subsidies in the United States implied that orchestras were deemed less essential there than in Europe. When the ‘pet dogs’ analogy stirred American resentment, he took pains to explain to the New York Times that he ‘intended to convey the idea that orchestras had grown to be more of a necessity to German communities than elsewhere on account of the greater age of German musical culture and national tradition.’”

This explanation was necessarily disingenuous. Furtwangler was not the sort of man to trade anecdotes at Manhattan dinner parties. His lapdog analogy plainly questioned the influence of affluent non-musicians in musical affairs.

In a recent blog I called the Philadelphia Orchestra’s decision to replace Leopold Stokowski with Eugene Ormandy “one of the most parochial blunders in the institutional history of classical music in America.” Was the Philadelphia Orchestra a Luxushund?

The incongruous 44-year phenomenon (1936 to 1980) of a middling conductor taking over from a galvanic genius remains mysterious. Certainly (as I earlier speculated) the music businessmen  Charles O’Connell and Arthur Judson had input into Philadelphia’s decision to hire Ormandy over such readily available refugee candidates as Erich Kleiber and Otto Klemperer – not to mention Fritz Reiner, who next door at the Curtis Institute coveted the Philadelphia podium.  O’Connell superintended the classical music division of RCA Records. Judson was for decades the presiding powerbroker – the Robert Moses – of classical music in the US. He ran the New York Philharmonic and (for a time) the Philadelphia Orchestra. He created Columbia Artists — the most powerful booking agency for conductors and instrumentalists.

For readers unfamiliar with Judson, here are a couple of Mahler vignettes:

In 1935 Klemperer, as a New York Philharmonic guest conductor (and a clear candidate to become a regular presence), insisted on conducting Mahler’s Second Symphony. His three performances impacted overwhelmingly; Olin Downes, in the Times, called them “historic.” Judson’s response was to apprise Klemperer that his Mahler concerts had run a substantial deficit. As reported by Klemperer’s biographer Peter Heyworth, this “Pyrrhic victory” sealed Klemperer’s fate in New York. When he discovered he would not be invited back, Klemperer wrote to let Judson know he was “very much offended”—an “outburst of rage and resentment,” according to Heyworth, “unique in his career.”

One of the Philharmonic’s most important American premieres was of Mahler’s Sixth, under Dimitri Mitropoulos in 1947. But the Philharmonic balked at scheduling the work on the Sunday afternoon broadcast concert — Judson maintained that Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F would be more suitable national radio fare and would also sell more tickets at home. In response, Mitropoulos wrote Judson (October 14, 1947) “to beg you, almost on my knees” to change his mind. “It would be a crime not to give this New World [broadcast] premiere of this great and exciting symphony . . . It would be a great event from which we have nothing to fear and from which to expect no less than the highest gratitude of all the musical artistic world in the United States.” He added that he awaited Judson’s response “with anxiety.” Judson said no.

Eugene Ormandy enjoyed a close, even filial relationship with Arthur Judson. Judson played a crucial role installing Ormandy in his first major position, in Minneapolis. He doubtless advocated for Ormandy in Philadelphia. In later life Ormandy said of Judson, “I owe everything to him.”

Thanks to an email from Gregor Benko, I now have at hand a long letter from Olga Samaroff which sheds further light on Ormandy’s Philadelphia  appointment. Marked “PERSONAL,” it’s dated December 8, 1934 (in which year Stokowski had temporarily “resigned”) and is addressed “Dear Curtis” – its recipient being Philadelphia Orchestra Association President Curtis Bok. “If I were President of the Philadelphia Orchestra there is just one man I would consider for the whole job, — that man is Eugene Ormandy,” Samaroff writes. “I feel very convinced that somewhere he will prove to be one of the greatest conductors of his generation.”

Samaroff (born Lucy Hickenlooper) was a prominent American pianist and pedagogue. She was also Leopold Stokowski’s first wife, and backstage played a decisive role both molding his exotic public persona and promoting his glamorous musical career. Her letter to Bok self-evidently conceals a back story – a web of negotiation impossible to extrapolate. But its surface content is wholly engrossing.

Here is a paragraph comparing Ormandy to other Philadelphia possibilities:

“I think the best thing that could happen in Philadelphia would be to have someone do what Leopold did in the beginning – be the regular conductor and conduct throughout the season [contradicting Judson’s unfortunate practice in New York of preferring guests to a permanent music director with teeth]. . . If Reiner were as good a symphony conductor as he is an operatic conductor, it seems to me he would be a logical choice but frankly and confidentially, I do not feel he is a big symphony conductor. Furtwangler has left Berlin [he had resigned in a dispute with the Nazis, but would be reinstated] might like to come to America but he is already too much the pampered ‘prima donna’ to do the kind of work somebody will have to do. He is also hard to get on with personally. Kleiber is not big enough. Klemperer is uneven. He does some things very well and other things not nearly so well. [Jose] Iturbi made a great success in Philadelphia in a concert primarily devoted to Spanish music . . . If he has the same limitations as a conductor however that he has as a pianist, I fear Philadelphia would miss the great experiences they have had in Bach, Brahms, Wagner and Beethoven. . . . “

Well, Samaroff was wrong about Reiner. Certainly Furtwangler and Klemperer were harder “to get on with personally” than Ormandy would be. Was Kleiber “not big enough.”? He today looms a lot bigger than Ormandy. What is more: In Berlin, it was he who led the world premiere of Berg’s Wozzeck in 1925, a brave and triumphant undertaking. As a guest with the New York Philharmonic in 1930 and 1931, Kleiber programed Mahler, Hindemith, Berg (excerpts from Wozzeck and Lulu both), Krenek, Toch, and Malipiero. Klemperer’s New York Philharmonic programs included Berg, Bruckner, Hindemith, Janacek, Mahler, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich.  Even Furtwangler, whose repertoire predilections were conservative, in 1925 led the Philharmonic in its first performances of The Rite of Spring.

Samaroff’s letter continues:

“Although Ormandy has become one of my personal friends I had formed my musical opinion of him when I did not know him from Adam. I went to a concert of the Philadelphia Orchestra when I knew nothing of him musically or personally. I was overwhelmed by the display of qualities that were so like the young Leopold that it was uncanny. I am not speaking of externals of conducting that might be imitative of Stokowski’s methods. I am speaking of purely musical and temperamental qualities, of phrasing, feeling and orchestral balance . . . As a man I do not yet know him very well but I have already had occasion to discover one priceless quality – loyalty. . . .

“Someone recently said to me that he was an opportunist. . . I know orchestra men resent his rise from the ranks [Ormandy began as a violinist]. They always do. The orchestra players’ jealousy of the conductor is as inevitable as any other form of class feeling. They all think they could be conductors if they had the chance. In Ormandy’s case it is enhanced by the spectacular rapidity with which he emerged . . . But if given life and death power – that is the power to dismiss men – I do not think he would have any difficulty in establishing control. After all, that is the one sure thing in determining the attitude of orchestra players towards their conductor. They do their best for the man who has the power to fire them.”

The letter is signed: “Affectionately yours, Olga.”

I realize there are readers who will agree with Olga here – when Norman Lebrecht reproduced my previous Ormandy/O’Connell blog on slippedisc, the respondents included Ormandy enthusiasts. Without getting into a shouting match, I will add that I heard Ormandy in live performance at the Academy of Music a few times in the late 1960s. I will agree that his live performances surpass his studio recordings. (I also found the sound upstairs quite decent, however notoriously dry the downstairs acoustic of the Academy may be.) I liked best a reading of the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition. The smooth skin of the Ormandy sound cushioned the bite of Mussorgsky’s characterizations and (in the case of the feuding Jews Goldenberg and Schmuyle) caricatures. But the sonic refulgence of the “Great Gate at Kiev” was undeniable.

Travel north to Boston, however, and listen to Serge Koussevitzky conduct the same music (I here refer to his broadcast of October 9, 1943). First of all, Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony is on fire; Ormandy was never this incendiary. Secondly, the spiritual elevation of the “Great Gate” occupies a realm of expression Ormandy was never known to inhabit. If you don’t believe me, just have a listen: go to 52:00 of the “PostClassical” Broadcast “Are Orchestras Really ‘Better than Ever?’

I pick this particular piece to make a point because it so happens that Koussevitzky commissioned and premiered Ravel’s orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition – no small achievement — in Paris in 1922. That’s a fundamental difference between Ormandy and such intrepid culture-bearers as Stokowski and Koussevitzky. Koussevitzky’s proudest achievement was Tanglewood – he created it as a laboratory for American music and American composers.  The list of important Koussevitzky commissions and premieres is long. As for Stokowski, the composers he historically championed ranged from Schoenberg to Rachmaninoff to Varese (think about that). He led his own Youth Concerts and his own Young People’s Concerts (including one in which he produced a live baby elephant for Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals).

There is a smoking gun in the annals of Arthur Judson. As I write in Classical Music in America: “In 1931, responding to complaints about Toscanini’s limited [New York Philharmonic] repertoire, Judson issued this remarkable edict: ‘There are certain composers like Bruckner and Mahler who have not yet been accepted heartily by the American public. Certain of their works are played from time to time and it may be that they will gradually attain their permanent place in the repertoire . . .We can only go as far as the public will go with us.’ . . . This market mentality was previously anathema to classical music. . . . It would never have occurred to . . .  Koussevitzky or Stokowski to treat audience taste as a given; as artists, their mission was to chart virgin terrain. In fact, Judson’s attitude . . . demeaned and redefined the performer’s role in the larger scheme of things musical. For the most part, music new or unfamiliar was considered not good for business.”

Arthur Judson notwithstanding, Koussevitzky and Stokowski shaped taste. Wilhelm Furtwangler notwithstanding, their American orchestras were not lapdogs.

P.S.: Curtis Bok resigned as President of the Philadelphia Orchestra board on Dec. 11, 1934 – three days after Samaroff’s letter — in protest against the board’s ouster of Stokowski. His mother, Mary Louise Curtis Bok, did the same. Though Stokowski came back, and the Boks did not, Samaroff’s counsel presumably remained pertinent when in 1941 Stokowski left Philadelphia for good and Ormandy became sole music director. However one reckons the magnanimity of the Boks and other Philadelphia philanthropists, and their influence on the affairs of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Curtis Institute (the Mary Louise Curtis Bok Foundation invaluably supports Curtis to this day), the most colossal of all American musical philanthropists was Henry Higginson. He invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony. He also built Boston’s Symphony Hall. It greatly mattered that Higginson (while a banker) was a Vienna-trained musician. He had taste, he had ears, he had exceptional scouts abroad. Personal amenability was self-evidently not a high criterion for prospective Boston Symphony conductors. Nor was Higginson impressed by great reputations. He was after talent. He hired Artur Nikisch before Nikisch became Germany’s pre-eminent symphonic conductor. He settled on Karl Muck, a powerful leader who in wartime betrayed him and broke his heart. I would additionally call Higginson a great man; he fits no categories for cultural benefaction. For the singular story of Higginson and the BSO, see my Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005). For a full Higginson portrait, see my Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle (2012).

 

The Artist and His Audience

As many who follow baseball know, Jacob deGrom is an artist.

It’s not just that he’s likely to win the National League Cy Young Award. Or that his stats this season were off the charts: a 1.70 ERA; 29 consecutive starts allowing three runs or fewer; 269 strike-outs in 217 innings.

DeGrom throws exceptionally hard. He is deceptive. He is a master of location. But the predominant impression, from the stands, is of Zen-like concentration, of a poetic fluency of self-possession uncanny and impregnable. The vicissitudes of the game seem not to intrude.

As I happened to be in DC on September 19, I was able to watch deGrom’s last two starts of the season, the second being a week later in New York. In both games, deGrom was a miracle of dispatch and efficiency. He worked quickly and rhythmically, easily, with long, lithe strides. He rarely fell behind in the count. Very few balls left the infield. Many dribbled between the mound and first base. I can’t remember seeing so many assists and put-outs by a pitcher (and DeGrom – a former shortstop — is a lyrically deft fielder). Against the Braves in New York, deGrom was brushed back three times by the opposing pitcher; he remained a picture of placidity.

Of the 15 innings deGrom pitched, 14 were scoreless. The exception – the third inning in DC – began with a rare walk; suddenly, deGrom couldn’t find the plate. He gave up to two runs, then shut the door. What accounted for this lapse I have no idea.

Might DC’s National Park, built in 2008, have been a factor? I refer not to the understandable DC allegiance of the Nationals’ fans, but of something far more distracting: the indifference of the ballpark itself.

Baseball stadiums behave differently than they used to. There was always an organ and an announcer. But over time it was generally assumed that baseball is insufficiently brisk and eventful to sustain the full attention of a mass of human beings. So new scoreboards exploded, and new sound systems did too. Also, something was done about those long breaks between innings – breaks greatly increased by the insertion of ever longer TV commercials.

At Nationals Stadium, not a single synapse was left unattended – we were treated to diversions of every description. The most elaborate was a “Presidents’ race” in the outfield, with George and Abe (but no Donald Trump). This event was included in the “Highlights of the Game,” recapitulated on a gargantuan screen. Meanwhile, the fortissimo stadium organ was rarely silent. In the late innings, when people began to leave (the Nationals were losing), it was deployed ever more insistently. The ambient crowd noise was also uncommonly loud: thousands talking rather than watching. And no wonder: the grace and tempo of the game were violated at every turn.

All of this was intrusively at odds with deGrom’s poetic composure.

In his many writings about performing symphonic music, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler harped on the significance of the audience. He insisted that, absent an engaged body of listeners, great music could not be made. Is baseball doomed by inattentive stadiums?

However: seven days later, in Queens, Citi Field listened to the game. Electronic musical intrusions were nearly absent except between innings. A spectator could pursue observations and think thoughts. The crowd gaped at Jeff McNeil’s airborne grab of a line drive far to his right. We absorbed the sweetness of Michael Conforto’s home run swing.

In the latter innings, when deGrom found an even deeper groove, the increased frequency of strike-outs was acknowledged.  When deGrom strode to the plate in the bottom of the seventh, there was shared understanding that he would therefore pitch the eighth. At the top of the ninth, the appearance of Seth Lugo emerging from the bullpen instantly registered widespread disappointment. After the game, deGrom was interviewed on the field. The crowd froze to watch and listen. The Mets’ losing season was forgotten in a surge of empathy and pride.

The most proactive sports audience I know is the Rangers’ at Madison Square Garden. The finer points of ice hockey are formally applauded en masse. Chants are invented and shared on the spot. Think now of the shrinking world of classical music. New York used to have such an audience for opera. Arias and duets are calibrated to ignite an immediate response. I am old enough to remember the Met when a full house registered informed expectation, keen arousal, delirious surprise. No longer. Cast a pair of equally certified celebrities in Eugene Onegin – I am thinking of Renee Fleming and the late Dmitri Hvorostovsky – and the approbation is equally generic. Never mind that Hvorostovsky was born to sing Onegin, and that Fleming was too self-conscious an artist to feign Tatyana’s innocence.

In a bygone era, I once heard Nicolai Gedda sing Lenski in the same Tchaikovsky opera. Was he the last tenor to deploy something like the floated half-tones once famously purveyed by Kozlovsky and Lemeshev? Perhaps. His second act aria detonated a sustained eruption of recognition. I will never forget how that 1979 audience sealed the occasion.

Jacob deGrom notwithstanding, we live in distracted times. No doubt baseball will suffer the same dilution as grand opera. But not yet.

Rachmaninoff Uncorked — Take Two: RCA, Ormandy, and the Cork

Charles O’Connell, who commanded “artists and repertoire” for RCA Victor from 1930 to 1944, left a book of reminiscences – The Other Side of the Record (1947) – documenting an astute, querulous intellect and a meddlesome ego. It was often O’Connell who decided what music famous conductors, pianists, and violinists might commercially record.

O’Connell admired Sergei Rachmaninoff – yet only recorded Rachmaninoff in two extended solo piano works: Schumann’s Carnaval and Chopin’s B-flat minor Sonata, both classics of the discography for piano. That is: O’Connell failed to record Rachmaninoff’s esteemed readings of Liszt’s Sonata or Beethoven’s Op. 111. Or of the piece Rachmaninoff considered his supreme compositional achievement: the existential Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninoff was known to play the Symphonic Dances, privately, with his friend Vladimir Horowitz in the two-piano version. We know that he wished to record the Symphonic Dances as a conductor. O’Connell had thrice recorded Rachmaninoff memorably conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in his own music. But O’Connell lacked enthusiasm for the Symphonic Dances and nothing was done.

All this matters greatly because Rachmaninoff refused to allow his live performances to be broadcast or otherwise recorded. Even though he was a master of musical structure, we have no documentation whatsoever of how he shaped the monumental Beethoven and Liszt pieces he famously purveyed. As important: we don’t know what he sounded like in a real hall with a real audience.

The new Marston 3-CD set “Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances” – the topic of my previous blog – permits a glimpse of this “real” Rachmaninoff: a supreme instrumentalist more emotionally aroused than the one O’Connell managed to capture in sound. Rachmaninoff’s private rendering of his Symphonic Dances, as recorded by Ormandy (probably without the pianist’s knowledge), is an unprecedented opportunity to eavesdrop on Rachmaninoff performing absent the intrusive self-awareness imposed by RCA’s microphones.

This historic release also suggests another impediment to hearing the real Rachmaninoff: Eugene Ormandy himself.

Of the repertoire Rachmaninoff happened to record, only one extended composition embeds the searing nostalgia that was the expressive keynote of this great artist. That is the Piano Concerto No. 3. His 1939-40 recording, with Ormandy, is a dry run. The concerto’s lachrymose intensity is missing.

That it did not have to be is proven by Rachmaninoff’s 1929 recording of a less emotionally fraught composition: the Piano Concerto No. 2. The difference is the conductor, Ormandy’s irreplaceable predecessor in Philadelphia: Leopold Stokowski.

Ormandy’s recorded accompaniments to Rachmaninoff’s First, Second, and Fourth Piano Concertos are merely supportive: they give the soloist nothing to work with. (My pianist friend George Vatchnadze, describing the Rachmaninoff-Ormandy relationship, calls Ormandy a “puppy” and a “servant” — apt adjectives.) Stokowski’s accompaniment to the Second Concerto is unique. The signature lava flow of his magnificent Philadelphia strings is not only memorably ravishing; it is acutely calibrated in dialogue with the composer/pianist. It is not for nothing that Rachmaninoff called Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra the greatest orchestra that had ever existed.

If you want to hear what I’m talking about, listen first to the passage from the First Concerto that Vladimir Horowitz once identified as the only instance of RCA adequately conveying Rachmaninoff’s art. This is the piano solo beginning at 12:52 here. And observe how the intrusion of Ormandy’s generic accompaniment cancels the abandon of Rachmaninoff’s playing, with its untethered rubatos and magically layered dynamics.

Now Stokowski – try the coda to the first movement of the Second Concerto, beginning at 8:45 here. You’ll hear pianist and conductor immersed in an inspired dialogue: two exemplary instruments of musical expression – Stokowski’s orchestra and Rachmaninoff’s Steinway – feed one another.

It is hardly surprising that once Ormandy took over, Stokowski did not guest-conduct in Philadelphia for more than two decades. Or that Stokowski, when passing through Philadelphia by train, would invariably lower the window shade.

How is it possible that Eugene Ormandy could have succeeded Leopold Stokowski? Both O’Connell and Arthur Judson, classical music’s supreme powerbroker, played decisive roles (O’Connell, in his book, testifies that Ormandy looked upon Judson “as on a father”). This choice — coinciding with refugee conductors of world stature looking for work in the US (Kleiber, Klemperer, etc.) — is one of the most parochial blunders in the institutional history of classical music in America. It bears comparison with the Met’s decision to replace Artur Bodanzky with Erich Leinsdorf in 1939; Leinsdorf, too, was a refugee — but no Kleiber or Klemperer. Two decades later, RCA inflicted Leinsdorf on the Boston Symphony; the resulting recordings are today forgotten.

And how is it possible that Rachmaninoff chose to record with Ormandy? According to O’Connell, “he preferred Ormandy to anyone, though he collaborated successfully and in the most friendly fashion with Stokowski.”

But O’Connell held Ormandy in exaggerated esteem. And I read in Richard Taruskin’s copious note for the new Marston release that Rachmaninoff, his longtime loyalty to Philadelphia notwithstanding, didn’t care for Ormandy’s reading of the Symphonic Dances — his preferred conductor for that work (other than himself) being Dmitri Mitopoulos. The Marston set includes a scorching New York Philharmonic Symphonic Dances led by Mitropoulos in live performance in 1942.

Another annotation for the new Marston release, by the producers, reports that Rachmaninoff’s preferred interpreters included Stokowski, Mitropoulos, and Willem Mengelberg – an informative list. These were sui generis conductors who never played by the rules. And, however constrained he may have been in the presence of Charles O’Connell and Eugene Ormandy – neither did Sergei Rachmaninoff.

PS: In an email exchange with Gregor Benko, the longtime Rachmaninoff authority who co-produced “Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances,” I learned the following:

“O’Connell tried to kill two birds with one stone, thinking he would please Rachmaninoff in keeping his promise for Victor to record Symphonic Dances, and satisfying his annual contractual commitment to Frederick Stock and the Chicago Symphony, by having Stock make the recording.  He hadn’t realized how much this would displease Rachmaninoff, or how much Rachmaninoff wanted to conduct the recording himself.  As happens so regularly at record companies, this seemingly minor personality kertuffle resulted in total failure, and no one recorded the Dances. O’Connell claimed that Rachmaninoff forgave him later, but we believe that is not true.

“As for plans for recording the Symphonic Dances with Vladimir Horowitz [in the two-piano version]:  talk of this has been much exaggerated, based on wishful thinking.  Horowitz and Rachmaninoff played it together privately in California, unknown date but sometime after their first two piano partying there in June, 1942.  Rachmaninoff was already ill and his circle was very worried. He tried to keep up a good face, and went with Horowitz to see Bambi at the Disney studios.  On July 17 & 18 Rachmaninoff played in the Hollywood Bowl and he was bent over.  Lumbago, it was explained, but it was probably acute pain. In July Steinway stopped making pianos as the war really began affecting music. A few weeks later his cancer was diagnosed.  It was a struggle just to fulfill contracted engagements for late 1942/early 1943, and plans for the future were on hold. No contracts for new things, no dates set aside for new recordings. Each contracted concert played was a trial, and finally in mid-February he stopped the tour. He died at the end of March. There was no way such a recording could have happened . . . ”

For much more on Arthur Judson and Leopold Stokowski, see my “Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall” (2005). For more on Charles O’Connell, David Sarnoff, the provincial NBC/RCA impact on American musical life, see my once notorious “Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American-Culture God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music “[1987].) 

 

 

Rachmaninoff Uncorked

Today’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my review of “one of the most searing listening experiences in the history of recorded sound” — the new Marston Records 3-CD set: “Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances” — which you can sample here. My review reads:

One of the saddest and most paradoxical artistic exiles of the 20th century was Sergei Rachmaninoff, who fled the Russian Revolution and wound up in New York and Los Angeles, in equal measure celebrated and obscure. 

Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) left Moscow a composer and conductor of high consequence who also played the piano. Yet in America he barely conducted and his compositional output plummeted. To earn a living, he turned himself into a keyboard virtuoso of singular fame and attainment—a late embodiment of the heroic Romantic piano lineage beginning with Franz Liszt. Offstage, he retained a lonely Russian home and Russian customs. His severe crewcut and gimlet eyes disclosed little to the world at large. His personal poise was awesome and implacable.

Rachmaninoff’s privacy took other forms. He refused permission to have his concerts broadcast, effectively preventing any documentation of what he sounded like in live performance. Instead, he recorded extensively for RCA. But, absent the oxygen a body of listeners can activate, those readings are as celebrated for their emotional control as for their sovereign interpretive mastery. They enshrine kaleidoscopic miracles of color and texture wedded to a vice-like command of musical structure. But the cap remains on the bottle.

No longer. A decade ago, a researcher was browsing a collection left by the conductor Eugene Ormandy to the University of Pennsylvania—and read: “33 1/3:12/21/40: Symphonic Dances…Rachmaninoff in person playing the piano.” That is: Ormandy had privately recorded Rachmaninoff playing through his “Symphonic Dances” prior to Ormandy’s premiere performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra in January 1941. This turned out to be no morsel, but 26 minutes of a 35-minute composition. And it’s now embedded in a three-CD Marston set titled “Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances.” The result is one of the most searing listening experiences in the history of recorded sound.

Most of the best piano recordings are made in concert. They’re not as perfect as studio products, but by and large they’re more spontaneous, more intense, more creative. Vladimir Horowitz, an intimate friend, claimed that only one of Rachmaninoff’s commercial recordings—that of the second movement of his own First Concerto, recorded in 1939-40—gave a fair impression. If you listen to that recording, you’ll easily ascertain what Horowitz was talking about—the opening solo is untethered.

As privately imparted to Ormandy, Rachmaninoff’s impromptu solo-piano rendering of his “Symphonic Dances” documents roaring cataracts of sound, massive chording, and pounding accents powered by a demonic thrust the likes of which no studio environment has ever fostered. Rachmaninoff’s humbling presence, re-encountered, is gigantic, cyclopean. 

And there is more: the piece itself; it is Rachmaninoff’s valedictory. Summoning his waning creative energies in this last major work, he fashioned his musical testament. The dances originally bore titles: “Midday,” Twilight,” “Midnight.” These are stations of life. The finale ends in a blaze of glory; near the close, Rachmaninoff inscribed: “Alliluya.”

But the work’s most poignant moment comes in the first movement coda, which cites and pacifies the “vengeance” motto of the confessional First Symphony, a youthful effusion Rachmaninoff discarded following its disastrous 1897 premiere. It is music as naked as the nostalgic Rachmaninoff of the Second Piano Concerto is decorous: a baring of the soul. The First Symphony was completely unknown in 1940 (only in 1944 was a set of parts discovered). And so Rachmaninoff’s allusion in the “Symphonic Dances” is a soul-baring even more private than his piano-rehearsal with Ormandy. In terms of his creative odyssey—his exile and accommodation in a strange land—it is nothing less than a closing of the circle. 

How does Rachmaninoff himself perform this secret passage, the meaning of which was his alone? Very slowly, lingeringly. Even more affecting is his treatment of the movement’s second subject, a long saxophone melody he invests with a heaving surge and ebb of feeling, imparting a trembling undertow of anguish, of memories faraway and yet unresolved. The second movement waltz, under Rachmaninoff’s fingers, is an essay in macabre shadow-play. The final dance is primal. The work emerges as an iconic leavetaking as bittersweet as any Mahler Abschied.

I own a 10-volume 1954 edition of “Grove’s Dictionary of Music” that allots to “Rakhmaninov” less than a page. It contains the sentence: “The enormous popular success some few of [his] works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favour.” Today that sentiment is as forgettable as Rachmaninoff is imperishable. 

The little box containing these Rachmaninoff memories within memories includes other rarities. I cannot imagine a better introduction to this artist at his true worth. It stands as a rebuke to the slickness that often passes for Rachmaninoff interpretation nowadays. More than a lost art, it documents a lost world.

What Are Orchestral Musicians For?

Years ago, before I was shown the door, I briefly taught at the Manhattan School of Music within their graduate program for aspirant orchestral musicians. My intention was to impart some knowledge about the history of the orchestra in order to shed light on the decline of orchestras and of orchestral performance – and to suggest that young musicians might be able contribute constructively.

I boldly inflicted both reading and writing assignments.

The class was large (it was in fact required) – more than 50 instrumentalists. The majority tolerated my course. A vocal minority found it revelatory. And equally vocal minority found it an imposition; they refused to read or write. (The administration backed the dissidents.)

One day I brought my friend Larry Tamburri to address the class. At the time, he was CEO of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, where he had succeeded in creating a unique institutional culture. The NJSO musicians were partners. Some sat on the board. Some had artistic input. Astoundingly, Larry’s strategy enabled him to negotiate contracts with the players without the participation of attorneys.

(Subsequently, as CEO of the Pittsburgh Symphony, Larry discovered himself unable to achieve what he had accomplished in New Jersey. I noticed, sometime later, that when the Pittsburgh Symphony players went on strike in 2016, they insisted on distinguishing themselves from the institutional identity of the PSO. This us-versus-them mentality, pitting musicians against “management,” remains pervasive.)

In my class, Larry drew two circles on the blackboard, a big one and a little one. The little one, he explained, signified the traditional institutional role of orchestral musicians. The big one showed what orchestral musicians needed to become: full institutional participants. Larry said that he was having trouble finding young big-circle instrumentalists for his orchestra.

In my various orchestral adventures and misadventures, I had occasion to take part in the ritual of contract negotiations as CEO of the Brooklyn Philharmonic in the 1990s. I discovered that members of the orchestra with whom I thought I had a decent personal relationship became different people when seated on the opposite side of a table. A counter-example is the South Dakota Symphony, about which I have often written in this space. That is an orchestra full of big-circle musicians.

In PostClassical Ensemble – the renegade DC chamber orchestra I co-founded fifteen years ago with the conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez – our big-circle contingent includes our principal trumpet, Chris Gekker. Now in a late phase of his career, Chris is one of the best-known brass players in the US. No other member of PCE is more keenly engaged by the intellectual content of our programing. Chris is also one of two PCE players who sits on our board of directors (the other being Bill Richards, our splendid principal percussionist).

Chris’s big-circle attitude, I am certain, has something to do with a decision he made at the age of 25. Even though he had access to membership in major orchestras, he decided that he would pursue a different career trajectory and restrict his orchestral playing to part-time positions. So he became principal trumpet of both Orpheus and of the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New York. He occasionally subbed as principal trumpet with the New York Philharmonic, or the San Francisco Symphony, or the Santa Fe Opera. And he simultaneously pursued a free-lance solo career including jazz and recording gigs. So he retained independence.

Chris grew up outside DC. He’s recalled: “My parents were both European immigrants; my sister and I are the first Americans in our family. In addition to hearing various languages spoken at home, there was music; they both knew a good deal, and my father was a fine amateur pianist, playing Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, and his beloved Russian music. Outside the house, in the 1960s, the sounds of soul and rock bands were everywhere, and I began playing in bands very early, so I had exposure to a lot of music.”

Chris’s unusual qualities as a person correlate with his eclectic background. I also believe that his professional independence correlates with his unusual qualities as a trumpeter. His style of playing is utterly personal – but subtly so. The clarion swagger many associate with the trumpet is not for him. Rather, he has developed a lyric vein of his own.

I cherish many memories of Chris Gekker in performance with PostClassical Ensemble – e.g., the cantabile solos in the second movements of both Gershwin’s Concerto in F and of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (our soloist, Alexander Toradze, called Chris “free as a bird – he creates on the fly”). But mainly I remember his contribution to Silvestre Revueltas’s fabulous score for the film Redes – music we have both performed and recorded. With the Mexican bandas of his childhood always in his ear, Revueltas is a creative and demanding composer for brass. His tuba parts are unique. In Redes, he creates a work-out for solo trumpet that is grueling and rewarding in equal measure.

Near the end of this hour-long film, there is an exquisite muted trumpet solo marked “piano.” I have produced Redes performances (the film with live music, plus exegesis) with more than half a dozen American orchestras. Chris is the only player who has so much as attempted to play this solo really softly, let alone pulled it off memorably. Our Redes recording documents his first take, at the tail end of four days of rehearsal and performance. Accompanying a funeral procession (one of this film’s many indelible episodes, with cinematography by Paul Strand), it sounds like this, with PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordóñez:

http://www.artsjournal.com/uq/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Gekker-Excerpt.mp3

Chris once shared with me his sublime second movement solo in Gunther Schuller’s recording of Gershwin’s Concerto in F, with Russell Sherman at the piano. It sounds like this

http://www.artsjournal.com/uq/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Gershwin-Concerto.mp3

Typically, Chris had something interesting to say about it:

“Gunther used the original Paul Whiteman Band scoring – which you didn’t hear in those days. The Gershwin estate actually tried to stop him.  They only wanted the symphonic version to be known. The trumpet solo in that standard orchestral version is marked ‘with felt crown’ — so it’s usually played with a soft hat mute, often literally a cloth hat or beret. In the Whiteman version, it’s marked ‘megaphone mute.’ No one knows exactly what that means — no such mute exists nowadays. Gunther brought one for me to use. In the original Whiteman performances, the solo was played by Charlie Margolis, who was the premier free-lance trumpeter in NYC during the ‘20s, commanding triple scale wherever he played, and in constant employment by radio company orchestras. The original parts, which Gunther used, just had people’s names on them, not ‘trumpet 1,’ ‘trumpet 2,’ etc. Bix Beiderbecke was in the band, he was a notoriously bad reader, so there is a trumpet part for him but it is mostly blank; according to Gunther he was expected to be onstage but was not given much to do during the Concerto.”

Chris’s most recent CD is titled “Ghost Dialogues.” The music is intimate. It ranges in style from classical to jazz. I was especially stirred by the title number, composed by Lance Hulme; Chris is here joined by the terrific saxophonist Chris Vedala. In an interview in Fanfare Magazine, pegged to “Ghost Dialogues,” Chris renders his high school impressions of Miles Davis and Maurice Andre, of Bobby Hackett and Ray Nance, of John Ware’s posthorn solo in the Bernstein/NY Phil Mahler Third and says “I loved the sound of the trumpet played softly.”

Chris Gekker is also a teacher – and has been a member of the faculty of the School of Music at the University of Maryland (College Park) since 1998. I have no doubt that his special qualities as a person make him a special pedagogue.

In fact, this past summer he became the first member of the School of Music faculty to be named a Distinguished University Professor.

For a filmed interview with Chris Gekker, by PCE’s resident film-maker Behrouz Jamali, click here.

 

 

 

THE FUTURE OF ORCHESTRAS — Part Six: What’s an Orchestra For?

Back in the 1990s, Harvey Lichtenstein – who recreated the Brooklyn Academy of Music – invited me to lunch and asked me if I wanted to run an orchestra.

Harvey had just read my notorious Jeremiad Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music. That was published by Knopf when a book about classical music might generate four or five dozen major reviews, including Newsweek and Time.

Understanding Toscanini ends with a diatribe about Lincoln Center. I speculate that if an audience exists for a refreshed, reconsidered presentation of classical music in live performance, it would be the inquisitive and diversified audience Harvey had cultivated at BAM.

BAM had its own orchestra: the Brooklyn Philharmonic. Harvey had some years before decided to jettison traditional programing. He had also jettisoned the orchestra’s remarkable music director, Lukas Foss, in favor of Dennis Russell Davies – a gifted conductor of world stature who better fit BAM’s “Next Wave” identity. In response, audience members flung their subscription renewal forms at the musicians’ feet backstage and the Brooklyn Philharmonic lost over two-thirds of its subscribers. So in offering me the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Harvey had nothing to lose.

I took him up on it on condition that I could experimentally implement thematic, cross-disciplinary programing – and nothing else — in place of the traditional overture/concerto/symphony template. Harvey liked that idea and a wild ride ensued.

The biggest Brooklyn Philharmonic festival, in 1994, was “The Russian Stravinsky,” based on Richard Taruskin’s ground-breaking research into Stravinsky’s Russian roots. Richard came, and so did (at his suggestion) Dmitri Pokrovsky’s revelatory Pokrovsky Folk Ensemble from Moscow. We also had half a dozen interesting scholars at hand. There were three concerts, all exploring new formats. The festival was reviewed all over the place, including scholarly journals. It felt important – it made the orchestra matter.

Some years later, BAM discovered itself deeply in debt and the financial relationship between BAM and the Brooklyn Phil collapsed – which precipitated my departure and foredoomed the orchestra itself (which no longer exists). Nevertheless, the new artistic template worked (we rebuilt an audience) – and I have ever since pursued humanities-infused thematic programing. That’s the nub of the NEH-funded Music Unwound consortium I direct.

The humanities template flourishes in its purest form, however, in DC, where fifteen years ago I co-founded PostClassical Ensemble with the wonderful Spanish conductor Angel Gil-Ordóñez. We just announced our Fifteenth Anniversary Season. The big events are at the Washington National Cathedral, where we’re Ensemble-in-Residence. You won’t find anything like them anywhere else. They furnish an original answer to the question: What’s an orchestra for?

In a recent blog about Leonard Bernstein, I wrote about “curating the past.” That’s something conductors and orchestras should do – and don’t. Next January 23, PCE is curating the past with a program called “Cultural Fusion: The Gamelan Experience.” Its starting point is the observation that gamelan is the non-Western musical genre that (by far) has most influenced the Western classical tradition. This story (which, amazingly, has yet to generate a book) begins with Debussy’s discovery of Javanese musicians and dancers at the 1889 Paris Exposition — the one with the Eiffel Tower. He later wrote:

“But my poor friend! Do you remember the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts? . . . Their school consists of the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand other tiny noises . . . what force one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a traveling circus.”

The story continues with Ravel, Poulenc, Messiaen, Britten, and Harrison – as well as lesser known composers of consequence like Colin McPhee. Both Javanese and Balinese gamelan – the first fragrant, the second metallic — cast their spell. For our concert, we’ll transform the cathedral’s Great Nave into an exotic cultural kaleidoscope, with Javanese and Balinese gamelan and dancers, archival film, two pianists, and a chamber orchestra.

The entire exercise is a sequel to the 1996 Brooklyn Philharmonic festival “Orientalism,” which featured two gamelan and a roster of distinguished participants including Steve Reich. It was also at BAM that (thanks to Dennis Russell Davies) I met and fell under the spell of Lou Harrison.

Harrison’s synthesis of Javanese gamelan sounds and techniques with the Western tradition is a profound achievement – and has been a longstanding PCE cause. (Our Harrison Centenary CD has been widely acclaimed abroad [and mainly ignored in the US]; we also produced a Harrison Centennial radio special.) In fact, Lou Harrison is one of three composers PCE has most championed – the other two being Silvestre Revueltas and Bernard Herrmann. With the waning of modernism (whose canons they did not endorse), these are twentieth-century masters whose time will come. And one of the things that orchestras are for is to support missionary work for composers who need and deserve it (cf. Bernstein and Mahler; Bernstein and Ives; Bernstein and Nielsen).

PCE’s month-long Bernard Herrmann festival in 2016 celebrated his versatility as “the most under-rated twentieth century American composer.” Herrmann’s justly famous film scores (Psycho, Vertigo, etc.) were juxtaposed with the inspirational war-time radio dramas he scored for Norman Corwin, and with his neglected concert music (of which his bewitching clarinet quintet is my favorite chamber music by any American).

In the course of all that, we struck gold: the 1944 Corwin/Herrmann radio drama “Whitman”; revisited in live performance, it turned out to be a major American concert work. That was with a student actor as Whitman, at the National Gallery of Art. And so on June 1, at the National Cathedral, our next Herrmann tribute will include “Whitman” with the distinguished American baritone William Sharp in the title role. The performance – celebrating Walt’s 200th birthday — will be broadcast live over the WWFM Classical Network. And we’ll record “Whitman” and two other Herrmann works for Naxos.

Our goal: to instate Bernard Herrmann’s “Whitman” as a concert melodrama (in musical parlance: a work mating music with the spoken word) of high consequence, a significant addition to the American symphonic repertoire.

And we have one more National Cathedral concert, on Nov. 5: “I Sing the Body Electoral.” Another Whitman celebration, it attempts to engage Whitman’s democratic ethos to ignite a musical town meeting on the eve of the crucial mid-term elections. Is that also something orchestras are for? We will find out.

For more on PCE and Bernard Herrmann, click here. For PCE’s two-hour Bernard Herrmann radio special, click here. To access the original 1944 “Whitman” radio play (with Charles Laughton – and terrible sound) click here. To survey PCE’s four 2018-19 events at the Washington National Cathedral, go to postclassical.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On Rescuing a “Dead Art Form” — Take Two

 

It seems to me pretty obvious that nowadays it’s far easier to stage a successful Hamlet or Three Sisters than a successful Aida or Siegfried. And one reason is equally obvious: finding an actor to play Hamlet or Masha is no problem; finding a dramatic soprano for Aida or a Heldentenor for Siegfried is difficult to impossible.

At the heart of Conrad L. Osborne’s Opera as Opera – the new, self-published mega-book that (as I wrote in The Wall Street Journal) surpasses all previous English-language treatments of opera in performance – is a complex argument exploring the less obvious reasons that theater lives and opera dies. Osborne encapsulates the differences in a single unforgettable sentence: “For a shining moment, opera seized the torch of orality’s failing hand.” That is: grand opera, a nineteenth century genre that flourished for something like a hundred years, grandly retained the rhetoric and gesture of poetry and drama – a grandiloquence of delivery otherwise discarded as artificial.

An actor orating “To be or not to be” has a range of choices: tempo, stress, pitch, articulation are all up for grabs. He can be declamatory or intimate. Not so the tenor singing “Celeste Aida” – it’s all composed into Verdi’s score.

And there is more. Osborne shows that operatic plots cling to a “metanarrative” based on conventions of courtly love that are today as anachronistic as Radames’ outsized way of celebrating his beloved’s attributes “heavenly” and “divine.”

Osborne’s historical perspective drives many of his book’s insights and arguments – including an absolute condemnation of operatic Regietheater. That is: the present-day predilection to re-date or resituate or otherwise alter operatic stories, not to mention the further predilection to deconstruct, casting doubt on composers and characters, in Osborne’s opinion signifies a failure to reckon with the nature of the beast. As theater and opera are not the same thing, he insists, neither is Regietheater in theater and opera one and the same: opera’s distinctive pedigree yields distinctive challenges. He builds his case with such tenacious patience and detail that it at the very least strikes an urgent cautionary note.

If my own perspective on Regietheater is less jaundiced, it’s because my first experience was exemplary. In the summer of 1977, the New York Times sent me to the Bayreuth Festival. It proved a charmed Bayreuth season. I experienced Patrice Chereau’s seminal Ring in its second year – when the irreplaceable Zoltan Kelemen was still singing Alberich (he died in 1979 at the age of 53). I attended Gotz Friedrich’s landmark Tannhauser, noisily premiered in 1972. And I attended the first performance of Harry Kupfer’s still remembered Flying Dutchman. The fourth Bayreuth production that summer, Wolfgang Wagner’s Parsifal, was a bland sequel to the famous abstract stagings of his late brother Wieland; it left no impression whatsoever.

The first thing that amazed me about the work of Chereau, Friedrich, and Kupfer was the acting – better than any I had ever encountered attending opera in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, or Munich. As for the directorial interpretations and re-interpretations of story and text – they felt wonderfully provocative, thoroughly refreshing. They were also, I would say, a natural emanation of twentieth century European trauma, which dictated new readings of the past. Though the US experienced no such twentieth century debacle as the Great War or Adolf Hitler, Regietheater eventually made the Atlantic crossing, as had serial composition – a comparable case of Old World aesthetic upheaval – some time before.

I remember spending many hours debating the astonishing ways in which Patrice Chereau second-guessed Richard Wagner. He scaled down or contradicted the cycle’s heroic speeches and deeds –beginning with those of Wotan, whose scowling face, stalking gait, and grasping gestures layered his “noblest” utterances with duplicity. Among other things, Chereau’s critique suggested an expose of the Ring itself, of the alleged arrogance and fulsome rhetoric of its creator; he even dressed Wotan as Wagner.

Looking back, however, what I most cherish about that 1977 Ring is not its deconstructive panache. Rather, I most remember Chereau’s human empathy for Loge, Mime, and Alberich – readings precisely comparable to Frank Corsaro’s ingeniously compassionate treatment of Violetta in Verdi’s La traviata at the New York City Opera. Osborne, in Opera as Opera, lovingly recalls “Violetta’s pause”: how in act one Corsaro daringly instructed Patricia Brooks to interpolate an unaccompanied pantomime preceding the expostulation “E strano!” (“How strange!”) and, thereafter, “the most intimate confessions of [Violetta’s] soul.”

If Violetta’s pause permanently transformed Conrad Osborne’s experience of “Ah, fors’e lui,” so it was for me with Mime’s shrug, as interpolated by Chereau and realized by the tenor Heinz Zednik. The Zednik/Chereau Mime was a quick-tempered little Jew, fussy and devious, but never grotesque. Mime’s brief act one narrative of Siegfried’s birth and Sieglinde’s death ends with the words “Sie starb (“she died”). Zednik punctuated this information with a palms’s up shrug – a sudden expression of civilized irony that stabbed the heart. (Go to 22:50 here.)

I will never again encounter anything like Kelemen’s hapless Alberich, in the same Chereau production: a grimy, potbellied opportunist, too weak-headed to keep the ring but abused and angry enough to curse it effectively. In Gotterdammerung, act two, Alberich instructs his son Hagen in evil. Chereau had him bow sheepishly before inquiring “Schafst du [are you asleep?], Hagen, mein Sohn?” Rather than hissing demands, he pled, “Sei Treu!” [be true!] with the anguish of one who knows the game is up, then shuffled slowly and confusedly offstage. Dominated by his futile greed and false hopes, Alberich departed the drama a poignant victim; he acquired tragic stature.  (Go to 10:36 here — but this is Hermann Becht, not Kelemen)

Both these moments, I might add, were complemented by Regietheater redatings: Mime’s wire-rim glasses and Alberich’s floppy coat resituated these characters in a drama tracking the sins of Wagner’s own industrial age.

As for the Kupfer Dutchman that Bayreuth summer: he staged it as if fantasized by Senta. (It’s on youtube here.) This hallucination anchored a case study in schizophrenia, replacing Wagner’s legend of redemption through love. Theatrically, the main beneficiaries were Wagner’s blandly sketched secondary characters. Believably portrayed as unwitting perpetrators of Senta’s insanity, Daland and the sailors’ wives took on added significance. As for Erik – rather than a dull-witted plea, his pathetic cavatina became an act of compassion. “Don’t you remember the day we met in the valley, and saw your father leave the shore?” he sang, desperate to yank Senta back to reality. But the narrow expectations of Erik and her father were the problem, not the cure; in panic, she visualized the Dutchman as a defense. The subsequent trio, tugging equally in three directions, was transformed.

Kupfer’s reconception did no favors for the Dutchman himself – I cannot imagine Hans Hotter submitting to enacting this opera’s title role as the figment of a deranged imagination. But Kupfer’s handling of musical content was an astounding coup. The opera’s riper, more chromatic stretches were linked to the vigorously depicted fantasy world of Senta’s mind; the squarer, more diatonic parts were framed by the dull walls of Daland’s house, which collapsed outward whenever Senta lost touch. In the big Senta-Dutchman duet, where Wagner’s stylistic lapses are particularly obvious, Kupfer achieved the same effect by alternating between Senta’s fantasy of the Dutchman and the stolid real-life suitor (not in Wagner’s libretto) that her father provided. Never before had I encountered an operatic staging in which the director’s musical literacy was as apparent or pertinent.

Back in New York, the following season, the Met premiered its first adventure in Wagnerian Regietheater: a Dutchman piloted by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle. Ponnelle’s conceit was to recast the story as a nightmare dreamt by Wagner’s slumbering Steersman – a gratuitous revision which led, scenically, to something resembling a high school Halloween party. Even though the Met had Jose van Dam – a far better Dutchman than Bayreuth’s – I remember not a single detail of this mis-production. And the same is true of the Robert Wilson Lohengrin that Osborn skewers for eternity.

Did Ponnelle read music? Does Wilson? I have no idea – but I gleaned no supportive evidence from their Wagner efforts at the Met. And this is one problem with Peter Gelb’s regime. When Rudolf Bing took over in 1950, he imported notable stage directors – Alfred Lunt, Margaret Webster, Peter Brook, Garson Kanin – rather than engaging directors trained in opera. The idea was to blow some fresh air into an old house. How that worked out I do not know. But the results of engaging Robert Lepage to direct the Met Ring on the strength of his prowess for special effects are by now notorious. In act three of Siegfried, Wagner furnishes what may be the most psychologically complex love duet in all opera. In terms of stage action, nothing happens. To choreograph this duet – to block the singers – requires, I would say, detailed comprehension both of text and of musical structure. Lepage simply has Siegfried and Brunnhilde stand and sing. At a loss, he embellishes the duet with the Magic Fire that Wagner has specifically and poetically extinguished in order to create a magical stillness that Lepage cancels.

I’ve had the pleasure of watching Dean Anthony rehearse young singers every summer at the Brevard Music Festival. All four Anthony stagings I’ve encountered there – Sweeney Todd, Rigoletto, Street Scene (cf this blog), Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream – have more than worked. The productions were packed with brave directorial details – but they took the form of Violetta’s pause and Mime’s shrug. And they were musically informed.

Dean Anthony came to opera-directing after a distinguished operatic career as a character tenor, assaying a wide variety of repertoire in several languages. He also trained as an actor, dancer, acrobat, and tumbler. (Kupfer and Friedrich were trained to direct opera by Walter Felsenstein — whose influentially revisionist Komische Oper receives a detailed report card from Conrad L. Osborne). That’s a more promising cv, I would say, than directing Broadway musicals or Las Vegas circus spectaculars, however successful.

 

 

 

 

 

On Rescuing a “Dead Art Form” — A Landmark Book on Opera in Performance

This weekend’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my review of Conrad L. Osborne’s new mega-book “Opera as Opera” — the most important English-language treatment of opera in performance ever written:

During the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, when classical music was a lot more ­robust than nowadays, High Fidelity was the American magazine of choice for lay connoisseurs and not a few profes­sionals. Its opera expert, Conrad L. ­Osborne, stood apart. “C.L.O.” was self-evidently a polymath. His knowledge of singing was encyclopedic. He wrote about operas and their socio-cultural underpinnings with a comprehensive authority. As a prose stylist, he challenged comparisons to such quotable American music journalists as James Huneker and Virgil Thomson—yet was a more responsible, more sagacious ­adjudicator. In fact, his capacity to marry caustic dissidence with an ­inspiring capacity for empathy and high passion was a rare achievement.

Over the course of the 1980s, High Fidelity gradually disappeared, and so did C.L.O. He devoted his professional life to singing, acting and teaching. He also, in 1987, produced a prodigious comic novel, “O Paradiso,” dissecting the world of operatic performance from the inside out.

Then, a year ago, he suddenly ­resurfaced as a blogger, at ­conradlosborne.com—a voice from the past. Incredibly, the seeming éminence grise of High Fidelity was revealed to have been a lad in his 30s. And now, in his 80s, he has produced his magnum opus, Opera as Opera: The State of the Art—788 large, densely printed pages, festooned with footnotes and end­notes. It is, without question, the most important book ever written in English about opera in performance. It is also a cri de coeur, documenting the devastation of a single precinct of Western high culture in modern and post­modern times.

This Olympian judgment takes the form not of a diatribe but of a closely reasoned exegesis. It impugns philistines less than intellectual trend-­setters, notably including operatic stage directors (with Robert Wilson’s catatonic Wagner the “last straw”). They are, in Mr. Osborne’s opinion, recklessly intolerant of earlier aesthetic norms, not to mention norms of gender, politics and society. His conviction, painstakingly expounded, is that the past is better served by understanding than by such remedial tinkering as (to cite one recent staging) empowering Carmen to survive the end of Bizet’s opera rather than submitting to José’s knife blade.

That Mr. Osborne has chosen to self-publish Opera as Opera is not really surprising. To begin with, it is several books, complexly intertwined. The ­subject matter ranges from philosophy and aesthetics to theater and theater history, to the mechanics of the human voice—and some of this material is ­addressed exclusively to specialists. The pace of exegesis is at all times unhurried; Mr. Osborne is intent on telling us everything. In fact, large chunks of ­Opera as Opera take the form of a ­copious diary that most editors would instantly scissor (and, if skilled, better organize).

Mainly, however, Opera as Opera is self-published because the audience for which the author continues to write does not itself continue. Let me offer a sample of what the Osborne perspective on things looks and sounds like: “Over these past five decades, continuing a process already underway, the ­operatic world has grown more tightly integrated. . . . During this time, the aesthetic ground has also shifted, and has now come set sufficiently to clarify its contours. The hostile takeover is on the books and the stealth candidates are out in the open. Still, nobody who is anybody will quite say so. Performance criticism . . . has been reduced, marginalized, and stuck in a lineup of popcult perpetrators, where it suffers the same woes as the artform on which it fastens. It is by far not enough for devotees to express exasperation and bafflement, or chuck everything into the Eurotrash bin. The dismemberment of opera is being undertaken by some of its most sophisticated, well-educated, and talented practitioners, and while their tongues are often in their cheeks, they don’t seem to know it. . . . Operatic true believers must show not that they don’t understand, but that they understand all too well, and that they have reasons beyond the lazy pleasures of nostalgia for their dismay.”

A useful starting point for absorbing the many-tentacled Osborne argument is the “metanarrative” he extrapolates from the operatic canon. It turns out that nearly all operas coming after Mozart and before Richard Strauss may be said to hew to a single basic story. An outcast male protagonist falls obsessively in love with a forbidden woman who returns his love. The fated couple encounters inflamed opposition. A clash of male claimants ends badly for the lovers. Mr. Osborne is hardly the first to notice that this template, or something like it, encodes dated notions of virile masculinity and divine femininity, but his treatment transcends cant, jargon and ideology more than any other known to me; it is adult. The challenges here posed for 21st-century preservation and revivification in the realm of opera are tackled vehemently, pragmatically and resourcefully.

The challenges ramify, multiply. ­Appended to the metanarrative is an even more original, more powerful insight. Here Mr. Osborne delves into the history of rhetoric and “orality”—the stuff of the Odyssey and its distant progeny. Relying on other writers, he limns the 19th-century novel as a watershed departure, displacing poetry and drama as the dominant literary mode, “with its tightly controlled narrative, its . . . increasingly antiheroic characters leading increasingly important inner lives, and its cultural saturation via print.” And then—an intellectual coup—he positions 19th-century opera as the apotheosis of the older movement: “For a shining moment,” he writes, opera “seized the torch from orality’s failing hand.” That is: For a century, grand opera rebuffed mistrust of venerable rhetorical traditions otherwise discarded as “artifice.”

With high-toned orality and rhetoric in retreat, a crisis in “great-voiced” singing was self-evidently fore­ordained. Here Mr. Osborne has a formidable precursor: W.J. Henderson (1855-1937), the most prominent American vocal authority for nearly half a century. Because he started so young and ended so old, Henderson commanded a lofty view of vocal decline. In the Wagner world, he could remember the prodigious ­Albert Niemann, whom Wagner himself chose to create the role of Siegmund; he reviewed the bewildering advent of Jean de Reszke, legendary in his own time as Tristan and Siegfried; he heard Lauritz Melchior, the Met’s reigning Heldentenor for two decades. Mr. ­Osborne picks up the thread—he, too, heard Melchior. He also frequently heard Jon Vickers, the last great-voiced Tristan.

Henderson wrote wonderfully about the singing voice. Mr. Osborne is more wonderful still. He can instantly evoke the frisson of Vickers’s idiosyncratic instrument. Why are there no great-voiced Tristans today? Mr. Osborne’s answer, incorporating early recordings not just of singers but of actors in ­several languages, references microphones and recording studios, changing styles of oratory and everyday speech, an unrefreshed repertoire, and newfangled performance priorities privileging directors’ prerogatives over those of singing actors.

Mr. Osborne dedicates some 34 pages to the decline of operatic conducting and orchestral playing, highlighting James Levine’s recently terminated Metropolitan Opera tenure. How Mr. Levine and his orchestra acquired such a commanding reputation is a question that deserves a book of its own. That Mr. Levine inherited an ­erratic pit ensemble, and fixed it, is undeniable. But the gifted Met orchestra of today lacks presence, depth of tone, kinetic energy. As Mr. Osborne observes, to encounter Valery Gergiev’s Mariinsky orchestra in the same Metropolitan Opera pit is really all you need to know. I also retain dazzling memories of the throbbing and mellifluous Bolshoi orchestra from its 1975 visit to New York. As for Mr. Levine, the Osborne account cites chapter and verse: He was an opera conductor of high energy and competence who nonetheless failed adequately to articulate musical drama. I would add that the dynamics of ­harmonic tension-and-­release never sufficiently shaped structure, or clinched a Wagner climax, with Mr. Levine in the pit. But never mind.

It must be stressed that ­Opera as Opera is not a sour pedantic exercise. Mr. Osborne craves emotional surrender. And he lovingly documents exceptions that prove the rule. His fondest memories include a famous New York City Opera production from the 1960s: La Traviata as ­directed by Frank Corsaro (with whom Mr. Osborne subsequently studied). Corsaro and the soprano Patricia Brooks collaborated on a portrait of Verdi’s Violetta saturated with fresh empathetic detail, including a daringly prolonged pause—dreamy, sinking into reverie—before the expostulation “È strano!” (“How strange!”) just after the party ends in Act One. “This activity took a little over a minute . . . very long for an unaccompanied pantomime inserted between the numbers of a middle-period Verdi opera,” Mr. Osborne writes. “More important than the mundane household activities [receiving a shawl, sitting down on a couch] . . . was the fact that we watched Violetta make a necessary but previously unremarked transition from her social persona to the private, emotionally charged state that generates her long, conflicted solo scene. How could we ever have tolerated the absurdity of Violetta showing out the last of the guests, turning around, taking a breath, and launching into the most intimate confessions of her soul?”

Mr. Osborne finds similar virtues in the singing and acting of the late mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and of the tenors Neil Shicoff and Jonas Kaufmann. None of these is a great-voiced singer (Mr. Osborne counter-offers Renata Tebaldi and Giovanni Martinelli). Rather, they are singing actors who ingeniously combine a “modern acting sensibility” derived from Konstantin Stanislavski and his legacy, with voices that are balanced, versatile and personal, if never galvanizingly voluminous.

The penultimate chapter of Opera as Opera is a 25-page set piece reviewing one of the Met’s most admired productions of recent seasons: Borodin’s Prince Igor as reconstituted in 2014 by the director Dmitri Tcherniakov. Mr. Osborne: “[It] sold out the house and generated an astoundingly acquiescent critical . . . response of a sort you’d expect from collaborationists greeting an occupying force. . . . That this takedown of a production and sadsack performance should stir not a whiff of dissent, not a scrap of controversy, is a mark of a dead artform.”

Finally, there is an epilogue—“Dream On”—imagining a corrective opera company of the future. It is run by singers after the fashion of certain theatrical cooperatives, of which ­Chicago’s Steppenwolf is the best-known American example.

Some people will dismiss Opera as Opera (without reading it) as an exercise in ­deluded nostalgia. Don’t listen to them. Listen instead to the Metropolitan Opera broadcast of Verdi’s Otello on Feb. 12, 1938. The cast includes Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett and Elisabeth Rethberg. The conductor is Ettore Panizza (to my ears, as great as Toscanini). If you prefer Wagner, Exhibit A is Siegfried on Jan. 30, 1937, with Melchior, Friedrich Schorr and Kirsten Flagstad, conducted by Artur Bodanzky. These imperishable readings document standards of singing and operatic orchestral performance unattainable today.

Conrad Osborne flings the gauntlet, relentlessly inquiring: What happened? What to do? It is hardly an exaggeration to suggest that the fate of 21st-century opera partly hinges on the fate of the bristling insights delineated and pondered in this singular mega-book.

[To sample those phenomenal 1937-38 Met broadcasts, go to the “historic recordings” linked to my book Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall: here.  For more on Artur Bodanzky’s Wagner, go here. For more on Ettore Panizza, go here and here. For more on James Levine: here. To purchase Opera as Opera, go to conradlosborne.com] 

Bernstein at Brevard — Take Two: The Artist and Politics

The Bernstein Centenary celebration at the Brevard Music Festival last month was multi-faceted. I was invited to explore the Bernstein story for a week with Brevard’s exceptional high school orchestra (the festival also hosts college and professional ensembles). The result was  the multi-media “Bernstein the Educator” program that I described in my previous blog.

I was also asked to lecture on “Bernstein and Social Justice.” This proved a lot more interesting (and timely) than I had anticipated.

After a few hours’ homework I realized that my topic would be the furious backlash Bernstein endured as a consequence of embracing political and humanitarian causes on the left. His activities became an insane obsession of J. Edgar Hoover. The resulting FBI file of some 800 pages included at least one allegation that Bernstein was a Soviet agent. There was also a trail of dirty tricks, including phony letters delivered to the Bernstein home. In the midst of it all, Bernstein was denied a passport by the US State Department. Two decades after that, he turned up on the Nixon/Haldeman tapes, and on Nixon’s enemies’ list (the antipathy was mutual).

Bernstein’s elder daughter Jamie, in the indispensable memoir just published by HarperCollins (the most vivid and affecting portrait of Leonard Bernstein I’ve ever encountered), cites as a peak Bernstein moment the Beethoven Ninth he led in Berlin when the wall came down in 1989; conducting instrumentalists from two continents, he changed Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” to celebrate “Freiheit” (freedom) rather than “Freude.”

Certainly social justice was a Bernstein leitmotif. Another famous Bernstein performance was of Haydn’s Mass in Time of War at the Washington National Cathedral – an anti-war protest timed to coincide with the Nixon inaugural concert across town. And it’s well-known that his early Broadway work was politically tinged – that On the Town was the first musical to cast a Japanese-American (Sono Osato) as an “all-American girl”; that West Side Story was a compassionate response to gang warfare; that the auto-da-fe in Candide lampooned the Red Scare.

This activity was rooted in the company Bernstein kept as a young musician. His close friends included Marc Blitzstein, arguably America’s foremost political composer, and a member of the Communist Party. Bernstein’s mentor Aaron Copland, as is now increasingly well-known, migrated far to the left in the thirties, addressing a Communist picnic in Minnesota and composing a prize-winning workers’ song espousing revolution.

When his passport was held up in 1953, Bernstein feared being asked under oath if he knew any Communists. His response was an excruciating seven-page affidavit, the whole of which is reprinted in The Leonard Bernstein Letters (2013). He testified:

“Although I have never, to my knowledge, been accused of being a member of the Communist Part, I wish to take advantage of this opportunity to affirm under oath that I am not now nor at any time have ever been a member of the Communist Party. . . I wish to state generally as to all the organizations involved that my connection, if any, with them has been of a most casual and nebulous character. . . . Needless to say I never knew their real character as they were later denominated by the Attorney General of the United States.”

The most chilling sentence is a mea culpa: “I did not possess the requisite suspicion and caution to probe the devious and subversive objectives of those by whom I and too many others were innocently exploited.” Bernstein’s associate Jerome Robbins notoriously named names when subpoenaed in 1953. Bernstein himself was never called.

As for the Nixon tapes: When Bernstein conducted the premiere of his Mass to inaugurate the Kennedy Center in 1971, the FBI surmised “plans of antiwar elements to embarrass the United States Government.” A memo described “a plot by Leonard Bernstein, conductor and composer, to embarrass the President and other Government officials through an antiwar and anti-Government musical composition.” The year before, a Nixon memorandum to Haldeman opined: “As you, of course, know those who are on the modern art and music kick are 95 percent against us anyway. I refer to the recent addicts of Leonard Bernstein and the whole New York crowd. When I compare the horrible monstrosity of Lincoln Center with the Academy of Music in Philadelphia I realize how decadent the modern art and architecture have become. His is what the Kennedy-Shriver crowd believed in and they had every right to encourage this kind of stuff when they were in. But I have no intention whatever of continuing to encourage it now.’’

This fascinating document isn’t paranoid – “95 percent” sounds about right. And I happen to agree with Nixon about the Academy of Music vs. Lincoln Center. But sample this, from Jamie Bernstein’s Famous Father Girl: “On Nixon’s tapes, the president’s voice can be heard reacting to H.R. Haldeman’s description of Bernstein at the curtain call of Mass, kissing the male members of the cast: ‘Absolutely sickening.’ But Daddy was rather proud to have been referred to by President Nixon as ‘a son of a bitch.’”

The elephant in the room, as many readers of this blog will remember, is “radical chic” – the 1970 Black Panther fundraiser at the Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment. Its hostile misrepresentations in the New York Times and New York Magazine long defined (and lampooned) “Bernstein and social justice.” Charlotte Curtis, the Times’  editor “for women’s and family/style news,” turned up uninvited, as did the late Tom Wolfe. Curtis’s reportage in the Times confrontationally construed a titillating entertainment: “Leonard Bernstein and a Black Panther leader argued the merits of the Black Panther Party’s philosophy before nearly 90 guests at a cocktail party last night in the Bernsteins’ elegant Park Avenue duplex.“

A subsequent Times editorial (!) read in part: “Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of . . . those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr.”

And here’s a tasty morsel from Wolf’s “Radical Chic”:

“Felicia is remarkable. She is beautiful, with that rare burnished beauty that lasts through the years. Her hair is pale blond and set just so. She has a voice that is ‘theatrical,’ to use a term from her youth. She greets the Black panthers with the same blend of the wrist, the same tilt of the head, the same perfect Mary Astor voice with which she greets people like Jason, Adolph, Betty, Gian Carlo, Schuyler, and Goddard . . .

“The very idea of them, these real revolutionaries, who actually put their lives on the line, runs through Lenny’s duplex like a rogue hormone. Everyone casts a glance, or stares, or tries a smile, and then sizes up the house for the somehow delicious counterpoint . . . Deny it if you want to! but one does end up making such sweet furtive comparisons in this season of Radical Chic . . . “

As Jamie Bernstein writes: Felicia Bernstein, through her work with the ACLU, had “agreed to organize and host a fund-raising event to assist the families of twenty-one men in the Black Panther Party who were in jail, with unfairly inflated bail amounts, awaiting trial for what turned out to be trumped-up accusations involving absurd bomb plots around New York City. My mother’s dual purpose was to raise money for a legal defense fund and to help the men’s families stay fed and sheltered until the trial came around. (And when the trial finally did come around, the judge threw the whole case out for being unsubstantiated and patently ridiculous.).” Nearly $10,000 was raised – a substantial sum in 1970 dollars.

Two years after Felicia Bernstein’s death, her husband was quoted as follows in the New York Times (Oct. 22, 1980):

“I have substantial evidence now available to all that the F.B.I. conspired to foment hatred and violent dissension among blacks, among Jews and between blacks and Jews. My late wife and I were among many foils used for his purse, in the context of a so-called “party” for the Panthers in 1970 which was . . . a civil liberties meeting for which my wife had generously offered our apartment. The ensuing FBI-inspired harassment ranged from floods of hate letters sent to me over what are now clearly fictitious signatures, thin-veiled threats couched in anonymous letters to magazines and newspapers, editorial and reportorial diatribes in The New York Times, attempts to injure my long-standing relationship with the people of the state of Israel, plus innumerable other dirty tricks.”

This testimony is nothing compared to that of Jamie, when she writes:

“It’s likely that to this day, Tom Wolfe may not understand the degree to which his snide little piece of neo-journalism rendered him a veritable stooge for the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover himself may well have shed a tear of gratitude that this callow journalist had done so much of the bureau’s work by discrediting left-wing New York Jewish liberals while simultaneously pitting them against the black activist movement . . . Nor may Wolfe truly comprehend the depth of the damage he wreaked on my family. Maybe not so much on my father, who suffered embarrassment but could immerse himself in his various musical activities . . . No, it was my mother who bore the brunt . . .

“After that year, Mummy grew increasingly dejected and discouraged. . . . Four years later, [she] was diagnosed with cancer.  Four years after that, she was dead of the disease, at fifty-six. Even now, my rage and disgust can rise up in me like an old fever – and in those nearly deranged moments, it doesn’t seem like such a stretch to lay Mummy’s precipitous decline, and even demise, at the feet of Mr. Wolfe.”

So all of this, and more, punctuated my Brevard talk. I delivered it twice, the first time at the public library. Brevard in the summer is a community, rather like Asheville down the road, packed with retirees from the northeast. I was initially astonished that my revelations were quietly received by a large and attentive audience. When I asked what was going on, I was informed that nothing I reported was in any way surprising. And that is where we are as a nation today.

Next summer’s Brevard theme will be Aaron Copland. Among the programs I will produce will be “Copland and the Cold War” – which I’ve presented elsewhere on many occasions. In addition to music, we’ll see and hear a re-enactment of Copland’s inept grilling by Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn. And we’ll all sing “Into the Streets May First!” – Copland’s workers’ song for The New Masses. Copland, too, was closely watched by the FBI (the switchboard operator at Tanglewood was a hilariously ignorant informant). His backlash experience was as richly embroidered as Bernstein’s – as when vigilant Republicans pulled A Lincoln Portrait from the Eisenhower inaugural.

The back story is that Copland began visiting Mexico in the 1930s, and there enviously discovered a nation in which artists and intellectuals powered social change. His own attempt to become a political artist generated a parable of sorts. It ultimately provoked disapproval and mistrust.

In twentieth century America, artists pursued political causes at their peril. Even JFK, speaking in praise of the artist’s vocation, excoriated political art with scant understanding (I recently wrote a blog about this).

What about today? Very likely we shall have occasion to find out.