Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 24

Bernstein the Educator

Museums curate the past. They help us to shape and populate our impressions of history.

Orchestras do not curate the past. A typical symphonic program (alas) begins with the selection of a soloist. The resulting programs are eclectic: a potpourri.

During his historic music directorship of the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein was the rare conductor for whom curating the past was an urgent priority. During his first season – 1957-58 – he undertook a survey of American music “from its earliest generations to the present.” The resulting programs, sans soloists, started with George Chadwick, Arthur Foote, and Edward MacDowell.

Ever the educator, he turned all that into his second Young People’s Concert: “What Makes Music America?” (Feb. 1, 1958).  It’s an essential Bernstein document. You can revisit it on youtube here.

For the Brevard Music Festival’s Bernstein Centenary festival-within-a festival this summer, it was my pleasure to create a young people’s concert about Bernstein’s Feb. 1, 1958, young people’s concert. The musicians were gifted high school students (comprising one of four Brevard orchestras). The conductor and host (also gifted) was Kenneth Lam. I created the script. Peter Bogdanoff created a visual track. You can see and hear what it looked and sounded like here. To sample the gist of it, start at 20:31, where we ask what made Bernstein’s young people’s concerts utterly different from all those that had gone before (the Philharmonic had been doing them since 1924) and answer: “personal need.”

The music for our “Bernstein The Educator” concert derived from the works sampled by Bernstein on “What Makes Music American?” – pieces by Chadwick, George Gershwin, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland. In Bernstein’s exegesis, they charted an evolutionary ladder from “kindergarten” to “college” and beyond. We added a fifth composer who Bernstein memorably championed – but who doesn’t fit the ladder: Charles Ives.

Hearing the finale of Ives’s Second Symphony (composed long before World War I) alongside An American in Paris, the finale to Harris’s Third, and “Night on the Prairie” from Copland’s Billy the Kid was a terrific experience. I am sure I am far from the only listener who found Ives fresher and more original than the Harris or the Copland. And yet in its day, Roy Harris’s Third  (premiered by Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony in 1939 – a dozen years before Bernstein discovered the Ives Second) was widely considered the foremost contender for “Great American Symphony.”

As for An American in Paris – though Gershwin was once widely perceived as a gifted dilettante, this irresistible tone poem sounds to me exceptionally well put together. As in Rhapsody in Blue and the second movement of his Concerto in F, Gershwin reserves his Big Tune (the languorous song for solo trumpet) for late in the game. And how cunningly he uses it – varying its mood and velocity — to drive his piece to a climax. I would call Harris’s fugal finale clumsy by comparison.

My script ended:

“What are we to make of Bernstein’s ‘evolutionary ladder’ today – more than half a century later? This question is not so simple to answer. The main challenger to Bernstein’s 1958 narrative is Charles Edward Ives, born in Connecticut in 1874. Many would today call Ives the greatest American symphonist. And yet – and this is a problem — Ives’s symphonies did not become well known until long after he composed them.

“Ironically, Charles Ives’s most important advocate among conductors was . . . Leonard Bernstein, who in 1951 introduced the world to a Great American Symphony: Ives’s Symphony No. 2, completed in . . . 1909. Packed with fiddle tunes and hymns, Stephen Foster songs and Civil War marches, Ives’s symphony is a grand American tapestry containing not a single original melody. It’s an act of visionary genius that Serge Koussevitzky didn’t know existed during those interwar decades when he predicted ‘the next Beethoven’ would show up in Colorado.

“Like Koussevitzky, Copland, and countless others, Leonard Bernstein believed that the 1920s and thirties constituted a new dawn for American music – a brave New World without real ancestors. This conviction, and the narrative behind it, was a catalyst. Never mind whether Chadwick was actually a ‘kindergarten’ composer. Never mind that Ives came first. The storied new beginning was energizing, invigorating. It empowered Bernstein to compose, to advocate – and to educate a new generation of American concertgoers.

“But what happens next? We still mainly hear European works in American concert halls. Audiences are aging and dwindling. And when in 1992 Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts were offered to American public television, nothing happened. There was far stronger interest in revisiting these historic shows in Germany and Japan.

“This is a cultural challenge that must matter to all of us. It requires the kind of creative response to a pressing need that once impelled Leonard Bernstein to re-invent the New York Philharmonic.”

I was invited to spend five days with Brevard’s young musicians exploring these questions. Ten of them took part in a vigorous post-concert discussion lasting the better part of an hour. I felt we had managed to concoct a learning exercise worthy of Leonard Bernstein’s high example.

Next summer Brevard will present a Copland festival. I’m working with Jason Posnock, Brevard’s far-sighted artistic administrator, to implement another such young people’s concert — in which the musicians themselves will serve as hosts and commentators. Stay tuned.

Furtwangler and the Nazis — Take Two

I am returning to the topic of Furtwangler because my previous blog produced a minor miracle – a thread of responses that yielded heightened understanding of a complex topic.

I wrote to William Osborne and Stephen Stockwell:

“Thanks so much for this engrossing feedback. Maybe we could summarize that the truth about Furtwangler falls within these two polarities:

“1.He stressed the communal experience of music, felt he couldnt access that outside Germanic lands (I find this credible), so he accommodated the Third Reich insofar as he had to, so long as he didnt have to join the Party and otherwise publicly endorse Nazi ideology, ethnic cleansing, book-burning. At the same time, his conservative cultural/political mindset created some degree of common ground with the Nazis. Think of Mann’s superiority posture in Reflections of a Non-Political Man (worth reading if you don’t know it). I cannot envision WF feeling personally kindred to a Hitler or Gobbels; his breeding was aristocratic.

“2.All of the above – but add to that some degree of actual enthusiasm for what the Third Reich stood for – eg concerts that were patriotic occasions, flaunting German exceptionalism/Kunst. Especially given the passions/exigencies of wartime. In other words: crossing the line Mann refused to cross, and doing so with some degree of fervor.”

Both Osborne and Stockwell seem to think this is a useful perspective on an elusive reality.

(Meanwhile, thanks to Norman Lebrecht, a second thread of responses on slippedisc.com tackled another aspect of the Furtwangler phenomenon: his rejection of non-tonal music and its implications for musical interpretation.)

I now feel impelled to revisit Topic A – not Furtwangler the man (B), but Furtwangler the conductor – and see what A and B put together look like today. So I’ve just re-read some of my own Furtwangler writings – from the 1979 New York Times (when I was a Times music critic) and from my most notorious book: Understanding Toscanini (1987).

The basic text for Topic A will always be Wagner’s indispensable booklet “On Conducting” (1869). It may be read as a Furtwangler bible. Everything Wagner here espouses may be found in Furtwangler’s art (and also that of Wagner’s disciple Anton Seidl, the subject of my best book: Wagner Nights: An American History [1994]). I refer to plasticity of tempo, extremes of tempo and dynamics, and other activist strategies rejecting mere adherence to the score. There is also in Wagner, as in Seidl or Furtwangler, an insistence on interiority in the experience and performance of symphonic music.

Whence this interiority? Most obviously: harmonic subcurrents felt, explored, and shaped. This “hidden” foundational content is what the music theorist Heinrich Schenker – paramount for Furtwangler – extrapolated in new ways.

The occasion of my 1979 New York Times piece was the release of a live 1943 performance of Furtwangler conducting Schubert’s C major Symphony. I decided to compare it with his famous studio recording of 1951 to see whether these readings, which seem so impulsive and personal, shared a fundamental groundplan. Here’s what I found:

“The fearless absorption Furtwängler stood for found its most obvious expression in interpolated changes of pulse, both as momentary rubatos and sustained alterations of a basic tempo. . . . In his book, ‘Concerning Music,’ he defined rubato as ‘a temporary relaxation of rhythm under the stress of emotion,’ and went on to say that, without ‘inward veracity,’ any rubato would wind up sounding calculated and exaggerated.

“Though the difference between good rubatos and bad is partly a matter of taste, the mastery of rubato evident in Furtwangler’s best recordings is impressive by any reasonable standard. His Wagner performances, in particular, handle fluctuating tempos in manner that never seems to draw attention to itself. If in his Schubert’s Ninth the tempo changes are more debatable, their clear intention, and frequent result, is to capitalize on the expressive potential of individual moments without losing sight of the whole.

“A couple of comparisons may help clarify the point. If one wishes to investigate the consequences of unbridled subjectivity in this music, there is 1939‐40 recording by Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra that moves in Dionysian fits. . . .

“Toscanini’s 1941 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra, a wonderful performance about as famous as Furtwangler’s, is an entirely different affair from Mengelberg’s. In the outer movements, the steadily pounding rhythms accumulate tremendous force. At the very end of the finale, however, where Schubert has the orchestra hammer out four repeated C’s, Toscanini adopts a much slower speed in order to weight the strokes. With the pulse so rock‐solid everywhere else, such a conspicuous shift sounds doubly conspicuous.

“It so happens that the four‐note figure Toscanini stresses is the same figure that is elongated by Mengelberg’s big ritard at the beginning of the second movement — it is one of the score’s basic ingredients. Furtwangler slows down in both places, but more subtly . . . In fact, the gear‐changes are so slight that, unless you listen for them, only their effects will be apparent: the lyric breadth of the oboe phrase, the extra intensity of the hammer blows. It is not merely that Furtwangler reduces speed less than Mengelberg or Toscanini; by establishing an overall pulse that is firmer than Mengelberg’s, but more plastic than Toscanini’s, he establishes a foil for his rubatos — they are absorbed into the rhythmic flow without disrupting it.

“Not all of Furtwangler’s rubatos are so moderate. In fact, there are places where the change of speed is far more drastic than anything Mengelberg attempts. One example stands out, a spot in the Andante just before the main reprise of the oboe melody. Robert Schumann’s description is nearly as famous as the passage itself: “A horn is calling as from a distance. . . .  everything else is hushed, as though listening to some heavenly visitant hovering around the orchestra.”

“It would be impossible to imagine a more rarefied affirmation of Schumann’s imagery than the music Furtwangler conjures up [go to 20:50 here]. . . . the horn, shrouded and remote, speaks as from a void.

“The chief catalyst here is a huge rubato: For a full minute, Furtwangler cuts the pulse by about 90 percent, folding open the space out of which the horn‐call materializes. Such an interpolation would derail any normal performance of a Schubert symphony, yet Furtwangler manages to integrate it. How?

“Partly, he relies on transitions: A massive ritard prepares the horn entry; afterwards, when the horn finishes, the oboe returns with the principle theme slightly under tempo, as if recuperating from a trance. More important, the entire movement is shaped with an ear toward accommodating the interruption. Not only does Furtwangler introduce grand ritards at comparable structural junctures, he anticipates the serenity of the horn‐call passage in the manner he phrases and articulates the second subject, dovetailing its four‐measure phrases into long, lofty spans of 13 and 19 measures. This may not satisfy everybody’s notion of how the movement should go — to most conductors, it is a steadier, more propulsive Andante con moto — but it is a unified approach, and it incorporates breathtaking stretches of repose.

“Throughout the symphony, in fact, Furtwangler’s approach is unified by feats of planning based on long‐range structural divisions and harmonic tensions. It is one of the trademarks of his art that the interpretation sounds spontaneous, even impulsive. To a certain degree, of course, it is. But anyone who doubts the existence of an encompassing master plan might compare the present Schubert’s Ninth with Furtwangler’s 1943 in‐concert recording with the Vienna Philharmonic  — though the range of tempos is wider in the 1943 performance, the overall scheme of tempo relationships is the same.”

So that’s what I wrote in 1979 (when such things could be written for a newspaper readership).

And here’s part of what I wrote in 1987 in Understanding Toscanini, undertaking a detailed comparison of Furtwangler and Toscanini in Wagner’s Prelude to Lohengrin:

“From the start, Toscanini has his [NBC Symphony] vocalize the melodic lines. Furtwangler, in his 1954 recording with the Vienna Philharmonic, prefers a shimmery, incorporeal sound, with less string vibrato. Toscanini’s tempo, while not hasty, is always distinctly mobile. Furtwangler is much slower (his performance takes 9’50” to Toscanini’s 7’35”) and initially much more relaxed: he makes little of swells Toscanini italicizes, preferring to let the music build cumulatively. Toscanini’s pacing is steadier, with many downbeats perceptibly marked. Furtwangler’s fluid pacing erases Wagner’s bar lines. The downbeats he marks are long-range stresspoints: unlike Toscanini, for  instance, he articulates a series of eight-bar phrases beginning with measures 20, 28, and 36. Toscanini accelerates into the prelude’s climax, the whole of which moves at a new, faster tempo. His shiny trumpets, which enter only at this point, dominate the sound [5:20 here]. Furtwangler retards into the climax, the whole of which moves at a new, slower tempo. His trumpets are darker, making the prelude’s crest less sonically distinct [5:58 here]. Postclimax, Toscanini resumes his earlier, slower tempo; Furtwangler, his earlier, faster one. Toscanini retards for the full cadence eight measures from the end. So does Furtwangler, but more drastically – rather than a local event, this unprecedented punctuation point registers the harmonic resolution of the prelude’s entire, arcing span. . . .

“No difference between the two performances is more crucial than the contradictory tempo changes at the climax. Toscanini, sensing one-bar units and relying on surface tension to keep the music whole, holds the line with a relatively tight rein. At moments of peak arousal, he grips harder and speeds up. Furtwangler’s reliance on four-bar units (or multiples thereof) and sustained harmonic tension allows for more play in the line. At moments of peak arousal, he slows down to give the harmonic tensions space in which to expand and resolve. He can also let the line go slack without stopping longterm musical flow; unlike Toscanini’s, Furtwangler’s climaxes pre-empt repose and lead to exhaustion. Their slow, weighted pulse might be likened to that of a pendulum swinging with greater force as it spans ever longer arcs. Their visceral impact bears some relation to the Hollywood convention of shooting moments of crisis or ecstasy in slow motion. Inner turmoil produces a sensation of temporal dislocation. Time ‘slows down,’ even ‘stands still.’ In the Prelude to Lohengrin, Furtwangler’s slow-motion climax seems to exist outside time.” (pp. 364-365)

It’s been a long time since I listened to Furtwangler’s Schubert 9 and I have no particular desire to revisit it in any detail. Beyond a doubt, I would today regard it more as an acquired taste than I did in 1979. In this work, Furtwangler’s antipode is not Toscanini. For me, it is Josef Krips (1902-1974). Krips’ name is today mainly forgotten – but back in the days of High Fidelity LP reviews, his Schubert 9 with the London Symphony was a basic frame of reference. (I remember in 1979 receiving a note from a Times reader advising me to listen to Krips.)

Krips was born in Vienna and I would summarize his art as “Viennese.” He cherished moderation, clarity, and song. His Strauss waltzes are the best I know. His Schubert is gemutlich – Schubertian. The demons Furtwangler discovers in Schubert – I am thinking especially of the astounding Cyclopean intensity of the central climax in the Schubert 9 Andante a la Furtwangler [24:20 here]– are not for Krips. Schubert, assuredly, can be demonic. Furtwangler’s Schubert demons, however, are massive Wagnerian demons.

I would also call Furtwangler an acquired taste in Beethoven’s Ninth (a Bruckner/Wagner reading, unforgettable in the first movement coda). He even has a live recording of Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements wholly un-Stravinskian but (for me) readily acquirable. What I find I cannot acquire a taste for is Furtwangler in Bach, Mozart, or Haydn. And I cannot imagine liking his approach in my favorite Beethoven symphony: No. 8, with its Olympian coda (another intoxicating Krips recording with the London Symphony, once a benchmark).

One thing that’s missing in those Furtwangler readings, and tangible in Krips, is a quality of wholesomeness. Furtwangler’s art – and here we circle back to Topic B – is dangerous. The subcurrents he exhumes are unknowable, inchoate – and uncontrollable. This is the “barbaric” dimension of Romantic art that Thomas Mann extolled and worried about. In the world of conductors, Wilhelm Furtwangler was its last great embodiment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Furtwangler and the Nazis

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal includes my review of  Roger Allen’s “Wilhelm Furtwangler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical.” As some readers of this blog may remember, my most controversial and notorious book – “Understanding Toscanini” (1987) – deals rather extensively with the American career of Furtwangler. I also use Wagner’s “Lohengrin” Prelude to illustrate fundamental differences between Furtwangler and Toscanini, showing how Furtwangler uses harmonic structure to shape an “inward” interpretation. Here’s my review:

One of the most thrilling documents of symphonic music in performance—readily accessible on YouTube—is a clip of Wilhelm Furtwängler leading the Berlin Philharmonic in the closing five minutes of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. Furtwängler is not commanding a performing army. Rather he is channeling a trembling state of heightened emotional awareness so irresistible as to obliterate, in the moment, all previous encounters with the music at hand. This experience is both empowering and—upon reflection—a little scary. And it occurred some three years after the implosion of Hitler’s Third Reich—a regime for which Furtwängler, though not exactly an advocate, was a potent cultural symbol.

In 20th-century classical music, the iconic embodiment of the fight for democratic freedoms was the Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, who fled Europe and galvanized opposition to Hitler and Mussolini. Furtwängler (1886-1954), who remained behind, was Toscanini’s iconic antipode, eschewing the objective clarity of Toscanini’s literalism in favor of Teutonic ideals of lofty subjective spirituality.

Furtwängler was inaccurately denounced in America as a Nazi. His de-Nazification proceedings were misreported in the New York Times. Afterward, he was prevented by a blacklist from conducting the Chicago Symphony or the Metropolitan Opera, both of which wanted him.

Furtwängler was no Nazi. Behind the scenes, he helped Jewish musicians. Before the war ended, he fled Germany for Switzerland. Even so, his ­insistence on being “nonpolitical” was naive and self-deluded. As a tool of Hitler and Goebbels, he potently abetted the German war effort. In effect, he lent his prestige to the Third Reich whenever he performed, whether in Berlin or abroad. He was also famously photographed shaking hands with Goebbels from the stage.

In “Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical,” Roger Allen, a fellow at St. Peter’s College, Oxford, doesn’t dwell on any of this. Rather he undertakes a deeper inquiry and asks: Did Furtwängler espouse a characteristically German cultural-philosophical mind-set that in effect embedded Hitler? He answers yes. But the answer is glib.

Mr. Allen’s method is to cull a mountain of Furtwängler writings. That Furtwängler at all times embodied what Thomas Mann in 1945 called “the German-Romantic counter-revolution in intellectual history” is documented beyond question. He was an apostle of Germanic inwardness. He endorsed the philosophical precepts of Hegel and the musical analyses of Heinrich Schenker, for whom German composers mattered most. All this, Mr. Allen shows, propagated notions of “organic” authenticity recapitulated by Nazi ideologues.

Furtwängler’s writings as sampled here (others are better) are repetitious—and so, alas, is Mr. Allen’s commentary. The tensions and paradoxes complicating Furtwängler’s devil’s pact, his surrender to communal ecstasies ennobling or perilous, are reduced to simplistic presumption. Furtwängler’s murky Germanic thinking remains murky and uncontextualized. One would never know, from Mr. Allen’s exegesis, that Hegel formulated a sophisticated “holistic” alternative to the Enlightenment philosophies undergirding Anglo-American understandings of free will. One would never suspect that Schenkerian analysis, extrapolating the fundamental harmonic subcurrents upon which Furtwängler’s art feasted, is today alive and well.

Here’s an example. Furtwängler writes: “Bruckner is one of the few geniuses . . . whose appointed task was to express the transcendental in human terms, to weave the power of God into the fabric of human life. Be it in struggles against demonic forces, or in music of blissful transfiguration, his whole mind and spirit were infused with thoughts of the divine.” Mr. Allen comments: “It is this idea, with its anti-intellectual subtext, which ­associates Furtwängler so strongly with aspects of Nazi ideology. . . . That Bruckner’s music represents the power of God at work in the fabric of human existence, can be seen as an extension of the Nazi . . . belief in God as a mystical creative power.” But many who ­revere Brucknerian “divine bliss” are neither anti-intellectual nor religiously inclined.

A much more compelling section of Mr. ­Allen’s narrative comes at the end, when he observes that Furtwängler blithely maintained his musical ideology after World War II, with no evident pause for reflection. One can agree that this says something unpleasant about the Furtwängler persona, suggesting a nearly atavistic truculence. But it is reductionist to analogize Furtwängler’s unrelenting postwar hostility to nontonal music to “the non-rational censure of ‘degenerate’ art by the Nazis.” Far more interesting is Furtwängler’s own argument that the nontonal music of Arnold Schoenberg and his followers lacks an “overview.” A calibrated long-range trajectory of musical thought was an essential ingredient of Furtwängler’s interpretive art. Absent the ­tension-and-release dynamic of tonal harmony, he had little to work with.

The political dangers inherent in German Romantic music are a familiar concern, beginning with Nietzsche’s skewerings of Wagner. The best writer on this topic remains Thomas Mann, who lived it. Here he is in ­“Reflections of a Non-Political Man” (1918): “Art will never be moral or virtuous in any ­political sense: and progress will never be able to put its trust in art. It has a fundamental ­tendency to unreliability and treachery; its . . . predilection for the ‘barbarism’ that begets beauty [is] indestructible; and although some may call this predilection . . . immoral to the point of endangering the world, yet it is an imperishable fact of life, and if one wanted to eradicate this aspect of art . . . then one might well have freed the world from a serious ­danger; but in the process one would almost certainly have freed it from art itself.”

With the coming of Hitler, Mann changed his tune and moved to California. The most ­impressive pages of Mr. Allen’s book come in an appendix: Mann’s lecture “Germany and the Germans,” delivered at the Library of Congress in 1945. Mann here becomes a proud American: “Everything else would have meant too narrow and specific an alienation of my existence. As an American I am a citizen of the world.”

It is pertinent to remember that seven years later, having witnessed the Cold War and the Red Scare, Mann deserted the U.S. for Switzerland; as early as 1951 he wrote to a friend: “I have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil to which I owe nothing, and which knows nothing of me.”

Wilhelm Furtwängler’s refusal to emigrate, however else construed, is not irrelevant here. He processed much differently the stresses that drove Thomas Mann into permanent exile.

 

 

The Gershwin Moment — Part Five: Klemperer, Tibbett, Gerstein

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As I’ve had occasion to observe in my various George Gershwin blogs, Gershwin and J. S. Bach are the two composers most malleable in performance. There is no Gershwin style. And if there is, there’s full license to ignore it.

The most recent “PostClassical” broadcast on WWFM includes two little-known but essential Gershwin performances that break the mold. One is Otto Klemperer conducting his transcription of the Second Prelude as a dirge.  The other, from the same Hollywood Bowl Gershwin Memorial Concert of September 8, 1937, features Ruby Elzy, from the original Porgy and Bess cast, singing “My Man’s Gone Now.” Both calibrate shock and grief; Gershwin had been only 38. You can hear them at 48:52 and 57:18 of our broadcast.

Elzy, who was scheduled to sing Aida when she died in 1943 at the age of 35 from a botched operation (had she been white she would have had superior medical attention), is in Serena’s great lament an operatic Billie Holiday. For Porgy’s great lament – “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess,” my singer of choice is Lawrence Tibbett, the supreme American Verdi baritone, who recorded it in 1935 – that’s at 1:04:13.

The same PostClassical broadcast features Kirill Gerstein playing and discussing the improvised cadenza he interpolates in the Concerto in F on his terrific new Gershwin CD.

The broadcast is called “The Russian Gershwin” because most of the performances feature Russian- or Soviet-born artists: Gerstein, Jascha Heifetz, Genady Zagor, Vakhtang Kodanashvili. Gershwin was always  esteemed in Russia. Not so in the US, where American-born classical musicians long dismissed him as a dilettante, and orchestras marginalized him as a “pops” composer.

No longer. But we’re still catching up. Our broadcast concludes with Angel Gil-Ordonez’s fabulous PostClassical Ensemble performance of Gershwin’s Cuban Overture. Why in the world isn’t this piece better-known? Maybe – as I speculate at 50:15 of part two — it’s because the contrapuntal sophistication of Andalusian middle section long confounded notions of Gershwin the unschooled genius.

LISTENING GUIDE

PART ONE

9:22 – George Gershwin speaks and plays

15:50 – Rhapsody in Blue performed by Genady Zagor and PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez (with improvisations)

47:46 — Arnold Schoenberg’s eulogy for George Gershwin

48:52 — Gershwin’s Prelude No. 2, as arranged and conducted by Otto Klemperer at the Hollywood Bowl Gershwin Memorial Concert

57:18 – Ruby Elzy sings “My Man’s Gone Now” at the Gershwin Memorial Concert

1:04:13 – Lawrence Tibbett sings “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess”

1:10:21 – Jascha Heifetz plays his own arrangement of “Summertime”

PART TWO

00:00 – Kirill Gerstein plays Earl Wild’s arrangement of “I Got Rhythm”

4:24 – Kirill Gerstein’s improvised cadenza for the Gershwin concerto mvmt 2

6:41 – Gerstein discusses his cadenza

13:10 – Gershwin Piano Concerto, mvmt 2, performed by Gerstein and St. Louis Symphony conducted by David Robertson

26:54 – Gershwin Concerto, mvmt 3, performed by Vakhtang Kodanashvili and PCE conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez

37:41 – Gershwin Cuban Overture, performed by PCE conducted by Gil-Ordonez

53:00 – Jascha Heifetz plays his own arrangement of “My Man’s Gone Now”

 

El Paso, Kurt Weill, and Tornillo’s Tent City

Readers of this blog may remember my last filing from El Paso – a “Kurt Weill’s America” festival, part of the NEH-supported “Music Unwound” consortium I direct, that ignited a week of discussion and debate about immigration past and present.

My most memorable experience that week was visiting Eastlake High School, in a semi-rural colonia, and telling 3,000 students about Weill, Walt Whitman, and Pearl Harbor. Weill’s immigrant’s response to FDR’s declaration of war on Japan, setting three Whitman Civil War poems, transfixed these remarkable young people. Mainly Mexican-American, they evince no sense of entitlement. When I was finished, the school chorus asked to sing for me. They chose “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

As I previously wrote:

“The quarterback for the El Paso Weill festival was Frank Candelaria, who as Associate Provost at the University of Texas/El Paso [UTEP] has the vision and persistence to make big things happen. Frank is an El Paso native, the first member of his family to obtain what is called ‘higher education’ — Oberlin and Yale. He left a tenured position at UT/Austin to return to El Paso five years ago. He expected the Weill festival to catch fire in El Paso, but the intimacy with which it penetrated personal lives took him by surprise. On the final day he said to me: ‘I learned a lot about my own city and how strongly people identify as Americans.’”

About a week ago, my issue of the Kurt Weill Newsletter arrived in the mail. It may well be the only classical-music magazine of quality we have left in the US. My blog about Weill in El Paso was there reprinted, with a full page of comments by students and participants. A UTEP student named Toni Torres wrote: “These projects on Kurt Weill gave me a new perspective on my citizenship. I need to be doing way more for my country and its music.”

No sooner did I read those words than I learned that Tornillo – one of the three colonias to which Candelaria has been bringing “Music Unwound” programs featuring UTEP faculty members and visiting artists — is to be the site of a tent city for children separated from their parents as a punishment for crossing the border illegally. Temperatures in Tornillo were predicted to shortly reach 105 degrees.

UTEP is a kind of miracle, an embodiment of the American Dream. More than 80 per cent of the students are Hispanic. More than 90 per cent are local. Any person with a high school diploma is accepted for admission. It inculcates high values that used to be termed American. It  is about to neighbor a holding facility for boys and girls, detained and corralled by our United States Government.

VISCONTI’S FOUR-HOUR “LUDWIG” — A Momentous Wagnerian Film

Today’s “Wall Street Journal” includes my mini-review of a remarkable film. It’s appended, along with a chunk of my book-in-progress about Wagner the man.






     The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s current Luchino Visconti retrospective climaxes with more than a week of screenings (June 16 and 22-28) featuring the restored, four-hour version of Ludwig (1973)—a rare opportunity to properly encounter a magnificent Wagnerian film.


     The story is familiar as a cartoon. Insane King Ludwig II of Bavaria built expensive fairy-tale castles no one wanted. And he squandered a fortune supporting Richard Wagner, who opportunistically played him for the fool he was. He grew fat and ugly, crazier and crazier, and finally drowned himself in a lake.


     I saw Ludwig when it was first released in the U.S. Helmut Berger’s Ludwig II seemed over the top. Trevor Howard, in a brief cameo, at least looked like Wagner. As with any Visconti film, the mise-en-scène was memorably luxurious—it was the film’s most notable attribute.


    In fact, Visconti made a 264-minute film that was trimmed for distribution. What I saw was 137 minutes—barely half the movie. In 1980 (four years after Visconti’s death), the original negative was purchased at an auction, then restored under the supervision of the original script supervisor. This version had its premiere later the same year at the Venice Film Festival. Whether the resulting mega-film is precisely what Visconti had in mind, I have no idea. But I am certain that it is a memorable achievement.






    Not only is the story that it tells no cartoon, it reasonably conforms to my own impressions of the dramatis personae, acquired over the course of a lifetime obsession with Wagner. Ludwig is an idealist, an aesthete, unsuited to reign. He is made to suppress his homosexuality. His appreciation of Wagner’s greatness is ridiculed and misunderstood. He detests the pomp of the court and resists military entanglements others regard as noble and patriotic.






    Ludwig was 18 when in 1864 he ascended the throne. His instantaneous agenda was to rescue the financially strapped Wagner, and to collaborate with him in a project redeeming German culture. These aspirations were no more deranged than was Ludwig himself. As his letters confirm, he was eccentric, but certainly no simpleton. He made bequeathing a permanent Wagnerian legacy his top priority. This fairy-tale reversal stunned the ever-beleaguered composer. Ultimately, Ludwig and Wagner served one another royally. Every other factor bearing on their complex friendship of two decades shrinks to insignificance.






    In Visconti’s portrayal the question of whether Ludwig was mad—debated in his lifetime and ever after—becomes moot. Chapter by relentless chapter, Ludwig ever so gradually descends into a condition of dissolute nihilism as a necessary consequence of passions and convictions he will not and cannot subdue.


     The triumph of this reading is that it’s not predicated on unwanted royal duties; Visconti is reflecting on contradictions inherent in the human condition: Wagner’s incessant theme. He has discovered in Ludwig a true embodiment of the Wagnerian pariah. He has transformed Ludwig’s story into a veritable Wagner homage. The charged psychological/existential topic, the glacial pacing (the opening coronation sequence lasts fully 15 minutes), the luxuriance and amplitude—all this is what makes Ludwig a Wagnerian film, the most remarkable of its species I have ever encountered.


    Ludwig becomes a solitary figure of numbing pathos. Concomitantly, Trevor Howard’s Wagner, in this full-length cut, is not the usual cartoon cad. There is nothing monstrous about him. Things Wagner said and did are (for once) plausibly enacted. He cavorts on the floor with his big dog. He honestly adores and admires the king—and also shrewdly critiques him behind his back. He paternally grasps the young man’s predicament. And he knows when he must dissimulate.


    Even Ludwig’s enemies—the courtiers for whom Wagner’s genius was a pernicious myth; the doctors and diplomats who conspired to declare Ludwig mad—are quite believably depicted. They are mere mortals, confronting factors they cannot glean.


    Too much critical commentary about Ludwig fastens on the scenery. But it is magnificent. Visconti so poetically renders one of Ludwig’s iconic nighttime sleigh rides—the white horses, the pristine snow, the lanterns and footmen in livery—that it nearly stops the show. The film’s visual peak is (of course) the Venus grotto at Schloss Linderhof. It is a measure of Visconti’s empathy that Ludwig’s entrance in his swan boat, and his feeding of the royal swans, heartbreakingly transcends any hint of camp. (You’ll find a pertinent clip here.)






    Both these vignettes are accompanied by “The Song to the Evening Star” (sans voice) from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Visconti’s musical masterstroke is to interpolate Wagner’s then little-known A-Flat Major Elegy for piano as a theme song; it strikes a searing intimate note.


    I almost forgot. There’s a star-turn—Romy Schneider as Ludwig’s cousin, Elisabeth of Austria. Visconti treats her rejection of Ludwig’s early affections as a key to his travails. Near the end, she attempts to see him and is maniacally rebuffed. This nonencounter, played to strains of Tristan, is nearly a gloss on the opera’s ending, but with a different outcome. It works.






    And here — as a P. S. — is a pertinent chunk from my book-in-progress “Understanding Wagner”:

 

Wagner’s written salutations to Ludwig characteristically read “my most beautiful, supreme, and only consolation,” “most merciful font of grace,” “my adored and angelic friend.”  The notoriously florid effusions of these letters were both sincere and consciously hyperbolic. Looking back, Wagner would say to Bulow: “Oh, those don’t sound very good, but it wasn’t I who set the tone” [July 10, 1878]. For his part, Ludwig (whose own letters indeed “set the tone”) supported Wagner faithfully, but not without discrimination or reservation. Meanwhile Bulow was installed as conductor in Munich, and there led the premieres of Tristan und Isolde (1865) and Die Meistersinger (1868). . . .

In the midst of [the never-ending subterfuge concealing the Wagner/Cosima/von Bulow menage], Wagner whispers to Bulow: “Though we berate the ‘fool,’ he nonetheless belongs to us, and will never be able to break free of us. All we need now is a little patience. If we can obtain from him all that he has promised me – intelligible to my innermost self –, just think what an unprecedented and unhoped-for miracle that will be!” (April 8, 1866). Wagner had earlier written to Bulow: “There is something god-like about him . . . He is my genius incarnate whom I see beside me and whom I can love” (June 1, 1864). And this was by no means Wagner’s only such expression of a platonic love liaison with the king.

The relationship was further complicated by promises unkept or kept incompletely. Wagner underestimated his financial needs. He changed his mind about assigning his operas to a new Munich festival theater. But it must be said that the 562,914 marks Wagner received from Ludwig over a period of nineteen years was substantially less than what Meyerbeer received for 100 performances of Le Prophete in Berlin. As for choosing Bayreuth over Ludwig’s Munich – Wagner was surely correct to situate his Festspielhaus offsite. . . .

Ludwig got his way with Das Rheingold and Die Walkure both, premiered in Munich in 1869 and 1870. In 1876 he travelled to Bayreuth, twice, to twice attend the complete Ring of the Nibelung. In the aftermath of this first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner’s  efforts to cope with the deficit in concert with Ludwig are exhausting merely to read about. He was simultaneously composing Parsifal, premiered at Bayreuth in 1882 under Ludwig’s court conductor Hermann Levi. Ludwig could not countenance attending a public performance of the sacred play; in 1884, a year after Wagner’s death, the Bayreuth production was mounted for the king, and the king alone, in Munich.

These early installments of the Bayreuth Festival, so instantly historic, vindicating Wagner’s genius to the world, were also a vindication of Ludwig, without whose patronage they could never have occurred. Ultimately, the king and his composer served one another royally. Every other factor bearing on their friendship of two decades shrinks to insignificance.

 

 

 

Shostakovich and the Cold War

Design Credit: Mimi McNamara

“It is difficult to detect any significant difference between one piece and another. Nor is there any relief from the dominant tone of ‘uplift.’ The musical products of different parts of the Socialist Fatherland all sound as though they had been turned out by Ford or General Motors.”

This October 1953 assessment of contemporary Soviet music, by Nicolas Nabokov in the premiere issue of Encounter Magazine, is fascinating for three reasons. The first is that Encounter, which became a prestigious organ of the American left, was covertly founded and funded by the CIA via the Congress for Cultural Freedom, itself a CIA front. The second is that Nabokov, a minor composer closely associated with Stravinsky, was the CCF music specialist.  The third is that his article “No Cantatas for Stalin?” imparts blatant misinformation. And yet Nabokov was shrewd. charming, worldly, never obtuse. He was also laden by baggage of a kind that was bound to skew his every musical observation.

Nabokov’s verdict came weeks before Evgeny Mravinsky premiered Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 with his peerless Leningrad Philharmonic. Some two years before that, Shostakovich completed a cycle of 24 Preludes and Fugues for solo piano. Neither work sustains a dominant tone of uplift. In fact, both are imperishable monuments to the complexity of the human spirit, arguably unsurpassed by any subsequent twentieth-century symphonic or keyboard composition.

A cousin of the famous novelist, Nabokov was born in 1903 near Minsk to a family of landed gentry subsequently dispossessed by the Revolution. He wound up a US citizen in 1936. In 1949, he conspicuously humiliated Shostakovich at the “Peace Conference” at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel – an adventure in Soviet cultural propaganda that provoked counter-measures; the CCF came one year later.

A decade after that, JFK joined the cultural counter-offensive with a series of speeches claiming that art could only flourish in “free societies” and casting aspersion on all political art. Here is some of what he had to say:

“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 Lenin 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. . . .”

“We know that a totalitarian society can promote the arts in its own way — that it can arrange for splendid productions of opera and ballet, as it can arrange for the restoration of ancient and historic buildings. But art means more than the resuscitation of the past: it means the free and unconfined search for new ways of expressing the experience of the present and the vision of the future. When the creative impulse cannot flourish freely, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.”

It all came to an end when in 1966 Ramparts Magazine outed the CCF as a CIA operation. A firestorm of controversy and consternation erupted. Scores of prominent publications and writers suddenly discovered that they had in effect been secretly employed as American intelligence agents. The best-known book about the CCF – Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War (1999) – impugns the CIA for compromising the intellectual freedoms it sought to promote.  But the ironies of the campaign against Shostakovich elude her and other writers on the CCF.

The penultimate event of the PostClassical Ensemble season at the Washington National Cathedral last week – “Secret Music Skirmishes of the Cold War: The Shostakovich Case” — attempted to make some  sense of it all. We assembled a former US Ambassador to Russia, a former CIA staff historian, and Vladimir Feltsman, who as the most famous Soviet “refusenik” was beginning in 1979 notoriously banned from performing in public until escaping to the West in 1987. A formidable American pianist – Benjamin Pasternack — performed four Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues, as well as his still too little-known Second Piano Sonata of 1943. We also had an actor, Ashley Smith, delivering extracts from three of Kennedy’s culture-war speeches.

The Kennedy orations made a great impression. Their sheer eloquence nearly masked their indefensible content.

But Shostakovich’s Olympian D minor Prelude and Fugue — in which the legacy of the Well-Tempered Klavier is fused with the Slavic pathos and grandeur of Mussorgsky (a more “original” creative feat, I would say, then turning Schoenberg’s 12-tone method into a comprehensive compositional prescription)– silenced all debate. Pasternack’s riveting performance was amplified by the ambience of the Cathedral’s great nave. It sounded like this (use headphones and turn up the volume).

How could Kennedy, his speech-writers and diplomatic aides, have so dismissed the caliber of such titanic music? The answer becomes obvious once the Cold War climate is recalled. A much-quoted review of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony by Virgil Thomson in the New York Herald-Tribune (October 18, 1942) ended:

“That he has so deliberately diluted his matter, adapted it, by both excessive simplification and excessive repetition, to the comprehension of a child of eight, indicates that he is willing to write down to a real or fictitious psychology of mass consumption in a way that may eventually disqualify him for consideration as a serious composer.”

Three years later in the same publication, another composer/critic, Paul Bowles, assessed the American premiere of one of Shostakovich’s peak achievements: the Second Piano Trio. It was, Bowles wrote, “by no means one of this most compelling works. Some of its melodic material gives the impression of having been made up of unused odds and ends left over from more inspired pieces.”

As these and countless other samplings of the American musical press from the forties and fifties testify, Shostakovich (notwithstanding a flurry of high acclaim, pace Thomson, for the timely Leningrad Symphony) was viewed as a Soviet stooge – a composer whose great promise had been snuffed out by repressive ideologues. As important, the West had a musical orthodoxy of its own at least as potently repressive as anything the Soviets imposed: serial music, commanded by the likes of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez. In fact, the criterion of worth adduced by Nabokov in his diatribe was not emotional veracity or elegance of form, but “novel tendencies” of which Soviet composers had at best displayed “faint indications.”

It took some courage to speak up for Shostakovich. One who did was Leonard Bernstein, in a 1966 Young People’s Concert titled “A Birthday Tribute to Shostakovich.” Bernstein had performed Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony in the USSR. He had met the composer. Addressing a national audience on American TV, he said:

“In these days of musical experimentation, with new fads chasing each other in and out of the concert halls, a composer like Shostakovich can be easily put down. After all he’s basically a traditional Russian composer, a true son of Tchaikovsky—and no matter how modern he ever gets, he never loses that tradition. So the music is always in some way old-fashioned—or at least what critics and musical intellectuals like to call old-fashioned. But they’re forgetting the most important thing—he’s a genius: a real authentic genius, and there aren’t too many of those around any more.”

At our National Cathedral event, both Nicolas Dujmovic, formerly of the CIA, and John Beyrle, a distinguished former US Ambassador to Russia and Bulgaria, defended the Congress for Cultural Freedom as an appropriate response to Russian disinformation. In fact, as even the Saunders book makes clear, the CCF was a sophisticated operation carried out by intellectuals on the left. One of the most fascinating episodes in her account is the CIA response to Joseph McCarthy’s loutish red-baiting, which the agency feared would undermine its  nuanced propaganda efforts. And if Nabokov’s attacks on Shostakovich weren’t nuanced, if Kennedy’s speeches weren’t credible, the charged musical climate of opinion was such that nobody noticed.

Vladimir Feltsman, speaking at the Cathedral, stressed the compatibility of great art and hard times. He also praised Soviet musical training at the Moscow Conservatory as the best in the world (a verdict Pasternack challenged, having studied with Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski at the Curtis Institute). In a follow-up email, Feltsman added: “No great art is ever produced by happy and healthy folks content with their lives, no matter where.” He also wrote: “The main difference between musical education in the USSR and the US was a lack of special training for musically gifted kids in the US. For the Soviets, starting in the 1930s with Stalin, the culture as a whole was a propaganda tool foremost and they wanted to prove to the world that their musicians, dancers, and athletes were the best in the world. That was the real reason for creating these special schools that were breeding  future ambassadors for Soviet empire and proved the superiority of the most ‘just and humane’ system of governance the world had ever seen.”

I would add one more irony to this complicated picture: the iron curtain. It paradoxically preserved musical traditions shattered or diffused in the West. Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues are an explicit homage to Bach. His symphonies build directly on the examples of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, and Mahler. A fascinating new window on the contradictions of Soviet musical life is Marina Frolova Walker’s Stalin’s Music Prize (2016), which excavates previously inaccessible Soviet archives documenting how recipients of state musical honors were chosen. Ideologues promoting Socialist Realism did not always prevail over Shostakovich and other musicians of consequence for whom the ideals of a morally charged people’s art embedded in tradition were not merely cant.

Here’s an addendum from my ongoing email exchange with Vladimir Feltsman: “What is particularly sad in the Shostakovich case (Feltsman writes) is that the mischaracterizations of his music and personality in the US were intentional and planned. Music critics are known to miss their targets time and again, but their mistakes were their own, not commissioned and paid for.”

The de facto State Department expert on Soviet music, Nicolas Nabokov was in retrospect a music analyst deafened by the opinions, assumptions, and loyalties of a dispossessed expatriate who deemed Stravinsky’s neo-classicism a supreme affirmation of artistic and aesthetic “freedom.” His writings on this topic fed the risible claims of Kennedy’s Cold War cultural orations.

What lessons, if any, can be extrapolated from this Shostakovich Case? Mainly, perhaps, that ideology and distance can greatly cripple our perceptions and assumptions. Is this finding, incriminating Cold War cultural propagandists on both sides, pertinent to the prosecution of the Cold War generally? To Cold War diplomacy as practiced under eight American Presidents? To our present-day understandings of Vladimir Putin’s Russia?

It’s something to think about.

 

 

“The Great Composer You’ve Never Heard Of” — and how he was suppressed by Carlos Chavez

“The Great Composer You’ve Never Heard Of” – the most recent “PostClassical” broadcast via the WWFM Classical Network – spends two hours exploring the astounding achievements of Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940). The show also reveals how Revueltas’s colleague Carlos Chavez – a lesser composer, but with more institutional clout – suppressed Revueltas’s music. It’s all here.

As readers of this blog know, Revueltas is the composer most championed by my PostClassical Ensemble in DC. He’s also the main topic of “Copland and Mexico,” the NEH-funded “Music Unwound” program I produce around the US.

In many respects, Revueltas bears comparison with George Gershwin: a self-invented composer of genius who mines the vernacular without apology or discomfort. And just as Gershwin was the victim of a “Gershwin threat” that pigeon-holed him as a dilettante interloper, so it was with Revueltas. Gershwin’s influential detractors included Aaron Copland. Revueltas was dismissed as a gifted amateur by his one-time colleague Chavez.

Copland’s view of Revueltas was comparable: he expressed wary admiration for Revueltas’s native gift: “Unfortunately, he was never able to break away from a certain dilettantism that makes even his best compositions suffer from sketchy workmanship.” Chavez chose to patronize Revueltas as a fallen disciple. If Copland mainly neglected Gershwin, he increasingly appreciated ingredients of incipient greatness. Chavez, by comparison, actively excluded Revueltas from the many Mexican programs he influentially curated in Mexico and the United States.

The writer/editor Herbert Weinstock, a Chavez friend and supporter, felt impelled to write to him on November 25, 1940, to beg an explanation: “Time and again, [I find] myself in the position of having to defend you against the charge of being jealous of Revueltas, of deliberately trying to smother his reputation by ignoring him.” Revueltas, who had just died, seemed to Weinstock “a musician of something approaching genius.” Citing Goddard Lieberson, for decades a key American advocate of twentieth-century composers, Weinstock reported that “many musical people here” struggled with the perception that Chavez “spitefully failed to do justice to his most important compatriot.”

Thirty-one years later, on October 8, 1971, Chavez delivered a lecture on Revueltas at a Mexico City conference on “La Musica en Mexico.” He complained that the “construction” of Revueltas’s compositions, “instead of showing development, was repetitive.” He continued:

“Although he showed great talent in the beginning, abrupt and impressive, his creative capacities never managed to mature, his metier was not perfected, and his style did not evolve. All his compositions are essentially similar in procedure, in expression and in style. Once or twice, after he started composing, I warned him, in conversation, about the issue of renewing oneself — renew yourself or die — and he understood this in theory. But it was easier for him to repeat his early works, the unending ostinati, the explosive contrasts, the piangendo melodies, etc, etc.”

The Revueltas scholar Roberto Kolb (to whom I am indebted for the Weinstock letter and Chavez lecture) comments: “I find a number of prejudices here. The first is the implicit definition of a ‘mature’ composition, one that incorporates evolutionary ideals such as development and organicity. This is something that Revueltas rejected, because he openly declared his intention to seek a different concept of time and agency — one inspired, for instance, by vernacular sources such as street cries. . . . Revueltas tends to base his compositions on the principle of montage and collage, dialectic or symbolic. This is linked to semantic goals, politically motivated. I find it extraordinary that this did not even occur to Chávez. He only evaluates Revueltas’s music from a formal point of view.”

Revueltas’s reputation is lately on the upswing – his music will be far longer remembered than that of Chavez. Among his peak achievements is the score for the 1935 film Redes, an uneasy partnership with Paul Strand and Fred Zinnemann. The former – like Copland, like John Steinbeck and Langston Hughes – sought inspiration from Mexico’s artists on the left. The latter – later the Hollywood director of  High Noon — was in flight from Hitler’s Europe. The “nets” of the title ensnare both fish and poor fishermen. The resulting film is as epic and iconic, flawed and unfinished as the Mexican Revolution itself.

Aaron Copland wrote of Redes: “Revueltas is the type of inspired composer in the sense that Schubert was the inspired composer. That is to say, his music is a spontaneous outpouring, a strong expression of his inner emotions. There is nothing premeditated . . . about him. . . . His music is above all vibrant and colorful. . . . the score that Revueltas has written for [Redes] has very many of the qualities characteristic of Revueltas’s art.” When these words wound up in the New York Times, Copand felt the need to explain to Chavez: “I suppose you must have wondered how I happened to write that piece for the N. Y. Times on Silvestre. As a matter of fact I had no idea the Times would use it . . . I did it rather hastily . . . “

Redes — with Revueltas’s galvanizing score performed live — is one of three PostClassical Ensemble Naxos DVDs featuring classic 1930s films with “restored” soundtracks. On “PostClassical,” we audition Redes with commentary. We also sample a wide variety of other astonishing Revueltas scores, as recorded in terrific live performance by Angel Gil-Ordonez and PostClassical Ensemble. You can judge for yourself whether “all his compositions are essentially similar in procedure, in expression and in style.”  And as usual I have occasion to mercilessly harangue Bill McGlaughlin with my opinions and enthusiasms. Here’s an overview of the broadcast:

PART ONE:

Music from the film Redes (1935), beginning at 19:20

PART TWO:

3:50: Son

10:10: Baile

17:11: Duelo

28:40: Sensemaya (in the original chamber version)

34:56: Carlos Chavez suppresses Revueltas

38:30: Two political songs, setting Langston Hughes and Nicolas Guillen

49:34: Planos

59:00: Revueltas as an “unfinished” composer, in parallel with Ives and Gershwin

By the way, Noche de los mayas — the “Revueltas” score championed by Gustavo Dudamel and so many others — wasn’t composed by Revueltas. It’s a kitsch confection created by Jose Limantour after Revueltas’s death, cannibalizing Revueltas’s score for a film of no distinction. Stick with Redes.

 

Leonard Bernstein at 100: An American Archetype

My 5,000-word piece on the Leonard Bernstein Centenary, in The Weekly Standard this week, begins with a story you’ve never heard before:

“In 1980, at the age of 62, Leonard Bernstein undertook the composition of a formidable full-scale opera, commissioned jointly by La Scala, the Kennedy Center, and Houston Grand Opera. He called it A Quiet Place. It’s the story of an unquiet family, the same one that Bernstein had depicted in Trouble in Tahiti in 1952, when he was just 34. Trouble in Tahiti is a romp, deftly dispatched. But Bernstein had not composed an opera since, and A Quiet Place did not come easily—so much so that he decided to incorporate Trouble in Tahiti as a flashback. As he worked on the score, he confided to an associate that Trouble in Tahiti was ‘a better piece.’ And so it is. The Bernstein trajectory of promises fulfilled and not is anything but simple.

“This August will mark Leonard Bernstein’s 100th birthday. The centenary celebrations started last August and are worldwide. The Bernstein estate counts more than 2,000 events on six continents. And there is plenty to celebrate. But if Bernstein remains a figure of limitless fascination, it is also because his story is archetypal. He embodied a tangled nexus of American challenges, aspirations, and contradictions. And if he in some ways unraveled, so did the America he once courted and extolled.

“Like the United States, Bernstein came late to classical music. . . .

To read the whole piece, click here.

 

THE FUTURE OF ORCHESTRAS — Part Five: Kurt Weill, El Paso, and the National Mood

“Wherever I found decency and humanity in the world, it reminded me of America.”

Kurt Weill wrote those words after returning from a visit to Germany in 1947. I read them aloud at least a dozen times during the Kurt Weill festival in El Paso last week. Every time I invited my listeners to consider whether or not they still apply.

Because Weill was an exemplary immigrant, he furnishes a singularly timely topic for the NEH-funded Music Unwound consortium I am fortunate to direct. “Kurt Weill’s America” has so far been produced at DePauw University and the Brevard Festival. It will travel to Chapel Hill and to Buffalo. But El Paso – a Mexican-American city on the Mexican border – is where we always knew it would most hit home.

Thanks to Music Unwound, El Paso hosts the closest collaboration between an orchestra, a university, and a community anywhere in the US. The orchestra is the El Paso Symphony and the university is the purest embodiment of the American Dream I know: the University of Texas/El Paso, known as UTEP. The vast majority of the students are local. Most are the first in their families to go to college. All high school graduates who apply are admitted. UTEP anchors El Paso.

The festival lasted seven days and included five concerts, three master classes, seven classroom presentations, and a visit to a semi-rural high school. Lots of questions are being asked these days about the relevance of orchestras to American communities. Those questions have been silenced in El Paso.

The first undergraduate UTEP class I visited was Selfa Chew’s “Afro-Mexican History.” She is herself Mexican/Chinese/Japanese, an authority on the fate of Japanese Mexicans during World War II. I told Weill’s story: a Jewish cantor’s son, born in 1900, he was the foremost German operatic composer of his generation. He fled Hitler and wound up in New York, where he re-invented himself as a leading Broadway composer before dying young in 1950. Weill considered himself an American from day one. He did not wish to consort with other German immigrants. He told Time Magazine: “Americans seem to be ashamed to appreciate things here. I’m not.”

The immediacy with which Professor Chew’s students engaged with this story was electrifying. One student asked with a trembling voice: how was Weill able to do it? She missed Mexico. Another wanted to know if Weill in America ever composed music that alluded to his German past. Not that I know of, I said. The students had me thinking  about Weill in new ways.

On Friday afternoon a UTEP Music “convocation” featured the El Paso Symphony’s exceptional guest soloists – William Sharp and Lisa Vroman – singing Weill. Bill sang “The Dirge for Two Veterans,” a patriotic setting of Walt Whitman in response to Pearl Harbor. I introduced this performance by screening FDR’s “day of infamy” speech, declaring war on Japan. Brian Yothers, from UTEP’s English faculty, gave a 10-minute talk on Whitman and why Weill would have found this iconic American a kindred spirit. Two UTEP vocalists sang “How Can You Tell an American?,” composed by Weill three years into his American period. The students keenly appreciated the song’s answer: you can’t tell Americans what to do.

I would call this presentation an exemplary humanities public program in miniature. When our 80 minutes expired, no one got up to leave. I am now accustomed to this kind of response in El Paso. The students are the hungriest I know. There is no sense of entitlement to get in the way.

Bill and Lisa sang and coached at UTEP throughout the week. Brian addressed three Music classes.

The central event was an EPSO subscription concert, given twice. The first half explored Weill in Europe; the main work was the Weill/Brecht Seven Deadly Sins (1933) with Lisa as both Annas. Part two was Weill in America: the four Whitman songs sung by Bill as a potent cycle; a Broadway medley to close. This was music as sanguine as Weill/Brecht is cheeky.

What was Weill about? We posed the question with a scripted exegesis and a continuous visual track. Here’s an excerpt, including Weill’s own voice and his 1938 song “Nowhere To Go But Up.” Our host and screen also allowed us to ambitiously contextualize the Whitman songs as an immigrant’s charged response to the bombing of the American fleet, and situate the sui generis Seven Deadly Sins – a work that can easily confound – within Weimar culture: its barbed aesthetics and politics; the  assaultive paintings of Otto Dix and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.

After that came “I’m a Stranger Here Myself” – a joint presentation of UTEP’s Opera and Theatre programs. Cherry Duke, director of Opera UTEP, wrote in a program note: “With the prevalence of division, xenophobia and fear in today’s news, I was struck by similar themes in many of Weill’s works. He seems to ask the question: Who exactly is the stranger, the outsider, the exile?” Weill’s songs, and a chunk of his 1946 Broadway opera Street Scene, were interspersed with excerpts from Brecht’s Mother Courage, and from the 1929 Elmer Rice play upon which Street Scene the opera was based. These juxtapositions registered powerfully. Even more powerful was a recitation of “Let America be America Again” (1935) by Langston Hughes, who collaborated with Weill on Street Scene. It reads in part:

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be. . . .

(America never was America to me.)

. . .

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,

I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.

I am the red man driven from the land,

I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—

And finding only the same old stupid plan

Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

The show began hypnotically, with a student clarinetist, Aaron Gomez,  performing his own solo version of “Speak Low,” a rendition that eloquently discovered Jewish/Yiddish roots.

The entire week was saturated by a density of discourse and inquiry about the American experience that relentlessly targeted the present moment.

I will never forget the testimony of a Jewish El Paso resident who remembered her childhood in Sioux Falls, where her father sold automobiles and supported the local NAACP. Her family had to house Harry Belafonte because no hotel would take him. Black workers were resented as outsiders. Anti-semitism was virulent. Her father’s favorite recordings included Weill’s anti-apartheid Lost in the Stars. He himself used to sing “September Song.” Only now, she told us, did she understand why.

I had my own “September Song” epiphany during my week in El Paso. It was and is one of Kurt Weill’s two most popular Broadway songs, the other being “Speak Low.” We heard Bill Sharp sing it – unforgettably – with the El Paso Symphony. The Hudson Shad – a one-of-a-kind male vocal quartet long associated with Weill – offered a doo-wop a cappella version of “Speak Low.” When a student named Jose, in Selfa Chew’s class, brought home to me the riddle that Weill in his American music never looked back, I recalled a conversation I once had with Lotte Lenya when I had the opportunity to interview her for the New York Times. She speculated that for Weill “never look back” was not only a strategy of renewal, but a way of suppressing intrusive memories, both good and bad. It cannot be a coincidence that both “September Song” and “Speak Low” course with a commanding nostalgia.

But it’s a long, long while from May to December

And the days grow short when you reach September

Weill was still a young man when he set those lyrics. Do not those signature Weill songs sublimate personal retrospection?

The quarterback for the El Paso Weill festival was Frank Candelaria, who as Associate Provost at UTEP has the vision and persistence to make big things happen. (Next fall, he becomes Dean of the Arts at SUNY Purchase.). Frank is an El Paso native, the first member of his family to obtain what is called “higher education” — Oberlin and Yale. He left a tenured position at UT/Austin to return to El Paso five years ago. He expected the Weill festival to catch fire in El Paso, but the intimacy with which it penetrated personal lives took him by surprise. On the final day he said to me: “I learned a lot about my own city and how strongly people identify as Americans.”

Which brings me to my final vignette. Once again a visit to Eastlake High School proved a humbling experience. It serves a semi-rural “colonia.” Of the school’s 2,200 predominantly Hispanic students, 69 per cent are “economically disadvantaged.” Frank and I visited Eastlake last year for “Copland and Mexico.” I described that visit in this space.

Again some 300 students were taken out of their classes for an hour-long assembly. When I entered the auditorium I was applauded – I was remembered. I spoke about Kurt Weill and immigration, I shared my clip of FDR declaring war, I played a recording of “Dirge for Two Veterans.” A girl raised her hand to tell us that she had wept twice during the song – the parts where Whitman and Weill describe moonlight overlooking the twin graves of the two Civil War soldiers, a father and son. Then I played a Frank Sinatra recording of “September Song,” after which the students requested another one. So I played Sinatra singing “Speak Low.”

Afterward, the East Lake Chorus asked to sing for me. They chose the “Star-Spangled Banner.”