Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 3

Stravinsky, Elmer Fudd, and the South Dakota Symphony

The final NEH-funded, multi-media “Music Unwound” concert featuring the South Dakota Symphony took place last Saturday night. I cast myself in a cameo role, playing the Soldier in three excerpts from Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. I modelled my impersonation on Elmer Fudd.

The main events, however, were Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G with Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements with a visual presentation by Peter Bogdanoff. This was a scripted program with a continuous visual track and certain surprises straying far afield from classical music. The topic was “New World Encounters” – the impact of jazz abroad. 

The South Dakota Symphony continues to impress as the most innovative, most adventurous American orchestra I know. Saturday’s concert capped a full week of activity, mainly at South Dakota State University, where my book The Propaganda of Freedom is this semester’s “common read.” The participants, all week long, include Bavouzet (a lecture/recital on “Ravel and Jazz,” performed three times) and former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle.

The current SDSO season concludes April 26-27 with Douglas Moore’s Pulitzer-Prize winning opera Giants of the Earth — its first performance since 1951; it will also be recorded. SDSO’s signature Lakota Music Project undertakes a statewide tour in October 2025; it begins on Native American Day at the Crazy Horse Memorial and works its way eastward, stopping at the Pine Ridge and Rosebud reservations, among others. I will be participating in a week-long Shostakovich festival, with a full range of educational partners, in March 2026. The repertoire will include the Symphony No. 8 and (at multiple venues) The New Babylon — the entire 1929 silent film classic, with Shostakovich’s amazing score performed live.

“Music Unwound” – initiated a dozen years ago in partnership with the NEH — will conclude next season with a Black Classical Music festival at Indiana University/Bloomington, and “Mahler in America” at the Colorado Mahlerfest (May 2026). 

(Photos courtesy of SDSO percussionist Daniel Sailer)

The Erosion of the American Arts

The new issue of the online New American Studies Journal is devoted to the challenged fate of the arts. I append an overview of my contribution on “The Erosion of the American Arts.” To read the whole article, click here . To see the whole issue, click here .

The gripping cover story of the 2024 December issue of The Atlantic is “How the Ivy League Broke America.” David Brooks, its distinguished author, characteristically adapts a purview broader, more based in political and cultural memory, than that of other pundits. Here, he applies a fresh historical perspective to our current national crisis, arguing that an exaggerated emphasis on intellectual aptitude, traceable to the educational priorities of Harvard President James Conant (1933–1953), fostered a new “meritocracy”—an American ruling class defective in other human virtues. “Is your IQ the most important thing about you?” Brooks asks. He answers: “No. I would submit that it’s your desires—what you are interested in, what you love. We want a meritocracy that will help each person identify, nurture, and pursue the ruling passion of their soul.” 

Brooks is addressing the rampaging malaise that all acknowledge—friendlessness and depression; opioid addiction and rage; political and governmental dysfunction. The diagnoses he adduces (packed with social science statistics) are more compelling than the remedies he glimpses. And one obvious source of remediation is hiding in plain sight: Amid a dozen pages of dense argumentation, Brooks only once drops the word “art.” And yet, it seems to me obvious that a rapid erosion of the American arts as previously experienced—in child-rearing, education, and higher education; in civic identity; in media and social media; and in our daily lives—is a crucial impediment to nurturing “what you love” and pursuing “the ruling passion” of the soul. And I find myself ever more mindful of how fundamentally exposure to the arts has diminished during my own lifetime. 

A tidal continuum submerging the arts with entertainment may be traced in stages from silent film to film with sound, then color; to TV with its laugh and applause tracks: to youtube, with its loud and irrelevant ads; to social media and the segmentation of Americans into consumers of political and cultural pabulum. The ease with which entertainment pays commercial dividends, the alacrity with which it can today be produced and acquired, are fatal enticements. At every stage, engagement grows ever more supine. 

Are these impediments deeply rooted in the American experience, even within the very ethos of democracy and freedom? Certainly there is an impressive lineage of writings analyzing an American aversion to artists and intellectuals. An enduring philosophical argument against the American arts was launched by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. Much more recently, positing “a new theory of modernism,” the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls the governing dynamic “social acceleration” – and his prognoses are grim. 

With so much at stake, where does hope lie? Contrary to what might be thought or assumed, it cannot be said that America was never a fit home for the arts. During the Gilded Age, no one pondering issues of shared American identity would consider omitting the arts. In the decades after World War I, the arts were more widely but also more superficially acquired. 

In my essay, I emphasize the possibilities for innovation in his own field: orchestras. They were once an American bellwether. Two recent controversies drive home the moment – the resignation of Esa-Pekka Salonen as music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and the engagement of Klaus Makela as music director of the Chicago Symphony. Curating the American musical past, comparable to the efforts of art museums, remains unattempted. A case in point is the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary, ignored by the major US orchestras. 

The Tangled Legacy of JFK and the Cultural Cold War: America Needs a New Public Policy for the Arts

President Kennedy at Amherst College, where in a major arts address he extolled “free artists”

Today’s online Persuasion magazine carries my thoughts on “The Tangled Legacy of JFK and the Cultural Cold War: America Needs a New Public Policy for the Arts.” You can read it here.

Bottom-line, I write: “If, logically, American arts policy today should focus on greatly increasing government support at every level, never has this prospect seemed less likely. Now, too, is a logical moment for top-down cultural diplomacy to soften and inform relations with at least some governments deemed hostile or intractable.”

Here’s a longer extract:

It is little-known that, when he died, President John F. Kennedy was about to appoint Richard Goodwin – a vigorous member of his inner circle – his advisor on the arts. Kennedy’s initiative would have vitally supported the ongoing cultural Cold War with Soviet Russia. Something like it is ever more necessary today. The American arts – as will increasingly become widely apparent – are in crisis. And the United States, incongruously, still possesses no Ministry of Culture.

Kennedy’s arts advocacy was surpassingly eloquent. . . . At the same, time, however, the White House’s eagerness to host the likes of Igor Stravinsky and Pablo Casals was mired in Cold War rhetoric. The central dogma of the cultural Cold War, as pursued by the United States Government, was the notion that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art – a plainly unsupportable claim. . . . 

That the “propaganda of freedom” cheapened freedom by overpraising it, turning it into a reductionist propaganda mantra, is one measure of the intellectual cost of the Cold War. . . .  It also prejudiced Kennedy against government arts subsidies – lest artists discover themselves pushed and prodded by the state. And this prejudice lingers.

We are today witnessing an erosion of the arts far beyond the arts challenge that worried Kennedy. . . . 

Where will new funding arise? . . . Though the need for government support is now self-evident, though the American experiment in laissez-faire arts support can by now be pronounced a failure, there is no political will to create an Arts Council on the European model. We have no Jacob Javits or Claiborne Pell in Congress, no Nancy Hanks at the NEA. Social justice activism has fractured the arts community at a crucial moment. Widespread public awareness of the arts as a necessary component of a nation’s life remains mainly apparent abroad. If, logically, American arts policy today should focus on greatly increasing government support at every level, never has this prospect seemed less likely. Now, too, is a logical moment for top-down cultural diplomacy to soften and inform relations with at least some governments deemed hostile or intractable. . . .

An indispensable Cold War asset, cultural diplomacy concentrated JFK’s vision of a more civilized nation. But reductionist misunderstandings of the arts – as ambassadors of “freedom” or instruments of social justice – ultimately disserve America’s vital interests, whether at home or abroad.  

To read a related article on why the arts and social justice are strange bedfellows, click here:

For more about “The Propaganda of Freedom,” click here:

The Answer Is “Blowin’ in the Wind”

In my most recent NPR “More than Music” show – “’Blowin’ in the Wind’ – Music and American Identity” — the conductor JoAnn Falletta asks, “‘How can we grow as human beings without the arts?” She continues: 

“If you don’t learn through the arts as a child, you can’t open yourself up easily. I read once when I was very young that the arts help us deal with our mortality. That struck me, and it still strikes me. The only way you can have these feelings is if someone opens the door to you as a child, whether it’s taking you to a play which has an uncertain ending, or to a museum and looking at a painting that you can’t understand, or even a piece of music that might seem frightening but may be interesting.” 

Of Bob Dylan, she says:

“He’s not afraid to force us to listen. Even ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ — it’s terrifying, that nothing changes for the better. I don’t think there’s anything like that today. There are love stories. There are stories of anger, but nothing that forces us to look at ourselves, that makes us feel uncomfortable.”

The topic at hand is music that embodies the American experience today. I asked JoAnn and four others to pick a piece.

—John McWhorter chose a song from Jerome Kern’s Show Boat that mediates between Black and white;

—Michael Dease chose John Coltrane’s Blue Train.

—Allen Guelzo chose Charles Ives’s tribute to a Black Civil War regiment

—Timothy Long chose music that speaks to him as a Native American living in multiple worlds.

And I chose George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue: “It’s polyglot – it’s classical, it’s jazz, it’s Broadway, it’s Black, it’s Jewish. . . . And it’s always been controversial – patronized and deployed by generations of commentators as derivative and appropriative. And that controversy, in itself, surely tell us something about ourselves. . . . In fact it sounds like a work in progress – and what could be more ‘American’ than that?” 

I also cals Rhapsody in Blue “unfinished” – there isn’t even a definitive version of the score. “I would call that a defining attribute of America – a characteristic of the self-made American genius. . . . And then there is a matter of unfinished business — what W. E. B. Du Bois was talking about when he famously called ‘the problem of the color line’ the ’problem of the twentieth century.’ Gershwin put it all together – and if the outcome isn’t integrated, neither are we.”

To hear the show, click here.

For more on Rhapsody in Blue, click here.

For more on Ives and Colonel Shaw’s Black regiment, click here.

For a Listening Guide, keep reading:

00:00 — JoAnn Falletta on Bob Dylan

9:00 — Michael Dease on John Coltrane

15:30 — John McWhorter on Show Boat

21:00 — TImothy Long on Earl Kim

30:00 — Allen Guelzo on Charles Ives

39:00 — JH on Gershwin

Ives and the Erosion of the American Arts

In celebration (yet again) of the Ives Sesquicentenary, I write for the online digital magazine Persuasion:

“Of the crises today afflicting the fractured American experience, the least acknowledged and understood is an erosion of the American arts correlating with eroding cultural memory. Never before have Americans elected a president as divorced from historical awareness as Donald Trump. If Charles Ives is the supreme creative genius of American classical music, it’s partly because, more than any other American composer of symphonies and sonatas, he is a custodian of the American past. A product of Danbury, a self-made Connecticut Yankee, he created a bracing New World idiom steeped in the New England Transcendentalists, in the Civil War, in smalltown patriotic celebrations. His improvisatory bravado, espousing the ‘unfinished,’ equally links to such ragged literary icons as Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman.”

To read the whole piece, click here.

To watch my Ives film documentary, click here. 

Abraham Lincoln, Ragtime, and Charles Ives on NPR

Jeremy Denk Allen Guelzo

Excerpts from  my most recent “More than Music” show  on NPR: “Finding the Common Good – Charles Ives at 150”:

Ives is a self-made Connecticut Yankee, born in 1874, who’s all about seeking common purpose, common sentiment, common good.  So at a moment when our nation seems to be coming apart, Ives speaks to us about the things that hold us together – or used to. And yet this year’s Ives Sesquicentenary – remarkably – is mainly being celebrated abroad, by European orchestras. 

I’m recently back from a nine-day Indiana University festival —  by far the biggest Ives celebration here in the US, with two and three events daily. Among the participants was the pianist Gilbert Kalish, still going strong at the age of 89. Back in the 1970s, when the music of Ives was being discovered half a century after he composed it, Kalish was a key figure in a great awakening. At a public forum on Ives’s piano music, I asked him to reflect upon the fate of Charles Ives in the US today. He suddenly fell into a crestfallen mode and said:

 “It’s a kind of cultural tragedy in a way – if you think of it.” 

Why would losing touch with Charles Ives seem a “tragedy” for Americans? It’s not just because he’s our most remarkable concert composer. It’s because he embodies what we’re losing touch within the American arts today: cultural memory. 

Here’s a perspective on Ives from a distinguished Civil War scholar, Allen Guelzo:

“Ives fills a great blank in the experience of a lot of Americans. We exist in an environment that is so immediate, that is so rootless, which lacks so much in the way of cultural ballast, that we feel sometimes like we’re floating weightlessly. In that respect we live downstream from the cultural shift that occurred in Ives’s lifetime. And Ives responds to it by trying to provide for us ballast in the form of the past and the experience of the past. And that’s different from the way other American composers have come at it. Because a lot of American composers who want to invoke the past really do it almost in a decorative fashion. It’s almost like walking into an antique store. That is not the case for Ives.”

Ives, Guelzo says, negotiated a “cultural shift” at the turn of the twentieth century, when American lives were challenged by new technology, and by a decline in the authority of religion and other sources of moral authority. That reminds him of today. And Allen Guelzo is also reminded, by Charles Ives, of Abraham Lincoln. They both feasted on American memory. They both furnished the kind of cultural ballast with which we’re losing touch. 

“Lincoln constantly surprises me. I keep finding entirely different ways of looking at the man and how the man looked at things. I am impressed by his sense of historical capacity, and how the history of the country weighed on him, almost as a burden. He felt a kind of responsibility, especially in 1861 to 1865, that everything was balanced on a pinhead, and he was determined to keep that balance the way it had been designed. He’s determined to do that because the future depends upon it. Not only the future of the country, but the future of the very idea of democracy.”

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Ives, Allen Guelzo says, shared a capacity to inhabit American history. And they rallied people – in their different spheres of government and the arts — to participate in that, and discover common roots. 

In some respects Ives parallels his European contemporary Gustav Mahler, intermingling high and low — the philosophic with the everyday. Ives’s Concord Sonata closes with a transcendental Nature reverie remembering Thoreau playing the flute on his doorstep overlooking Walden Pond. But an earlier movement of the same work triggers a blast of ragtime to evoke Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fanciful short stories.

It cannot be coincidental that two of the most notable exponents of the Concord Piano Sonata also relish rags by Scott Joplin and his progeny. One is Steven Mayer, who we’ve been listening to. The other pianist is Jeremy Denk, who’s just released an Ives album on Nonesuch including all the piano and violin sonatas. Ragtime was the rage beginning in the 1890s, when Ives was at Yale and pounded ragtime in theaters and taverns. In fact, ragtime was an essential catalyst for what Denk calls “the whole universe of American popular music.” And he continues:  

“Ragtime is a way of taking a pre-existing tune and syncopating it and giving it a new life; it’s an act in which you revive something that’s square and stale.” 

European composers, and also American composers, attempted to “harness” jazz – and shackled it with quotation marks. Ives, by comparison, is never slumming or condescending. His deployment of ragtime is torrential, impolite, elemental. Denk experiences in Ives “a tremendous homage” to ragtime, an “oppositional”  and “improvisational” abandon. And he cites as a case in point Ives Third Violin Sonata, begun in 1905. It’s one of five works on his new Nonesuch Ives Sesquicentenary release, in which he’s joined by the violinist Stefan Jackiw.

Here’s a LISTENING GUIDE to the whole NPR show – which you can access here:

3:00 — Allen Guelzo on Ives and “cultural ballast”

4:50 — The parade down Main Street: William Sharp and Steven Mayer perform “The Circus Band”

7:00 — “The Alcotts” and the “human faith melody”

12:00 — The sonic sorcery of “The Housatonic at Stockbridge”

22:30 — Jeremy Denk, Ives, and ragtime

30:00 — Slavery, “Old Black Joe,” and the Second Symphony

39:30 — Edie Ives on why her father was “a great man”

42:30 — Allen Guelzo on Ives and Lincoln

44:00 — William Sharp and Steven Mayer perform “Serenity”

Remembering Teddy

Teddy died last Sunday after a short, swift illness, probably cancer. He was eleven years old.

My seminal Teddy memory: in the kitchen, during his early adulthood, I off-handedly said: “Mommy’s coming.” Teddy quivered with an anticipatory elation that consumed every particle of his being. This was my first experience of his bewildering linguistic acumen, and of an unadulterated emotional vocabulary that would never cease to surprise and amaze. 

Much more recently – about a year ago – I informed my wife Agnes that the elevator was broken again and Teddy would have to take the stairs. This information was not imparted to Teddy. But, as was so often the case, Teddy was listening. When I leashed him and opened the front door to our apartment, he proceeded not to the elevator but to the stairs and began to whimper – he hated the stairs, his paws would slip and slide going up and down. The next day I told Teddy “The elevator is fixed” and he was a happy dog.

Teddy was good friends with Neil and Diane down the hall. Early in this relationship, I informed Agnes that Teddy knew we were about to pay them a visit; he had heard us talking about it. Agnes was skeptical. “Go and look,” I suggested. Agnes poked her head out the door and observed Teddy parked on his haunches in front of 6D. “Speak,” I said. He barked, the door opened, and Teddy entered wagging his tail. 

The imagery of Teddy anticipating a visit was repeated many times. We acquired a self-serving habit of informing Teddy of impending “surprises.” The biggest announcements were that Bernie or Maggie – our son and daughter – were arriving. Teddy would position himself downstairs in the lobby, tautly immobilized. His suppressed energy would detonate once Bernie or Maggie appeared. We eventually conceded that we were exploiting his loyalty for our own pleasure. So we would strategize to keep Teddy in the dark – which proved impossible, because he eavesdropped even on phone conversations.

During the years that Agnes worked at Wadleigh High School on West 114 Street, Teddy and I would often meet her after work. Teddy would haul me to the bus stop at the corner of  96th and Central Park West and there inspect each arriving uptown bus. Or Teddy and I would walk 18 blocks to Wadleigh — he knew the way. It mattered not if Agnes was delayed. We sat on a stoop scrutinizing the schoolyard. Not once would Teddy look left or right.

Sometimes Agnes felt too tired or too busy to join us for Teddy’s early evening walk. Teddy would tenaciously object. Almost invariably, Agnes would change her mind.

When I took Teddy to Central Park, I chatted with him about one thing or another. However busy reconnoitering, Teddy would glance up to acknowledge my comments and instructions. In later years, he grew increasingly sociable. He took no interest in other dogs – or squirrels or horses, or the occasional raccoon, or the stray coyote we once saw at a distance. He could shrewdly assess which children and adults would likely succumb to his gaze. For many, it was irresistible. Can I pet your dog? What’s his name? May I say hello? Teddy would waylay passengers emerging from a car. He thought nothing of interrupting the cell phone conversations of strangers. 

Of his friends on the block (typically with people whose names I never learned), the oldest and most intense was with Dino the night doorman four buildings down. Our midnight walks would begin with single instruction – “Let’s visit Dino” or (on Saturdays and Sundays) “no Dino.” Teddy accepted the finality of “no Dino” and would proceed across the street to pee. “Let’s visit Dino”  meant waiting for Dino to appear and open a locked door. Sometimes Dino was not available and Teddy would cross the street with extreme reluctance. Dino’s wife once asked him: “Do you give him treats?” But Teddy’s friendships were never enticed – except by Teddy himself. When Teddy passed, Dino called him an “angel.” I owe my friendship to Dino to Teddy.

I haven’t mentioned that Teddy was born with a couple of serious medical disorders: myasthenia gravis and mega-esophagus. A miracle drug called mestinon kept him alive. But he could not swallow food or water normally. Like all myasthenia gravis dogs, he ate in a “Bailey chair” which kept his throat vertical. 

So we hand-fed Teddy three times daily. The risk that Teddy would mis-swallow was ever present – we would have to pound his sides to help dislodge phlegm and errant food. We belonged to a diligent online community of MG dog owners. Bonding with a dog with special needs is itself a special experience.

Agnes and I never left Teddy alone. If we all travelled together, it was by car with Teddy and his chair; Teddy was far too large to pack on a plane. Last Monday, Agnes and I flew together for the first time in over a decade – to be with Maggie and Bernie in San Francisco. When we return to our New York apartment, we will return to Teddy’s chair, to Teddy’s beds, to Teddy’s medicines and toys and blankets and coats – to all things Teddy except Teddy himself.

His passing leaves an immense void.

Lawrence Tibbett and the Fate of American Opera Today

“Singing Black” — Tibbett in “The Emperor Jones” at the Met (1933)

Today’s online edition of “The American Scholar” carries my essay on Lawrence Tibbett and how he “prophesied today’s Metropolitan Opera crisis.” You can read it here. An extract follows:

In a recent New York Times “guest essay,” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s embattled general manager, expresses the naïve hope that “new operas by living composers” can make opera “new again.” And he blames critics for being “negative or at times dismissive.” In fact, recent Met seasons have highlighted operas in English composed by Americans. But they’re all recent (the Met still ignores Marc Blitzstein’s Regina [1948], arguably the grandest American opera after Porgy and Bess) and debatable in merit. Works like Terence Blanchard’s Champion and The Fire Shut Up in My Bones, however touted today, will not endure: their craftmanship is makeshift; there is no lineage at hand. And the standard repertoire is increasingly hard to cast with singers capable of projecting musical drama into a 3,850-seat house. In fact, the vast Met auditorium is today an albatross, an emblem of financial duress and artistic crisis.  

Of all the many might-have-beens, among the most tantalizing involves Lawrence Tibbett, who seemed a candidate to take over the Met in 1950 – the year an Austrian, Rudolf Bing, was appointed general manager. Though retired from the stage, Tibbett was still widely famous, arguably the foremost singing actor ever produced in the US. As a Verdi baritone, he had more than held his own with pre-eminent Italians. He had starred in Hollywood and on commercial radio, had sung many dozens of recitals annually in cities of every size.  American-born, American-made, he embodied a pioneer archetype. 

And, no less than Henry Krehbiel [who wrote that opera in the US would remain “experimental” unless and until American works were promoted and embraced], Tibbett was prophetic. He declared opera in America “in grave danger,” entrapped by a “star system” enforced by a social elite. He advocated American opera and opera in English. He urged the substitution of smaller auditoriums, shedding the glamour of opera houses in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco far exceeding in scale European norms. He resisted touring abroad or Italianizing his name. He called for financial incentives for American opera composers. He wrote that “the whole structure of opera must by Americanized if Americans are to support it in the long run.” Ignoring a critical consensus marginalizing George Gershwin as a dilettante, the claimed that Rhapsody in Blue surpassed “in real emotional musical quality half of the arias of standard operatic composers whose works are the backbone of every Metropolitan season.” Singing Gershwin and Cole Porter, Sigmund Romberg and Jerome Kern, singing Lieder in English, he embodied a democratic range of style and repertoire decades ahead of the game. A voluble public advocate, he thundered: “Be yourself! Stop posing! Appreciate the things that lie at your doorstep!”

To access an NPR “More than Music” episode about Lawrence Tibbett, American opera, and “singing Black,” click here. 

Lawrence Tibbett and Fate of American Opera Today

“Singing Black” — Tibbett in “The Emperor Jones” at the Met (1933)

Today’s online edition of “The American Scholar” carries my essay on Lawrence Tibbett and how he “prophesied today’s Metropolitan Opera crisis.” You can read it here. An extract follows:

In a recent New York Times “guest essay,” Peter Gelb, the Metropolitan Opera’s embattled general manager, expresses the naïve hope that “new operas by living composers” can make opera “new again.” And he blames critics for being “negative or at times dismissive.” In fact, recent Met seasons have highlighted operas in English composed by Americans. But they’re all recent (the Met still ignores Marc Blitzstein’s Regina [1948], arguably the grandest American opera after Porgy and Bess) and debatable in merit. Works like Terence Blanchard’s Champion and The Fire Shut Up in My Bones, however touted today, will not endure: their craftmanship is makeshift; there is no lineage at hand. And the standard repertoire is increasingly hard to cast with singers capable of projecting musical drama into a 3,850-seat house. In fact, the vast Met auditorium is today an albatross, an emblem of financial duress and artistic crisis.  

Of all the many might-have-beens, among the most tantalizing involves Lawrence Tibbett, who seemed a candidate to take over the Met in 1950 – the year an Austrian, Rudolf Bing, was appointed general manager. Though retired from the stage, Tibbett was still widely famous, arguably the foremost singing actor ever produced in the US. As a Verdi baritone, he had more than held his own with pre-eminent Italians. He had starred in Hollywood and on commercial radio, had sung many dozens of recitals annually in cities of every size.  American-born, American-made, he embodied a pioneer archetype. 

And, no less than Henry Krehbiel [who wrote that opera in the US would remain “experimental” unless and until American works were promoted and embraced], Tibbett was prophetic. He declared opera in America “in grave danger,” entrapped by a “star system” enforced by a social elite. He advocated American opera and opera in English. He urged the substitution of smaller auditoriums, shedding the glamour of opera houses in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco far exceeding in scale European norms. He resisted touring abroad or Italianizing his name. He called for financial incentives for American opera composers. He wrote that “the whole structure of opera must by Americanized if Americans are to support it in the long run.” Ignoring a critical consensus marginalizing George Gershwin as a dilettante, the claimed that Rhapsody in Blue surpassed “in real emotional musical quality half of the arias of standard operatic composers whose works are the backbone of every Metropolitan season.” Singing Gershwin and Cole Porter, Sigmund Romberg and Jerome Kern, singing Lieder in English, he embodied a democratic range of style and repertoire decades ahead of the game. A voluble public advocate, he thundered: “Be yourself! Stop posing! Appreciate the things that lie at your doorstep!”

To access an NPR “More than Music” episode about Lawrence Tibbett, American opera, and “singing Black,” click here. 

“Rachmaninoff In His Own Words” – A Man of Firm Identity and Principle

A dear friend of mine died recently of a sudden heart attack. I discovered that the only music I found consoling was the slow movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto – the 1929 recording with the composer at the piano, accompanied by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.

I am of course aware that many people find this piece maudlin. But Rachmaninoff the pianist is never maudlin. He projects sadness with implacable poise. His expressive inflections are never momentary inspirations; they are governed by a designated template of feeling. He projects a sovereign personality as admirable and imposing as any I can think of in the creative arts.

A new book of Rachmaninoff’s essays and interviews – Sergei Rachmaninoff In His Own Words, edited by Geoffrey Norris – amplifies these observations. I even discovered Rachmaninoff writing about that 1929 recording. But nothing in the book stirred me as profoundly as its preamble. In 1932, Rachmaninoff was one of more than a hundred individuals invited to define “music.” He responded with seven lines in Russian. Translated, they read:

What is music? How can one define it?
Music is a calm moonlight night; a rustling of summer foliage; music is the distant peal of bells at eveningtide. Music is born only in the heart and it appeals only to the heart. It is love!
The Sister of music is Poetry and the Mother is Sorrow! 

In the articles and interviews here assembled, Rachmaninoff also testifies that he approaches music “from within.” He writes: “Music should bring relief.” Conducting an orchestra, he experiences an “inner calm”; it reminds him of “driving a motorcar.”

The 1929 concerto recording with Stokowski is a supreme collaboration.  Their exchanges are seamless, clairvoyant. Unlike the mix in many modern recordings, the piano is never an exaggerated presence – and Rachmaninoff delights in circulating under the orchestra, then mercurially arising. In the Adagio sostenuto second movement, the famous Stokowski legato – a lava flow – is an ideal medium of expression. The coda to the first movement is also exceptional, with Stokowski’s hyper-sensitive cellos inspiring Rachmaninoff’s sonic imagination. In Rachmaninoff in his Own Words, Stokowski’s orchestra is repeatedly praised as nonpareil. Of the recording of his Second Concerto, Rachmaninoff says (in The Gramophone, April 1931):

“To make records with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra is as thrilling an experience as any artist could desire. Unquestionably, they are the finest orchestral combination in the world: even the famous New York Philharmonic, which you heard in London under Toscanini last summer, must, I think, take second place. Only by working with the Philadelphians both as soloist and conductor, as has been my privilege, can one fully realise and appreciate their perfection of ensemble. 

“Recording my own [Second] Concerto with this orchestra was an unique event. Apart from the fact that I am the only pianist who has played with them for the gramophone, it is very rarely that an artist, whether as soloist or composer, is gratified by hearing his work accompanied and interpreted with so much sympathetic co-operation, such perfection of detail and balance between piano and orchestra. These discs, like all those made by the Philadelphians, were recorded in a concert hall, where we played exactly as though we were giving a public performance. Naturally, this method ensures the most realistic results, but in any case, no studio exists, even in America, that could accommodate an orchestra of a hundred and ten players. 

“Their efficiency is almost incredible. In England I hear constant complaints that your orchestras suffer always from under-rehearsal. The Philadelphia Orchestra, on the other hand, have attained such a standard of excellence that they produce the finest results with the minimum of preliminary work. Recently, I conducted their superb recording of my symphony poem, “The Isle of the Dead”, now published in a Victor album of three records which play for about twenty-two minutes. After no more than two rehearsals the orchestra were ready for the microphone, and the entire work was completed in less than four hours.”

Two themes that pervade Rachmaninoff’s public discourse are American music education, which he finds inadequate, and modern music, which he disdains. He praises American orchestras and audiences unstintingly. He calls New York City the “musical capital of the world.” He appreciates the “bold private initiative” of the Boks, who fund the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Curtis Institute. But gifted American music students, he finds, are underserved. They cannot even afford to attend important concerts, because no tickets are set aside for them. And there is no national conservatory, no institutionalization of “the highest and the purest in music radiating from the center.” 

(In Russia — including Soviet Russia — an integrated musical community of performers and composers, orchestras and conservatories instilled tradition. Nothing of that sort ever emerged in the United States – although Jeannette Thurber, in founding her National Conservatory of Music and in 1892 naming Antonin Dvorak to lead it, had that in mind. Thurber’s efforts to secure federal funding went nowhere. And Dvorak’s complaints about American music education forecast Rachmaninoff’s.)

In a 1925 Musical Courier article, we learn something pertinent about Rachmaninoff’s regard for another “radiating center” — Konstantin Stanislavsky’s legendary Moscow Art Theatre: 

“Rachmaninoff is very devoted to the theatre. In his youth he was a great admirer of Chekhov. He is a friend of the players of the Moscow Art Theatre. I remember what a stimulating sight I saw one afternoon in the Artists’ room after a Rachmaninoff concert at Carnegie Hall, New York. There stood in a corner a huge glittering laurel wreath in green, gold and white, presented to the master pianist with the cordial greetings of the Moscow Art Theatre. The actors and actresses from the greatest theatre of the world led by stalwart and handsome Stanislavsky, almost surrounded him. Some of the men kissed him, and he them in real Russian style. They exchanged a few words in the tempo of a chant before an altar. Then for a minute or two they spoke not a word. The Moscow players simply looked at the great Moscow musician in reverent silence. Such devotion, such poise, such childlike sincerity, I never saw before, even on the stage of the Moscow Art Theatre. The actors surpassed themselves. Then they gently walked away one by one, like so many children, sad at parting from their playmate. The master’s gaze was fixed on them, and he waved at the last actor who looked back as he went out of the door. I watched this bit of drama in life with breathless wonder, and I am not ashamed to admit that the sanctity of the scene moved me to tears. And from the quick movement of his eyelids I could notice that the master’s eyes were not altogether dry either. I shall never forget this one act play of the Moscow Art Theatre, Rachmaninoff playing the part of the hero. It was more than a play, it was a sacrament.” 

But perhaps the most abiding motif in Sergei Rachmaninoff In His Own Words is Rachmaninoff’s contempt for musical modernism. For him, beauty in music is an absolute criterion, and music’s supreme ingredient is melody. In this regard, he pursues a polemic whose best-known manifestation, in English-speaking countries, was once Constant Lambert’s Music Ho – A Study of Music in Decline (1934). Intolerant of Igor Stravinsky, Lambert’s anoints Jean Sibelius his contemporary composer of choice. 

But Sibelius wrestled with modernism in his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, anxious and insecure, trying to catch up. Serge Prokofiev, too, strove to be a modernist in competition with Stravinsky. Then he called it quits, returning to Russia and his own Russian Romantic roots.  

In 1930, Rachmaninoff revealingly recalled meeting Tchaikovsky “some three years before he died. . . . Tchaikovsky at that time was already world-famous, and honoured by everybody, but he remained unspoiled. He was one of the most charming artists and men I ever met. He had an unequalled delicacy of mind. He was modest, as all really great people are, and simple, as very few are. (I met only one other man who at all resembled him, and that was [Anton] Chekhov.)” 

Judging from his interviews and essays, Rachmaninoff was never tortured by modernism. He never wrestled with its challenge to tradition. A man of firm identity and principle, he simply waited it out. 

And his music prevails.

Related blogs: Rachmaninoff “the homesick composer”; Rachmaninoff’s valedictory “Symphonic Dances.”