Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 32

Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” Symphony — Part Two

My last posting introduced the Hiawatha Melodrama, proposing a radical re-interpretation of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. As a postscript, here is a visual rendering of the Melodrama’s fifth movement by my colleague Peter Bogdanoff. #

As concocted by myself and the Dvorak scholar Mike Beckerman, the Melodrama aligns text from Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha” with music by Dvorak. The world premiere recording is part of a new themed “Dvorak and America” Naxos CD (Naxos 8.559777) featuring PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. #

The starting point of the Melodrama is Dvorak’s testimony that the middle movements of his symphony were inspired by Longfellow’s poem. In effect, the Melodrama suggests what a Dvorak “Hiawatha” cantata or tone poem might have sounded like (and Dvorak aspired to compose such a work). It also establishes some of the extra-musical imagery that fired Dvorak’s musical imagination. The New World Symphony, being quasi-programmatic, marks a transition toward the tone poems and operas Dvorak would compose upon returning to Prague; he never composed another symphony. #

“The Hunting of Pau-Puk-Keewis,” the fifth of the Melodrama’s six movements, includes sung as well as spoken text (at 3:30). Beckerman comments: “While this at first may seem far-fetched, one must remember that as soon as he returned to Bohemia in 1895, Dvorak composed a series of tone poems based on the ballads of K. J. Erben. In at least one of these, he set down the poem, line by line, beneath the music – so this process was not alien to him.” #

Here is a related visual presentation for the Largo and the Scherzo of the New World Symphony. #

I next explore “Dvorak and America” as an Aspen Institute seminar (July 9-10, as a DePauw University festival (Oct. 27 to Nov. 2), and as a Columbus Symphony festival (Feb. 20-21). #

Dvorak’s “Hiawatha” Symphony

Is Dvorak’s New World Symphony a programmatic Hiawatha symphony? With the Dvorak scholar Mike Beckerman, I’ve composed a 35-minute Hiawatha Melodrama for narrator and orchestra that combines Dvorak with verses from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. A new Naxos CD, “Dvorak and America,” includes the world premiere recording, with PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. Here’s movement five, in which “The Hunting of Pau-Puk-Keewis” aligns with the finale of Dvorak’s symphony:
http://www.artsjournal.com/uq/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Hiawathalongest.mp3 #

Dvorak himself cited The Song of Hiawatha as a source of inspiration for his American symphony of 1893. Beckerman has closely studied points of correspondence between episodes of the symphony and episodes of Longfellow’s poem. He’s also demonstrated that the Larghetto from Dvorak’s Violin Sonatina is a portrait of Minnehaha, Hiawatha’s wife. #

Our Melodrama is in five movements:

1.A spoken Prologue

2.Hiawatha’s Wooing (the music of which mainly draws on the Larghetto)

3.Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (which presents the Scherzo from Dvorak’s symphony as a tone poem)

4.The Dearth of Minnehaha (using Dvorak’s Largo)

5.The Hunting of Pau-Puk –Keewis (Dvorak’s finale)

6.Epilogue: Hiawatha’s Departure (applying the coda of Dvorak’s symphony, which with its dirge and apotheosis can only be programmatic) #

Our first goal in creating the Hiawatha Melodrama is to create a viable concert work. As a work of scholarship, the Melodrama suggests what a Hiawatha opera or cantata by Dvorak might have sounded like (and Dvorak wanted to compose a Hiawatha opera or cantata). Finally, the Melodrama apprises us what images and stories were in Dvorak’s head when he composed his symphony. Certainly Dvorak powerfully empathized with the fate of the Indian, and of the African-American – and, however subliminally, this element of compassion is at the root of the symphony’s enduring appeal. #

By way of exploring Dvorak’s American style, the same Naxos CD includes Dvorak’s American Suite, the Larghetto from the Violin Sonatina, and a couple of Humoresques – as well as three terrific Indianist cameos by Arthur Farwell, who called himself the first composer “to take up Dvorak’s challenge.” #

That Dvorak became an American composer during his astounding New World sojourn of 1892 to 1895 can no longer be doubted or denied. #

A Mexican Composer Whose Time Will Come

Gustav Mahler predicted, “My time will come” – and he was right. Anton Bruckner is another composer whose posthumous fame, decades after his death, far eclipsed scattered acclaim during his lifetime. #

The relative paucity of post-1930 canonized symphonic repertoire impels the question: who else is awaiting such discovery? The surest candidate I know is Silvestre Revueltas, whose dates are 1899 to 1940. #

Revueltas is sui generis, impossible to place, an unfathomably original talent. His birthplace – rural Mexico – is the surest point of orientation: the shrieking clarinets, shrill trumpets, and booming tubas of the village bandas of his childhood generated a galvanizing, instantly recognizable Revueltas sound. He partakes of nationalism, modernism, populism, and the cultural politics of the far left. His music is both “accessible” and challenging, surprising, provocative. #

The most obvious reason Revueltas is not famous is painful to concede: it’s that we don’t expect Mexico to produce great international figures in classical music. And Mexican composers of Revueltas’s generation did not enjoy the publishing, performance, and recording resources of composers in other lands. Another reason Revueltas is not famous is that he was eclipsed in his lifetime by his compatriot Carlos Chavez, a card-carrying modernist who enjoyed the allegiance of Aaron Copland and other Americans, and was a compelling organizational factor in Mexican culture. Revueltas had nothing like Chavez’s practical acumen. #

And there is a third obstacle to absorbing Revueltas’s importance – he did not compose in the “normal” forms. Of his big symphonic works, the only one of substantial length – La noche de los Mayas – is an ersatz symphony concocted after Revueltas’s death by the conductor José Ives Limantour; it vulgarizes and misrepresents Revueltas. #

There is, however, a great Revueltas film score some thirty minutes long: Redes (1935). The film itself is a flawed masterpiece, an iconic product of the Mexican Revolution. Like that Revolution, Redes is unfinished. Its collaborators – including Revueltas, the master photographer Paul Strand, and the Austrian director Fred Zinnemann (in Mexico en route to Hollywood) — lacked a final, consummating vision. The script – about a fishermen’s uprising — is ordinary. The actors are amateurs (many are actual fishermen). But where score, cinematography, and story align, Redes is one of the peak achievements in wedding music and the moving image. #

Thanks to Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Foundation, we now have a beautiful restored print of Redes. What is not restored is the crude 1930s soundtrack. And yet, because in Redes music rarely overlaps dialogue, it’s possible to screen the film with a live orchestra performing Revueltas’s score. The new WCF print has so far been thus employed by the Louisville Orchestra, the Austin Symphony, and most recently by PostClassical Ensemble of Washington, D.C. (which I co-founded a decade ago). There will surely be more such performances to come – because they are revelatory. #

The film’s epic sequences are three. All eschew dialogue and all other sound except music. The first is the funeral of a child. The second is when the fish come in. The third is the film’s finale – the fishermen mount their boats and surge towards the village where they’ll demand their rights. You can see the funeral (with the original soundtrack) here. You can sample the very ending of the film (begin at 5:10) here. But the sequence that trumps every other is the big catch, with the fishermen – iconic Mexican faces, captured by Strand against an iconic Mexican sky – hauling their nets. The nets (“Redes” means nets) are deployed by Strand as a metaphor for ensnared lives. Strand makes a visual connection from the rope of the nets to the veins articulating toiling human arms. Revueltas’s score seizes on both these metaphors, and transcends them with a stately brass chorale. The resulting montage is suddenly heroic, a universal statement of human resilience. #

The autonomy of Revueltas’s musical set-pieces is such that they more discourse upon than accompany Strand’s poetic visual imagery. Accordingly, Angel Gil-Ordonez disdained a click-track conducting PostClassical Ensemble at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center (College Park) May 10 – an event supported by DC’s enterprising Mexican Cultural Institute, Alonso Ancira (CEO of Altos Hornos de México), the Chevron Corporation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Angel wanted to conduct the music as music. In the finale, where a panting figure in the orchestra alludes to heaving oar-strokes, he succeeded in pacing the film’s cumulative crescendo more successfully than Revueltas himself, conducting the soundtrack in a Mexican studio. It is a cinematic ending like no other. #

What I Thought I Wrote about “Porgy and Bess”

Anyone who writes books learns sooner or later that a book has no fixed meaning. #

In my case, the discovery came in 1987, with Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music. The book was reviled and proscribed, extolled and prescribed. This was nothing less than I had expected, having assaulted a high icon. What I had not expected was that so many would read a book different from the one I thought I had written. I recall only one review – among many dozens – that felicitously encapsulated my notion of a social and institutional cultural history using the Toscanini cult as a metaphor for 20th century decline. And that appeared in a scholarly journal far from the mainstream. I also liked the alte Edward Said summarizing, in the New York Times Book Review, that I had composed a “Jeremiad.” But Said proceeded to deplore my failure to consider the cultural critiques of Theodor Adorno. I had written a long book and Said had doubtless read a bound galley with no index – and so (as I pointed out in a letter published by the Book Review) had overlooked my long section on Adorno. (Some years later Said shared with me his puzzlement that he had never again been invited to review for the New York Times.) #

My most recent opus — “On My Way”: The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and Porgy and Bess (W.W. Norton) – has received sympathetic notices in publications like the Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Times Literary Supplement. I do not complain. Those reviewers enjoyed what they carefully read. They committed no errors of fact or omission. And the meaning of my book to them as is valid as its meaning to me. More than that: I learned things about my book reading how they had read it. #

But only this week did I discover a review that more or less precisely coincided with my own reading of On My Way. It appeared in the Bulletin of my alma mater, Swarthmore College, and was written by a faculty member: Andrew Hauze. Hauze’s review concluded: #

“While Mamoulian’s direction often took liberties with the text, his changes to the ending of Porgy are downright authorial. By ‘recasting the novella’s dour ending as a redemptive mass finale, Mamoulian nudged Porgy toward a “miracle play” paradigm,’ writes Horowitz. Vital changes were made to the original script in Mamoulian’s hand, including many of the final scene’s most powerful lines (particularly memorable once George Gershwin set them to music). Beyond the brilliant direction of the original production, Mamoulian is, in the end, responsible for the redemptive tone of both play and opera.” #

That, I would say, is the spine of my book as I conceived it, more succinctly expressed than I expressed it. What may get lost in the detail of my account is that Mamoulian in later years regarded as his highest achievement his 1926 Rochester staging of Maeterlinck’s miracle play Sister Beatrice – and that (as Hauze’s review stresses) in style, tone, and content this production links directly to Porgy as refashioned by Mamoulian a year later. #

Musical theater is typically a collaborative enterprise with many authors. That Rouben Mamoulian, directing Porgy and Bess in 1935, contributed something to the constitution of the most important American opera is itself unsurprising. What I discovered is that Mamoulian’s contribution, stemming from his late revisions to the Dubose and Dorothy Heyward play Porgy, was fundamental – and far from typical. He must in the future be considered an indispensable contributor to the creative vision of Gershwin’s opera, not merely its first director. #

Wagner at Coney Island

In the 1890s, when Wagnerism was at its height, Wagner’s American disciple Anton Seidl (1850-1898) would lead concerts fourteen times a week at Coney Island. He mainly conducted Wagner. The concerts, at the seaside Brighton Beach Music Pavilion (capacity 3,000), included children’s programs and the Seidl Society children’s chorus. Seidl himself composed a work for the children, “Good Night,” the manuscript of which resides at the Seidl Archives at Columbia University. #

“Good Night” received its first performance since 1898 a few weeks ago as part of “Scenes from Childhood,” a concert presented by PostClassical Ensemble (I’m the Executive Director) at DC’s Dumbarton Church. The chorus was Washington National Cathedral Choir of Boys and Girls (Michael McCarthy, conductor), conducted on this occasion by PCE Music Director Angel Gil-Ordonez. It sounded like
http://www.artsjournal.com/uq/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/PCE-Seidl_2.mp3 #

The story of the Seidl Society is one of the strangest and most stirring in the history of classical music in America. It was a singular Brooklyn women’s club, founded by Laura Langford. In summer, the Society presented Seidl and his orchestra at Brighton Beach. In winter, the Society’s Seidl concerts at the Brooklyn Academy of Music were more numerous than those of the New York Philharmonic, also conducted by Seidl, across the river. Propagating Wagner as a spiritual therapy, the Society hosted working women and African-American orphans, presented lectures on social and spiritual betterment, reserved special railroad cars so unescorted women could attend the Brighton Beach concerts; its goal — aborted by Seidl’s death — was a Brooklyn Bayreuth. #

Seidl had aspirations to compose, and was working on a Hiawatha opera when he died. Though he produced numerous transcriptions for orchestra, he left only a single composition of note: “Good Night,” composed and premiered in 1895. I discovered the score when researching my book Wagner Nights: An American History at Columbia University’s Seidl Archive. (I’ve also written about Seidl and Langford in Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle). The text, a poem by Edna Dean Proctor, reads: #

Good-night! Good-night! The morn will light

The east before the dawn,

And stars arise to gem the skies

When these have westward gone.

Good-night! And sweet be thy repose

Through all their shining way,

Till darkness goes, and bird and rose,

With rapture greet the day, –

Good-night! #

“Good Night” was last performed on May 2, 1898 — the Seidl Society’s memorial concert for Anton Seidl. Emil Fischer, a much-loved bass in his final American performance, sang Wotan’s Farwell. The program also included the Dream Music from Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel, Liszt’s Les preludes and Concerto pathetique (arranged for piano and orchestra), and, to close, Siegfried’s Funeral Music, for which the audience was asked to stand. Langford rose to explain that, as Fischer was sailing for Europe that very day, Wotan’s Farewell would be repositioned near the beginning of the evening. This short speech effectively ended Laura Langford’s public career. A Seidl monument at Brighton Beach was advocated by the Eagle; none was erected. The Seidl Society ceased to exist. #

For the PostClassical Ensemble performance, the piano accompaniment for “Good Night” was transcribed (and performed) for solo harp by Jacqueline Pollauf. #

Shostakovich Decoded

The Pacific Symphony, an orchestra that does things differently, mounted a “Shostakovich Decoded” festival over the past two weeks in collaboration with Chapman University. There were more than a dozen events, including a conference on Stalin and culture, an exhibit of Stalinist kitsch, master classes and lectures, and a potent variety of concerts. The central participants included Solomon Volkov, the author of Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, and the actor David Prather, whose re-enactments of Shostakovich remembering were a tour de force. #

Writing the script for the core symphonic program, I hit upon the idea of juxtaposing Shostakovich’s dissident memoirs, from the 1970s, with a couple of official pronouncements from the 1940s. So in addition to assigning Prather various readings from Testimony, we filmed him, in scarred black and white, reading Party Line statements about the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies he later contradicted; it looked like this and this. #

Dissidence of another kind was furnished by Alexander Toradze, whose performance of the Shostakovich Second Piano Concerto unforgettably re-imagined the slow movement, marked “Andante” by the composer, as a painstricken Largo. #

But the main event, on the same concert (with Toradze and Prager and Volkov), was Carl St. Clair’s profoundly felt reading of Shostakovich’s cathartic response to Stalin’s death in 1953: the Tenth Symphony, with its avalanche of lamentation and purgative self-assertion. Prather prepared the orchestra’s eclectic Orange County audience to engage with this intense act of personal and communal symphonic therapy; St. Clair drove the symphony home. #

As eyewitnesses to history, Volkov and Toradze furnished gripping reminiscences of Soviet cultural vagaries. Volkov and Shostakovich, we learned, had assumed that Testimony – with its contemptuous disparagements of Stalin — could be published in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union. But Stalin’s reputation remained sufficiently unsettled that the manuscript had to be smuggled to the West. Toradze shared with us the circumstances of his impromptu defection in 1983 – when on tour with a Moscow orchestra in Spain he was neither permitted to perform (the Spanish presenters had not been apprised that a piano soloist would be furnished) nor to return home. #

Not the least important component of the festival was the orchestra’s collaboration with Chapman University. The notion of collaborating with colleges, universities, or conservatories remains novel within the American symphonic community. And yet, as orchestras rethink their institutional mission, and absorb the advantages of thematic programming (as practiced by museums, for instance), alliances of this kind can vitally expand their reach and impact. On this occasion, Chapman – galvanized by its dynamic Chancellor, Daniele Struppa — seized “Shostakovich Decoded” as a cross-disciplinary pedagogical opportunity, using public programming to explore culture and totalitarianism with a full week of campus activities binding music and liberal arts. #

“Shostakovich Decoded” was the latest installment in the Pacific Symphony’s “Music Unwound” series, underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment of the Humanities. No other American orchestra strives so tirelessly to discover new concert formats aligned with new audience needs. It deserves to be a model for the nation. #

My “Porgy and Bess” Playlist

I invite you to sample (in sequence): #

1.[Beginning of track 1:] From the Gershwin Memorial Concert at the Hollywood Bowl (Sept. 8, 1937), Otto Klemperer conducting his LA Phil in his own slow-motion transcription of Gershwin’s Second Prelude, ingeniously transforming it into a dirge for the deceased composer. Like so many European-born classical musicians in the US, Klemperer more surely recognized Gershwin’s genius than his American-born colleagues. #

2.[Track 1 at 12:03:] That the Met’s Lawrence Tibbett should have been the first singer to record Porgy’s songs (rather than Todd Duncan, the superb black baritone from the original case) was properly controversial in 1935. And yet Tibbett’s heartbreaking version of “Oh Bess, Oh Where’s My Bess” will never be surpassed. And the US has never produced a greater operatic baritone than Lawrence Tibbett. #

3.[Track 1 at 22:00:] Jascha Heifetz was another European-born Gershwin admirer; he wanted a violin concerto from Gershwin. He never got one – but Heifetz’s own suite of Porgy tunes comprises an impressive and original tribute. It also elicited some of Heifetz’s best recordings, in which Slavic pathos is mated with a quicksilver jazz sensibility. #

4.[Track 2 at 3:56:] The “cultural fluidity” of Porgy – of Gershwin generally – is such that Porgy’s songs can be sung any number of ways. Avon Long, who excelled as Sporting Life, applied his breathy high tenor to a terrific 1942 version of “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’” with the Leo Reisman Orchestra. #

5.[Track 4 at 8:00:] My desert-island Porgy recording, also from that Hollywood Bowl Memorial concert: Ruby Elzy, the original Serena, singing “My Man’s Gone Now” for the departed composer. Elzy, who herself died young, was planning to tackle Aida. At the same time, her high-ranging soprano has some Billie Holiday in it. This amazing performance documents (among other things) the interpretive freedom enjoyed by the first performers of Gershwin’s opera. #

Leonard Bernstein’s Letters

Reviewing the new book The Leonard Bernstein Letters in last Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, I write: #

In June 2011, the estate of Leonard Bernstein donated to the Library of Congress 1,800 letters that had been sealed at his death. As the library’s Bernstein Collection already included more than 15,000 letters, postcards and telegrams, the resulting amalgamation obviously called for a book—and here it is, 23 years after the composer-conductor’s death at the age of 72. #

As composers go, the champion letter writer was Ferruccio Busoni, whose correspondence serenely discloses an acute humanistic observer and hypnotic personality. If their letters are less splendidly literary, Wagner and Schönberg were composers whose galvanizing complexity of affect was copiously mirrored in words on paper. Tchaikovsky’s letters are remarkable acts of intimate self-revelation bearing on his sexuality. The Bernstein correspondence partakes somewhat of all these qualities but without attaining a comparable density of disclosure on any front. Mainly his letters, as selected and edited by Nigel Simeone, are less about music or ideas or the wide world than they are about Bernstein’s breathless aspirations and mercurial ups and downs: ecstasies of fulfillment in rapid alternation with disappointment, backaches and “big, soggy depressions.” #

The bulk of the letters predates his 1969 departure from the helm of the New York Philharmonic. That is, they include the period of his tutelage by the composer Aaron Copland and the conductors Serge Koussevitzky and Fritz Reiner; of his Broadway triumphs “On the Town” and “West Side Story”; of his Philharmonic music directorship (1958-69); and of his 1951 marriage to Felicia Montealegre. Bernstein’s sexuality is a dominant topic, frankly and seriously discussed. Young Lennie was gay, and so were many of his friends. In letters variously airy and anguished, he craves company and describes himself as chronically lonely. “You may remember my chief weakness—my love for people,” he confides to a Harvard classmate in 1939. “I need them all the time—every moment. It’s something that perhaps you cannot understand: but I cannot spend one day alone without becoming utterly depressed.” Nor can he figure out whether to compose symphonies or shows, or to conduct. Koussevitzky and the composer Roy Harris advise him that he needs a non-Jewish last name. “I suppose I haven’t approached [Koussevitzky’s] model for me sufficiently,” he tells Copland in 1942. “I haven’t changed my name, or learned to schmoos, or become a dignified continental. The hell with it.” #

Of his amours, the Hollywood actor Farley Granger writes to him with a ¬special sweetness. Dimitri Mitropoulos (1896- 1960), Bernstein’s too little remembered predecessor on the Philharmonic podium, was a major conductor who did nothing to conceal his homosexuality. He writes to Bernstein in the late 1930s, when they became intimate: “Have I really failed to you, have I really left you a void after our last meeting? This thought makes me crazy, and so happy that I dare not believe it. . . . Dear boy, if you only could know how alone I am.” In a 1939 letter, Mitropoulos writes: “I am very happy to hear that you are working hard . . . I see you too come to the position now to have problems: musical, artistic, social and spiritual—and the worst of all, sexual. Unfortunately I am too far away to help—to give you good advice.” #

In this context of high-pitched conflict and confusion, Bernstein’s correspondence shows Copland as a lifelong pillar. “Dear A,” Bernstein writes in 1967, “I suppose if there’s one person on earth who is at the centre of my life, it’s you; and day after day I recognize in my living your presence, your laugh, your peculiar mixture of intensity and calm . . . I hope you live forever. A long strong hug.” Bernstein’s 1979 Kennedy Center tribute to Copland (included here) extols “the Copland grin, the Copland giggle, the Copland wit and warmth, and width of his embrace.” Bernstein also recorded that he had only once seen Copland weep—“at a Bette Davis movie that caused me to oo and ah and marvel and groan ‘NO, NO, NO’ at the unbearable climax.” Copland, Bernstein continues, turned to him, “his cheeks awash with tears, and sobbed ‘Can’t you shut up?’ ” #

The union with the actress Felicia Montealegre was an experiment. During the long and twisting courtship, his analyst, Marketa Morris, had written in 1947: “You are seeing Felicia and the day she leaves you have to see a boy. The same old pattern. You can’t give up.” One month after the wedding, writing to Copland, he finds marriage “fascinating . . . the most interesting thing I have ever done, though there are times when one’s interest must be that of a person in an audience, or one would go mad. It is full of compensations and rewards, and reveals more to me about myself than anything else ever has.” Around the same time, Felicia writes to him, acknowledging “you are a homosexual and may never change.” But, she continues: “Let’s try and see what happens if you are free to do as you like, but without guilt and confession, please! . . . Our marriage is not based on passion but on tenderness and mutual respect. Why not have them?” #

Three years later, Bernstein wrote to his sister, Shirley: “Now I feel such a certainty about [Felicia and myself]—I know there’s a real future involving a great comradeship, a house, children, travel, sharing, and such a tenderness as I have rarely felt.” The birth of their first child, Jamie, in 1952, deepened everything. Years later, in 1976, Bernstein left to live with a male lover; Felicia cursed him and predicted, “You’re going to die a bitter and lonely old man.” When she died of cancer in 1978, Bernstein blamed himself. In a 1987 letter to his business manager, Harry Kraut, Bernstein alludes to “those ever-decreasing moments when I like myself.” #

The letters here collected contain surprisingly few musical nuggets. There is new information about the gestation of “West Side Story” and about frustrations regarding the ways in which it was recorded and filmed; writing to Arthur Laurents in 1961, Bernstein decries the “line-by-shot destruction” of Laurents’s book “by the H’wood exegists,” making “painfully obvious” the “line, however fine, between whatever art is, and non-art.” Two heated 1955 letters to the composer Marc Blitzstein memorably record Bernstein’s failed attempts to get La Scala to mount Blitzstein’s formidable American grand opera “Regina”—which Victor de Sabata, La Scala’s artistic director, liked so much that he would perform the number “Watching my gal watch me” at the piano. But the most substantive “musical” letter is not by Bernstein but by a contemporary, the composer/performer/teacher Gunther Schuller, commenting on Bernstein’s presentation of “modern music” on a 1957 “Omnibus” TV show. In 10 closely reasoned paragraphs, Mr. Schuller gently chides Bernstein for fashioning a narrative slighting the contributions of Debussy and Webern. #

The reason this letter interests is that Bernstein, master educator that he was, favored schematized readings of musical history that could be perilously reductionist (as when his allegiance to Copland’s modernist moment led him to patronize Ives and Gershwin as gifted dilettantes). That in his correspondence Bernstein seems so hurried feels relevant. Among the most resonant phrases to be found in these letters are “the whole desperate race with time” (1947) and the “panic at time running out before all our works can be finished” (1981). #

Ultimately reading “The Leonard Bernstein Letters” is a discomfiting experience; one feels like a voyeur peeking at Bernstein’s own discomfiture. Bernstein’s versatility and ambition were such that he spent a lot of time trying to figure out who he was—which also meant searching for American music and for the future of music generally. This book doesn’t resolve Bernstein’s quest. But it’s an invaluable resource, and the quest itself continues to fascinate and to matter. #

“I’m a Didactic Writer”

Last Fall, I was interviewed for a full hour by Chris Johnson of Houston Public Radio and invited to comment not only on my book Moral Fire, but more broadly on the state of culture in today’s America. #

Chris suggested that my book, though situated in the late Gilded Age, was “chockfull of lessons – but that might not be the word you would use.” #

Oh yes it is, I replied — I’m a didactic writer who writes books “partly out of disgruntlement with the 21st century.” #

So I wound up talking about Jon Stewart and Bill Maher, about the cooptation of moral outrage (a potential dimension of art) by cynical and opportunistic politicians, about the marginalization of books, all kinds of things. #

The Bulletin of the Society of American Music has now printed an edited transcript of the interview and you can read it here. #

How Did “Porgy and Bess” Originate?

“Where did the big set pieces of Porgy and Bess originate? With Rouben Mamoulian, it seems,” writes Steven Suskin in his copious Playbill.com review of my new book “On My Way” – The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess.” #

Well, thank you, Mr. Suskin. As a book has no fixed meaning, it’s often informative (and sometimes not) to discover how others read what you yourself thought and wrote. My book is about many things. It’s a Mamoulian book (arguing for his rediscovery as a forgotten hero of Broadway and Hollywood). It’s a Gershwin book (arguing that we must stop patronizing him as a dilettante of genius). And it’s a Porgy and Bess book (revealing that the opera’s most famous line – “Bring my goat!” – and the entirety of its redemptive ending were fashioned by Mamoulian eight years before the premiere in 1935). #

Yes, the opera’s big set pieces – Robbins’ funeral, the hurricane, “O Lawd I’m on My Way” — actually originate with Porgy the play as directed and refashioned by Mamoulian in 1927. The reason we didn’t know that before is that all published versions of the play omit Mamoulian’s crucial revisions – which have only now come to light with the opening of the Mamoulian Archives at the Library of Congress. #

As an author, I’m grateful for any attention I get, and the reviews of “On My Way” have been uniformly gratifying. But the core of my book, as I myself read it, happens to be those set pieces, and the revelation that it was Mamoulian who transformed what had been a snapshot of a regional black subculture (DuBose Heyward’s novel Porgy, with its languorous depressed ending) into an epic human saga (with a redemptive finale utterly at odds with Heyward’s sentimentality and anthropological verisimilitude). #

Porgy and Bess as we know it could never have happened without Rouben Mamoulian. #