Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 33

Dvorak and Hiawatha

Two wicked questions to ask conductors of Dvorak’s New World Symphony are: “Why does the coda begin with a dirge?” and “Why is there a diminuendo on the final chord?” The musical content of the finale in no way dictates these developments. Obviously, a story of some kind – a “program” – is in play. The dirge is a pentatonic “Indian” theme with timpani taps. It is restated as an apotheosis. Then there is a robust arpeggiated tonic cadence and that final E major chord fading to silence. Any conductor who performs this music without a story in mind has failed the composer. #

But what story? Any story that fits will do. But there is an obvious story already at hand: “Hiawatha’s Leavetaking” from Longfellow’s famous poem. Hiawatha sails his birch canoe into the purple mists of evening, “to the regions of the home-wind, to the land of the hereafter!” That, to my ears, is what the coda to the New World Symphony describes. #

That Dvorak and Longfellow have something to do with one another is indisputable. The composer told New York reporters that the middle movements of his symphony were inspired by The Song of Hiawatha. We know that the opening of the Scherzo was envisioned as the whirling, spinning Dance of Pau-Puk Keewis at Hiawatha’s wedding feast. And, thanks to the music historian Michael Beckerman, we are pretty sure that Minnehaha’s death in winter inspired the heart-stopping middle segment – with pizzicato double basses – of the great Largo. #

The alignment of Longfellow’s poem with Dvorak’s symphony is not only suggestive but supremely poetic. Dvorak was already stirred by The Song of Hiawatha when in Prague he read it in Czech. In New York, he re-read it in English (a language he knew). His crowning aspiration, in America, was to compose a Hiawatha opera or cantata. But it was not to be. #

My own obsession with Dvorak’s Longfellow fixation long ago compelled me to create (with the video artist Peter Bogdanoff) a visual presentation for the Largo and Scherzo of Dvorak’s symphony, culling text from Longfellow’s poem and imagery from iconic nineteenth century American painters (Bierstadt, Church, Remington, Catlin, etc.); it’s been used by the New York Philharmonic and many other orchestras. I’ve also, with Mike Beckerman, created a nine-minute “Hiawatha Melodrama” for narrator and orchestra, also widely performed. (You can see and hear it by scrolling to 35 minutes at http://vimeo.com/27663049.) This combination of textual and musical fragments has now begotten a full-fledged, self-sufficient concert work: a 32-minute Hiawatha Melodrama in five parts: “Hiawatha’s Wooing,” “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast,” “The Death of Minnehaha,” “The Slaying of Pau-Puk Keewis,” and — an Epilogue — “Hiawatha’s Leavetaking.” The music is drawn from Dvorak’s New World Symphony and American Suite. In addition, I’ve composed sections myself, using themes from Dvorak’s symphony and suite, and also from the Larghetto (“Indian Lament”) of his Violin Sonatina, which happens to be a picture of Minnehaha. #

The new Hiawatha Melodrama was premiered to a standing ovation last weekend by PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez (who also orchestrated the sections I’ve composed), with Kevin Deas as narrator. We’ve also just recorded it for Naxos, for a themed CD (“Dvorak and America”) that will also include music by Arthur Farwell (who as the leader of the “Indianists” movement in music called himself the “first composer to take up Dvorak’s challenge”). #

In other words: I have just made my debut as a composer. As it happens, I’ve also just finished, in draft, my first novel: The Disciple: A Tale of New York in the Gilded Age. The novel is historical fiction – the story of Anton Seidl, who spearheaded the Wagnerism movement in America. At the moment, I don’t see myself writing any more “non-fiction” books. I’m a novelist now — and a composer, with more projects to come. Though I cannot explain these sudden personal and professional developments, they can’t be unrelated. #

The Met’s New Parsifal

The current Times Literary Supplement UK), not available online, includes my review of the Met’s exceptional new Parsifal, as follows: #

In the program book for the new Parsifal at the Metropolitan Opera, the French Canadian director Francois Girard comments that his goal “is to engage a modern audience and to let this piece say things that matter, without kidnapping it and throwing it into a new context, which I think is being done to Wagner too often.” This prescription, which could be anodyne, proves triumphant. But the triumph begins not on stage, but in the pit with the conductor: Daniele Gatti. For more than three decades, James Levine has owned Parsifal at the Met. Levine’s Parsifal is satisfyingly weighty, but also ponderous and stiff. Gatti, who previously had only led Aida and Madama Butterfly in New York, offers a Parsifal vision of exceptional altitude and breadth. Though the range of tempo is great, for the most part the Gatti Parsifal is uncommonly slow. He also obtains a remarkable range of timbre and dynamics from the Met’s superb orchestra, including myriad soft gradations and a wondrous depth of tone for the big moments. The many cadential retards (not to be found in Levine’s reading) include climaxes – in particular, the act one transformation scene and the Good Friday music — that shake the stage. #

Gatti’s deliberation registers a detailed investment in text and incident that constitutes both an invitation and challenge to his singers. They are up to it. The revelation is the tragic stature of Peter Mattei’s Amfortas. This character, so obviously the opera’s “Tristan” with his deliriums of pain and longing for death, typically lacks anything like Tristan’s nobility: we only encounter him at the destitute tail end of his life’s journey. Mattei enters not in the usual litter, but leaning heavily on a pair of knights, dragging his feet, contorting his face and body, a picture of unendurable physical pain. His act one monologue, reshaped by Gatti, becomes intimately narrative rather than exclamatory. When he elevates the Grail cup it quakes with the palsy and shudder of his infirmity. Then, unassisted, he raises himself and staggers off, momentarily uplifted by the residual idealism of his youth, when in seeking to defeat the renegade Klingsor he instead relinquished the Grail knights’ Holy Spear. On his heaving, spastic shoulders, Mattei’s exiting Amfortas bears his entire story and fate. #

Jonas Kaufmann’s Parsifal is a model of histrionic art; he registers Parsifal’s evolution by exquisite degrees. His initial persona — confronted by the swan he has thoughtlessly shot – is amazingly plausible, all insolence and confusion, hands in pockets, shoulders twitching and shrugging. In act two, comprehending his mother’s death and Amfortas’s pain, he achingly embodies the profundity of empathy that is here Wagner’s message. In act three, entering in possession of the recaptured Spear, this Parsifal is yet not fully mature — so that his transformation into an agent of redemption is something we get to witness. Kaufmann’s beautiful tenor admittedly lacks something in heft for a house of great size, but he gloriously sustains the long lines that Gatti extracts. Rene Pape remains an incomparable Gurnemanz. If Katarina Dalayman’s Kundry is an interpretation less textured with verbal and gestural nuance than the others, she is a strong vocal and dramatic presence. #

Girard, whose production was previously seen in Lyon a year ago, directed the films The Red Violin, Silk, and Thirty-two Short Films about Glenn Gould. He has staged Siegfried for the Canadian Opera, and written and directed for Cirque du Soleil. The Girard Parsifal is notably unencumbered by a Hall of the Grail Knights, by flowers or flowered maidens, or by Parsifal’s suit of armor. In fact, there are few sets to speak of. The contributions of the video designer Peter Flaherty are vital and poetic. The towering backdrop for act two is a bloody cleft. The blood courses downward in a variegated stream (1,600 gallons per performance, according to a production note). Sulfurous hues intensity Kundry’s seduction scene; when Parsifal seizes the purloined Spear, at the act’s close, the red stream turns milky white. In acts one and three, the transformation sequences are video only, an animated abstraction of globes and light-shafts – and it is enough. The most anomalous feature of this Parsifal is the constant presence of groups of women. What they are doing in act one I do not know. But the direction taken by this motif is knowable: at the close, it is the redeemed Kundry, not Parsifal, who raises the Grail Cup – and then expires, cradled by Gurnemanz, released at last from her life of Schopenhauerean restlessness and pain. This ending does not register as strange. Rather, it indelibly excites compassion – and compassion is what Parsifal is about. #

Any Parsifal production sleights aspects of so multifarious a stage work. At the Met, with a Parsifal history going back to 1903, Parsifal has never been about decadence, racism, or anti-Semitism. In recent decades, the innocence of the Met Parsifal has sometimes seemed a loss or incongruity. Not this time. Peter Gelb, as General Manager, has steadily campaigned for a more populist, less elite image for opera at the Met. Entrusting the Ring of the Nibelung to the stage magician Robert Lepage, Gelb created a monster, false and moribund. This Parsifal is a true and living incarnation. Close up, the Mattei and Kaufmann performances, in particular, should transfer superbly to movie theatres on March 2, when the Saturday matinee is transmitted live throughout the US and most of Western Europe, including the UK. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Wagner’s genius. #

Schubert Uncorked

Readers of this blog in the New York vicinity will (I hope) be interested to know that I’m producing a take-no-prisoners concert event – “Schubert Uncorked” – this Friday night at The Stone, John Zorn’s club on the Lower East Side. There’s a single, one-hour set at 8 pm. Tickets are $10 at the door. The performers are David Taylor and Bill Wolfram. #

Taylor is a subversive bass trombonist – Gunther Schuller once called him “one of the world’s three greatest instrumentalists” (he didn’t say who the other two were). #

Wolfram is one of our most outstanding American pianists – whom I featured in my book The Ivory Trade as the quintessential competition loser who deserved to win. #

To sample Taylor’s one-of-a kind Schubert (and to learn more about Friday’s event): click here. #

To hear Taylor play Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata on the trombone, click here. #

To read my previous blog on David Taylor, click here. #

To hear Taylor and Wolfram play the Arpeggione, two late Schubert songs, two late Schubert Klavierstucke, and the Allegretto in C minor, come to Friday’s concert. #

Interpreting Shostakovich

PostClassical Ensemble’s month-long “Interpreting Shostakovich” festival, in DC, began with a screening of Grigori Kozintsev’s 1970 film version of King Lear, with music by Shostakovich and Boris Pasternak’s Shakespeare translation. If ever there was a film that cannot be viewed at home in TV, this is it. On the wide screen of the National Gallery of Art’s film auditorium, and a superb sound system, Kozinstev’s Lear was the most powerful Shakespeare experience I can recall, on stage or screen. #

In the course of a long and interesting post-film discussion, an audience member praised Kozintsev for his fidelity to Shakespeare. But I do not find the film Shakespearean. Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov is an obvious point of inspiration. Like Boris, the Kozintsev Lear is in equal measure personal and epic. Lear himself – his repentance, sorrow, and death — is Boris. Mussorgsky’s truth-telling Holy Fool is Lear’s Fool. But Shakespeare’s play contains nothing like the film’s vast wastelands – rock and dirt and sullen skies – or its huddled or processional human hordes, a complex mass protagonist at once powerful, dangerous, and pathetic. No less than Mussorgsky, Shostakovich underlines the magnitude of the terrain and its strewn inhabitants. Serendipitously, late Shakespeare here mates with late Shostakovich: a musical idiom as spare and dissonant as the imagery and action at hand. #

“Shostakovich and film” was one focus of our festival. Its featured participants included the Shostakovich scholar Solomon Volkov, who in his book Shostakovich and Stalin explores the Soviet dictator’s hands-on management of Soviet film, and speculates that Shostakovich’s usefulness as a film composer insured his survival. The festival booklet included a seminal essay, by Peter Rollberg and Roy Guenther (both of George Washington University), arguing the importance of Shostakovich’s film scores as a fresh and vital topic, notwithstanding the composer’s own denigration of this component of his creative output. #

The National Gallery of Art showed three other Shostakovich-scored films, including – at the opposite extreme from Lear – Joris Ivens’ 1954 documentary Song of the Rivers, in which workers of the world unite for more than 90 minutes. Shostakovich’s potboiler music includes a proletarian song (words by Bertolt Brecht) in the style of Eisler, performed by Paul Robeson. #

We also showed Tony Palmer’s 1988 film adaptation of Volkov’s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich, starring Ben Kingsley as the harrowed composer. Both Palmer and Volkov were on hand to comment. The film concludes with a fantasy: Stalin posthumously visits the dying Shostakovich and claims, “you needed me.” Shostakovich, in the book Testimony, admits no such thing; he treats Stalin with hatred and contempt as a bloodthirsty philistine. But Volkov agrees with Palmer’s Stalin. Stalin, in Volkov’s view, was a master propagandist who stage-managed the sensational success of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony in the West. #

The festival’s music was supplied by violinist Dmitri Berlinski, the cellist Andrei Tchekmazov, the pianist George Vatchnadze, and PostClassical Ensemble conducted by Angel Gil-Ordonez. Rudolf Barshai’s string orchestra transcription of Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet was unforgettably reshaped by Gil-Ordonez as a Brucknerian essay in sorrowful breadth and repose – a reading in which the Washington Post’s Stephen Brookes plausibly found “unearthly luminosity.” #

An ongoing debate, permeating the festival, questioned whether such iconic Shostakovich creations as the Eighth Quartet are necessarily to be understood and experienced in the context of the Stalinist conditions that imposed their morbidity. I am old enough to remember a time when Shostakovich was widely perceived in the West as a composer whose precocious genius was distorted and diluted by Soviet aesthetic dictates. (The New York Times obituary called him a loyal Communist.) After that, conventional wisdom – influenced by Testimony – shifted toward an appreciation of Shostakovich as a subversive chronicler of Soviet suffering, an ironist whose double meanings were endlessly exhumed. In Volkov’s view, such readings as Gil-Ordonez’s in DC (which he called “better than Barshai”) suggest a new chapter in Shostakovich reception history, canonizing the composer with scant lingering regard for the political circumstances shadowing his odyssey. #

In any event, three decades after Shostakovich’s death, his music continues to resonate disturbingly. Pertinent, it seems to me, is Shostakovich’s discomfort (in Testimony) with a Stravinsky “personality flaw” – that he “always spoke only for himself.” Shostakovich also says, in Testimony: “Meaning in music – that must sound very strange for most people. . . . What was the composer trying to say? . . . The questions are naïve, of course, but despite their naivete and crudity, they definitely merit being asked. And I would add to them, for instance: Can music attack evil? Can it make man stop and think? Can it cry out and thereby draw man’s attention to various vile acts to which he has grown accustomed?” #

The twentieth-century view that saw Stravinsky and Schoenberg towering over the contemporary musical landscape has never seemed more remote. #

Moral Fire and Mitt Romney

As readers of this blog know, I am the author of a recently published book titled “Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America’s Fin-de-Siecle.” My topic is culture as an agent of moral empowerment. That is: my portraits are of four late nineteenth century Americans who believed that exposure to Beethoven and/or Wagner made people “better” – more humane, more compassionate. This is, I argue, a notion far out of fashion – and yet pertinent today. #

Last week I received an email from a colleague – an American historian – inquiring if reviewers of Moral Fire “got it.” I wrote back that the reviews have been uniformly favorable, but cursory. Only one reviewer (in the Wall Street Journal) had expressed a caveat. She was disconcerted that I did not seem bothered that Henry Higginson, Laura Langford, and Henry Krehbiel were elitist “paternalists.” This caveat initially perplexed me because Moral Fire emphasizes that Higginson, Langford, and Krehbiel were democrats. That is: as inventor, owner, and operator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Higginson reserved 25 cent tickets for all performances. As founder of the Seidl Society (a remarkable Brooklyn women’s club that presented Wagner at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and at Coney Island), Langford brought working women and orphans to her Brighton Beach concerts (which were even less expensive than Higginson’s at Symphony Hall). As the “dean” of New York music critics, Krehbiel opined that the Dahomians at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition (despised and caricatured by other writers) were “amazingly ingenious” musicians, more rhythmically sophisticated than “Berlioz in his supremest efforts with his army of drummers.” #

In the context of the late Gilded Age, an “elitist” would be , e.g., John Sullivan Dwight, whose Harvard Musical Association concerts were only attendable by members of the Harvard Musical Association. No less than Higginson or Krehbiel, Dwight believed that Beethoven was morally empowering. But he feared the rabble; Boston’s Irish seemed uneducable to him. #

Higginson, Langford, and Krehbiel, by comparison, were zealous democratic pedagogues. Higginson delighted in the variety of his patrons at Symphony Hall (a classless auditorium without boxes). Langford’s Society pioneered in presenting lectures with orchestra. Krehbiel wrote the most widely used primer for musical laymen. They shared a conviction that learning and (especially) the arts would spread sweetness and light. #

That Higginson, Langford, and Krehbiel can nonetheless be read as elitists is a function of their language and convictions resituated in our twenty-first century. Persons educated and (especially) cultivated, they believed, were better persons. Beethoven’s symphonies, as experienced by Higginson and Krehbiel, inculcated humanity. Parsifal, as experienced by Langford, inculcated compassion. #

The uses of “education” are otherwise understood today. When educators and politicians talk about education, they talk about jobs and about the path to professional status and income. There is no talk, as in the late Gilded Age, of education as a catalyst for character, and of status thereby conferred. #

Higginson, who cared about the wellbeing of his city and of his nation about as much as any single human being could, wrote and lectured about “citizenship.” What kinds of citizens comprise our electorate today? I am a cultural historian, inexpert in the history of government and politics. My impression, for what it’s worth, is that the pertinent machinery of propaganda is more pervasive and sophisticated than ever before – that the electorate has never been more manipulable. Education, which could counteract Fox News, is today redefined by learning standards and standardized multiple choice tests. Mitt Romney, in the third Presidential debate, recast himself as amenable and non-confrontational as a strategy to woo women. It seems to have worked. His credibility generally – his status – partly depends on his documented capacity to amass wealth. #

When Romney speaks of education in terms of the high rankings enjoyed by Massachusetts schools when he was governor, he is not talking about education as I understand it. What I understand is that he opposes the NEA, the NEH, and PBS. Higginson (who, like Krehbiel, never graduated from college) elucidated an educational ideal different from Romney’s when he wrote that the Eroica Symphony “opens the flood-gates.” “The wail of grief, and then the sympathy which should comfort the sufferer. The wonderful funeral dirge, so solemn, so full, so deep, so splendid, and always with courage and comfort. The delightful march home from the grave in the scherzo . . . and then [in the finale] the climax of the melody, where the gates of heaven open, and we see the angels singing and reaching their hands to us with perfect welcome. No words are of any avail, and never does that passage of entire relief and joy come to me without tears – and I wait for it through life, and hear it, and wonder.” #

Another exemplar of Moral Fire from late nineteenth century America is the composer Antonin Dvorak, hired by Jeannette Thurber to direct her National Conservatory of Music. Mrs. Thurber was a fervent, if unsuccessful, advocate of federal funding for the arts. (So was Dvorak.) She inspired Dvorak to help American composers find an “American” voice. Krehbiel eagerly abetted this effort. The notion of American cultural identity embedded in Dvorak’s New World Symphony is one that embraces African Americans and Native Americans as iconic Americans. Dvorak came to this view via moral fire: a butcher’s son raised within a Hapsburg minority, he compassionately identified with the poor and disenfranchised. #

Last spring, the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra presented a “Dvorak and America’ festival exploring the message of Dvorak’s New World Symphony. JoAnn Falletta, the orchestra’s music director, later wrote: “What was truly astonishing was that many [concert-goers] said that the symphony was completely changed for them — revealed as a work with deep literary roots and steeped in Dvorak’s empathy for the cultural world of Native Americans and African Americans. The composer himself emerged not only as a consummate artist but as a great humanitarian and visionary.” #

The crux of this testimonial is that Dvorak’s symphony matters because it conveys a moral message that is timeless and inspirational. I would call Buffalo’s festival an act of education. #

P.S.: For more on Romney’s corporate view of American exceptionalism, and its educational content, see E. L. Doctorow’s “Narrative C” in the Winter 2012 Daedalus. #

Kurt Weill and Darwinian Adaptation

My topic has ever been cultural transplantation – the fate of classical music when exported from Europe to America. Of the composers America has imported, Kurt Weill is a special case. In Berlin, Weill’s defining success was The Threepenny Opera, to a scathing anti-capitalist libretto by Bertolt Brecht. In America, he became a Broadway composer whose big hits were Lady in the Dark (1941, with Ira Gershwin and Moss Hart) and One Touch of Venus (1943, with Ogden Nash and S. J. Perelman). #

The late David Drew, the first major Weill scholar in the English-speaking world, unforgettably explored the riddle of the “two Weills.” “The difference between Weill up to 1934 and Weill after 1940 is not attributable to any development which could be described as normal,” Drew wrote in 1980. “While some notable artists have simply stopped creating at a certain stage in their careers and a few have put an end to their lives, Weill is perhaps the only one to have done away with his old creative self in order to make way for a new one.” #

A revisionist “one-Weill” narrative, however, is now the conventional wisdom. In his new “Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform,” the music historian Stephen Hinton has subtly and magisterially enshrined the view that Weill in America maintained the same plateau of inspiration and originality that made his reputation abroad. For the general reader, Ethan Mordden has produced “Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya” – which I reviewed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. #

If Weill had an enduring anchor, it necessarily had something to do with the legendary composer/pianist Ferruccio Busoni, with whom he studied in Berlin, and whose memory he ever revered. Hinton’s book nails the Weill-Busoni connection. Mordden’s does not. As for the one-Weill thesis, I have no doubt that this dialectical response to David Drew will sooner or later produce a response in turn. But Hinton’s book will remain a benchmark. #

Weill’s was a creative personality always in flux, and so will be his reputation. Few composers offer as captivating a study in adaptation. He is a veritably Darwinian phenomenon. #

(I write about Weill’s American adaptation in my own Artists in Exile.) #

Recapturing Moral Vision (cont’d)

As readers of this blog know, I was recently amazed to find myself talking on the radio for 20 minutes about my new book “Moral Fire” in what turned out to be a completely unhurried exchange with ample time for thought. That was on Boston’s WGBH, thanks to Brian Bell. #

Now, thanks to Chris Johnson, Houston public radio has broadcast an even longer, even more expansive interview – 50 minutes of me waxing nostalgic about public discourse and institutional achievement during the late Gilded Age. #

I frankly confess that I adore this interview, especially the last 10 minutes beginning at 41:22, where I’m asked what it all means for TODAY. I found myself saying that moral passion has in our new century been “co-opted.” I talk about the riddle that the visionaries of late Victorian times seem no longer replicable. I talk about how a bygone world can inspire and instruct. I talk about the shrinking cultural vocabulary of a shrinking readership for books. And I quote the favorite sentences from my book, which read: #

“If the Met’s screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs in the 1890s are in fact unthinkable today, it is partly because we mistrust high feeling. Our children avidly specialize in vicarious forms of electronic interpersonal diversion. Our laptops and televisions ensnare us in a surrogate world that shuns all but facile passions; only Jon Stewart and Bill Maher share moments of moral outrage disguised as comedy.” #

For the most recent review of “Moral Fire, in The Wall Street Journal, click here. #

For the correct URL for the Boston Globe review (vs. the one I posted), click here. #

For a “political” speech transcending politics and attaining a gravitas rare in what passes for public discourse today, click here. #

Jon Stewart and Moral Fire

As I have occasion to remark in my new book Moral Fire, moral passion is a phenomenon little glimpsed in public life nowadays, unless you happen to be a devotee of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Typically, moral passion as purveyed by politicians and the “media” is opportunistic and shallow, if not wholly counterfeit. #

My book celebrates practitioners of moral passion in late 19th century America, when it was more mattered than today. More specifically, I explore four individuals for whom the notion that culture – that is, music, literature, the visual arts – is morally uplifting was more than a Victorian canard. #

My first chapter remembers Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Higginson’s belief that Beethoven made people more humane was profound and true – at least for Higginson himself. His concept of “useful citizenry” was to amass a fortune so he could give it away for the betterment of the city of Boston. Though often misportrayed as a Brahmin snob, Higginson was not born to wealth. A cultural democrat, he set aside tickets for 25 cents – even in 1881 a modest sum – for all Boston Symphony concerts and public rehearsals. His friend Bliss Perry testified that “to his true comrades,” Higginson “was like a lover.” This capacity for affection, for honest intimacy, pervades many a startling Higginson letter. His singular range of close acquaintances – from J. P. Morgan to Henry James, whom he called “Harry” – anchored the man and his heroic scope of achievement. #

Thanks of Boston’s WGBH, I recently enjoyed an opportunity to talk about Higginson on the air for more than 20 minutes – an unhurried exchange with time enough for thought. Brian Bell, who is himself writing a history of the Boston Symphony, asked the big questions, including: Where in the arts are there individuals of such colossal personal vision today? And if we can’t find any, what happened to them? #

I’m additionally grateful to Brian for posting the interview online – and here it is. #

In Praise of Moral Fire

My new book Moral Fire is praised in today’s Boston Globe by Jeremy Eichler for its “elegant and warmly sympathetic” portrait of Henry Higginson, who invented, owned, and operated the Boston Symphony. I’m fortunate to have my book reviewed by Jeremy – and Boston is fortunate to be the rare American city with a classical-music press of stature. #

I visit Boston in early October to give the Elson Lecture at Harvard on rethinking orchestras as purveyors of the humanities – that’s 5:15 pm Tuesday October 9. And the next day, also at Harvard, I take part in a conversation about the future of classical music in the US – with Jeremy, Lloyd Schwartz, and Boston Symphony CEO Mark Volpe. #

That orchestras are moving toward “contextualized” programming – a preoccupation of this blog — seems to me both necessary and indisputable. Stay tuned. #

Mixing Art and Music (cont’d): Mixing Food and Music

Now that the always enterprising Anne Midgette has posted my blog objecting to live Bach cello suites imposed on visitors to the Corcoran Gallery, I’ve realized that I failed to indicate that this was not a museum concert. Rather, the cellist was offered as an embellishment to dining in the atrium. Johann Sebastian was enlisted to cheerfully accompany both Frederick Church’s “Niagara” and the consumption of soup, sandwiches, and pasta. #

As it happens, the day after I attempted to ponder “Niagara” at the Corcoran I had lunch at DC’s University Club with my son Bernie and a friend. We were talking — arguing, actually — about Bach at the Corcoran when Bernie and I became aware of the Waltz from Rachmaninoff’s Suite No. 2 for two pianos. Our luncheon soundtrack — previously comprising anodyne Baroque selections — had suddenly obtruded. Both Bernie (who adores Vladimir Horowitz and hence the piano music of Rachmaninoff) and I found the excellent rendition of this two-piano showpiece, with its combination of virtuoso keyboard velocity and Slavic pathos, irresistibly compelling. #

Is Rachmaninoff’s two-piano Waltz appropriate restaurant music? I am reasonably certain that Rachmaninoff (who was no snob; he admired Art Ttaum) would have said: no way. #

And I would go further. I would say that the Club music menu, on this occasion, insidiously (if inadvertently) miscategorized Rachmaninoff (as many do) as a merely confectionary composer. #