Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 6

Why Colorado Mahlerfest Matters

Ken Woods plies his guitar at “Electric Liederland” [Photo: Mark Bobb]

The most profound music ever conceived by Richard Strauss may be Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings. Composed in 1945 when Strauss was 81 years old, it memorializes the cultural inheritance symbolized by the opera houses of Munich, Dresden, and Vienna, all bombed to rubble during what Strauss called “the most terrible period in human history . . .  the 12-year reign of bestiality, ignorance, and anti-culture under the greatest animals.” He also wrote: “I am beside myself. . . . There can be no consolation.”

At the thirty-seventh annual Colorado Mahlerfest in Boulder last week, Kenneth Woods prefaced Metamorphosen with Wagner’s overture to Die Meistersinger – a sublime embodiment of what those opera houses were about. The impact of this juxtaposition was devastating — not least because we ourselves increasingly inhabit a time of “ignorance and anti-culture”.  

At 55, Woods is the rare conductor with an exceptional curatorial gift. He has been Mahlerfest music director since 2015. His regular job is conducting the English Symphony Orchestra in Worcester (UK). He lives in Carduff, where his wife plays in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Born and trained in the US, he has never been offered an American podium of consequence.

The 2024 Mahlerfest packed seven concerts and an all-day symposium into five days. As Woods also plays electric guitar and sings, one evening, “Electric Liederland” in a Boulder rock/folk venue, included edgy riffs on Mahler’s Ninth and Das Lied von der Erde. Another included on its second half “Visions of Childhood,” a sui generis suite for chamber ensemble and soprano conceived by Woods and previously presented in concerts and a recording by the English Symphony Orchestra. It comprised:

–The opening measures of Mahler’s Fourth (arr. Woods)

–Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll (arr. Woods)

–Two songs from Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel (arr. Woods)

–Schubert’s “The Trout,” alternating the song with the variations for piano quintet (arr. Woods)

–Mahler’s “Das irdische Leben” (arr. Woods)

–Schubert’s variations on “Death and the Maiden” (arr. Woods)

–Mahler’s “Das himmlische Leben” (arr. Woods)

The cumulative impact was magical.

The festival’s big pieces (on separate symphonic programs) were Strauss’s Alpine Symphony and Mahler’s Symphony No. 4. (I contributed a symposium talk on Mahler and Schubert; my Mahlerei for bass trombone and chamber ensemble, recasting the Scherzo of Mahler’s Fourth, was also performed.)

Woods’s reading of the Mahler symphony was both spacious and sharply detailed. Of his 94 players, the vast majority are Mahlerfest regulars. They come from as far away as New York and Texas, Canada and Korea. They relish this composer’s sweet portamentos and prickly dynamics. They also manifest a rare degree of pride and engagement. The excitement with which they applaud Woods, and one another, reminds me of the South Dakota Symphony – another orchestra mainly comprised of ardent out-of-towners who don’t come for the money. 

Introducing the Meistersinger Overture at a pre-concert talk, Woods highlighted a salient feature of Wagner’s inexhaustible opera: its celebration of cultural community. And this, finally, is what the Colorado Mahlerfest is about. As with last year’s memorable reading of the Resurrection Symphony, the audience for Mahler’s Fourth was strikingly inter-generational, including local families for whom Mahlerfest is an annual ritual. The week also included a mountain hike, open rehearsals, and various breakfasts and dinners.

I will have something to say about my Mahlerei – magnificently realized by Woods and David Taylor – in a forthcoming post. Next year, the featured symphony will be No. 6. In 2026, the Mahlerfest topic will be “Mahler the Man” — explored via the Symphony No. 9 and a staging of the full-length play I have extrapolated from my novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York.

“Ripeness Is All” — Is the South Dakota Symphony’s Mahler Really Better than Klaus Makela and the Oslo Phil?

Many readers have responded to a series of recent blogs in which I’ve pondered the bewildering appointment of Klaus Makela, age 28, to become music director of the Chicago Symphony beginning in 2027. Some have expressed incredulity that I prefer Delta David Gier’s South Dakota Symphony reading of Mahler’s Third to Makela’s with his superb Oslo Philharmonic.

As it happens, South Dakota has just released a livestream video of its Mahler 3. And Makela’s sits on youtube right here. So you can make the comparison yourself. 

As I wrote: to my ears, Makela’s performance of the vast finale sounds “enraptured by the ardor of youth,” whereas Gier’s sounds “enraptured by the pathos of humanity.”  That is: Gier’s is the deeper, more Mahlerian reading.

Now that I have had the opportunity to revisit both performances, I find the disparity in impact even greater than I had thought. They are in fact fundamentally different. 

During his years as a New York Philharmonic assistant conductor, Gier heard Leonard Bernstein rehearse Mahler’s finale. It’s marked “Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden” (slow, peaceful, heartfelt). Mahler’s original title was “What Love Tells Me” – “love” here designating agape: Christian love for one’s fellow beings. Gier vividly recalls that Bernstein challenged the assistant conductors in the hall to describe the movement in a single word. They all failed. The correct answer was “pain.”

Perhaps this exchange says more about Bernstein than Mahler. And yet Mahler’s sublime finale unquestionably recalls the first movement’s catastrophic upheavals. Have a listen to Gier’s reading. From measure one, it maps an interior trajectory gradually intensified on a vast scale, an odyssey of feeling in which pain is revisited and healed. In Makela’s reading, I detect no searing pain, no inner trajectory. The smile he occasionally flashes seems to me inappropriate. And I find myself aware of the push and tug of the conductor’s baton. It is Gier’s performance that sounds organic, egoless.

At the very beginning of the movement, the South Dakota string choir conveys a stirring gravitas. Mahler instructs “molto expressivo,” “Sehr gebunden,” “Sehr ausdrucksvoll gesungen” (very expressively sung). His portatos and portamentos, dynamic swells, Luftpause  – all hallmarks of Mahler style – are more vitally and fully rendered than by the Oslo players. The pianissimo cello song beginning on measure nine searingly intermingles beatitude and sorrow. That’s at 00:36. The second violins, who have been listening, confide a rapt response.

To hear the Oslo cellos and second violins, go to 1:16:19. These opening measures, led by Makela, sing a portentous song. But Mahler’s existential duress is silenced. 

Some people find this Mahler movement too long. The very ending follows a triumphant cadence with another, and another, and another, and another. In Makela’s performance, this sequence sounds distended – it could end sooner or later. In Gier’s performance, Mahler’s calibrated re-emphases sound right. And the final message is not a smile, but Mahler’s own superscript: “Behold my wounds: Let not one soul be lost.” 

If I am beating a dead horse, it must be beaten. Klaus Makela’s Chicago appointment coincides with his concurrent music directorship of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. Gier has lived in Sioux Falls since 2005. He is a civic force, an agent of communal identity. Again: age matters. He is 62.   

There is no denying that Makela’s is a great talent. As I have twice written: he seems to have been born with a baton in his crib. Orchestras adore him, and no wonder. There is also a panic to find young audiences, to brandish the imagery of youth. It is not his fault that his Mahler lacks ripeness. We should not expect him to simulate a maturity not yet his.

I ponder musical ripeness in a recent American Scholar article. Should you discover a pay-wall, I append what I wrote. My earlier American Scholar article on the South Dakota Symphony and the future of American classical music may be accessed here.

[From “Ripeness Is All,” as recently published online in The American Scholar:]

Today’s biggest controversy in classical music is the Chicago Symphony’s appointment of Klaus Makela, who will become music director in 2027-2028. He will concurrently take over Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra – one of the half dozen most eminent European ensembles. He will be all of 32 years old. 

No one can reasonably dispute Makela’s precocious talent. He seems to have been born with a baton in his crib. From a tender age, he trained with a legendary Finnish pedagogue: Jorma Panula. His subsequent professional trajectory has been meteoric. 

The attendant outcry takes three forms: that, beyond conducting concerts, Makela will lack the maturity (let alone the time) to furnish institutional vision; that he will be conducting too many pieces for the first time under a glaring spotlight; that, given his youth, his interpretations will lack “ripeness.”

The third reservation is the slipperiest – and ultimately the most momentous. It’s long been conventional wisdom that symphonic conductors mature slowly – that age suits them better than, say, singers or dancers or instrumentalists, all of whom practice demanding physical skills. And many a famous conductor has been most eminent when most old. Think of Arturo Toscanini, whose reputation peaked when he was in his eighties. Or Otto Klemperer, who acquired a commanding eminence gris when he was in his seventies. But what, exactly, does musical “ripeness” connote? How is it manifest in performance? And is it imperiled by our ever accelerating world of social media and AI?

I can think of an obvious example of exigent life experience transforming the recreative act. Wilhelm Furtwängler was with Toscanini the most celebrated symphonic conductor of the twentieth century. Because Furtwängler was a performer who channeled the moment, his World War II broadcast performances, from beleaguered Berlin, attain an apocalyptic intensity. And his postwar performances, commensurately, are beleaguered by pain. His 1951 Radio Cairo broadcast of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony does not resemble other readings – including Furtwängler’s own 1938 studio recording. The difference is the traumatic memory of war. The composer’s autobiographical heartache is transformed into a dire existential statement transcending the personal. The symphony’s most familiar melody – the first movement “love theme” – is taken so slowly that it changes meaning: it emanates a terminal Weltschmerz.

But I mainly find myself thinking of an artist I knew well, because I wrote a book about him. My Conversations with Arrau (1982) document many eventful meetings with Claudio Arrau beginning in 1978, when he was already 75 years old. Arrau had acquired an elite reputation as a concert pianist prone to tortuous introspection. Earlier in his career, he had been a dazzling virtuoso – and by all account a voluble conversationist. When I knew him, he had withdrawn from language. I observed: 

“Arrau is an effortful speaker. Sometimes, before answering a question, he will draw a breath and look away. His sentences break down when a phrase or name will not come, and the ensuing silences can seem dangerous. . . . It is really not far-fetched to surmise that for Arrau words and music occupy distinct personal realms, and that the pronounced civility of the first moderates the instinctual abandon of the second. His gentle manners, his fastidious attire, the artifacts that embellish his work environment – these suggest a striving for order whose musical equivalent is his absolute fidelity to the text, and whose adversary is a substratum of fire and ice. To witness Arrau performing the Liszt sonata is to know how thoroughly this substratum can obliterate his normal self-awareness. Even while sleep, the demons cast a trembling glow from behind his mildest public face. And they penetrate the timbre of his voice. . . . Arrau listens to his own recordings with visible discomfort; he perceive the clothes of civility being stripped away.”

A humbling specimen of Arrau’s mature artistry is a 1976 recording of “Chasse neige.” This is the last of Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes and, according to many, the most challenging to play. Liszt has fashioned a ruthless study in tremolo: the rapidfire alternation of notes or chords. To this he adds gigantic skips, upward and downward, in both hands. The tremolos are pedaled – a smearing effect promoting ambience. At the same time, the more notes the ear discerns, the more exciting – the more harrowing – the etude becomes.

Arrau’s virtuosity is paradoxically mated with patience. Because even in the midst of  chaos he never rushes, the clarity of attack remains exceptional. And because he perfected a technical approach to the piano stressing arm and shoulder weight, his tone remains characteristically plush – not chipped, not shallow – regardless of the frantic demands placed upon his fingers. No other rendering of this music, in my experience, is as thick with incident.

But the coup de grace occurs two and a half minutes into the piece, where Liszt – having unleashed a  barrage of oscillating chords pulverizing the extremes of treble and bass – writes “calmato,” “accentuato ed espressivo,” and “mezzo piano.” Here the left-hand tremolos cease, replaced by rapid chromatic scales racing upwards and down like dark breaths of wind. Under Arrau’s cushioned hands, the scales are streaked with pain. They momentarily sigh with exhaustion, and with an uncanny sadness of memory. They are the stilled human eye of an inhuman storm.

Arrau performed the music of Liszt throughout his long career. He studied with a distinguished Liszt pupil. He revered Liszt, identified with Liszt. He portrayed Liszt in a Mexican bio-pic. His earliest Liszt recordings date from the  1920s. But never before the 1960s will you hear anything like Arrau’s recording of “Chasse neige.” (Arrau himself once acknowledged to me: “Many people say I’m a ‘late developer.’”) The very keynote of this interpretation, clairvoyantly extrapolated by an artist already 73 years old, is retrospection. A famous 1840 painting of Liszt, by Josef Danhauser, situates him in a lushly appointed salon. George Sand, Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo, Nicolo Paganini, and Giacomo Rossini are all in attendance. A large bust of Beethoven sits atop the piano. As a conjurer’s recollection of Liszt in his element, revered by his contemporaries, reverencing his great forebear, Arrau’s “Chasse neige” far trumps Danhauser’s painting. Liszt’s “snow storm” resonates and expands; it jars open a bygone world of feeling and experience both conscious and subliminal. It exudes a veritable elixir of memory.

Could any young pianist or conductor accomplish such a feat? There are ways. Van Cliburn peaked at 23 when he won the 1958 Tchaikovsky International piano Competition. Upon landing in Moscow, he had asked to be driven to the Church of St. Basil. Standing snowy Red Square late at night, he thought his heart would stop. He identified the Moscow Conservatory, where the competition was held, with his hero Rachmaninoff, who had graduated with a gold medal in 1892. When he visited Tchaikovsky’s grave in Leningrad, he took some Russian earth to replant at Rachmaninoff’s grave in New York. He called the Russians “my people” and said, “I’ve never felt so at home anywhere in my life.” Living a dream, he moved with a clairvoyant sureness, touching outstretched hands, pledging friendship between nations. Performing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto, he built the first movement cadenza – the concerto’s central storm point, an upheaval of expanding force and sonority — with utter sureness: the tidal altitude and breath of its crest were dizzying. The leading Soviet pianists, on the competition jury, proclaimed him a genius. Cliburn’s filmed 1958 and 1960 Moscow performances of concertos by Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, nestled on youtube, document a young artist surrendering himself completely to the moment. Never again would Cliburn attain such heights of musical expression. And the Russia he knew, insulated from the West, still re-living its musical past, no longer exists. 

In 1962, the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition was begun in Forth Worth. To date, its most esteemed gold medalist was Radu Lupu – in 1966, when Lupu was 21 years old. Born in Rumania, he trained in Moscow. His earliest recordings already document an uncanny musical worldliness.  As a peerless exponent of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, Lupu all his life inhabited a bygone world. He shunned twentieth century music. He kept his own counsel. In fact, to the surprise and consternation of the Cliburn Foundation, he had pocketed his first prize and returned to Russia, refusing to undertake the high-profile concert tour prepared for him. Suppose that Klaus Makela had told his manager Jasper Parrott: Thank you very much, but I am not prepared to take over two of the world’s most prominent orchestras. That was Radu Lupu.

The winner of the most recent Cliburn competition is a Korean: Yunchan Lin, now twenty years old. He has catapulted into a major international career. As it happens, one of his acclaimed competition performances was of Liszt’s “Chasse-neige.” You can see and hear it on youtube. Lin has great fingers and he has heart. His rendition is riveting — never glib, never superficial. But it would be vain to look for anything like the scope of Claudio Arrau’s reading. Arrau’s Liszt echoes and re-echoes through corridors of time, a performance for the ages. For that matter: Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Cairo Radio recording of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony revealingly juxtaposes with Klaus Makela’s intensely entertaining Pathetique – I heard him conduct it with the New York Philharmonic in December 2022. The third movement march, in particular, memorably ignited. But it would be vain to look for anything like the pain and tragedy of Furtwängler’s reading. 

Will Makela and Lim attain ripeness? Consider: Franz Liszt was born in 1811, Claudio Arrau in 1903 – nine decades later. During the intervening century, many things changed. Nevertheless, Arrau was born (in Chillán, Chile) to a world without telephones, without airplanes or cars or radios. Later, he stayed put in Berlin, immersed in the cultural efflorescence of Weimar Germany. He later recalled: “I’m sure that the twenties in Berlin was one of the great blossomings of culture in history. The city offered so much in every field, and everything had a greater importance than in other places. . . .  You see, there was a great misery. Many people were starving. There were no jobs. Such times are always fertile. Everything was so difficult that people sought a better life in culture.”

And what if Arrau had been born, like Klaus Makela, in 1996? That’s 94 years after 1903 – about the same time-gap that separated Arrau from Liszt. And yet the century of change ending in 2000 documents an upheaval unprecedented and ongoing – what the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls “social acceleration.” Writing in 2013 (Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity), Rosa lists three “fundamental dimensions” of this phenomenon: technological, social, and “pace of life.” He predicts an “unbridled onward rush into an abyss,” possibly including nuclear or climatic catastrophes. He also predicts – accurately – “the diffusion at a furious pace of new diseases” and “new forms of political collapse.” Rosa does not highlight the arts. But socially accelerating atoms of human experience today undermine all previous understandings that art is necessarily appropriative; chaotically askew, they support the illusion that, locked in our disparate identities, we cannot know or speak for one another. What is more, a privatized, atomized lifestyle promotes neither arts patronage nor production. Rather, its diversion mode is the soundbite: particulate cultural matter; stranded arts particles. 

A month ago my own quest for anchorage inspired me to re-read Buddenbrooks (1901). How can one absorb that Thomas Mann was in his mid-twenties when he wrote this novel about a mercantile family history in northern Germany? It’s populated with men and women of all ages, from infancy to late infirmity. How could someone so young absorb so much experience? The only possible answer is that Buddenbrooks was written a very long time before social media and cell phones. No sooner did I share my bewilderment with colleagues and friends than I heard back from a prominent scholar who teaches at an eminent university. He had just shared Tristan und Isolde with his freshmen and encountered blank stares in response.

Currently, I’m working on a documentary film based on my book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War. So I am making my way through a nine-part Netflix series: “Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War.” The archival footage is gripping. Otherwise, this film is an exercise in instant gratification catering to short attention spans. Though an army of scholars has been assembled, the barrage of thirty-second soundbites from a multiplicity of sources pre-empts differing viewpoints. The story at hand becomes a centrist fable, implying a consensus of opinion where none exists: no questions, just answers. And the ubiquity of musical cliche – the soundtrack, which never stops to listen or reflect — turns it all into  melodrama: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin Wall – and Kharkov right now. 

Commensurately, cultural memory – for untold centuries, a precondition for creativity and appreciation of the creative act – risks becoming a stack of flashcards processed as media clips. Will sustained immersion in lineage and tradition remain an organic prerequisite for composition, interpretation, and reception?

Gloucester, in King Lear, counsels: “Ripeness is all.” Never has Shakespeare’s observation more resounded as an admonition.

A New Biography Ponders the Controversial Director of “Porgy and Bess”

 My Wall Street Journal review of Kurt Jensen’s new Rouben Mamoulian biography takes stock of a unique near-genius, perhaps the least known and appreciated American theater and film director of consequence.  

I came to Mamoulian (1897-1987) while writing my book on immigrants in the performing arts: Artists in Exile. The juxtaposed magnitude of his successes and failures confounded comprehension. Because Mamoulian was chronically meddlesome, it became obvious to me that more could be learned about his role in directing the premiere of Porgy and Bess on Broadway in 1935. 

When the Library of Congress finished cataloguing its vast Mamoulian Archive in 2007, I felt certain to find a smoking gun. And I did, almost immediately. It was the working script for the precursor to Gershwin’s opera: the Dorothy and DuBose Heyward play Porgy, directed by Mamoulian in 1927. All published versions of that script, I realized, omitted Mamoulian’s crucial changes. The outcome of my discovery was a book: “On My Way”: The Untold Story of Rouben Mamoulian, George Gershwin, and “Porgy and Bess.”

One of those changes was the ending, where Porgy picks himself up and exclaims “Bring my goat!” It was entirely Mamoulian’s. In effect, Mamoulian rewrote the character Porgy to make him an agent of redemption. (The Heywards’ Porgy sinks into obscurity.) Many blogs in this space have pondered the ramifications of this discovery – on how to understand Porgy and Bess; on how to (and not to) perform it. As I write in my review of the new Jensen biography: “We wind up with a different Porgy altogether: he’s become the moral compass of the community. And so he remains in Gershwin’s opera. In fact, Mamoulian wrote the words for the ending of play and opera both. Though the Gershwin Estate insists that Porgy and Bess be billed as ‘the Gershwins’,’ Ira Gershwin shared the lyrics with DuBose Heyward. And Rouben Mamoulian was no mere director.” 

I also write: 

“Mr. Jensen’s biography is to date the fullest account of his life and career. He has assiduously scoured the sources at hand. He has scrutinized the self-serving reminiscences Mamoulian recorded and re-recorded in retirement. He has amassed a trove of anecdotes deftly told and judgments reasonably rendered. He calls Mamoulian ‘a loner who constructed a sturdy veneer of imperturbable sangfroid,’ a man ‘mostly hidden, occasionally revealing himself in bitter recollections of being pushed aside in Hollywood.’

“The bitterest of Mamoulian’s recollections were of Sam Goldwyn, who crudely removed him from the 1959 film version of Porgy and Bess in favor of Otto Preminger. Mamoulian’s elaborate Catfish Row set and detailed script revisions were mis-utilized; he deserved to have masterminded this abandoned labor of love. Then came Cleopatra (1963), whose producer, Walter Wanger, blamed Mamoulian for a series of legendary delays. Mr. Jensen, however, blames bad weather complicated by the moodiness and ill health of Elizabeth Taylor. Mamoulian was ousted and never directed for Hollywood again. Mr. Jensen’s detailed accounts of these twin debacles make painful reading. . . .

“In Rochester [where he directed at the Eastman Theatre], Mamoulian had registered as a precocious genius. Somehow his genius dissipated in the decades to come. What happened? Was he corrupted by Hollywood banality and glamour? Was he the victim of a socialite spouse who succumbed to alcohol and dementia? Mr. Jensen is the right person to ask – and he supplies plenty of possible answers without volunteering finished verdicts. 

“Another question: how would a Mamoulian production play today? In Peerless, we can revisit his once famous rhythmic staging of ‘I got plenty o’ nuttin’,’ with its soap bubbles, rug-beating, shoe hammering, and knife sharpening — not to mention vacant rocking chairs controlled by invisible threads. Startling in 1935, this rendering – memorably compared by Mr. Jensen to ‘the casual syncopation of a Disney cartoon’ — would nowadays likely seem artifice run amok. Mamoulian’s most tangible legacy was the integrated musical – an art in which he tutored Richard Rodgers, whom he instructed to write both songs and an abundance of incidental music for  [the subversive 1932 film musical] “Love Me Tonight.” But when Oklahoma! and Carousel came along, Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Agnes de Mille got all the credit for using music and dance as dramatic engines. And Rouben Mamoulian, who always kept score, more than knew it.”

Mahler in Sioux Falls (with yet another glance at Klaus Makela)

I have just returned from a trip to Sioux Falls, where I heard Delta David Gier lead the South Dakota Symphony in Mahler’s Symphony No. 3. As readers of this blog know, I regard the SDSO as an American cultural institution that must be studied and emulated.

When I arrived at my balcony seat I was addressed by a couple of young men sitting just in front of me. They had heard my pre-concert conversation with David Gier. They had driven for four and a half hours from the University of North Dakota to hear Mahler. One of them expressed regret that there was no Bruckner on the SDSO season.

Seated to my left was David Chin, who introduced himself as a conductor at Augustana University in Sioux Falls. He had just performed (with commentary) Bach’s cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden. I had already learned about this event from Gier, who was immensely impressed. Chin was seated with half a dozen students. How many more were in the hall? I asked. Countless, he said. 

Earlier in the day, ten conducting students from South Dakota State turned up at the dress rehearsal. For the performance, 28 were bussed from their campus in Brookings, an hour away. 

The audience (strikingly inter-generational) numbered 1,200, the orchestra and chorus 88 and 82, respectively. Sioux Falls has a population of 200,000.

Before the music began, Jennifer Teisinger, the orchestra’s executive director, saluted its retiring members. The first name was Shireen Ranschau, in the cello section. She had joined the SDSO 54 years ago. Teisinger told the audience something it already knew – that the concert celebrated Delta David Gier’s twentieth season as music director. He had been asked to pick whatever music he wished. Gier had already led the SDSO in a complete Mahler cycle. He decided to return to No. 3 – which is in six movements and lasts about 100 minutes.

Before launching the symphony, Gier shared with the audience a sentence or two for each movement. He said that Mahler had originally titled the slow finale “What Love Tells Me” – and that Mahler had in mind what the Greeks called agape – spiritual love. Then Gier (who is a devout Christian) quoted a superscription on Mahler’s draft: “Behold my wounds! Let not one soul be lost!” 

Gier’s rapt performance of Mahler’s finale was something unforgettable. I recently had occasion to watch 26-yer-old Klaus Makela conduct this music (on youtube) with his magnificent Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra in 2022. Makela’s reading is tremendous, enraptured by the ardor of youth. Gier’s performance was enraptured by the pathos of experience. 

The string choir of the South Dakota Symphony is a marvel (would that the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra had such expressive violins). Everything sounds deeply felt. The section leaders are a multi-cultural quartet (Korean, Taiwanese, Polish, American) that in fact frequently performs as the Dakota String Quartet. The quartet regularly visits Native American reservations and works intensively with children there. So does the orchestra’s Dakota Wind Quintet. This is the SDSO’s signature Lakota Music Project, about which I have often written. It is one reason the orchestra’s musicians perform with self-evident pride.

The principal double bass, Mario Chiarello, also conducts the Lincoln High School orchestra – one of fourteen middle and high school orchestras in town. (There are in addition four South Dakota Symphony youth orchestras. Elementary schools offer string instruction beginning in grade four.) Chiarello’s Lincoln High orchestra has performed all nine Beethoven symphonies. For his retirement next year, he will conduct the finale of Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony (with chorus).

David Gier’s performance of Mahler’s Third was live-streamed. But SDSO concerts are not archived on the web – the orchestra lacks the financial resources for that. Back in the 1990s, when I was running the Brooklyn Philharmonic, I was able to secure large grants from the Hearst, Knight, Mellon, and Rockefeller Foundations. Nowadays, not a single major American charitable foundation supports classical music.  And yet the example of the South Dakota Symphony is vital. Right now. 

To read my “American Scholar” article about the national significance of the South Dakota Symphony, including commentary by Alex Ross of “The New Yorker,” click here.

To hear my 50-minute NPR version of that article, click here.

To read my recent reflections on “ripeness” in musical interpretation, also in “The American Scholar,” click here.

To read about the abandonment of classical music by our nation’s leading philanthropic organizations, click here.

Are the Arts Inimical to our Democratic Ethos?

The starting point of my new book The Propaganda of Freedom is the core tenet of the cultural Cold War as prosecuted by the CIA and the Kennedy White House: that only “free artists” in “free societies” can produce great art. And yet this is a risible claim, self-evidently counter-empirical; I’ve dubbed it the “propaganda of freedom.”

An exceptionally thoughtful review has just materialized in the online magazine Fusion. The author is Robert Bellafiore, who writes:

“In The Propaganda of Freedom, Joseph Horowitz considers the history and influence of Kennedy’s argument and finds it harmful to freedom and culture alike, revealing an uneasy relationship between art and politics that any free society must grapple with. . . .

“Through his musical analysis and a broader history of the [Congress for Cultural Freedom] and cultural exchange during the Cold War, Horowitz seeks to protect both art and freedom from their cheapening . . .

“The tensions between artist and audience, and between artist and government, didn’t resolve themselves when the Cold War ended. What makes The Propaganda of Freedom more than just a compelling history is its illustration that these tensions will mark every free society, including ours today. For any American who is discouraged by the vulgarity and frivolity of contemporary culture and wishes for something better, the book raises difficult questions.” 

Is our ethos of democracy and freedom somehow inimical to the life of the arts? Arts skeptics will argue that certain impediments are deeply rooted in the American experience. Certainly there is an impressive lineage of writings analyzing an American aversion to artists and intellectuals. Alexis de Tocqueville, nearly two centuries ago, observed among the citizens of the United States “a distaste for all that is old.” Assessing an expanded “circle of readers,” he discerned “a taste for the useful over the love of the beautiful,” for the “mass produced and mediocre.” 

No less than ascetic Calvinism, Republican rationalism could spurn creative achievement. If popular government demanded a virtuous and pious citizenry, monarchies linked to sensuality and decadence. Were the arts an aristocratic luxury? Even the likes of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – cosmopolites of humbling intellectual attainment – expressed ambivalence toward the cultivation of painting and sculpture. “Too expensive for the state of wealth among us,” opined Jefferson. Conducive to “luxury, effeminacy, corruption, prostitution,” wrote Adams. Both men well knew pre-revolutionary Paris.

Many decades later, American politicians of note included no Adamses or Jeffersons. Edward Shils, a widely influential sociologist, in 1964 regretted that in the US “the political elite gives a preponderant impression of indifference toward works of superior culture.” Two years before that, the historian Richard Hofstadter produced a Pulitzer-Prize winning study of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. He adduced an enduring New World stereotype of the effete intellectual: impractical, artificial, arrogant, seduced by European manners. A related American stereotype, Hofstadter reported, holds the “genius” to be lazy, undisciplined, neurotic, imprudent, and awkward. He blamed democratization, utilitarianism, and evangelical Protestantism. These critiques registered aversion to the Red Scare and also to the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, who once told Leonard Bernstein “I like music with a theme, not all them arias and barcarolles.” 

An enduring philosophical argument against the American arts was launched by Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School. This was a tirade against the “atomized” premises of Anglo-American empiricists who in separating the individual from society spurned a vigorously  “holistic” dialectic. “Affirmative” American culture was bland and homogenized – rather than bristling with “negative” attributes igniting an engaged interactive response. Packaged and merchandized for mass consumption, affirmative culture was a feature of twentieth century capitalism. Concomitantly, capitalist society embraced a mistaken notion of the artist as a distant actor, unfettered and autonomous. The very DNA of American democracy – its notion of “freedom” – was in the Frankfurt view a naïve myth.

The contemporary pertinence of all this philosophizing is everywhere around us: increasingly, our democratic world of social media and mounting, ever multiplying gadgetry swims in bits and pieces, in disconnected dots, in superficia and ephemera – an ontology of fragmentation. 

For more of the same, see my current “American Scholar” essay “Ripeness Is All.”

For more on the Frankfurt School with reference to American classical music, see my notorious “Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music” (1987)

Mahler on Solo Trombone — Coming Up at Colorado Mahlerfest This May

David Taylor and JH perform Schubert’s “Der Doppelganger” at the 2023 Brevard Music Festival

Writing in The American Scholar, Sudip Bose said of David Taylor playing Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger”: “Not in my wildest imaginings could I have envisioned such revelatory and shocking interpretations. . . . The pathos was unrelenting, almost too much to bear. . . . Taylor’s Schubert performances have been haunting me ever since. I cannot get them out of my mind.”

It was I who introduced David Taylor to “Doppelgänger.” I have often partnered his unpredictable renditions of this and other late Schubert songs. Our Mahler/Schubert concoction, “Einsamkeit,” has been heard in New York and at the Brevard Music Festival. We’re now working up a version of Schubert’s ruthlessly despondent song cycle Winterreise.

The trek from late Schubert to Mahler is short and turbulent. Hence: Mahlerei, my concertino for bass trombone and chamber orchestra, created for Taylor and premiered at the Kennedy Center in 2022. A revised version, abetted by Daniel Schnyder, will be performed at Boulder’s ever- ambitious Colorado Mahlerfest on May 15.

I’ve taken the Scherzo from Mahler’s Fourth Symphony and turned it into a kind of Yiddish chant, with the melodic line – which Mahler shares generously – piled onto Taylor’s horn as a bumptious moto perpetuo. There are sundry surprises along the way. And I must say: it works. (The Washington Post called it “a strange and strangely satisfying experiment.”)   

This year’s 37th annual Colorado Mahlerfest explores two relationships: Mahler and Schubert; Mahler and Richard Strauss. There are six concerts, a symposium, and a mountain hike. The repertoire includes Schubert’s Death and the Maiden Quartet (adapted by Mahler), Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. Mahlerei kicks off the festival on a program otherwise mainly exploring childhood, with music by Schubert, Wagner, Humperdinck, Mahler, and Richard Strauss.

I call my symposium talk, on Schubert and Mahler, “Taverns in Heaven” – a reference to the intrusion of a Bierhaus zither midway through the sublime Andante of Schubert’s E-flat minor Klavierstuck (which I am eager to perform). I’ll also be examining Mahler’s annotated Vienna and New York scores for Schubert’s Ninth, which (on the podium) he turned into something utterly and provocatively Mahlerian. 

Many essays in this space have griped that today’s conductors are seldom bona fide “music directors.” Colorado Mahlerfest is curated by a gifted conductor who is also a writer, a thinker, and an artistic administrator: Kenneth Woods, who (though American) serves as principal conductor and music director of the English Symphony Orchestra in Worcester, UK. 

In 2026, the Mahlerfest topic will be “Mahler the Man” and the festival events will include a professional staging of my play The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York (a spin-off from my recent novel with the same title). 

You can read more about Colorado Mahlerfest here.

You will find the complete 2024 festival schedule for this May here. 

Harry Burleigh’s “Deep River” of Common Humanity on NPR

If you’ve ever heard Marian Anderson sing “Deep River,” you’ve heard an immortal concert spiritual by Harry Burleigh. His name won’t appear on the youtube captions – and yet Burleigh’s “Deep River” isn’t a mere arrangement. 

I unpack the genesis of “Deep River” – its surprising origins as an obscure “church militant” spiritual, its indebtedness to Antonin Dvorak, its subsidiary theme composed by Burleigh himself – on the most recent “More than Music” feature on NPR: “’Deep River’: The Art of Harry Burleigh.” The performances (other than Marian Anderson’s) were recorded in concert by the exceptional African-American baritone Sidney Outlaw. It was my pleasure to be the pianist.

The show argues that Burleigh was a major creative force – more than the pivotal transcriber of spirituals as concert songs. In particular, we present his final art song – “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One”(1935) – as his valedictory: not merely one of the supreme concert songs by an American, but an encapsulation of Burleigh’s life philosophy. It takes an eloquently impatient Langston Hughes poem, and turns it into an expression of hope and faith. “Burleigh consistently refused to participate in movements he considered separatist or chauvinistic,” writes Jean Snyder in her Burleigh biography. He believed that artists, not politicians, would most effect progressive change. “They are the true physicians who heal the ills of mankind,” he wrote. “They are the trailblazers. They find new worlds.” Our performance of this song, at Princeton University last year, is a little slower than other versions; its interior life (the climax is a pregnant silence) felt deep and true.

Burleigh’s own life story is a parable of faith: his patience was rewarded. As I remark on NPR: “When Harry Burleigh arrived in New York, its leading classical music institutions were segregated. Eight years later, in 1900, a ‘race riot’ erupted in the Tenderloin District. But New York was at the same time a city of opportunity for Harry Burleigh. And the opportunities did not merely arise in spite of his skin color; sometimes, they materialized because – dignified and composed — he was self-evidently a young Black American unusual in talent, character, and promise.” 

In New York, Antonin Dvorak made 26-year-old Harry Burleigh his assistant.  Jeannette Thurber, the visionary music educator who invited Dvorak to lead her National Conservatory, was part of a community of cultural leaders who – like Dvorak and W. E. B. Du Bois — looked to Black America for direction. Not long after Dvorak arrived, she added a department “for the instruction of colored pupils of merit” with free tuition. The conservatory soon acquired 150 Black students – out of a student body totaling 750. Meanwhile, Henry Krehbiel, the most influential New York music critic, turned himself into what would later be called an ethnomusicologist, studying vernacular music from all over the world – including the music of Native America, and of Africa. In the New York Tribune, Krehbiel wrote: “That which is most characteristic, most beautiful and most vital in our folk-song has come from the negro slaves of the South.” Krehbiel and Burleigh would become friends and allies.

When we observe that, beginning with “Deep River” in 1913, Burleigh’s spirituals were  instantaneously popular among vocal recitalists – that means they were being sung by famous white recitalists. But over the course of the 1920s, Burleigh himself became an immensely popular black recitalist.

In the long view, Burleigh commences a high lineage of Black vocalists whose renderings of the songs of Black America are buoyed by a courageous optimism. His first two great successors, both of whom he knew and admired, were Roland Hayes and Marian Anderson. Closing the NPR show, I ask: “Is Burleigh’s ‘deep river’ of common humanity a thing of the past? Let’s hope not. Here’s a Dutch student chorus singing Harry Burleigh.”

LISTENING GUIDE:

Performances by Sidney Outlaw and JH recorded in concert at the Newark School of the Arts (with thanks to Larry Tamburri), and at Princeton University (presented by the James Madison Program, with thanks to Allen Guelzo):

6:00: “Deep River”

10:10: “Sometimes I Feel like a Lonely Child”

22:45: “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One”

25:31: “Steal Away” —

“Ripeness is All” – What May Be the Fate of Classical Music’s New Superstars?

Yunchan Lin

Today’s biggest controversy in classical music is the Chicago Symphony’s appointment of Klaus Makela, who will become music director in 2027-2028. He will concurrently take over Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra – one of the half dozen most eminent European ensembles. He will be all of 32 years old. 

No one can reasonably dispute Makela’s precocious talent. The attendant outcry takes various forms, of which the trickiest and most momentous is that his interpretations will lack “ripeness.” What, exactly, does musical “ripeness” connote? How is it manifest in performance? And is it imperiled by our ever accelerating world of social media and AI? 

My ruminations — today published online by The American Scholar – lead me to Wilhelm Furtwangler and Claudio Arrau (who once remarked to me: “I’ve always been told I’m a ‘late developer.’”). I write of Arrau’s 1976 recording of Liszt’s “Chasse-neige” that “it jars open a bygone world of feeling and experience both conscious and subliminal. It exudes a veritable elixir of memory. Could any young pianist or conductor accomplish such a feat?”

Thence to Van Cliburn, who peaked at the age of 23, and to the winner of the most recent Cliburn competition: Yunchan Lin, now twenty years old. I write: “He has catapulted into a major international career. As it happens, one of his acclaimed competition performances was of Liszt’s ‘Chasse-neige.’ . . . His rendition is riveting — never glib, never superficial. But it would be vain to look for anything like the scope of Claudio Arrau’s reading. Arrau’s Liszt echoes and re-echoes through corridors of time, a performance for the ages.”

I also have occasion to recollect the Cliburn Competition’s most esteemed gold medalist: Radu Lupu – in 1966, when Lupu was 21 years old. “To the surprise and consternation of the Cliburn Foundation, he had pocketed his first prize and returned to Russia, refusing to undertake the high-profile concert tour prepared for him. Suppose that Klaus Makela had told his manager Jasper Parrott: Thank you very much, but I am not prepared to take over two of the world’s most prominent orchestras. That was Radu Lupu.”

My ultimate topic is the erosion of cultural memory:

“Socially accelerating atoms of human experience today undermine all previous understandings that art is necessarily appropriative; chaotically askew, they support the illusion that, locked in our disparate identities, we cannot know or speak for one another. What is more, a privatized, atomized lifestyle promotes neither arts patronage nor production. Rather, its diversion mode is the soundbite: particulate cultural matter; stranded arts particles. . . .

“Commensurately, cultural memory – for untold centuries, a precondition for creativity and appreciation of the creative act – risks becoming a stack of flashcards processed as media clips. Will sustained immersion in lineage and tradition remain an organic prerequisite for composition, interpretation, and reception?

“Gloucester, in King Lear, counsels: ‘Ripeness is all.’ Never has Shakespeare’s observation more resounded as an admonition.“

You can read the whole thing here.

To read Alex Ross in The New Yorker on the Makela appontment, click here.

The Chicago Symphony Lands Klaus Makela

It’s now official: Klaus Makela will become the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, beginning in 2027-2028. He’ll conduct fourteen weeks of CSO concerts of which four will be on tour. He’ll concurrently become music director of Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra. He’ll retain relationships with the Oslo Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris. He’ll be thirty-one years old.

Makela is a big catch, the hottest young conductor around. But the initial response has been predictably mixed. An influential music critic of my acquaintance calls the Makela appointment the “most hairbrained” development he has yet witnessed in American classical music. Norman Lebrecht, on his ever-popular slippedisc blog, writes that Chicago has entered into “a raw deal.” An email that arrived this morning from a leading European artists’ manager reads: “[Chicago’s] mediocre management is unable to produce any vision for the future, so they are entrusting the ‘golden boy’ who’s supposed to rescue the entire music industry. Makela perfectly serves a music institution without a purpose. Until the next sensation comes along.”

Many blame this new norm on Ronald Wilford, who at Columbia Artists Management created the “jet-set conductor” as a signature of career status. That’s become such a ubiquitous template that it’s worth a moment of reflection. 

Arthur Nikisch is widely regarded as the leading symphonic conductor of his generation, based in Germany. Earlier in his career, however, Nikisch was conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for four seasons (1889-1893). That meant that he led 388 of the orchestra’s 398 nonsummer concerts, including 196 on tour to 32 American cities. There were no airplanes. There were no “guest conductors,” 

The Chicago Symphony had two music directors during its first half-century: Theodore Thomas (1891-1905) and then Thomas’s assistant Frederick Stock (1905-1942). That they were both German-born conferred identity – and a Germanic fundament remained long in place, governing repertoire and sonority. Thomas and Stock were Chicago fixtures. As I remarked in an earlier blog: “Stock’s commitment to the Midwest (which he toured extensively) was absolute, his popularity immense. Touting (from the stage) the ‘I-will spirit of Chicago,’ he spurned prestigious offers to relocate northeast. He implemented concerts targeting ethnic neighborhoods with seats costing fifteen to fifty cents. He led his own children’s concerts. He inaugurated outdoor summer concerts at Grant Park. (And I could go on.)”

Theodore Thomas’s credo — “An orchestra show the culture of the community” – loudly re-echoes today when American orchestras are quite suddenly cognizant that they lack local roots. I have often extolled the South Dakota Symphony in this space because its Lakota Music Project, and kindred initiatives, define it as South Dakota’s orchestra. Its music director, Delta David Gier, moved to Sioux Falls and raised a family there.

Makela’s appointment self-evidently has nothing to do with Thomas’s credo. Rather, it was largely driven by the enthusiasm of the Chicago Symphony musicians. And doubtless there is a feeling that a young conductor will entice young audiences.

That Makela is an exceptional baton-wielder is unquestionable. I heard him conduct Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony with the New York Philharmonic in December 2022 and wrote: “Makela’s Tchaikovsky, while not profound, proved terrific. This fellow must have been born with a baton in his crib. His style of leadership is both commanding and spontaneous. His imprint is personal. I concede that his Pathetique is (alas) more about drama than about pain; but the drama – its nuanced ferocity – carried the day.  He has the confidence and authority to listen and respond in the moment to the musicians, both individually and collectively; to the vicissitudes of musical argument and expression. His is a bewildering talent.”

But – as I later added – none of that speaks to Makela’s capacity for institutional leadership. It’s demonstrably risky to entrust musicians to choose their own “music director.” A notorious instance: the New York Philharmonic players wanted Loren Maazel and they got him, in 2002. But Maazel, a famously virtuosic conductor, projected no institutional vision. And he left no legacy. 

Assessing that Makela Pathetique in New York, I further wrote: “If he were fifty years older . . . he would probably be capable of extracting a more tragic reading of the Pathetique Symphony. For me, the supreme recording of this work was made by Wilhelm Furtwangler and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1951, courtesy of Radio Cairo. . . . It has little in common with Makela’s thrilling rendition the other day in New York.” Conductors ripen no more rapidly than other human beings do. 

Another thing: conductors with a gift for grasping and leading “the culture of the community” are not likely to be young conductors; they’re people like Gier and the late Michael Morgan, in Oakland, with a certain amount of life experience behind them. It took Gier more than a decade of patient negotiation to clinch his orchestra’s charmed relationship to half a dozen Indian reservations.

Chicago’s decision to hire Klaus Makela will now inescapably be juxtaposed with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s resignation in San Francisco – because Salonen is a bona fide music director. The Makela appointment, whatever else one makes of it, rejects fundamental change. It will come sooner or later. It has to. 

P.S. — My “More than Music” NPR feature on music directorships, citing South Dakota, is here. The commentators include the New Yorker‘s Alex Ross, who says: “There’s just a tremendous amount of caution, a tremendous amount of groupthink, in the orchestra world.. . . For a music director to carry off an ambitious project, you have to be there. You have to be on the scene, persuading people, interacting with them, listening to their ideas. Not just communicating your own. Building a sense of cooperation. You cannot do that as effectively if you’re flying in for two or three weeks, and another couple of weeks in the winter, and another two weeks in the spring. I find it a bit outrageous that music directors are so highly paid to begin with for one job – and then you find them holding a second or even a third position with exorbitant salaries in those places as well. This, of all things, is something the orchestra world should really be thinking about: drastically revising our idea of who a music director is, what their job entails.”

For more on Thomas, Stock, and Chicago, see my Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (2005).

Mulling Salonen’s Resignation — Take Three: Harvey Lichtenstein and BAM

Harvey LIchtenstein (1929-2017)

Here are a couple of responses to my latest blog, mulling Esa-Pekka Salonen’s resignation as music director of the San Francisco Symphony:

–From a major European artists’ manager of long experience: “Over a period of decades, I have witnessed a progressive decline in the quality of leadership in the music business. Cultural institutions today prefer to attribute failure to excessive costs — not lack of purpose.”

–From Karen Hopkins, Harvey Lichtenstein’s indispensable aide-de-camp during the glory days of BAM: “Alas, there was but one Harvey.  The key was not only his unlimited love for artists, it was his courage — something in short supply at this moment.”

A few days ago I told a Harvey Lichteinstein story about artistic vision — how in half an hour he resolved to take the entire Mariinski opera company to BAM for four performances. Here’s another Harvey story: one day the fire alarm went off and the building emptied. As we were the last to leave, I ran into Harvey in the BAM lobby. He said to me: “I hope the place burns down.” 

The critic Winthrop Sargeant once summarized the force of Arturo Toscanini’s leadership of the New York Philharmonic as a “psychology of crisis” and likened the members of Toscanini’s orchestra to persons trapped in a sinking ship, pursuing a prodigious course of action out of desperation. At BAM, the Thursday morning meeting of department heads in Harvey’s office was a weekly ritual. The main event was invariably the BAM budget: a page of numbers, of which the ones that mattered showed updated income and expenses versus projections for the season. The hot seats were occupied by the marketing director and director of finance. A self-conscious congeniality failed to mask a mood of exigency.

Today, the American arts are ever more in crisis – the building is actually burning. On the fund-raising side of things, the wealthiest Americans are less likely to care about the arts. Our major charitable foundations remain in thrall to an equation likening the arts to instruments of social justice – a naïve disorientation. Two years ago, I interviewed some of the major players in this drama, among whom the wisest counselled patience: the pendulum will swing back. It hasn’t yet. I previously referenced the resulting article, in The American Purpose; here it is again, freshly pertinent. 

Whatever I was able to achieve running the Brooklyn Philharmonic was abetted by major grants from the Mellon, Knight, Hearst, and Rockefeller Foundations – not one of which retains much interest in saving classical music. (We were also the first orchestra ever to be supported by the NEH – which remains an invaluable resource for orchestras ambitious to become mission-driven.) The frustrations of the foundation community (which I had occasion to witness first-hand) were entirely understandable: American orchestras have chronically resisted innovation. But an enlightened policy of selective support is more urgently needed than ever.

And of course audiences are dwindling. Here is another set of issues even more vexing: the impact of social media and shrinking attention spans, of what the German sociologist Hartmut Rosa calls “social acceleration,” of what I call the erasure of cultural memory. In my most recent book, The Propaganda of Freedom, I address the relationship between the artist and the state — and make a case for vastly increased federal support. There is at present no political will for that – indeed there are no national spokespersons of prominence for the arts. As I ponder in The Propaganda of Freedom, it’s a little known fact that the day John F. Kennedy died, the morning edition of the New York Times announced that he would be appointing a member of his inner circle, Richard Goodwin, to lead a new council on the arts. Nothing like that ever happened. It greatly matters now.

And all of this makes arts leadership the more challenging – and, arguably, visionary leadership the more elusive.

What, finally, is one to make of the ongoing SFSO controversy? Is it some form of incipient scandal that titillates a crowd? Or might the avalanche of responses I’m getting signal a constructive moment? Here’s a weathervane: according to rumor, the Chicago Symphony is about to announce its next “music director,” succeeding Ricardo Muti. This is an orchestra which, during its first half century, had only two presiding conductors: Theodore Thomas (1891-1905) was succeeded by his assistant Fredrick Stock (1905-1942). Both became fixtures in the cultural life of the city. Neither had conflicting commitments elsewhere. Thomas began as a legendary barnstorming educator; his Chicago initiatives included “workingman’s concerts.” Stock’s commitment to the Midwest (which he toured extensively) was absolute, his popularity immense. Touting (from the stage) the “I-will spirit of Chicago,” he spurned prestigious offers to relocate northeast. He implemented concerts targeting ethnic neighborhoods with seats costing fifteen to fifty cents. He led his own children’s concerts. He inaugurated outdoor summer concerts at Grant Park. (And I could go on.)

Will today’s Chicago Symphony opt for an institutional leader? Or will I follow today’s pack and choose a young conductor already spread thin? And if the latter, where will leadership reside?