Joseph Horowitz's Blog, page 8

“Tannhäuser” — Take Three

The Ride of the Valkyries, from Francois Rochaix’s Seattle “Ring”

The emails continue to roll in, responding to my two Tannhäuser  blogs. Here’s one from a former member of the Met orchestra:

“Your two articles pretty much describe what I observed at the Met during my 40-plus years with the Met Orchestra. The best performances I had a chance to experience, and the privilege to be part of, were the ones presenting a complete art form. During these rare occurrences, the sum total created an unforgettable night, bigger than the components would suggest. In particular, then Carlos Kleiber conducted, the whole approach was: everything is organic, it all has to work together. Then you get to Lepage – who was not the only one who didn’t care, by the way.  There have been many of those for whom ‘theater’ meant placing the singers where you can’t really hear them.”

Let’s remember that the members of an opera orchestra – a competent one – are not just following the conductor. They’re listening to the singers. Many of them can also see the singers and observe the staging. When you hear those old broadcasts from the thirties and forties, the energy in the pit is nearly bewildering. It’s evident, I would say, that the players love the operas – they’re not just drawing inspiration from a baton. And of course the caliber of the singing was very high. 

To again reference Robert Lepage’s Met Ring: Wagner’s Siegfried ends with one of the most psychologically complex love duets in opera. It documents sexual awakening. Siegfried is naïve and immature. Brunnhilde is vulnerable and scared. Over the course of some 35 minutes, they wind up in the same place. Lepage did not even attempt to stage this sequence. The singers weren’t blocked – they stood and sang. At either side, electric squibbles signified the Magic Fire. But both music and libretto tell us that the Magic Fire through which Siegfried has passed is now wholly absent. Lepage’s indifference to music, and to the marriage of music and words, is here absolute.

The most memorable Ring in my experience was staged by Francois Rochaix in Seattle in 1986. I’ve written about it extensively – in The Post-Classical Predicament (1995) and Wagner Nights (1994). It shows how a bold exercise in Regietheater can at the same time remain keenly attuned to Wagner’s synthesis of the arts. I write in The Post-Classical Predicament (reprising a long article “On Staging Wagner’s Ring” in Opus Magazine, April 1987):

“To underline Siegfried’s coming of age, Rochaix inserts a touching pantomime . . . just after Siegfried penetrates the Magic Fire: he envisions his father’s murder, his mother’s death in childbirth, Fafner’s warning, and the Forest Bird’s summons. Fortified by new self-knowledge, he tentatively kisses Brunnhilde. Rochaix’s handling of this long final scene is so honest that for once Siegfried’s astonished exclamation ‘Das is kein Mann!’ is astonishing, not comic. Disregarding Wagner, Rochaix has Siegfried flee his awakened bride; when Brunnhilde sings ‘Wer ist der Held, der mich erweckt?’ [‘Who is the hero who has awakened me?’], he stands, terrified, well outside her field of vision. Brunnhilde’s gradual transformation from goddess to woman, Siegfried’s coming to terms with adult feelings, their growing proximity, mutual awareness, and commitment — Rochaix’s detailed understanding of all of this, his use of blocking and gestural detail to bind the momentous, compressed emotional scenario, is a triumph of creative empathy.

“Many at Seattle found Siegfried’s interpolated pantomime/vision intrusive. The problem is partly Wagner’s; his layoff partway through act 2 of Siegfried created discontinuities in the Ring. In particular, Siegfried and Brunnhilde became somewhat different personalities. Rochaix’s masque intelligently attempts to explain the new Siegfried, whom Brunhilde eventually praises for his loyalty and valor.”

Rochaix had never before directed a Ring production. His preparations, documented in reams of notes and advisories he doubtless shared with the singers, were prodigious. Lepage’s preparations were self-evidently wasted on complexly intrusive stage machinery in service of a Ring made more “theatrical.” Re-reading my Opus essay of 36 years ago, I discover this, by Thomas Mann: “Wagner experienced modern culture, the culture of bourgeois society, through the medium and in the image of the operatic theater of his day. He saw art reduced to the level of an extravagant consumer product . . . he watched with fury while vast resources were squandered, not for the attainment of high artistic purpose, but for that which he despised above all else as an artist: the easy, cheap effect.”

“Tannhäuser” — Take Two

On the heels of my Tannhäuser blog, Conrad L. Osborne has posted yet another of his indispensable mega-essays – on the topic of cultivating American opera.

I wrote: “The arts are today vanishing from the American experience. There is a crisis in cultural memory. How best keep Tannhäuser alive? Flooded with neophytes, the Metropolitan Opera audience is very different from audiences just a few decades ago. What I observed at the end of Tannhäuser was an ambushed audience thrilled and surprised. The Met is cultivating newcomers with new operas that aren’t very good. A more momentous longterm strategy, it seems to me, would be to present great operas staged in a manner that reinforces – rather than challenges or critiques or refreshes – the intended marriage of words and music. For newcomers to Wagner, an updated Tannhäuser would almost certainly possess less ‘relevance’ than Otto Schenk’s 46-eyear-old staging – if relevance is to be measured in terms of sheer visceral impact.” 

Conrad writes of the Met’s sudden espousal of new works: “The company’s current management has undertaken a program of artificial insemination in place of what was once natural conception—hence the ethnocultural distribution [catering to Black and Latino audiences] . . . , to which we can add a sexual identity element, as well. This is not a program of audience integration . . . , but of audience fragmentation, in perfect synchronization with the oft-remarked silo-ing of group identities in our society as a whole.”

And Conrad contrasts the current crop of new operas mounted by the Met with the New York City Opera’s more informed attempt to curate American opera back in the 1950s. Of that crop, he writes: “Several of the sturdier American operas maintained a hold in the NYCO repertory through the 1960s, along with several more 20th-Century European works, and the company’s first season in its new home at Lincoln Center (Spring, 1966) consisted wholly of post-WW1 operas, though just three of the eleven were American. The pattern did not hold, of course.”

The composers Conrad mentions whose operas enjoyed an “occasional return” at City Opera are Gian Carlo Menotti, Kurt Weill, Carlisle Floyd, Douglas Moore, Marc Blitzstein, and Robert Ward. I would add that our pre-eminent American grand opera, Porgy and Bess (1935), was also given at NYCO. My two cents: in second place I would position Blitzstein’s Regina (1948), adapting Lillian Hellman’s Broadway triumph The Little Foxes. Too many of the new and newish American operas nowadays at the Met are makeshift efforts best assigned to much smaller spaces. Regina is the real deal; suitably cast with big voices and personalities, honestly produced without special pleadings, it would flood the big house with drama and song. It adroitly sets the English language. It powerfully critiques class and race.  As once with Porgy , unproduced at the Met for half a century, Regina remains — now more than ever – a beckoning, high-stakes Metropolitan Opera opportunity.

Also, this Tannhäuser  afterthought: As it happens, not long after experiencing the Schenk Tannhäuser at the Met in 1977, I attended the Bayreuth premiere of Götz  Friedrich’s Tannhäuser  – a polemical anti-Fascist staging that became famous. My chief reaction, at the time, was that I’d never witnessed such terrific, painstakingly rehearsed acting, top to bottom, on an operatic stage. I also felt intellectually tantalized. But it is the Schenk Tannhäuser , re-encountered last Tuesday, that made me weep during the finales of acts two and three. In these days of synthetic groupthink outrage, weeping has perhaps become somewhat passé. And perhaps that’s pertinent to whatever makes Otto Schenk’s Tannhäuser seem “old-fashioned.”       

***

A torrent of emails suggests that my Tannhäuser blog has struck a responsive chord — and I feel impelled to say a little more about Wagner and Regietheater. Gotz Friedrich’s Bayreuth Tannhäuser, whatever one makes of it, was self-evidently a product of intensive engagement with music and text; where he departed from Wagner’s intended marriage of notes and words, he had his reasons, good or bad. The same Bayreuth summer, I encountered the premiere of another famous production: Harry Kupfer’s The Flying Dutchman. In fact, i reviewed it for the New York Times (if you look it up, the misspellings [“Terry Kupfer,” “Hans Knattersbusch,” etc.] and misconstrued words were a result of trans-Atlantic dictation via telephone in pre-email days). Kupfer, too, knew exactly what he was doing. I was stunned by his conceit that the main action of the opera was hallucinated by the deranged Senta. I found her character fortified — and also that of Erik, who understood his beloved all too well. The trade-off was a shallower Dutchman, reduced to an idealized figment of imagination. But what most lingered was Kupfer’s ingenious delineation of twin stage-worlds coincident with twin sound-worlds. As I once wrote in this space: “Kupfer’s handling of musical content was an astounding coup. The opera’s riper, more chromatic stretches were linked to the vigorously depicted fantasy world of Senta’s mind; the squarer, more diatonic parts were framed by the dull walls of Daland’s house, which collapsed outward whenever Senta lost touch. In the big Senta-Dutchman duet, where Wagner’s stylistic lapses are particularly obvious, Kupfer achieved the same effect by alternating between Senta’s fantasy of the Dutchman and the stolid real-life suitor (not in Wagner’s libretto) that her father provided. Never before had I encountered an operatic staging in which the director’s musical literacy was as apparent or pertinent.”

What most disturbs me about Regietheater at the Met is the prevalence of directors who seem tone deaf, even musically illiterate; they steamroll the calibrated music-and-words alignment that is the lifeblood of opera, its very reason for being. Robert Lepage’s Ring is merely the most notorious example.

If you happen to listen to that 1936 Met Tannhäuser (extolled in my previous blog), begin with act three: Lawrence Tibbett (Wolfram) and Lauritz Melchior (Tannhäuser). It wil cost you an hour. Follow the libretto. I just re-experienced their interaction with my wife. She said when it was over: “Every word is emotionally articulate.” Precisely. And so is the orchestra. It is an exercise in empathy.

A Timely Old “Tannhäuser” at the Met

“Tannhauser,” act two, at the Metropolitan Opera

The Met’s current revival of Otto Schenk’s 1977 production of Wagner’s Tannhäuser is an event unthinkable in any European house – perhaps unthinkable in any other American house. Designed by Gunther Schneider-Siemssen, this was a rare attempt to faithfully render Wagner’s complex scenic intentions, albeit with access to instruments of stagecraft unavailable in Wagner’s time. The result was an unimpeachably Romantic staging of a Romantic grand opera – with no questions asked about hidden agendas or old-fashioned thinking. 

I well remember Andrew Porter’s ecstatic New Yorker review, which hailed a triumphant antidote to revisionist Regietheater. “A twentieth century landmark in the history of Wagner staging,” he called it. “As far as I know, it represents the first attempt any major company has made in more than a quarter of a century . . . to do a Wagner opera in the way Wagner asked for it to be done.” Porter urged the Met to undertake a Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen Ring. And the Met did precisely that – with disappointing results. The Ring is a music drama exploring archetypes, not a Romantic opera invoking thirteenth-century German history. But the Schenk Tannhäuser worked its magic. And it proves just as presentable — and arguably more necessary —  in 2023.

Many points of conjunction between what the ear hears and the eye sees are unforgettably clinched. The action begins with the erotic Venusberg. Wagner asks for “a wide grotto which, as it curves towards the right in the background, seems to be prolonged till the eye loses it in the distance. From an opening in the rocks, through which the daylight filters dimly, a greenish waterfall plunges down the whole height of the grotto, foaming wildly over the rocks; out of the basin that receives the water a brook flows to the further background; it there forms into a lake, in which Naiads are seen bathing, while Sirens recline on its banks.” Schneider-Siemssen wisely doesn’t attempt all of this – but he poetically renders enough of it to get the job done. At the climax of the Venusberg orgy, Wagner makes everything suddenly and cataclysmically vanish, to be replaced by “a green valley. . . blue sky, bright sun. In the foreground is a shrine to the Virgin. A Shepherd Boy is blowing his pipe and singing.” A credulous rendering of this transformation, abetted by Wagner’s musical imagination, proves as breathtaking today as half a century ago.

At the opera’s close, Tannhäuser expires alongside Elisabeth’s bier, and young pilgrims arrive with a flowered staff betokening his foregiveness. Nowadays, this ending is variously revised. It is considered toxic or tired. But faithfully conjoined with the reprise of the Pilgrims’ Chorus, it remains overwhelming. I attended Tuesday night’s performance with a devout Christian who objects that Wagner presents Tannhäuser’s redemption as a reward for repentance (“Christ died for our sins”). Another companion, at the same performance, objects that the opera’s discourse on duty and honor seems terribly Germanic in a musty way. Alternatively, Tannhäuser can be read and re-read as an argument against self-indulgence. I discover, for myself, that none of this really matters. I now mainly discover in Tannhäuser an emotional purgative or therapy – it powerfully exercises feelings of compassion. 

The arts are today vanishing from the American experience. There is a crisis in cultural memory. How best keep Tannhäuser alive? Flooded with neophytes, the Metropolitan Opera audience is very different from audiences just a few decades ago. What I observed at the end of Tannhäuser was an ambushed audience thrilled and surprised. The Met is cultivating newcomers with new operas that aren’t very good. A more momentous longterm strategy, it seems to me, would be to present great operas staged in a manner that reinforces – rather than challenges or critiques or refreshes – the intended marriage of words and music. For newcomers to Wagner, an updated Tannhäuser would almost certainly possess less “relevance” than Schenk’s 46-year-old staging – if relevance is to be measured in terms of sheer visceral impact. 

About Tuesday’s performance: Reviving the Schenk Tannhäuser would be pointless without the forces to do Wagner some degree of justice. And standard repertoire at the Met, these days, is never a sure thing. The current cast offers nothing remotely comparable to Leonie Rysanek’s Elisabeth or James McCracken’s Tannhäuser of 1977 – to say nothing of such legendary Met Wagnerites as Lotte Lehmann and Lauritz Melchior. The first 45 minutes are a loss. The Venusberg ballet seems interminable. I could not detect a single word sung by Venus. Later on, the Wolfram is at best an acquired taste: Christian Gerhaher talks his way through the part. But the Met’s current Tannhäuser and Elisabeth – Andreas Schager and Elza van den Heever – rise sufficiently to the occasion. Neither is vocally resplendent – but both singing and acting are honest and informed, audible and visible. The conductor, Donald Runnicles, capably steers the big climaxes.  The chorus is terrific.

It is by now apparent that the current Met orchestra suffers from an odd defect: the violins are at all times overbalanced. Regardless of venue or seat location, they register with insufficient volume and energy. (I am by no means alone in this opinion.) Perpetuating cultural memory is a challenge for everyone – onstage, in the pit, in the house. I discern scant evidence that these youngish string players love the operas they perform. The Venusberg music, in particular, is a faded cartoon unless purveyed with sustained intensity. Just listen to Artur Bodanzky’s torrid Met orchestra of 1936 and you’ll hear what I am talking about: a harrowing vortex of feeling. In the pit, the Schwung and bite of the low strings, animating the Landgraf’s arid speeches, the urgency and precision of the reckless violin riffs, are feats no longer associated with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra.  

But this 1936 Tannhäuser broadcast is Melchior’s show. If in his lifetime he was somewhat taken for granted, it was partly because his consistency of achievement (at least until Bodanzky died) was absolute. On this occasion, every encounter with Lawrence Tibbett’s Wolfram strikes sparks. The third act’s Mitleid moment – where Wolfram’s unexpected compassion ignites Tannhäuser’s tortured confessional narrative – is so believable that the incredulity of Tannhäuser’s gratitude seems wholly unrehearsed. Porter, in his New Yorker review, discovered authenticity in the Met’s Tannhäuser of 1977. But it is Melchior, in 1936, who realizes the Olympian expectations Wagner specified: that in act two Tannhäuser’s  “Erbarm dich mein” must become the drama’s titanic linchpin; that in act three Tannhäuser must exude a terminal weariness both physical and existential. 

Not so long ago, the 1936 Bodanzky Tannhäuser was only accessible to opera fanatics on rare LPs. These days, it’s an under-utilized tap on youtube. As a prized morsel of cultural memory, it remains indispensable. But an 87-year-old broadcast recording in faded sound, sans scenery and stage activity, can only retain pertinence if we possess the means — and also the mindset — to recreate a vital re-embodiment in our vexed twenty-first century.

Yet Again — The South Dakota Symphony

As readers of this blog now know by heart, I regard the South Dakota Symphony as a national exemplar. I’ve written about their Lakota Music Project, which connects the orchestra to Indian reservations throughout the state. I’ve extolled their ingeniously contextualized performances of Silvestre Revueltas’s Redes, of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, and – most recently – of Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto. And I’ve reported Alex Ross’s enthusiasm for the South Dakota Symphony in The New Yorker. 

Now my friend Doug McLennan, founder/editor of the invaluable ArtsJournal, has chimed in with his own report on the Harrison concerto last October. Doug begins:

“That the piece hasn’t found a wider following is a shame. Horowitz considers it the best American piano concerto, and I might agree. From its grand bombastic opening and angular melodies, reflective pools and undulating rhythms, it is both original and evocatively American.” 

Doug continues:

“The South Dakota players are good musicians, but what is extraordinary about them is the way they listen to one another, build on one another’s phrases and the willingness of [Music Director David] Gier to give them room to do it. Italian pianist Emanuele Arciuli was the soloist, a specialist in American music. He tore into the propulsive second movement, using percussion as counterpoint he could play with like a cat with a toy. The longer, angular open-toned melodies he gave room to breathe – they evoke for me the great Western expanses and mountains – and made the gamelan-inflected oscillations of the score supple rather than strict. In every way, this was an idiomatic performance that let it find its own language.”

The Harrison concerto was flanked by two examples of musical Orientalism – Ravel’s The Princess of the Pagodas and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. These sublime touristic visitations were juxtaposed with Harrison’s informed fusion of Eastern and Western idioms. Doug writes:

“To make the connections and context clear, the program began with a stage conversation between Gier and Horowitz and a short video introducing Harrison. And it wasn’t just informational – context isn’t just about more information, it’s about finding ways to locate what you’re hearing in a set of experiences that help give them meaning. So: an introduction to gamelan and how it can sound and is traditionally used.”

And finally:

“This orchestra doesn’t sound like others. Players come from around the Midwest, as far away as Minneapolis and Chicago, and Gier says they keep returning because they like the camaraderie and the freedom they have there. That players seem to listen differently he attributes in part to their work with musicians from the Lakota Indian nation in the western part of the state. . . . The encounters have taught Symphony musicians to listen to one another differently, and this has been infused into the larger group.”

In short: these are concerts that demand a wider audience and an influential role. I next visit South Dakota for Mahler’s Third Symphony this coming April. I’ll spend more than a week in South Dakota in February-March 2025 for “New World Encounters,” a festival exploring the American impact on the arts abroad. Our soloist will be Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (who will explore “Ravel and jazz”). Former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle, an inspired practitioner of cultural exchange, will also take part. We will partner with local universities. The result will be a grand cross-disciplinary adventure – an experimental showcase —  funded by the National Endowment of the Humanities “Music Unwound” initiative. I can hardly wait.

Celebrating the Ives Sesquicentenary: An American Landmark

The upcoming Sesquicentenary of Charles Ives (1874-1954) is a landmark moment in American cultural history. Not only is he the towering creative genius of American classical music; he links to the highest American cultural pantheon, resonating in countless ways with the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville (connections I explore in my book Dvorak’s Prophecy).

Judging from the website bachtrack, Ives is today far more performed in Europe than the US. Judging from Wikipedia, he is still mis-categorized as a “modernist.” The Sesquicentenary is an opportunity to claim Ives for his American time and place: the late Gilded Age and American fin-de-siecle.

Thanks to J. Peter Burkholder, the central celebration will take place at Indiana University/Bloomington, where the Jacobs School of Music is planning a week (October 1 to 6, 2024) of contextualized concerts, cross-disciplinary lectures, and discussions supported by the NEH Music Unwound project that I direct. There will also be NEH-supported Music Unwound Ives festivals at the Brevard Music Center (mid-July, 2024), Bard College (including a Carnegie Hall concert by Bard’s The OrchestraNow – November, 2024), and Chicago (the Chicago Sinfonietta in collaboration with the Rembrandt Chamber Players and Illinois State University/Normal — mid-February, 2025).

The Bloomington festival is notable for the participation of scholars outside Music. These include a major art historian specializing in the 19th century “American Sublime” (Tim Barringer), a major Civil War historian who really knows music (Allen Guelzo), a major Gilded Age historian who can track the etymology of that troubled label (Alan Lessoff). My own contribution will juxtapose Ives with Mahler (who similarly oscillates between the quotidian and the sublime), and with Sibelius and Elgar (who similarly stopped composing, vexed by modernism and modernity, rooted in native landscapes). I already know that I will say:

“Among canonized composers of classical music, Charles Ives possesses the most elusive, least stable reputation; he remains a moving target. That at the same time he is for many the supreme American creative genius among concert composers, a figure protean and iconic, must say something about America and Ives both: as ever, we’re not sure who we are. Even our orchestras and instrumentalists perform him far less than they should.

“Ives’ first reputation, congealing midway through the twentieth century, was framed by modernists who pedigreed ‘originality.’ Ives’ ‘experiments’ in tonality and rhythm were compared with those of Arnold Schoenberg – whose music he did not know. This obsession with ‘who got there first?’ pigeonholed Ives as an intriguing historical anomaly rather than an expressive genius. It placed him firmly in play, but proved essentially patronizing.

“Once the modernist criterion of originality dissipated, it became possible to resituate Ives not as an anomalous victim of repressive materialistic decades, but as a complex product of a dynamic period of  American growth itself undergoing revision. Hence the sesquicentenary opportunity at hand, celebrating the 150th birthday of this most volatile cultural bellwether.” 

A Great Present-Day Pianist

When I reminisce with pianists of my generation (born 1948), the perennial topic is Great Pianists of the Past. We tediously agree: in those days, famous pianists were great pianists – with their own sound, their own distinctive musical personality projecting into the far reaches of Carnegie Hall. No one could admire equally Arrau, Horowitz, Serkin, Michelangeli, Richter, Gilels, Rubinstein. But in every case: famous for a reason. The same conversation inevitably leads to grousing about today, when fame and stature do not correlate.

However – there is one pianist of my acquaintance who credibly insists that there are Great Pianists of the Present. They simply happen not to be Famous Pianists. Sergei Babayan is such a pianist. 

When I heard him in Tbilisi last June, he played the Bach/Busoni Chaconne followed by Bach’s GoldbergVariations. At Zankel Hall recital tonight, his program included Liszt, Schubert/Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Schumann. 

Babayan in recital is an integrated whole. Physically, he somewhat resembles Arrau, Rubinstein, Gilels – big torso, big hands, short arms and legs. He is one with the piano; the instrument is part of him. He relies on arm and shoulder weight to deeply depress the keys. His sonority is full-bodied and dark. His whispered pianissimos retain body and shape. His fortissimos are plushly upholstered. He does not have to bang. His musical intelligence is probing and informative. He is fearlessly improvisatory. 

Armenian born, he trained in Russia. His lineage includes Vladimir Sofronitzky, who taught Babayan’s teacher Georgy Saradjev. Sofronitzky was a terrifying Scriabin specialist. His live recordings of Schubert songs in Liszt’s transcriptions are memorably authentic. I perhaps detect the influence of Sofronitzky in the Schubert/Liszt set Babayan performed at Zankel. The transcriptions themselves are a phenomenal labor of love (Liszt was extolling songs as yet unknown) informed by love for the keyboard – a conversation between complementary geniuses. Liszt’s retelling of these songs peaks where Schubert is visionary. Transcribing “Schwanengesang,” he tellingly begins not amiably, with “Liebesbotschaft” (as in the published song cycle), but with “Die Stadt” – in which Heinrich Heine evokes a dank and morbid seascape. Liszt’s mastery of the piano’s resources here leads to extremities of virtuosity that the capacious song absorbs and fortifies. Babayan’s rendition was a chilling exercise in musical and emotional imagination – as memorable as Sofronitzky’s live recording.  

Babayan’s Rachmaninoff set began with the Etude-tableau in E-flat minor, Op. 39, No. 5 – commonly, a fat tune atop pounding chords.  Babayan’s reading was a study in texture and sonority – fresher and more spontaneous than his DG recording (which I just sampled on youtube). 

The program also included a 1983 Fantasia, by Vladimir Ryabov, in memory of Maria Yudina. She, too, was a pianist who took no prisoners. In fact, every one of Babayan’s readings at Zankel bristled with surprises. Nothing was predictable, save the mastery of his pianism.

I am grateful that he is not a brand name. 

The Cultural Cold War Revisited — and Cultural Diplomacy in Africa Today

Leonard Bernstein at a USIA exhibit in Moscow in 1959

The vanishing presence of the arts in the American experience has implications for America’s reputation abroad, and for its pursuit of foreign policy goals.

If the US is in fact embarking on a new Cold War, the cultural Cold War with the USSR is urgently pertinent. My latest “More than Music” program on NPR is “The Cultural Cold War Revisited.” It’s based on my new book The Propaganda of Freedom: JFK, Shostakovich, Stravinsky, and the Cultural Cold War. 

In a nutshell: the CIA-funded Congress of Cultural Freedom was initially a seminal Cold War propaganda instrument. In my book, I argue that, by claiming that only “free artists” in “free societies” produce great art, it failed to produce credible propaganda. Far more successful was cultural diplomacy with the Soviet Union, beginning in 1959 with Leonard Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic (a visit about which I have new things to say). But as the Cold War waned, so did cultural diplomacy. So much so that when in 1986 Vladimir Horowitz triumphantly returned to Russia, Ambassador Arthur Hartman had to raise funds on his own.

Today, cultural diplomacy could be a formidable tool in, say, Central Africa, where the US is vying with China to exert influence. My “More than Music” show features remarkable testimony from Alexander Laskaris, the US Ambassador to Chad – who recently hosted the African-American baritone Sidney Outlaw. You can hear Sidney Outlaw sing “I am a Pilgrim of Sorrow” for fishermen on an island in Chad – and hear them sing a fishing song of their own in response. 

John Beyrle, former US Ambassador to Russia, contextualizes this vignette. Beyrle persuasively extols cultural diplomacy. He also worries that the arts today wind up “on the chopping block.”

A LISTENING GUIDE. [listen here]

00:00 – Willis Conover’s “Jazz Hour” on the Voice of America and its electrifying impact in the USSR

3:00 – About my new book The Propaganda of Freedom

6:00 – The late Alexander Toradze on how jazz symbolized “American freedoms” in Soviet Russia

10:00 – A knowledgeable Soviet audience boos Benny Goodman because he’s old-fashioned

12:00 – Leonard Bernstein speaks to a Moscow audience about musical bonds

16:25 – Contradicting CIA-sponsored propaganda, Bernstein extols Shostakovich in Russia

18:30 – Former US Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle on misconceived CIA-sponsored cultural propaganda

21:30 – A triumph of cultural diplomacy: Vladimir Horowitz in Russia (1986) — a visit for which the US ambassador had to raise funds on his own

25:00 – Horowitz performs Schumann before a weeping Moscow audience

30:30 – Ambassador Beyrle: the arts “on the chopping block” once the Cold War waned

34:30 – Ambassador Beyrle on the potential importance of cultural diplomacy in Africa today

35:15 – US Ambassador to Chad Alexander Laskaris on cultural diplomacy in Guinea and Chad

38:25 – Sidney Outlaw singing in Chad

40:00 – Ambassador Laskaris on the arts and US foreign policy

43:00 – William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony – a foreign policy opportunity

45:00 – Philadelphia Orchestra President Matias Tarnopolsky on visiting China

Curating American Repertoire in South Dakota

The South Dakota Symphony concert I last wrote about in this space has now come and gone. In every way, it fortified my impression that this is an orchestra that deserves to be a national model.

The program comprised Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto and Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. That is: it introduced to Sioux Falls an American masterpiece that is little known and little performed, and revisited an opulent symphonic favorite that interestingly contextualizes Harrison’s genius for fusing Eastern and Western cultural practices. I served as an artistic advisor, scripting a 25-minute preamble with film. The result – I believe — was an object lesson in how to curate important American repertoire, and a showcase for the orchestra’s singular esprit. 

The evening began with the Princess of the Pagodas from Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite. It served to introduce the 1889 Paris World’s Fair, whose highlights included the Eiffel Tower and the Javanese Pavilion with its never-before-heard gamelan: an epiphany for Paris’s musical community. Ravel attended as an impressionable teenager. Saint-Saens was duly impressed. Debussy experienced a veritable epiphany. All this was narrated and illustrated – and led to a consideration of Lou Harrison’s absorption of gamelan practice. Here the film (by my colleague Peter Bogdanoff) showed gamelan scholar Bill Alves demonstrating how Javanese gamelan evokes “a cosmic hierarchy in sound.” Then Emanuele Arciuli, our wonderful soloist, illustrated at the piano how Harrison’s layered keyboard textures, with their “gongs” in the bass, lyrically re-process Javanese music. For the thirty-minute concerto – to my ears, the most formidable by any American — the Sioux Falls audience was rapt. There was a standing ovation. Arciuli and Delta David Gier repeated the entire Stampede movement – and a second standing ovation was ignited. 

Gier’s performance of Scheherazade, after intermission, was memorably expansive, subtly shaped, intensely felt. For his woodwind soloists, he seamlessly fashioned opportunities for personalized expression. They responded in turn. (The orchestra’s principal oboist, Jeffrey Paul, is one of the most eloquent instrumentalists I have ever encountered. He also composes and conducts.) It is not irrelevant that these players do not perform concerts three and four times a week. More often, they perform as a full-time woodwind quintet. They regularly interact with Native American musicians on reservations throughout the state – the Lakota Music Project I have often written about. That is: their musical lives are varied and whole; their commitment to the South Dakota Symphony transcends rehearsing and performing. In New York, members of the Philharmonic are spared school visits – the orchestra has a separate roster of “educational” players for that. This arrangement circumscribes the roles musicians play. No one is well served, especially today when orchestras and communities no longer mesh – except in fortunate cities like Sioux Falls.

Ancillary to Saturday night’s concert, Emanuele Arciuli – who performs more American music than any American pianist, and has even written a book (in Italian) about it – played an “American Fusion” program at South Dakota State University (which bussed students to the Harrison/Rimsky concert), and a Frederic Rzewski program at the University of South Dakota.

On April 27, Gier conducts Mahler’s Third Symphony in celebration of his twentieth season as Music Director. I’ll be there.

(My 7,000-word American Scholar manifesto, “Shostakovich and South Dakota,” may be read here. My “Shostakovich and South Dakota NPR program may be heard here. The Lou Harrison documentary film that Peter Bogdanoff and I produced for Naxos may be purchased here.)

A Saturday Night Livestream: Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto in South Dakota

I have often extolled Lou Harrison’s Piano Concerto as quite possibly the most formidable concerto by any American. And I have often extolled the South Dakota Symphony as a national model. This Saturday night at 8:30 pm ET, the South Dakota Symphony performs the Harrison concerto – a concert that will be livestreamed (but not archived), if you would like to sample how the South Dakota Symphony does things.

The concerto will be directly preceded by a 30-minute scripted preamble with a film created by my colleague Peter Bogdanoff.  We will begin with some Ravel (“The Princess of the Pagodas” from Mother Goose), then explore the 1889 Paris Exposition, with its Javanese Pavilion, which introduced Paris (and the Western world) to gamelan. All of this will eventually lead to a sampling of the Harrison concerto, and a little demonstration of how the piano writing is indebted to the layered textures of Javanese music.

I wrote the script, and will narrate alongside Music Director Delta David Gier. Our soloist – an inspired Harrison exponent – is Emanuele Arciuli. Though Italian, Emanuele has performed more American piano music than anyone else I know, and has also written a book about it (awaiting an English translation).

The second half of the program features Rimski-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a prime example of musical “Orientalism” preceding the East/West fusion seminally clinched by Harrison.  

There will also be a pre-concert talk with film and a post-concert discussion. Tonight, Emanuele and I present an “American Fusion” program at South Dakota State University, which will bus students to Saturday night’s concert. 

To my way of thinking, all this embodies how symphony orchestras should function these days, with dwindling audiences and dissipating cultural memories.

Here’s my program note for Saturday’s concert:

“But my poor friend! Do you remember the Javanese music, able to express every shade of meaning, even unmentionable shades which make our tonic and dominant seem like ghosts? . . . Their school consists of the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand other tiny noises . . . that force one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a traveling circus.” – Claude Debussy

Debussy discovered Javanese music at the 1889 Paris Exposition – the one with the Eiffel Tower. Its Javanese Village was just that, with sixty residents from the Indonesian islands of Java and Sunda. They inhabited a kind of pre-industrial paradise, crafting batiks, weaving straw hats, and – most notably – performing a kind of music and dance as yet wholly unknown in Europe. There were no films or recordings to prepare the shock. France’s musicians and painters were more than galvanized; their vocabulary of gesture and ambience was actually transformed. For Debussy and Maurice Ravel, gamelan embodied sounds and textures previously unimagined. They were merely the first of countless influential Western composers to undergo an Indonesian epiphany. 

A towering figure in this narrative is one of the most formidable of all American composers: Lou Harrison (1917-2003); that he remains little-performed (outside the West Coast) is scandalous. That he doesn’t felicitously fit any musical map is both a proof of his originality and a penalty he pays. The absorption of gamelan elements in his music is so complete that the style, global influences notwithstanding, is all of a piece; the finished product cannot be called “eclectic.”

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1917, Harrison was a product of the West Coast: facing Asia. He eventually settled in rural Aptos, near Santa Cruz. Ongoing explorations of other cultures was an ongoing Harrison life motif. As a child he studied dance and Gregorian chant. In San Francisco’s Chinatown, he imbibed Chinese opera and purchased huge gongs to supplement instruments he himself created out of discarded brake drums and springs found in junkyards. The 1939 San Francisco Golden Gate Exposition introduced him to Indonesian gamelan: a life-long passion. He acquired a similar expertise in Korean and Chinese music.     

Harrison’s music is an original, precise, and yet elusive product of these and other far-flung cultural excursions. And yet his American roots are identifiable. American is his self-made, learn-by-doing, try-everything approach. So is his polyglot range of affinities, unchannelled by any linear narrative of advancement. A composer far ahead of his time, Harrison espoused “world music” before there was a name for it. 

Harrison’s 30-minute Piano Concerto celebrates the grandeur and variety of his musical vision. Harrison’s biographer Bill Alves comments: “It’s easy to get lost in Lou’s eclecticism. He’s really a Romantic at heart.” In fact, it is hard to think of a more persuasively expansive concerto by an American composer. The big sonorities and lean, uncluttered textures connect with the “prairie” mode of Aaron Copland. But Harrison is more polyglot, more idiosyncratic, more remote from European models and experience. 

The concerto begins with a fortissimo flourish forecasting its exceptional scope. What follows is an equally exceptional 12-minute movement in sonata form; Sudip Bose, the editor of The American Scholar and a Harrison connoisseur, memorably calls it “as vast as a canyon.” The piano writing is itself highly unusual – and indebted to the layered textures of Javanese gamelan. The second movement “Stampede” is a patented Harrison genre of which the composer writes: “[It] is a large and rambunctious expansion of the European area’s medieval dance form Estampie. The two words are cognate and refer to general noise and bruha-ha and not, as I had originally thought, to any form of ‘stamping’ dance.” The raucous affect is reinforced by occasional use of an octave bar, to produce dissonant tone-clusters. The third movement is an eight-minute Largo hymn. Of the concerto’s brief finale, Harrison writes: “I have written Jalas in a sort of perpetuum mobile style . . . This last movement is meant as a kind of quiet ‘lace-work.’” (By “Jalas,” Harrison refers to a technique in North Indian classical music in which the player interpolates a repeated drone.) The Harrison Piano Concerto is at once original, melodious, and formidably grand.

Our program closes with music as familiar as Harrison’s is not: Rimsky-Korsakov’s sublime Scheherazade (1888). It is perhaps the most famous embodiment of “Orientalism” – an arm’s-length infatuation with the exotic that galvanized many a Russian and European composer before the turn of the twentieth century. In other words: Orientalism prefaces the 1889 Paris Exposition – it celebrates a mainly imaginary East, preceding direct exposure to the real thing. And there is nothing wrong with that, especially when the creative imagination is as opulent as Rimsky’s is here. 

In 1874 Rimsky visited the town of Bakchisaray, near Sevastopol on the southern coast of Crimea. He marvelled at “the coffee houses, the shouts of its venders, the chanting of the muezzins on the minaret, the services in the mosques, and the oriental music.” Thirteen years later, he embarked on an orientalist fantasy inspired by The Arabian Nights (collecting Arabic, Persian, and Indian tales) and called it Scheherazade. It is she, in the Arabian Nights, who spins a vast web of tales, one per night, for 1,001 nights in order to pre-empt the Sultan’s vow to kill each of his wives. Rimsky discouraged an overly programmatic reading of the four movements (he later suppressed the movement titles listed on tonight’s program page). He did concede that the solo violin evoked Scheherazade “as she tells her wondrous tales to the stern Sultan.” He further wrote: “In composing Scheherazade I meant these hints to direct only slightly the listener’s fancy on the path that my own fancy had traveled . .  . All I wanted was that the hearer. . . should carry away the impression that it is undoubtedly an Oriental narrative of numerous and varied fairy-tale marvels, and not merely four pieces played one after the other and based on themes common to all four.”

Mahler, Bernstein, and “The Marriage”

What did Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein have in common? As is well known, Bernstein was a triumphant advocate of Mahler’s symphonies at a moment when they had yet to enter the mainstream repertoire. And both were outsiders – Mahler as a Jew in Vienna, and Bernstein as someone trying to resolve the oxymoron “American classical musician.”

But in my NPR interview yesterday about my new novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York, I found myself talking about what they did not have in common. Bernstein, conducting the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s, was an exemplary music director. Mahler, conducting the Philharmonic from 1908 to 1911, was judged a “failure” – not as a conductor, but as a cultural leader. Exploring this verdict, I contrast Bernstein’s excavation of little-known American works with Mahler’s inattention to the fledgling American composer. In the process, I have occasion to mull the challenge facing the Philharmonic and other American orchestras right now – a moment when the role of the “music director” must be redefined (the topic of my 7,000-word rant in the current American Scholar).

I also discuss how I found myself sympathetic to the plight of Gustav’s controversial wife, Alma – and so discovered how historical fiction could be a crucial tool for the cultural historian.

Ultimately, Mahler’s supreme importance was not as a conductor or a husband, but as a great composer – a verdict supported by a supremely beautiful orchestral extract (from the slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth) at the close.

Also: I am delighted to announce that Wolke Verlag will publisher a German translation of my novel. 

My thanks, as ever, to Rupert Allman and Jenn White at WAMU, the DC public radio station that produces “1A” – home to my “More than Music” features, and also yesterday’s interview.