Joseph Horowitz's Blog

I once described Bill McGlaughlin, who has died at the age of 82, as manifesting “a singular combination of gravitas, humor, and informed sincerity.” He began his musical life as a trombonist, later became a conductor and composer — and America’s single best-known classical music radio host.

Classical music radio turned toxic decades ago. It connotes arthritic programing for aged or timid listeners, and an orotund baritone spewing platitudes. Bill’s baritone was never orotund — I would describe it as breathless and excitable, quivering with feeling. That such an original radio presence acquired such popularity goes to show that conventional wisdom is often flawed wisdom.

One of my most remarkable experiences being interviewed about classical music occurred in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on an early morning TV show. I was curating a “Dvorak and America” festival for the North Carolina Symphony, and had been invited to talk about Dvorak on live television. Which I did. Meanwhile, my interlocutor was visibly perturbed by instructions she was receiving via her headset. I couldnt hear the instructions, but I knew the gist: “Get that guy to stop talking.” Which I did not.

Equally remarkable was the experience of being interviewed, years ago, by David Osenberg, who runs a classical music radio station unlike any other: WWFM. Dave’s questions were unpredictable and my answers were long. Shortly after that exchange was aired without mishap, Dave suggested we fashion a regular program based on the thematic concerts I was concocting for PostClassical Ensemble in Washington, D. C. Most took the form of advocacy for underplayed American composers like Bernard Herrmann, Silvestre Revueltas, and Lou Harrison. We knew the program needed Bill McGlaughlin.

On the resulting shows, Bill and I talked more than we listened. Here’s a sample of “PostClassical” as broadcast by WWFM on February 21, 2020. The topic was Wilhelm Furtwängler’s wartime Berlin broadcasts. This was Bill’s response to a 1942 broadcast of Schubert’s Ninth Symphony, movement two:

So that’s BIll counting the extra beats Furtwängler interpolates when Schubert’s juggernaut suddenly stops and yields a cavernous silence. And then he unforgettably says: “This time we broke it, we really broke civilization.” And I concur.

But Bill and I didnt always agree. We had a running battle over Aaron Copland, whose music I find over-praised and over-played. One fine afternoon, Bill’s patience ran out: “So you better get over it, Jack,” he announced. So much for that topic.

Another show dealt with great American orchestras back in the days of Toscanini, Stokowski, and Koussevitzky. The most extreme was Dmitri Mitropoulos’s Minneapolis Symphony, whose stylistic base was Mahler, Schoenberg, and Berg. Mitropoulos was especially proud of his 1940 recording of Schumann’s Second Symphony. We auditioned some of that until Bill interrupted. “It makes me really jittery,” he confided. “I can’t understand this Schumann. I know that Schumann was meshugana. This is so crazy-making for me. Help me out!”

Bill admired my recent novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York and eagerly wrote about it. But Bill was about uplift and I savor Mahler’s torment. Bill commented: “The overall trajectory of Mahler’s life in these years could leave a reader despondent. Then, just when we’re about to abandon all hope, Joe gives us the story of the premiere of the Eighth Symphony in Munich, one of he greatest triumphs of Mahler’s life. This chapter is filled with love and music and children and leaves us with the will to go on.” His comments ended: “Mahler is now heard around the world. And this book deepens our experience and satisfaction and love.”

He was one of a kind, irreplaceable.

To audition the entire “PostClassical” broadcast dealing with “Furtwängler in Wartime,” click here.

To hear Furtwangler’s 1942 Schubert performance, click here. The climax in question peaks at 23:07.

I’d like to draw attention to four of the public responses to my recent blog on the “Orchestra Gap,” in which I observe among the younger members of major American orchestras “diminished motivation: as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.” Two of the responses are from senior orchestral musicians. The third is from a prominent music educator, the fourth from a conductor. I append them in full below. These are excerpts:

One of the orchestral musicians writes: “I have to agree that today’s American orchestral musicians (strings, primarily) lack engagement and involvement. . . . The top American orchestras feel that their ‘phone-it-in’ level of play is quite good enough for the job. . . .  The BSO [Boston Symphony] has been like this for decades. . . . I fought this, myself, from my corner of the string section. I didn’t believe in it.”

The music educator writes: “I can tell you that in my training as a string player in the 80s and 90s, the biggest compliment one could give or get was ‘that’s so clean!’ Everyone listened to and wanted to sound like an engineered commercial recording. It only got worse. I think today’s string player accuracy–as playing machines, instrument operators–is without comparison in the history of music . . . No surprise that the current generation is incapable of lilting the second beat of a waltz.”

I hear this sort of testimony all the time, but always in private. Teachers of dance and theater say the same. The topic is perilous. It is no wonder that the conductor Kenneth Woods, with whom I participated in the podcast embedded above, felt impelled to preface our exchange as follows: “This is a pretty intense conversation about some challenging topics in orchestral life. The casual listener dropping in or out could be forgiven for taking something out of context and thinking either of us is begin unfair . . . We think it’s worthwhile to make clear that this is a discussion about how we create an orchestral culture where as many orchestral musicians as possible are able to express as much of their artistry and humanity as possible.”

A necessary question is: Are there remedies? And a necessary starting point is to acknowledge that people growing up in today’s world face unprecedented challenges to personal expression. Social media, cell phones, AI – all of it impels a moment-to-moment existence that’s anathema, both emotionally and intellectually, to sustained immersion in a Beethoven symphony. On top of that, and for the same reasons, cultural memory is shot – the younger you are, the less you’re likely to know about yesterday or the day before.

In my podcast with Ken, we ponder certain corrective strategies. We talk about instrumental pedagogy. We talk about the audition process. We wonder out loud about whether the study of historic recordings could play a bigger role – not only in classrooms, but (unthinkable thought) in rehearsals.

At the very end of the conversation, I found myself referencing the engaged orchestral musicians I cherish at Ken’s Colorado Mahlerfest and in Delta David Gier’s South Dakota Symphony (which you can see performing Mahler here). I share these further observations:

The members of both orchestras are self-selected. When musicians travel to Boulder or Sioux Falls to play the big symphonies of Mahler or Shostakovich, it’s not for the fee. They’ll tell you that it’s for the vibe. The players exude pride and excitement. In Europe, think of Ivan Fischer’s hand-picked Budapest Festival Orchestra, almost all of whose members are Hungarians. Or the Lucerne Festival Orchestra, with a summertime crop of motivated players from top ensembles. I’m not comparing these four orchestras in caliber; I’m comparing them in attitude.

As I’ve often written in this space, the nine core members of the South Dakota Symphony, comprising a string quartet and wind quintet, are the happiest musicians I have ever encountered in a professional American orchestra. They perform 100 times a year. They are basically self-governing. Their assignments include working with youngsters on Indian reservations throughout the state. For them, membership in an orchestra isn’t a gig. Rather, they are vital members of a cultural institution serving a distinctive community.

Decades ago, I briefly taught at the Manhattan School of Music. My students were enrolled in a two-year graduate-level sequence tailored to aspirant orchestral players. I shared historic recordings. I lectured on the history of the American orchestra. Most in the class participated without evident enthusiasm. A minority refused to countenance the reading and writing assignments (“That’s not what we’re here for”). Another minority, perhaps half a dozen, found the recordings and readings revelatory.

One day, Larry Tamburri visited my class. At the time, he was Executive Director of the New Jersey Symphony, where he had to a remarkable degree empowered the musicians as institutional partners. Larry drew two circles on the blackboard, one big and the other small. The small circle, he explained, described the traditional role of the orchestral musician: rehearsing, performing, and that’s it. The larger circle described the kind of musician he needed for his orchestra: a full participant in the life of an arts organization. My students remained silent. He’s telling you what I’ve been talking about for the last two months, I said. What do you think? A bassoonist raised his hand. What’s you’re talking about, he offered, is something we can think about later. Right now, our focus is how to excel as instrumentalists and how to win an audition.

Ken Woods has just posted a follow-up to our podcast here. One thing he talks about is how actors are trained to study and internalize a text, to understand the state of mind and back-story of the characters they enact. Musicians can learn from that practice, he suggests.

I here append the four comments referenced at the top of this blog:

From a prominent American music educator:

I can tell you that in my training as a string player in the 80s and 90s, the biggest compliment one could give or get was “that’s so clean!” Everyone listened to and wanted to sound like an engineered commercial recording. It only got worse. I think today’s string player accuracy–as playing machines, instrument operators–is without comparison in the history of music; clean and absolutely faithful to every detail of the score edition in front of them. (I was once thrown out of a lesson for trilling at a cadence in a Handel sonata. Not before my teacher scolded, “Great! now you are Handel!” He always demanded “absolute fidelity” to the score.) No surprise that the current generation is incapable of lilting the second beat of a waltz. It goes against their training. Fidelity to the written score has been drilled into every fiber of their being (that is not distracted by social media). The faster and cleaner the better. The score is not regarded as a guide but a dictator of the composers presumed intentions. (Never mind that many scores are far removed from the composer, surviving only in copyists hands and musicologists’ best guesses.)

From “James”:

I have to agree that today’s American orchestral musicians ( strings, primarily) lack engagement and involvement. This has been cultivated to a great degree because of the wrong-headed notion that movement in one’s playing is a distraction to one’s colleagues, and that it is for the conductor alone to provide “the dance”.
The Berliners would scoff at that.

What they don’t understand is that a withholding of a show of involvement too often translates to actual non-involvement and manifests itself in the sound and energy produced. The top American orchestras feel that their “phone-it-in” level of play is quite good enough for the job. They are right about that to some extent. But it is the “edge of the seat” quality in the performance that is rarely reached. Yes, the “good enough” level is higher than it’s ever been. But if colleagues are “teaching” the new hires that “this moving thing is just not what we do here”, then the enthusiasm they had upon entry gets quashed quite rapidly.

The BSO has been like this for decades. The string players have effectively worked this (obvious to the audience) physical withholding of engagement into their performing ethos. I fought this, myself, from my corner of the string section. I didn’t believe in it.
Audiences listen with their eyes perhaps as much as with their ears, and now maybe moreso in this era of visual overload. I once had a visiting conductor stop me as I was exiting the stage after a rehearsal to tell me that he appreciated my contribution to the music making and that he looked to me (specifically) quite often for reinforcement amongst the sea of tepid responses. It was the sole acknowledgement of my work in a 35 year career.

I have often thought that the first American orchestra to shed the shroud and Berlin-ize itself will have audiences flocking there.

From “Doublerdad”:

I am an orchestra musician in my 70’s but still working. I often feel like the last railroad lookout in the caboose…obsolete and irrelevant. It’s a long trend and Covid was the finishing blow.

From the conductor John Welsh:

When I was younger I soon discovered the difference between American and European orchestras as I was listening to comments from members of a major European orchestra (not the Berlin but an orchestra that I prefer over it). A group of string players (violinists even!) were discussing in a very positive and enthusiastic way their performance that evening. The comments were about how well the orchestra played and complimentary on their colleagues contribution to the effort. There might have been suggestions (NOT criticisms) on what could have been done differently but said in sincere interest of making the music better. In American orchestras (this is a gross generalization) what is said by many of the members is often despairingly said about other colleagues, the conductor or the job itself.
STYLE – it seems that in this country it is rarely taught! I once was doing a complete performance of the Vivaldi Seasons with a very up and coming violinist with New York management. The discussion of the difference in approach to Vivaldi versus Mozart or Beethoven came up. There wasn’t any reaction from the soloist so I asked what her prominent teacher had told her. The answer was that it had never been mentioned. Once in a conducting workshop the student was doing a Mendelssohn work and treating it as if it was Beethoven. I asked the student if there was any difference between a forte in different composer’s works. The answer was a forte is a forte. I was fortunate to have a teacher that not only discussed the conceptual differences between Bach and Debussy but gave me the technique utilized in the production of those different sounds. With those concepts I was able, after studying and observing conductors whose techniques fit different styles, to be flexible enough to utilize those different techniques to produce those different sounds from orchestras. I am thankful for that first teacher that wouldn’t allow me to play unless I understood what environmental effects brought about the music that those composers wrote.

The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra going through the motions of Wagner’s “Liebestod” – “diminished motivation: as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.”

To access a pertinent podcast conversation between Joseph Horowitz and conductor Kenneth Woods, click here. To discover a final whiff of optimism, go to 1:00:53.

An accelerating hiatus between Europe and the United States, especially obvious to Americans (such as myself) recently abroad, touches on aspects of daily life, of governance, and – not least – of civilization.

For instance: though it’s not yet widely noticed (except privately), there’s a growing gap between the top European orchestras and the big-name American orchestras — and it’s symptomatic of bigger things. Perhaps this will prove a reckoning moment for classical music in the United States, documenting a cumulative failure to absorb the European parent culture and, moving on, to grow New World roots.

If so, it’s a failure that was long deferred and disguised by stellar immigrant conductors and instrumentalists — who today, however, are barely a memory. When I wrote Understanding Toscanini: How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Created a New Audience for Old Music in 1987, it was pilloried for falsely forecasting a classical music crisis particular to the United States. My premise was that the high-pitched celebrity of an Italian symphonic conductor signified a “culture of performance” seduced by foreign glamour and sidelining the creative act.  In today’s US, the Toscanini loyalists are by now long gone, music critics are gone, audiences are gone or newly clueless. Our composers increasingly confect makeshift music. I predicted it would happen – but never imagined it would transpire so quickly.

Back in 1927, Charles Edward Russell – a popular socialist writer – called America’s orchestras our “foremost cultural asset,” a “sign of honor among the nations.” It was a credible claim. The concert orchestra was largely a New World invention, versus pit orchestras abroad. And we had some great ones. Just listen to broadcasts of the symphony orchestras of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and of the Met orchestra, during the thirties and forties.

Curiously – revealingly – they’re a heterogeneous group. They don’t share a common “American” style. Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony boasted an exceptionally robust string choir. Many of those players, including the concertmaster, were Russian. The winds were French. Koussevitzky was himself a Russian string player (a double bass virtuoso) who arrived in the US by way of Paris. What did they sound like? Koussevitzky was a Tchaikovsky specialist. Try this torrid 1943 broadcast of Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini.

The New York Philharmonic was more Italianate, at least when Arturo Toscanini was on the podium. Its signature was a scorching combination of precision and song. Here is the overture to Rossini’s Semiramide.

Downtown at the Met, the orchestra was even more Italianate, with more Italian members (impossible to count because the Met’s archivists now store previously accessible records where they’re not “retrievable”). As I’ve often written, under Ettore Panizza’s baton this group was a powderkeg. Its whipsaw attacks, lean sonorities, and taut melodic filaments manifest a Verdi style. That in Wagner, under Artur Bodanzky, the same style proved unidiomatic but thrilling demonstrates how tradition deeply seated in performance can be liberating rather than confining. I once shared with my late friend Alexander Toradze Bodanzky’s January 30, 1937, Siegfried broadcast (the mightiest rendering of that opera that I know). We sampled the mountaintop passage leading to Brunnhilde’s awakening, then the beginning of the duet. Many treasure this performance because the singers are Kirsten Flagstad and Lauritz Melchior. Lexo’s incredulous response was: “What an orchestra!” And so it was.

(More than those of any American concert pianist I can think of, Lexo’s interpretations – of Ravel, of Prokofiev, of Shostakovich, of Stravinsky, of Rachmaninoff – were inflected by the rhythmic energies of American jazz, which he had zealously absorbed via the Voice of America “Jazz Hour.”)

Stokowski’s band in Philadelphia was sui generis. They emitted a sonic lava flow, sans subito dynamics. Even staccatos were viewed with suspicion. This is the orchestra Rachmaninoff called “the greatest the world has ever known.” My favorite Stokowski/Philadelphia performance is of Beethoven’s Fifth, as experimentally recorded (with remarkable dynamic range) by Bell Labs in 1931. The misterioso passages of the Andante, reconceived by Stokowski as an Adagio, attain an hypnotic poetic stasis. And listen to his cellos sigh the opening tune.

The only thing these four orchestras had in common was a caliber of engagement rarely encountered nowadays. The players were closer in time and disposition to the repertoire at hand. They “feel it.” Today, that link’s been severed.

Recently, I felt impelled to return to the most astonishing symphonic ensemble I ever encountered in live performance. This was Yevgeny Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic, on tour in the US (for the only time) in 1962. I was fourteen years old and listened in a state of shock. Thanks to the Iron Curtain, Mravinsky and his players inhabited a time warp. For half a century, beginning in 1938, his prerogatives were absolute. Rehearsals and performances observed a sacred calling. The lineage back to Tchaikovsky remained intact. For new music, they had Shostakovich’s symphonies. In Tchaikovsky’s Fifth (which I heard), the vibrating horns and piercing trumpets and (most of all) the bewitching string choir, with its vast range of nuance and dynamics, revealed to my ears the true sound of Tchaikovsky. And yet this specificity of style and sound was empowering, not constricting. You can now hear Mravinsky in a wide swath of repertoire, recorded in concert. His affinities are actually Germanic. His Beethoven and Bruckner seem to me incomparable. The trombone vibrato is an acquired taste.

American orchestras, in comparison, have never enjoyed a stylistic base linked to native repertoire because there is no adequate American canon. Might there have been? Two possible progenitors were our two supreme concert composers: Charles Ives and George Gershwin. But Ives exerted no influence during the decades he was composing, and Gershwin was sidelined as an interloper from the tainted precincts of Broadway and jazz – the very influences that might have fostered a distinctive New World swagger (at times detectable in various Leonard Bernstein interpretations).

I’ve often written that the biggest “what-iff” in the history of American classical music is: What if Gershwin had lived as long as Aaron Copland? Responding to my recent blogs, the composer David Chesky writes: “Gershwin reflected the syncopation, rhythm, optimism, and energy of American life. His orchestral work captured the sound of a nation coming into its own. Our cities pulse with jazz, hip-hop, Latin music, rock electronic music, and countless hybrid forms. If America is going to have a living classical tradition, it must absorb those rhythms and that vitality. . . . If American classical music had been allowed to develop naturally, it might have continue the lineage of Gershwin – with richer harmonies, greater complexity, and new orchestral colors.”  

In retrospect, what’s “American” in common for Ives or Gershwin or Stokowski is a self-made insouciance, discarding or mangling Old World tradition. In my Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall, I made the same claims for Jon Vickers and Glenn Gould – the signature North American opera singer and pianist, whose performances of Old World classics were never idiomatic. Of Vickers I wrote:

“The most original Met artist during the [Rudolf] Bing and [James] Levine years was the Canadian tenor Jon Vickers. In an era when other singers worked to recapture the fleeting essence of styles Italian, French, German, or Russian, Vickers eschewed every pretext of stylistic authenticity; like the great singers of the Met’s Golden Age and before, he was always the same. For Fernando De Lucia in the 1920s, performing “nun sei bedankt, mein lieber Schwan!” in Italian, Lohengrin was quite simply an Italian role, as enthrallingly and sinuously lyric as Puccini’s Rodolfo. As a Canadian, Vickers had no such recourse: like the comparable New World originals Stokowski, Gould, and the later Bernstein, he was sui generis, one of a kind. None of his signature roles – not Beethoven’s Florestan, sung in German; not Berlioz’s Enee, sing in French, not Leoncavallo’s Canio, sung in Italian, not Tchaikovsky’s Hermann, sung in Russian was idiomatic as he sang it. In fact, closer contact with a Giovanni Martinelli or Peter Pears could only have diluted his Otello or Peter Grimes – not because he was the greater artist, but because his artistry was whole, and wholly iconoclastic. One foundation for Vickers’ singular vocal personality is obvious: unlike most other North Americans of his generation, he had extensive experience singing . . . in his mother tongue. A specialist in outcasts – Tristan and Siegmund were also among his roles – he was himself an operatic pariah.” (I once attempted a pertinent phone conversation with Jon Vickers; it proved untenable.)

Back to orchestras – today’s best, many would say, is the Berlin Philharmonic. Two seasons ago, at Carnegie Hall, Kyrill Petrenko took them through Rachmaninoff’s The Isle of the Dead. The sustained fortissimo string tremolos crowning that performance were the most explosive I have ever heard. This past season, the Chicago Symphony came to Carnegie with Klaus Makela. The windswept landscape of “Lemminkainen in Tuonela,” the third of Sibelius’s four Lemminkainen Legends, is a cruel study in tremolo: you feel it or you don’t. What I think I observe among the young Chicago violinists – and those of the New York Philharmonic, of the Met orchestra, of the Boston Symphony — is diminished motivation: as if the music fails to impel a commanding physical and emotional response.

The Berlin players retain a dark sonic signature going back at least as far as their fabled decades under Wilhelm Furtwangler. To the south, the Vienna Philharmonic can still play a waltz, can still summon a special sweetness in Strauss (either one) and Mozart (I just heard them in their Staatsoper pit in The Magic Flute). And I recently encountered (at the Mahler festival in Steinbach) the Wiener Theatermusiker, whose mastery of the waltz idiom is enduringly divine.

Bettina Gradinger, who leads the Theatermusiker with deft virtuosity, is concertmistress of the Vienna Volksoper. How I wish I had heard her narrate the zany foibles of the composer’s wife when Chicago assayed Ein Heldenleben at Carnegie. The dour acrobatic violin solos of movement three (“The Hero’s Companion”) deserve to be as inimitable as Pauline Strauss herself. The Theatermusiker program I heard in Steinbach also organically incorporated some hilarious jazz riffs. (European classical musicians have long been more receptive to jazz – and, during the interwar decades, to George Gershwin — than the Americans. This is the “jazz threat” and “Gershwin threat” I discover in Classical Music in America.)

In correspondence with Tscho Theissing, the former Volksoper violinist who masterminds the  Theatermusiker, I discovered kindred concerns about an emergent “international style” penalizing string players in particular. He writes: “Many young string players who enter Viennese orchestras have no or very little idea about our style, as it seems not to be taught at the universities (where of course there are many professors from all over the world), and there is a lack of conductors who are capable and/or willing to work on these topics – or they are willing but do not get the opportunity.”

I asked in a recent New York Times piece: “At 250, Has America Delivered on its Classical Music Promise?” When it was picked up by Norman Lebrecht’s slippedisc, the headline read: “Will America Have Orchestras in 2076?” Norman continued: “Classical music [in the US] is now in retreat on most fronts. Apart from raging Dudophilia in Los Angeles and New York, there are few manifestations of classical music as a limelight of American civilisation. Classical music has been eradicated from public education. Historic orchestras in Boston and Pittsburgh are playing half-empty. African-American musicians in orchestras are few and far between. Ensembles are sustained by an influx of US-trained Chinese and Koreans. Europe’s leading maestros (Finns apart) show little interest in becoming music directors in America. The public seems resistant to energetic efforts to diversify the performing repertoire. There are few causes for optimism.”

I wrote to Norman for the names of “leading maestros” with “little interest” in the US. He replied: “Kirill Petrenko, Rattle, Chailly, Gatti, Simone Young, Thielemann, Guggeis, Pappano, Lahav Shani, Bychkov, Popelka, Jakub Hrusa, Marie Jacquot, Lorenzo Viotti, Tomáš Netopil, Philippe Jordan, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, Kazuki Yamada, Ivan Fischer, Adam Fischer, Robin Ticciati.” While I’m not sure what to make of this list, I can report that when Daniele Gatti conducted Parsifal in New York in 2013, the Met orchestra for once sounded like a great orchestra. I’ve written about that, also about Ivan Fischer and his Budapest Festival Orchestra.

If we are in fact broaching a reckoning moment, if the chickens are in fact flocking home to roost within America’s top symphonic ensembles, what to do? Performance history is actually susceptible to study. There is a Verdi style, documented on recordings by Toscanini and Panizza, among many others. American conservatories could systematically expose budding violinists and trumpeters to jazz. Then there are the Central European dance genres that permeate the symphonies of Dvorak, Bruckner, and Mahler — they, too, can be shared. As for the Viennese waltz style documented on recordings by the likes of Franz Lehar — it can’t be that hard to learn to kick the second beat. Writing about the eminent New York chamber orchestra accompanying Jonas Kaufmann at Carnegie Hall in 2018, I reported:

“Never have I heard so clueless a performance of a Central European waltz as the [Orchestra of St. Luke’s] treatment of Lehar’s divine Ballsirenen from The Merry Widow; a lilt was not even attempted. But the evening’s nadir was the waltz from Giuditta. Whatever time was allotted to rehearsing this number (surely very little) would have been better spent inviting the instrumentalists to audition Hilde Gueden in ‘Meine Lippen sie Kussen so heiss’ via youtube (I am perfectly serious). They showed no more familiarity with the pertinent style than they might have performing an Indian raga or a Javanese gamelan number. My wife, who is Hungarian, said she would have preferred ‘the Budapest postal workers’ orchestra.’”

I happen to know a former Metropolitan Opera violinist. He was in the pit for many performances ineffectively led by Valery Gergiev. I once asked him: “Have you ever heard Gergiev conduct his own Mariinski Orchestra? They play in New York all the time.” He had not. So he did — and it proved instructive. So would be Ettore Panizza’s 1938 Otello.

A pipedream.

The books of Robert Seethaler, one of Europe’s pre-eminent novelists, include a 2020 novella about Gustav Mahler: Der letzte Satz. It’s just appeared in English as The Last Movement. It seeks to explore the final turbulent years of the Mahler odyssey. So does my own 2023 Mahler novel: The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. Scanning the similarities and differences observable in these fictitious recreations of an actual life, does a coherent “Mahler” emerge?

The Last Movement, I would say, studies an exceptional personality who happened to have been a famous composer and conductor. Seethaler spends little time with music. He makes no particular attempt to align Mahler’s compositions and performances with personal attributes. Rather, he exercises a novelist’s imagination to bring a story vividly to life. When Mahler sailed home to Europe for the last time, in 1911, did he lean against a deck container upon which a coil of rope sat “with an iron hook sticking out”? Was the hook “rusted at the tip” and the rope “frayed and black with oil”? It matters not. I would hesitate to call The Last Movement “historical fiction.” Rather, it’s an exercise in fiction that happens to deploy an actual historical personage.

The Marriage is also an exercise in fiction. But the incidents I relate, and the characters I describe, are invariably matters of historical record and many passages incorporate Alma’s letters and reminiscences verbatim. Also, Mahler’s music and music-making are major topics; rather like Thomas Mann, I find myself using words to describe not just the affect of music but the sounds themselves. What is more, I have an agenda – to juxtapose the Mahlers, Gustav and Alma, with a new environment: New York City, where between 1907 and 1911 Mahler conducted both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Mahler’s continued ignorance of the city’s musical life (which unfortunately also afflicts his biographers) furnishes an illuminating commentary on Mahler the man. The resulting novel, I would say, is less “historical fiction” than “creative non-fiction.” Its author is a cultural historian seeking new avenues of inquiry.

And yet the two books have much in common. Both writers deploy first-person narratives to explore what’s inside Mahler’s head. And both situate Mahler aboard a trans-Atlantic vessel, where the contemplation of sky and water inspires philosophical reverie. The entirety of The Last Movement, in fact, transpires in April 1911 aboard the Amerika. Terminally ill, Mahler is heading home to die in Vienna. The turbulence of his recent personal affairs is recalled in flashback. In The Marriage, there is a single ship-born episode midway through, but it crucially limns the essential interiority of the Mahler persona.

Here’s a sampling of Seethaler: 

     Sitting on the sundeck, Mahler contemplated the meaninglessness of life with a twinge of baleful resignation. Life was little more than a brief exhalation, a breath in the storm of the world, yet he loved it so much that his sadness at the futility of this love almost broke his heart. 

     “It could have all have gone quite differently. We should have swum across to the other shore. It was a mistake to turn back halfway. Who does such a thing?”

      Mahler spoke into the wind. His head jerked up, and he blinked in the bright sunlight . . . 

      The cloud had vanished; the sky was white and empty. Mahler leant against the steel wall at an angle and tried to bear it. He could hear voices again on the lower deck. People were talking over each other; someone laughed, and then it was quiet again, apart from the wind and the sound of the sea.

      Tears suddenly sprang to his eyes and he sobbed into his palms. He thought of the others, their faces and voices, and his guilt.

      “I would so have liked to live longer,” he said out loud.

      This made him feel ridiculous, and he was embarrassed. . . .

      It’s full of life down there, he thought. Quite unlike the heavens. Up above, it’s all empty and dead. Strange, really, for people to hope that’s where they’ll go. . . . 

And here – from an earlier stage in the story — is a bit of Horowitz:

      “Vita fugax.” This fleeting life. My work unfinished. 

      And yet: How beautiful the world is! How can any clod claim indifference? How detestable is a “worldly” cynicism! Man is such a marvelous machine. When we see a complex mechanism – a motor car – do we assume that no means of propulsion is present merely because none is visible? So it is with Nature.

      He was leaning on the railing, facing sky and water. The great ship was asleep. The enveloping blackness signified the hidden presence both of stars and clouds – and also no doubt of an impregnating deity. Left behind was the concrete of the city, its rackets of noise and miniature facsimiles of lake and forest. Soon he would return to the wooded seclusion of his composing hut the thought of which caused him to sink far into himself, a narcotic sensation laced with the sublime privacies of creative introspection. Lost to the world.

      Gradually a half moon appeared, its outline diffused by drifting wisps of colored air made visible by the pale yellowish light. Directly underneath, darting specks, also yellow, lit the Atlantic: Kantian ephemera, a flickering, fickle world of appearances masking the elusive profundities of existence itself. . . .  

      The opening pages of the new symphony – his Ninth: dangerous epochal number – had for some time congealed in his ear: a cradle song for violins, harp, and quivering violas – a waterscape, clear or turbid, light or dark in hue, whose tolling brass and timpani intimated shoals of foreboding. . . . 

In the world of external events, both novels use dialogue to recreate the marriage crisis of August 1910: Mahler discovers a love letter from the young architect Walter Gropius, addressed to his wife. Here is Seethaler:

      He thought back to the previous summer. On the way to Toblach he had grabbed Alma by the arm to confront her. She looked at him, and a shadow flitted across her forehead, although the day was hot and cloudless.

      “It’s not true,” he said. 

      ”Let go,” she said. “You’re hurting me.” 

      He let her go, and for a moment they stood facing each other in silence.

     “It’s not true,” he said again.

     “Stop it. I’ve told you everything.” 

     “No, you haven’t. I read the letter.” 

     “It’s just words on a piece of paper. People always read what they want to read. Why did you have to read it, anyway? It was my letter you should have kept your hands off it.” 

     “It was addressed to me.” 

     “By mistake. You know that.” 

     “Your architect is an idiot. You’re the lover of an idiot.”

     “I’m not his lover.” 

     “What are you, then?”

     “I am what you could see, if you ever really looked at me properly.” 

     Her dark eyes were very wide. There was expression in them that he had only ever seen once before, and it frightened him.

      “Do you think I like being like this?” he said. “I don’t recognize myself any more. But maybe I’m just imagining it, and I’ve never really known myself at all. I’m jealous. I hate you. And I love you. You’re my light.”

     “My God, you’re so dramatic.”

     “I only ask one thing. Don’t lie to me any more. Tell me about him. Tell me who he is.”

     “He’s a person. He moves and speaks. He breathes. He has a little hollow in the muscles of his arm, just above the elbow. I haven’t worked out what it is and I haven’t yet dared to ask.” 

     “You bitch!” he said.

     “What do you expect? Everything I once believed in has ceased to exist. Maybe it was never there. They did warn me. All he thinks about is his music. . . . ‘’

     “Will you see him again?” he asked abruptly.

     “What if I did?” she said. “I’m a woman. He’s a man. It’s that simple. Of course, you have no clue about that. A genius doesn’t concern himself with such things. . . . “

     “Forgive me,” he said. He abruptly thudded to his knees and clasped her hips in his hands. “Please, please forgive me!”

     Alma’s whole body trembled. She put a hand on his head, and at the same time made a feeble attempt to pull away.

     “Get up,” she said. “Please, get up!”

     Mahler pressed his face to her belly Then, slowly and with difficulty, he unclenched the fingers he had dug into her skirt and got to his feet.

And here, incorporating Alma’s actual correspondence with Gustav, is Horowitz:

     He looked up at the vacant room and in a choking voice cried: “Alma!” She duly appeared. “What is this?!” He stood and handed her the letter. She briefly examined it, blanched, pushed it in her pocket, and replied:

     “I met a young architect at the sanatorium. Purely by chance. And he fell in love with me.”

     She spoke in frozen tones. Her husband’s stricken countenance, the neediness of his bulging reddened eyes, registered the unmediated child in mocking contradiction of the deep furrows of his pale and sunken cheeks, the scarred lines of his high forehead, the incipient graying of his thick and unkempt forest of black hair. His strangely large head, its sallow color and parallelogram shape, looked suddenly reptilian.

     “I had been living like a monk, on lettuce and buttermilk. Exercising in the rain, bathing in the hot springs,” she continued. “Then the doctor prescribed dancing. He introduced me to a young German — a student of Behrens, who had been a friend of my father’s.” 

     She realized with relief that he was not angry. That he was panicked made her guilty and confused. She felt pity. She felt revulsion.

     “An architect?!”

     “Gustav: you sent me to Tobelbad for nearly a month. You told me to stay ‘as long as possible.’ You wrote every day, complaining about your stomach, complaining about your arm, complaining about the noisiness and unruliness of the village children here at Toblach. Informing me that you were eliminating butter from your diet. Lecturing me about Plato and ‘Platonic love.’”

     “And anxiously inquiring why you were writing so seldom, and so impersonally. . . . Alma: Do you love me still?”

     Involuntarily, even – in his panic – subliminally, he observed her altered appearance. Since the marriage, her buxom shape had turned more monumental, her face puffier, blurrier. But now her skin resumed its marble luster. Her chiseled lips and firm chin were softer. A sultry allure he had quite forgotten had like a dangerous ghost reinhabited her visage.

     “For eight years I have been a hermit. Your Hausfrau, rolling up my sleeves, your book-keeper, your maid, at your beck and call. . . .  I am depressed. I drink. I faint. My heart complains. Now it is my gall bladder, Fraenkel says. And my body – it has all but dried up. At Tobelbad I played the piano every day – ‘Du dist der Lenz.’ The Liebestod!”

     “ .  .  . What is his name?”

     “Walter Gropius.”

     “And why in the world would he have addressed this letter to me?”

      “I do not know.”

     “It could only have been deliberate.”

“I do not know.”

     “Alma — What will you do?”

     ”I must think about it. I must think about it alone.” 

     And she was gone. The room was mute. Prior to her departure, neither of them had moved so much as an inch. She had seemed to him unapproachable, inviolable. He looked to the piano, for the letter, then remembered it was in her pocket. So she is reading it now. The piano was trembling. He sat. His pulse was pounding. Was this it, the heart attack he had so long anticipated and feared?

     He did not care.

If the role of Alma Mahler looms far larger in The Marriage than in The Last Movement, it is because Seethaler’s topic is Mahler and mine is indeed the marriage – and its response to  stresses and opportunities posed by a new environment. That said, Alma – demonized in many a Mahler biography — emerges in both books as a victim of her husband’s self-absorption, itself an understandable dimension of his genius. 

Early on in The Last Movement, Mahler remembers observing his wife “waiting, just as she has been waiting for something or someone ever since childhood, while life just passes her by. That, at least, was what she often said when she spoke of her ‘half-lived life.’ He couldn’t take his wife seriously in this regard.” When Alma expresses a desire to experience the novelty of a New York City drugstore, Mahler instructs himself: “No idea what that is, but don’t forget. Don’t forget, don’t forget.” In the wake of the Gropius crisis, he thinks: “She had been right. He hadn’t seen her. He had looked at her as you might contemplate a vase.” 

In The Marriage, Alma encounters a couple of professionally fulfilled women: the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, who was the Maria Callas of her time; and Natalie Curtis, who trekked West to document the songs of Native America. Of Curtis, Alma muses: “Her mission in life is settled.  For Mahler, by comparison, composition is a lonely necessity. It is his way of communing with himself, and now more than ever. . . . Though he swears that he needs me, I am an appendage merely. When he creates – what he feels set upon the earth to do – he is the epitome of self-sufficiency. His very being teems with as much activity as he can tolerate. He bans conversation at dinner. He insists on separate bedrooms. But I require the stimulus of human contact: people.” She subsequently asks herself: “How is it possible that I remain so hollow and indistinct?”

Late in life, Mahler was interviewed by a journalist from Etude magazine and carelessly revealed how little he knew of America’s composers, and how little thought, generally, he had ever given to American music. Ignoring the influential advocacy of “Negro melodies” by Antonin Dvorak in New York two decades previous, and the assiduous investigations into “African-American folk song” by his New York nemesis Henry Krehbiel, Mahler tactlessly added: “That the Negroes in America have accomplished so much is truly amazing. In their music they doubtless copied and varied the songs of the white households to which they were attached. Their love for singing and their sense of rhythm assisted them in this. But to expect that they would evolve an original folk song is preposterous in itself. . . . Surely American music based upon the ‘slave songs’ of the African American, or the crude dances of red-skinned aborigines, is no more representative of the American people today than are the Indians or the Negroes representative of all Americans.” 

In The Marriage, I envision Mahler’s interlocutor from Etude as a knowledgeable young man who necessarily speaks German, and who discloses a keen interest in Mahler’s own Fourth Symphony. Caught off guard, Mahler’s stops pontificating to inquire: “Would you perhaps like some cake? Some coffee? . . .  Put away your book and tell me about yourself. Almschi, bring us something to nibble for Mr. . . . What is your name, by the way?” 

In The Last Movement, Seethaler, too, invents a young man who penetrates Mahler’s self-involvement. He is assigned to look after the dying composer on board the Amerika. An early exchange reads:

     Mahler gazed out over the sea, which still lay grey and empty. . . 

     “Can I do anything else for you, Mr. Director, sir?”

     “Yes, throw me in the sea.”

     “I’m not sure I understand . . .  ?”

     “Never mind. Bring me another tea.” 

     “Certainly, Mr. Director, sir!”

     The boy left.

Forty pages later:

      “Mr. Director,” said the boy.

     “Yes?” said Mahler. He had half-closed his eyes and was listening to the pounding of the engines.

     “What kind of music do you make? Will you tell me something about it?”

      “No. You can’t talk about music; there’s no language for it. As soon as music can be described, it’s bad.”

     The boy looked at him with big, shining eyes.

     “I think I’ll go now,” he said. ”Shall I bring you another pot of tea?”

     Mahler shook his head.

     “Make sure you stay warm,” said the boy. “Mind your feet, especially.”

     “Yes,” said Mahler, “Have they told you that I’m dying?”

     “No,” said the boy, and Mahler could see it was a lie.

And near the end:

       “You should sit down again . . . “

     Mahler looked the boy straight in the face. He wanted to tell him to go to hell, to go and get on someone else’s nerves, but he looked serious and sad, and Mahler’s fury disappeared as quickly as it had come.

     “You’re right,” he said. 

Finally: are these two Mahlers, rendered as fiction, the same? The soprano Lilli Lehmann, who was worldly and never naïve, wrote of Gustav Mahler that his coats were missing buttons, that he was “a nervous fanatic of art,” that he “had no talent for handling people, or for business. . . . There was much that, as a practical friend, one had to teach him.” That is more the Mahler of The Marriage than of The Last Movement, I would say. But both Mahlers, mine and Seethaler’s, so sporadically aware of others, are outwardly captious, ironic, neurotic. Inwardly, essentially, their naivete is consumed by honesty. It anchors a capacity to feel and to love. 

The “New World” Symphony visual presentation created by Peter Bogdanoff for the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s 1994 Dvorak festival. Building on research by Michael Beckerman, it extrapolates the influence of Longfellow on Dvorak. It has since been used by dozens of other orchestras.

I am still processing an avalanche of responses to my New York Times piece on the state of American classical music 250 years in. I’m particularly grateful to readers who wrote to remember the Brooklyn Philharmonic festivals during my 1990s tenure as the orchestra’s Executive Director. That experiment was the subject of the Postlude to my essay collection The Post-Classical Predicament (1995). Below, I’m reprinting all 5,000 words – before it all fades from living memory.

When I was invited by Harvey Lichtenstein to take over the BPO – the Resident Orchestra of his incomparable Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) — there was nothing left to lose. The orchestra had lost over two-thirds of its subscribers over two seasons. And Harvey was a world-class gambler.

As I remarked in my Times piece, the new programing template now controversially proposed for the Boston Symphony, replacing eclectic fare with thematic festivals, has in effect been implemented by the South Dakota Symphony, for which I serve as scholar-in-residence. But its initial manifestation was at BAM, where the impact was immediate. We more than tripled our audiences. We became the first orchestra to be funded by the NEH. We landed major foundation grants from Mellon, Hearst, Rockefeller, and Knight. Among the composers we brought to BAM were Louis Andriessen (the happiest, best-fed composer I have ever encountered), Sofia Gubaidulina, Lou Harrison, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Lukas Foss, Gunther Schuller, Zhou Long (not yet famous), Chen-Yi (ditto) and – not to be forgotten – P. D. Q. Bach aka Peter Schickele.

Re-reading my Postlude today, I discover that I was overly optimistic that American orchestras would succumb to innovation. I also worried about alienating “traditional” BPO subscribers. That proved a groundless fear – we polled our audience and discovered no interest in standard repertoire or “celebrity soloists” (among whom I only engaged Gidon Kremer). I was the beneficiary of Harvey’s BAM audience, which he boldly cultivated by offering what could not be found at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center.

What ended it all was a BAM audit that disclosed a crisis. Overnight, Harvey cancelled the financial favors the orchestra enjoyed as a “resident ensemble.” It afterward died a lingering death.

Here’s my Postlude:

Post-Classical Music in Brooklyn

As program editor for concerts at New York’s 92nd Street Y through 1994, I had the good fortune to serve as artistic advisor to the “Schubertiade”—the Y’s distinguished Schubert festival, anchored by the baritone Hermann Prey. One of my responsibilities was to create an annual Sunday symposium. And so I was thrust from my writer’s desk—a secluded outpost, overlooking a courtyard with trees and unmolested by visitors or telephone calls—and onto the stage of the Y’s Kaufmann Concert Hall.

The first Schubertiade symposium, in 1988, was a hastily organized afternoon exploring Schubert’s earliest songs alongside settings by such forgotten contemporaries as Johann Rudolf Zumsteeg. The following year, “Schubert Lieder in Performance” was fully six hours long, starting at one P.M. and ending at eight, with a break for dinner. We considered the relevance of fortepianos, of improvised ornaments, of historic recordings. The participants included the musicologist and pianist Robert Winter, the fortepianist Malcolm Bilson, the baritone Sanford Sylvan, and the critic Will Crutchfield. The day had its interesting ups and downs. The advocacy of original instruments and interpolated appoggiaturas was, I thought, more clever than persuasive. The most vivid, most spontaneous moment came in the closing panel discussion, when I pressed Prey for an opinion about the elaborate ornaments—based on ornaments once sung by Johann Michael Vogl with Schubert at the piano—we had heard sung by Timothy Mussard. “I hated them!” he exploded. The audience roared its approval.

The following season, in January 1990, we hit stride with “Perspectives on ‘Erlkönig.’” The entire six hours were allotted to a four-minute song, Schubert’s most famous composition for more than half a century after his death. How was it that “Erlkönig” made Schubert’s reputation and shaped it? How assess its popularity and impact? Two lengthy presentations—each, in effect, a concert with commentary—addressed these questions. First we heard, in chronological sequence, seven settings of Goethe’s poem “Erlkönig,” performed by Prey and two other singers, with commentary by the musicologist Walter Frisch. The second presentation, with commentary by Frisch’s Columbia University colleague Christopher Gibbs, sampled nine adaptations of Schubert’s setting; here, the central performer was the pianist William Wolfram. In short, we surrounded Schubert’s achievement with popular ditties and flamboyant concert works, with kitsch and Sturm und Drang, with music obscure and famous, all of it fostered by Goethe’s ballad of 1782.

The first “Erlkönig” song turned out to be a meek strophic rendering by the actress and composer Corona Schröter, who performed it as part of the Singspiel Die Fischerin: a wife passes the time by singing about a child scared to death by a phantom; upon finishing, she remarks that the men are late for dinner. Equally improbable, alongside Schubert’s, was the final “Erlkönig” in our survey, a Biedermeier diversion composed by Ludwig Spohr—who adds a suave obbligato violin impersonating the evil erlking. Anselm Hüttenbrenner’s “Erlkönig Waltz,” with its dainty hand-crossings, was a hilarious Schubert parody. In Joseph Roth’s Schubertiana, a beer-garden medley for two violins, accordion, and guitar, snippets of “Erlkönig” and of the Great C major Symphony took turns with “Heidenröslein” and “Ave Maria.” Of another order were Liszt’s “Erlkönig”—his most famous, most virtuosic Schubert song transcription—and the terrifying harmonics of Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst’s version for solo violin. Of two other solo piano adaptations that we exhumed, Stephen Heller’s “Erlkönig” proved a fascinating, free paraphrase after Schubert, and Geza Zichy’s, for left hand alone, proved unplayable.

The day’s most insightful comment came from an audience member who conjectured that Schubert was drawn to “Erlkönig” through bitter personal experience: Goethe’s poem depicts a son who cannot share with his father what he sees and feels; there is evidence that Schubert himself was not understood by his father. The day’s most electrifying moment was supplied by Prey. In his dressing room he had listened to Karen Smith Erickson sing Corona Schröter’s “Erlkönig,” then to Nathaniel Watson in “Erlkönig” settings by Carl Friedrich Zelter, Johann Friedrich Reichardt, and Bernhard Klein. Distinguished exponents of the Berlin Lieder school Goethe himself endorsed, Zelter and Reichardt support Goethe’s eight stanzas gently and inconspicuously. Klein, by comparison, agitates both singer and pianist; he remolds the poem. This trajectory from reticence to skilled manipulation—a relentless “Erlkönig” drama of its own—culminated with Schubert’s harrowing night ride, and with that of Karl Loewe—a famous and harrowing 1818 “Erlkönig” in its own right. With this build-up, Prey stopped the show with a rendition of the Loewe “Erlkönig” pitched at the very edge of the doomed child’s abyss of terror. It was the performance of a lifetime, galvanized by a sense of occasion no ordinary format could have generated.

The Schubertiade symposiums that followed built upon “Perspectives on ‘Erlkönig.’” They aimed to refresh the experience of famous music by creating a new framework for understanding. Crucial to this framework were samplings of popular music and popular culture, contradicting the solemnity of “classical music.” Lectures and discussions, slides and film were incorporated. At the same time, music in live performance increasingly dominated—so that the format became that of a concert framed by topics in social and cultural history. “Schubert the Man: Myth versus Reality,” in 1992, revisited portrayals of the demure, sweet-tempered Lieder genius: “The Music Master,” an unintentionally whimsical Hollywood film biography from 1941, and Das Dreimäderlhaus, Heinrich Berté’s phenomenally popular Schubert confection of 1916, an operetta that reinvents Schubert’s life in conjunction with retooling his tunes. Prey triumphed in Tschöll’s yodeling aria, performed in juxtaposition with its improbable source: the sublime E-flat Klavierstück, D. 946. The speakers on this occasion included Susan McClary, whose talk “Schubert’s Sexuality” was a reconsideration of the Unfinished Symphony inspired by Maynard Solomon’s contention that Schubert inhabited a homosexual subculture.

“Schubert and the Piano,” in 1993, was offered in combination with Andras Schiff’s traversal of the complete piano sonatas. Steven Lubin compared Schubert’s E-flat Impromptu on a replica Graf fortepiano with the sound of a modern Steinway. Robert Winter dissected the first movement of the D major Sonata—and its recorded performances by Artur Schnabel and Alfred Brendel. Ruth Solie pondered the parlor piano of Schubert’s day. The two-hour centerpiece was a whirlwind tour of Schubert’s four-hand music by Richard and John Contiguglia, including performances of his three piano duet masterpieces from 1828. “Schubert, Death, and the Wanderer,” in 1994, was a five-hour prelude to Prey’s evening performance of Winterreise. The Germanist Cyrus Hamlin showed paintings by Caspar David Friedrich and read poems by Goethe and Hölderlin. Leon Botstein documented the heightened awareness of mortality in Schubert’s disease-ridden Vienna. Susan Youens, assisted by Nathaniel Watson, argued that the Winterreise Wanderer does not descend into madness, but attains stoic understanding. The main event was a lecture-recital by David Owen Norris presenting the belated New York premiere of the complete Schubert-Liszt Winterreise—an occasion for exploring Romantic largesse in comparison to the stark proto-modern concision of Schubert’s last songs.

The Schubertiade symposiums acquired a diehard following, including followers from outside New York. They demonstrated that there exists a classical music audience starved for intellectual engagement. They demonstrated that for certain scholars academia seems as limiting as the concert regime seems to certain listeners. They demonstrated that, in combination, these scholars and listeners can create a unique opportunity for music in performance, one that showcases certain pieces and performers in special ways. Finally, they demonstrated that it was time for me to change careers.

The Schubertiade audience was unique. Its inquisitiveness set it apart. At the same time, it was undeniably aged. Its core was New York’s German-Jewish audience for Lieder and chamber music: wonderful folks, but irreplaceable. Post-classical music needs a younger audience, one more attuned to American and contemporary culture. In New York, such an audience exists, but not in Manhattan.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music has been truly described, in The New Yorker, as “America’s most visible showcase for experimental performance.” Built in 1907, it hosted Caruso and Bernhardt, Rachmaninoff and Casals, H. G. Wells and Aldous Huxley, then declined after World War II. Its rebirth began in 1967, when Harvey Lichtenstein became executive director. As early as 1969, Lichtenstein was presenting Twyla Tharp, Robert Wilson, and Jerzy Grotowski at BAM. His commitment to vanguard performance eventually spawned the influential Next Wave Festival, beginning in 1983. Lichtenstein helped to introduce Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, and Peter Sellars—and Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Nixon in China. In 1987, he refurbished the abandoned Majestic Theater, a block away, to host Peter Brook’s epic Mahabharata. Brook became a BAM mainstay, as did Ingmar Bergman.

Beginning in the late 1980s, Lichtenstein ventured increasingly into opera. Stressing opera as theater—his 2,000-seat Opera House is half the size of the cavernous Met—he presented stagings of Lully, Gluck, Verdi, and Weill by Jean-Marie Villegier, Harry Kupfer, Peter Stein, and Peter Sellars. He also mounted opera in the 900-seat Majestic. BAM Opera acquired a vital following. Lichtenstein was emboldened to tackle chamber and symphonic music. He made the Brooklyn Philharmonic, previously a tenant, BAM’s resident orchestra in 1990. He dismantled BAM’s chamber music series and invited the violinist Gidon Kremer to create something in its place. Kremer proposed a two-week chamber festival combining music, theater, cinema, opera, and dance. Lichtenstein said yes—and engaged me to help plan it.

For BAM, Kremer was a choice both obvious and inspired. His satanic intensity defamiliarizes the standard repertoire. Equally wicked are his tongue-in-cheek encores, which provoke amazed laughter and guffaws. He makes a cause of Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Arvo Pärt—more than anyone else, he has brought to our attention these and other late twentieth-century composers from East Europe and Russia. He collaborates with Keith Jarrett and Laurie Anderson. Alongside the creamy tones and pleasing smiles of Perlman, Pavarotti, and te Kanawa, he is as discomfiting as Lenau’s Mephisto fiddling with Faust. Yet his popular appeal is immediate.

For his BAM festival Kremer programmed a Moscow early music group, a chorus from Pakistan, a Soviet jazz pianist, a Cuban-American band, and a one-man Shakespeare troupe. His dual appeal—to Lincoln Center and Next Wave—promised a fusion audience that could save classical music from itself. But Lichtenstein’s box office projections were poor, and he pulled out at the eleventh hour.

This disappointment proved a postponement, not a cancellation. Kremer did perform at BAM with the Brooklyn Philharmonic—after which Lichtenstein resolved that his resident orchestra, not his abandoned chamber music program, would become an experimental laboratory. I was again invited to plot strategy, and this time the plot took hold. As of 1993–94, the Brooklyn Philharmonic’s main subscription season was reconceived as a series of interdisciplinary, thematically organized weekend festivals. The most ambitious were “From the New World,” celebrating Dvořák’s historic three-year sojourn in the United States, and “The Russian Stravinsky,” exploring Stravinsky’s indebtedness to folk culture. Both festivals reassessed canonized masterworks—Dvořák’s New World Symphony, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Les noces—in light of fresh research by scholars whom I knew to be galvanizing speakers. Both stretched the framework of understanding to include popular culture. Both were embellished with lobby activities and with thick, illustrated program booklets generously subsidized by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For “From the New World,” Dennis Russell Davies and the orchestra offered an aural snapshot of America’s turn-of-the-century symphonic culture: the New World Symphony, composed in New York in 1893; the “Dirge” from the contemporaneous Indian Suite by Edward MacDowell, whom Americans considered their leading composer; and the Gaelic Symphony by Amy Beach, begun in January 1894 in response to the first Boston performance of From the New World less than a month earlier. The weekend proposed a thesis: that Dvořák’s New World residency was more influential than we remember; and that the American music on which he drew, and which he inspired, is also worthy of remembrance. Dvořák himself was a student of African-American and American Indian music, echoes and preconceptions of which infiltrate the New World Symphony. In New York in 1893, all who heard this music heard its American accent, but in heated debate could not agree on its relevance to forging a native symphonic style.

At BAM we aspired to make Dvořák’s American accent as audible as it seemed a century ago. In a pre-concert performance piece, Michael Beckerman recited excerpts from The Song of Hiawatha accompanied by excerpts from the New World Symphony, by way of arguing that parts of Dvořák’s symphony narrate Hiawatha’s wedding, his homeward journey, and his climactic battle with Pau-Pau-Keewis. Post-concert, Robert Winter presented his state-of-the-art CD ROM on Dvořák in America, including a historic recording of Harry Burleigh singing “Go Down Moses” (as he once sang it for Dvořák), and recorded reminiscences of Czech Americans who knew Dvořák during his Iowa summer of 1893. As Dvořák had told Americans that the middle movements of the New World Symphony were inspired by Longfellow’s poem, in our performance the Largo and scherzo were accompanied by slides exploring resonances with the American West and Hiawatha (memorably poetic canvases by Remington and Catlin), with plantation life, and with the Bohemian homeland.

A six-hour Sunday afternoon “Interplay,” modeled after the Schubertiade symposiums, revisited the debate over Dvořák’s agenda for America. Juxtaposing Dvořák’s American Suite, performed by Alan Feinberg, with a “Plantation Dance” by his African-American student Maurice Arnold, we documented the effect of the American vernacular on Dvořák’s “American style.” Exploring the folk pungency of certain Amy Beach songs and piano pieces, we considered the influence of Dvořák’s example on a leading American composer. The afternoon’s other music was by Dvořák, Burleigh, Scott Joplin, Will Marion Cook, and Arthur Farwell. The speakers included the American historian John Mack Faragher, whose words and slides recreated Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (which Dvořák attended in New York) and the Kickapoo Medicine Show (which Dvořák attended in Iowa). In the lobby, during each of three intermissions, Faragher presented rare archival footage of the Buffalo Bill pageant, with its parading or warring Indians, settlers, and cavalrymen.

We kicked off “The Russian Stravinsky” with folk songs and free vodka. There were two orchestral programs plus a six-hour Sunday Interplay. Our premise was that Stravinsky—the cosmopolitan modernist who had called himself French, then resettled in California, then chose to be buried in Venice—was in fact the most Russian of Russian composers. The costumed singers and dancers of Moscow’s Pokrovsky Ensemble presented folk ceremonies, including the ritual sacrifice of a virgin, underlying The Rite of Spring; they also sampled the regional marriage ceremonies upon which Les noces is based. Dennis Russell Davies and the Brooklyn Philharmonic played The Rite of Spring. The Pokrovskys themselves performed Les noces—not as a ballet, as Stravinsky intended, but as a reenacted peasant wedding. Richard Taruskin, whose landmark research paralleled years of fieldwork by Dmitri Pokrovsky, was a central participant. Taruskin and Pokrovsky agreed that Stravinsky had falsified his past and denied his borrowings in order to conceal his enduring Russianness. But Pokrovsky balked at endorsing Taruskin’s view that the embittered, anti-Semitic émigré in Stravinsky impregnated The Rite and Les noces with an “anti-humanistic” political philosophy celebrating national community at the expense of individual rights.

The Brooklyn Philharmonic’s 1993–94 festival weekends resulted in the highest (and most controversial) public profile in the orchestra’s forty-year history. Ticket sales increased by 40 percent—from rock-bottom lows documenting an aging, alienated subscriber base. Not all the orchestra’s remaining subscribers were entranced: they missed standard-format concerts with notable soloists. The new audience members, by and large, were single ticket buyers trying something different. Whatever their eventual commitment to the orchestra, they have already contributed to its redirection, as the season’s last panel discussion, closing “The Russian Stravinsky,” made clear. Taruskin—a bearded, Talmudic presence—built his case patiently:

“What is Stravinsky saying about society generally? What is he telling us in the West about how we should be ordering our lives? Stravinsky had definite ideas about that, whether or not you will agree with me that they are implicit in Les noces; it’s certainly a matter of record that Stravinsky was intensely antiliberal in his thinking at this time in his life, was traumatized by the Russian Revolution, and placed all his hopes in Mussolini as the regenerator of Europe. And he didn’t just have Western models for this kind of proto-fascist thinking. There were good homegrown proto-fascists as well, and one of them was a very close friend of his whose name is pretty much forgotten—Lev Karsavin.”

Influenced by Gogol’s Correspondence with Friends, in which Gogol “gave voice to the most reactionary political thinking in all of nineteenth-century Russia,” and by Byzantine liturgy, Karsavin theorized a “symphonic society”—“a society in which everybody’s activity is ideally coordinated and harmonized with everybody else’s activity, so that nobody would ever have to think, and there would never have to be a choice exercised.” This was the philosophy that Stravinsky embodied in such works as Symphonies of Wind Instruments, which he modeled after a Byzantine service, and Les noces, in which the wedding celebrants behave in what is, by liberal standards, “a subhuman way.”

Theodore Levin, an ethnomusicologist from Dartmouth as calming as Taruskin is needlingly self-assured, offered in response that “one must acknowledge that Les noces has not in recent history been viewed as a celebration of authoritarian culture. Tikhon Khrennikov in 1948 accused Stravinsky of mocking Russian customs and animal instincts. My own feeling when I hear the work now is that Stravinsky adopts an epic voice in which he’s neither celebrating nor mocking. He conveys, much as Homer did in the Iliad, the relentless logic of tradition, the pitiless logic of the way life is in those villages. And in that sense, I see him as a kind of ethnographer, who just reports.”

The next speaker was the composer and conductor Lukas Foss, who knew Stravinsky, and who played the piano in a historic recording of Les noces under Stravinsky’s baton. “We’re devoting much too much time to totally irrelevant things,” Foss began in the eager mezza voce that excites all his conversation. “The musicologists are so happy, in a self-indulgent way, when they can point out the influences. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that the composer transforms these influences, and makes them his own. Which reminds me of a wonderful Stravinsky statement. He once said, “You must always steal, but never from yourself.” What he meant by that is quite obvious. When you steal from yourself you learn nothing. When you steal from others, you enrich your vocabulary.”

A flurry of applause punctuated this opinion as Foss handed the cordless microphone (a wonderful invention) to Dennis Russell Davies. Both Foss and Davies had suffered Taruskin’s exegesis with visible impatience. As Davies now confided: “I said to Lukas, ‘Who’s going to say, “So what?”—you or me?’ He said I could say it.” Loud applause.

John Bowlt spoke next. He is a historian of Russian visual art, a specialist in the Diaghilev circle, of which Stravinsky was part. He sailed round the musicians’ debates: “I feel that all these comments about structure and derivations that we’ve heard are of course very important. But when you come down to it there’s something in Stravinsky which is profoundly incomprehensible and, well, perhaps divine. There is suddenly a sensibility that moves us beyond words. And it’s exactly the same kind of experience I’ve had when I look at the black square of Malevich of 1915, or hear “e u iu/i a o/o a/o a e i e ia,” which is a translational poem of 1913.”

Elizabeth Valkenier took the microphone and briefly observed: “Being a specialist in nineteenth-century Russian social history, I would like to add is that this discussion—in which there is only one answer to a question, and anything else has to be pulverized—is also profoundly Russian.”

Taruskin now requested the microphone and commenced: “I of course disagree fundamentally with what we’ve been hearing. And I think these are very important issues. I really feel a moral commitment to say something, even though I doubt that many of you will agree with me. The idea that it is somehow an attack on the composer, or a diminishment of his work, to bring up what we are accustomed to think of as extramusical factors that bear upon it, especially when these are things that we don’t normally regard as wholesome—I think it’s a kind of evasiveness. There’s something that makes us uncomfortable about attaching political meanings to a musical work, especially if they’re not political meanings we learned in school to admire. Am I in fact writing off the work? Am I in fact disengaging myself from commitment to it by raising these points? Just the contrary. The reason I became interested in such questions is that I find Les noces the most moving experience that twentieth-century music has to offer. And I think unequivocally that it is Igor Stravinsky’s masterwork. When I listen to it I have goosebumps from beginning to end, and in a good performance I shed tears. And yet Les noces is abhorrent to me in some ways. The content is abhorrent and the experience is intensely compelling. It creates within me a conflict, it creates within me a tension. And that is what has impelled me to do the research that I’ve done.”

As moderator of this discussion, I had been wrestling with the impulse to interrupt, to compress and simplify. But it had proceeded so spontaneously—with barely a pause for breath—that I only now interceded to inquire if there were questions or comments from the audience. To my astonishment, a forest of hands—easily fifty, maybe seventy-five—shot up. We ended an hour later only because we had to clear the stage—after which the discussants continued in smaller groups. This experience violated every precept conveyed by the sound bite. It contradicted the disdain for complexity inculcated by anchormen and talk show hosts, politicians and campaign advisers, media experts and classical music broadcasters. It demonstrated that an audience attending a 1994 Stravinsky festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music could listen with relish and discernment to a debate over the relevance of Lev Karsavin to Les noces—a debate, moreover, whose flair and subtlety of expression would not have disgraced Fleischmann’s round table and other Union Square haunts frequented by the likes of James Gibbons Huneker, Anton Seidl, and Antonín Dvořák a century ago.

The 1993–94 Brooklyn Philharmonic season generated collaborations with Da Camera of Houston and with the Chicago Symphony. The 1994–95 Brooklyn Philharmonic season, meanwhile, includes Dennis Russell Davies conducting Philip Glass, Marianne Faithfull singing Kurt Weill—and Gidon Kremer performing Pärt and Schnittke.

My 1987 book, Understanding Toscanini, was a declaration of symphonic obsolescence. Subtitled “How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music,” it argued that the American concert orchestra—a remarkable invention, distinct from the pit orchestras of Europe—lost its way during the interwar decades. An expanded audience, full of upwardly mobile newcomers; a new compositional aesthetic, hostile to Romantic pleasures; an influx of luminary performers, chased west by Hitler, yet retaining European artistic loyalties—these were some of the factors dictating that canonized masterpieces and celebrity conductors dominated as never before. America’s orchestras turned hostile to American music, to contemporary art, to creativity itself.

The glamour of what Marc Blitzstein derisively called the “Platinum Orchestra age” was guaranteed not to last. The celebrity conductors died off. The canonized repertoire grew old and overly familiar. Blitzstein was not the only American composer who saw it coming; they all did. Daniel Gregory Mason decried “museums of the past” and “fashion-enslaved, prestige-hypnotized minds.” Virgil Thomson lampooned popularizers for whom Great Music ended with Sibelius. Aaron Copland despaired of the American obsession with “masterworks.”

By the 1980s the complacency of the classical music establishment was stultifying—except to the administrators and music businessmen who preserved the status quo. The only thing that worried them was their aging audience. A 1982 survey by the New York Philharmonic found that 51 percent of its listeners were over fifty-five years old, with only 13 percent under thirty-five, and 69 percent reporting annual incomes of forty thousand dollars and more. Two years later, the Philharmonic undertook a characteristic response: a marketing study. The study’s recommended “strategies,” equally characteristic, were for improved marketing. As I reported in Understanding Toscanini:

“Acknowledging audience antipathy to ‘new music’ as documented in the 1982 survey, the study at no point conjectured that fresher repertoire might entice younger listeners; rather, the orchestra’s ’image’ needed freshening. Alluding to widespread disenchantment with the music director in the musical press, the study inferred that ‘bad publicity’ needed rectifying by ‘increased publicity support, particularly in the form of selected appearances and interviews by Mr. Mehta and—wherever possible—members of the orchestra.’ ‘The Philharmonic experience,’ according to the study, aspired to fulfill leisure needs by furnishing an ‘enjoyable’ and ‘stress-reducing activity.’ How to communicate the Philharmonic experience? ‘[Get] on the air more frequently in the New York area in TV and cable and radio.’ ‘High visibility [for] New York occasions, like the Big Ship parade, a dedication of the Statue of Liberty, a Christmas Show, a New Year’s Eve concert, etc.’ ‘Solo appearances by members of the Philharmonic with other area orchestras.’ ‘Further development of the management of direct mail and telephone marketing by zip code areas.’”

Thus did the manipulable needs and aspirations of the classical music audience preempt the needs and aspirations of art. But this survival strategy could only prove self-defeating in the long run.

In 1992, the American Symphony Orchestra League published a three-part study of the condition of American orchestras. A year later, a follow-up report, “Americanizing the American Orchestra,” called for substantial and systemic change embracing repertoire, format, and the relationship to the community.

At recent ASOL conventions, self-congratulation, once a frequent theme, has been displaced by ferment—by a plethora of reports on new tactics for audience development, for music education, for transforming the concert experience. Some proposed strategies seem desperate or expedient: old goods repackaged. But, even where imagination falters, the search is authentic, not cynical.

A new subject matter—a diversified “post-classical music”—is an inescapable outcome of these tendencies if they are to do the work of renewal. What the searchers are groping toward is an integration of concert music and society unknown since the turn of the century, when Dvořák studied African-American spirituals, American Indian chants, and Stephen Foster songs, and Anton Seidl led the New World Symphony for a public eager to participate in the quest for an American music.

In Understanding Toscanini, I mapped five ‘’worlds of American music” that had been omitted from the curriculum of music appreciation—and therefore withheld from the new interwar audience and its progeny.

The first was of Koussevitzky, Tanglewood, and [the interwar journal] Modern Music: the American composers of the twenties and thirties. The second was a maverick sidebar to the first: rangy American originals in the tradition of Whitman and Melville, beginning with Charles Ives and including Edgard Varèse, Harry Partch, and John Cage. The third omitted world was of American musical theater: Gershwin, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers. The fourth—endorsed by Modern Music, Ives, and Gershwin, denigrated by highbrow music appreciators—was jazz, its precursors and forms: gospel, blues, ragtime, swing. The fifth omitted world of music mounted the most thorough attack on the “masterwork” idea, with its elaborate distinctions between “serious” and “popular,” “art” and “recreation.” Propagated in Modern Music by the composers Henry Cowell, Paul Bowles, and Colin McPhee, among others, it prophetically embraced the music of Asia, Africa, and South America, accommodating listening modes more meditative or ceremonial than those of the modern West. . . . McPhee’s Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936)—his best-known composition, forecasting the “minimalism” of Steve Reich and Philip Glass—is an orchestral toccata appropriating Balinese gamelan techniques.

Seven years later, our Brooklyn Philharmonic programs at BAM embrace Virgil Thomson, Charles Ives, Kurt Weill (in both his Berlin and Broadway modes), Duke Ellington, Colin McPhee, and Philip Glass. They debunk the distinction between high and popular culture. Rather than elevating Great Music and Great Performances, they leaven Mozart and Stravinsky with large helpings of folk music and jazz. And this assault on “classical music” is not a premeditated strategy, but a natural direction dictated by the orchestra’s venue, its audience, its time and place.

And we are not alone. Across the river, in Manhattan, Leon Botstein has reinvented the American Symphony Orchestra. American Symphony concerts investigate such topics as “Bruckner and the 20th Century” and, in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Paris in the 1860s: The Origins of Impressionism.” Every August, the orchestra anchors the Bard Festival, whose intellectual ambitions are no less enthralling than its bucolic setting.

Quest and discovery equally prevail at the Baltimore Symphony’s Saturday morning Casual Concerts, where David Zinman conducts not Beethoven’s Fifth and Rhapsody in Blue, but Mahler’s Sixth, Elgar’s First, and Michael Torke’s Ash. No less than his uncompromising repertoire, Zinman’s maniacal humor subverts. When he sings “Full Moon and Empty Arms” in his high plaintive baritone, he not only illustrates that Rachmaninoff’s melodies “could be popular songs,” but creates an opportunity for madness: a Casual Concerts contest. “We want you to send us your lyrics to any Rachmaninoff tune,” he announces; he intends to pick and perform the winning entry. Discussing Brahms’s First Symphony, he features “News from the Trombone Section.” “Did you know that in Brahms’s First Symphony, the trombones don’t play at all until the fourth movement? What do you suppose they’re doing all that time? Come with me. We’re going to head back to the trombone section and talk to them.” Threading his way through cellos and winds, he winds up face to face with four trombonists. “Gentlemen, you’re in the special teams division. You sit there for a long time and do nothing. Obviously you can’t read a book, because people are looking at you. You can’t scratch yourself. What do you think about?”

Zinman relishes comedy for its own sake. But by smashing pedestals he also honors the Great Composers thus toppled to earth: listening to Rachmaninoff, listening to Brahms, listening to Mahler, his Saturday morning audience is provoked to hear in ways that are anything but casual. Baltimore’s “casual” concertgoers pore through the program notes. They rise to the challenge of new music. They compose lyrics for Rachmaninoff’s tunes.

Granted, these are initiatives that seek to make a virtue of necessity. Like the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the American Symphony is fighting for survival in a city oversupplied with concerts, musicians, and orchestras. Similarly, the Baltimore Symphony, which promises its musicians more than three hundred services per season, created a Saturday morning series in an attempt to add concerts without depleting its existing market. And yet when Zinman says that “the days of simply sitting at concerts are vanishing,” what he perceives is less a problem than an opportunity. His reforms, like Botstein’s, are activated less by a marketing plan than by an artistic vision—and the faith that marketing will follow, because the essential crisis is one of substance, not appearances.

The Baltimore Symphony’s Casual Concerts have succeeded in drawing a younger audience. Will the Brooklyn Philharmonic also succeed? The Manhattan audience that flocks to BAM for contemporary dance, theater, and opera dismisses orchestral concerts as old-fashioned and redundant; this plausible stereotype is tough to puncture. In Brooklyn, meanwhile, former Philharmonic subscribers long for bygone comforts. How should they be wooed? What is the orchestra’s largest potential audience? What is its most appropriate audience?

As of this writing, these questions still need answers. But other answers are emerging. In 1987, in Understanding Toscanini, I searched for evidence that a new audience for symphonic music could materialize outside traditional precincts, and beyond conventional expectations. Seven years later, I find that I can glimpse the possibility of a post-classical future. (1995)

Mahler’s composing hut on the Attersee

One of my more popular blogs – it still gets lots of hits – is “Jonas Kaufmann vs. The Orchestra of St. Luke’s” back in October 2018. The larger topic is the role of tradition in musical performance – in this case, of the sublime idiom of Viennese operetta. I wrote:

“Kaufmann made no attempt to sound like [Richard] Tauber or [Joseph] Schmidt – any more than they had sounded like one another. Instead, he gloriously found his own way into the tradition they embodied. . . . Somehow, the bewitching Tauber combination of spontaneity, intimate charm, and vocal fireworks was renewed. The evening climaxed with a heroically robust rendition of ‘Dein ist mein ganzes Herz.’ Kaufmann made the songs his own.”

I also wrote of the same event:

“Never have I heard so clueless a performance of a Central European waltz as the [Orchestra of St. Luke’s] treatment of Lehar’s divine Ballsirenen from The Merry Widow; a lilt was not even attempted. But the evening’s nadir was the waltz from Giuditta. Whatever time was allotted to rehearsing this number (surely very little) would have been better spent inviting the instrumentalists to audition Hilde Gueden in ‘Meine Lippen sie Kussen so heiss’ via youtube (I am perfectly serious). They showed no more familiarity with the pertinent style than they might have performing an Indian raga or a Javanese gamelan number. My wife, who is Hungarian, said she would have preferred ‘the Budapest postal workers’ orchestra.’”

And I could say the same of the New York Philharmonic’s flat rendition of the Blue Danube Waltz under Gustavo Dudamel at Radio City this past season.

Then came the terrific “Trivial Mahler?” evening at this summer’s Gustav Mahler Festival in Steinbach, which annually revisits Mahler’s bucolic retreat on Austria’s Attersee. Curated by the violist Tscho Theissing, the idea was to celebrate the “folk-like melodies, marches, and landler that co-exist with what is [sometimes] perceived as trivial” in Mahler’s symphonies. The key players included Bettina Gradinger, concertmistress of the Vienna Volksoper, Lorenz Raab, that company’s principal trumpet, and Theissing himself, who preceded Gradinger as concertmaster of the same ensemble. Both Raab and Gradinger also play jazz.

The extensive violin solos in Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben portray the zany foibles of the composer’s wife. They deserve to be as inimitable as Pauline Strauss herself. Gradinger would be their perfect exponent. In Strauss and Lehar, she leads with a freedom that only tradition – paradoxically — can confer. One listens incredulously, smiling and chuckling, to one deftly flung phrase after another. The entire “Wiener Theatermusiker” ensemble, also including accordion, double bass, clarinet/saxophone, and a second violin, is divinely united in spirit and style. The evening climaxed with a series of hilariously touching riffs on Mahler’s most singular borrowings.

The festival, in its entirety, was enthralling. Its mastermind, Morten Solvik, is the Norwegian musicologist  who oversees Vienna’s Mahler Foundation. He is a ubiquitous presence, radiating Mahler pride and enthusiasm, equally quick to espouse or challenge a new Mahler idea. (I took part, with Thomas Hampson, in an afternoon session on “Mahler in New York.”)

The festival climaxed on June 28 with a memorable rendition of Mahler’s Third Symphony, composed in Steinbach in the summers of 1895 and 1896. The performers were Markus Poschner and his Bruckner Orchestra Linz, which arrived en masse from sixty miles away to occupy a makeshift concert hall with excellent acoustics. Linz (population 215,000) boasts an orchestra of international caliber. As the superb program book pointed out, the meadow of flowers which once surrounded Mahler’s Attersee composer’s hut (today filled with camping vehicles – cf the fate of Tribschen on Lake Lucerne) surely inflects the symphony’s second movement (“What the Flowers in the Field Tell Me”). It is one of Mahler’s halcyon inspirations.

The eight-day festival also included a guided nature walk, a boat cruise, a film, and five concerts.

I was repeatedly reminded of Boulder’s Colorado Mahlerfest. It also incorporates walking tours: both Boulder and Steinbach magnificently (because the tall rocky landscapes are magnificent) affirm the importance of mountains in Mahler’s creative imagination. Ken Woods and Ethan Hecht, who run the Mahlerfest, are as cheerfully productive as Morten is in Austria. Both festivals are unpredictably creative. They mutually eschew glamour and pretention. They seamlessly incorporate scholarship. They attract an avid following.

In short: they are exemplary. And so are Vienna’s Theatermusiker.

The conductor Ettore Panizza. Credit:.The New York Times

The New York Times invited me to attempt a succinct assessment of classical music in the US, from its beginnings to today. My response runs in today’s paper:

Last fall, I found myself in a South Dakota hotel lobby talking with the composer Derek Bermel. Days before, I learned that his clarinet teacher had played in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. I asked whether he knew the Met broadcasts from the 1930s and ’40s. He did not.So I emailed him a supreme opera performance: Verdi’s “Otello,” as broadcast on Feb. 12, 1938. The conductor is Ettore Panizza. The principal singers are Giovanni Martinelli, Lawrence Tibbett and Elisabeth Rethberg. Bermel reported back that what he heard sounded fundamentally different from any other Verdi he had encountered — and more galvanizing.

While we were earnestly cogitating about why that was the case, unbeknown to us, Chris Eagle Hawk was listening from an adjoining table. (Eagle Hawk, who died late last year, was a sagacious Lakota tribal elder I was privileged to know.) He turned to us and said three words: “They felt it.” That ended the conversation.

Classical music in the United States is borrowed from Europe, and that borrowing was initially ambitious and impressive. An apex was attained around 1900. Colossal leadership was furnished in Boston, where Henry Lee Higginson invented the Boston Symphony Orchestra and built Symphony Hall. In Chicago, Theodore Thomas founded the Chicago Orchestra (now the Chicago Symphony Orchestra) after decades of barnstorming coast to coast with his world-class Thomas Orchestra. In New York, Anton Seidl, once Richard Wagner’s surrogate son, led a Wagnerism movement that dominated national intellectual discourse. He also led symphonic concerts 14 times a week during the summer at Coney Island. Seidl’s best friend in Manhattan was Antonin Dvorak, who, as director of the National Conservatory of Music in 1893 predicted that “Negro melodies” would foster a “great and noble school” of New World concert music.

Probably none of these individuals would have anticipated that 250 years after the birth of the United States, the country’s orchestras would still mainly be playing European repertoire.

The sorrow songs Dvorak esteemed inspired genres of American popular music known the world over. But an ample American concert canon never materialized. Instead, a “culture of performance” presided, privileging celebrity conductors, instrumentalists and singers over composers.

With the passing of stellar immigrant musicians over the course of the 20th century, it became harder for American performers and composers to nurture Old World traditions — or to grow commensurate New World roots. Today, that twin failure breeds an absence of binding purpose, both musically and institutionally.

The failure takes many forms. As any sampling of broadcasts from New York, Boston and Philadelphia in the 1930s and ’40s will confirm, today’s orchestras “feel it” less and less. Our orchestras, comparably, lack access to lineage. Although American music is finally being performed in quantity, too much of what we hear is makeshift and detached from the ballast of tradition. On top of that is the world we live in: short attention spans and dwindling financial resources for the arts. That the sesquicentenary for Charles Ives, the United States’ foremost concert composer, was in 2024 more celebrated in Germany than in his own country signifies a crippling erosion of cultural memory.

One positive development is a dawning awareness among American institutions that systemic change may prove an urgent priority. Here are some snapshots, from the East Coast, the West Coast and the Midwest.

Empty Seats, but a New Era Rises in the East

Symphony Hall in Boston is riddled with empty seats. The Boston Symphony once privileged distinguished local composers and later served as a national laboratory for new American works. Now, the orchestra’s programing is anonymous. Judging from its Carnegie Hall visits, it also isn’t playing very well. The musicians, the administration and the board are at odds over the dismissal of the music director, Andris Nelsons, making him a martyr when his departure is most needed.

A Boston Symphony planning document, leaked to the press and patrons with tumultuous consequences, proposes “symphonic cycles,” “festivals” and “programmatic themes that build connections across several weeks of B.S.O. concerts.” Such programing, it says, is “easier to market to targeted audiences.”

The same prospectus advocates “humanities-based collateral presentations, including lectures, panel discussions, demonstrations and workshops,” as well as “affinity programming, intended to appeal to segments of our communities who have not traditionally felt welcomed.” These changes “are neither radical nor even especially novel,” the document adds. In fact, they sound perfectly plausible. And if they prove to be novel, so much the better.

Down the coast, the New York Philharmonic has embarked upon a new era under Gustavo Dudamel, who aspires to become as identified with New York as Nelsons (who also leads the Gewandhaus Orchestra in Germany) is foreign to Boston. Everything about Dudamel’s appointment as music and artistic director, including its emphasis on finding venues outside Lincoln Center, tacitly acknowledges that the Philharmonic has long lacked effective leadership. In fact, not since Leonard Bernstein’s fabled decade as music director has it successfully pursued a consolidated purpose.

It bears stressing that Bernstein did not concurrently preside over another orchestra. During his first season (1958-59), he led 18 weeks of subscription concerts (notably incorporating a “general survey of American music from the earliest generations of American composers to the present”), plus numerous young people’s concerts and 36 concerts on tour abroad. The remainder of the subscription season was shared by only six guest conductors (a stellar list including Herbert von Karajan), each assigned multiple weeks.

The Philharmonic’s 2026-27 subscription series, by comparison, features no fewer than 19 conductors, with Dudamel in charge for only eight weeks. But his programs are creative. And he has already led a memorable premiere: David Lang’s oratorio “the wealth of nations,” a composition that demonstrates how new symphonic music can be clever, original and timely. Setting texts by Adam Smith, Frederick Douglass and Eugene V. Debs, it bears witness to today’s fraught American experience without preaching or prescribing.

The New York Philharmomic’s premiere performance of “the wealth of nations” in March.Credit…Brandon Patoc

At the Metropolitan Opera, the company’s well-documented financial challenges are compounded by issues of artistic planning. Göran Gentele, Rudolf Bing’s successor as general manager in 1972, had he not died in an automobile accident, could have made a difference. His most farsighted priority was a planned mini-Met. The company’s 3,800-seat Lincoln Center home, he realized, craved big voices that no longer existed. And he knew that a refreshed repertoire would demand a more intimate alternative space. Today’s cavernous Met struggles to fill seats with overrated midcult products that cannot possibly endure. Changing times generate changing needs and circumstances.

Eager to Innovate? Go West

West Coast institutions of classical music have long been more open to experimentation. During the directorship of Speight Jenkins, from 1983 to 2014, the Seattle Opera displaced the Met as the leading North American venue for Wagner. He would not have commissioned the vapid, high-tech “Ring” with which Robert Lepage burdened the Met in recent years. Jenkins shrank the Seattle house and enhanced its acoustics. He was omnipresent in the lobbies. He stressed world-class “Ring” lectures, four-hour “Ring” symposiums and a serious bookstore. He introduced English supertitles long before the Met began translating Wagner for its audiences.

In Los Angeles, Ernest Fleischmann rethought the Los Angeles Philharmonic and engaged Frank Gehry to build Walt Disney Concert Hall — which, in its third decade, continues to entice capacity audiences with dramatic sightlines and crystalline acoustics. The orchestra’s current leadership team evinces both continuity and an eagerness to innovate. Dudamel, as departing music and artistic director, will become artistic and cultural laureate. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who preceded Dudamel, will become creative director. The composer John Adams is the creative chair, and Herbie Hancock is the creative chair for jazz. Daniel Harding is the incoming music director. Though this profusion of titles has excited ridicule, it doubtless negates business as usual.

Up the coast, the Oakland Symphony enjoys a remarkably multiethnic, intergenerational audience — a legacy of Michael Morgan, who served as music director for three decades until his death in 2021. Morgan’s omnipresence in the community defined his tenure. That is why you will even now find his picture displayed on the walls of the city’s public high schools.

Cultivating Community in the Midwest

In the Midwest, the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra (for which, full disclosure, I serve as scholar in residence) likewise fulfills the credo pronounced long ago by Theodore Thomas when he crusaded for symphonic music across the United States: “A symphony orchestra shows the culture of the community, not opera.”

In fact, the concert orchestra, to a remarkable degree, proved an American invention — a civic hub comparable to the opera house abroad. The South Dakota Symphony enjoys a music director, Delta David Gier, who moved to Sioux Falls 22 years ago and has raised a family there. Gier has at all times insisted that an orchestra aspire to serve a specific community in specific ways. His signature initiative is the Lakota Music Project, which binds the orchestra to Native American reservations throughout the state. Beyond that, all the proposals now controversial in Boston, including thematic festivals and “affinity programing,” have already been implemented in Sioux Falls.

The South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s Lakota Music Project.Credit…Tara Weston for The New York Times

Do the South Dakota Symphony musicians, in Eagle Hawk’s words, “feel it”? The orchestra maintains a nine-member, full-time core consisting of a string quartet and wind quintet, both self-governing. They perform more than 100 times per season. At the Pine Ridge or Rosebud reservations, they play with Lakota drummers and singers, and mentor young musical aspirants. The remainder of the orchestra’s members, many of whom come from the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, are self-selecting: They do not trek to Sioux Falls for the income, but are enticed by the repertoire, which is brave, and the vibe, which is exhilarating.

The history of the Lakota Music Project tracks the South Dakota Symphony’s larger trajectory. It is an exercise in building trust and mutual understanding. Early on, the symphony members and the Porcupine Singers would play for each other. Personal and musical relationships evolved. Then there were fledgling attempts to make music together. The most recent Lakota Music Project tour, last October, premiered two compositions: one by Jeffrey Paul, the orchestra’s extraordinary principal oboist, and one by Bermel, with whom I conferred about those Met Opera broadcasts. The performers included symphony musicians alongside Pine Ridge’s Creekside Singers and the Dakota flutist Bryan Akipa.

In both pieces, elements of Native American and Western classical music merged triumphantly. Bermel has recast his composition to include the entire South Dakota Symphony; it premieres in November as part of a two-week festival considering “Native American inspirations” in classical music, beginning with Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony (accompanied by visuals exploring his indebtedness to Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha”). Given the intellectual heft of this exercise, tracking the “Indianist” movement Dvorak inspired and its more recent aftermath, the festival will reach beyond the concert hall not only to local high schools, but to classrooms and concerts at four universities in four South Dakota cities.

I cannot imagine a more promising musical celebration of the United States at 250.

For a book-length treatment of this topic, there’s my “Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall.”

Visiting Zurich earlier this week, I was eager to sample the Zurich Opera in Wagner. They are bringing the Ring to Carnegie Hall next season led by their General Music Director, Gianandrea Noseda. I found myself attending the premiere of a new Tannhäuser production. The conductor is not Noseda, but Tugan Sokhiev. The director is Thorleifur Orn Arnarsson. Would that Sokhiev and Arnarsson were conducting and directing the forthcoming Met Ring, rather than Yannick Nezet-Seguin and Yuval Sharon. The Zurich Tannhäuser is better than the Met.

Compared to Donald Runnicles’ Met Tannhäuser of 2023, compared to Nezet-Seguin’s meandering Parsifal and bland Tristan, Sokhiev is more dynamic, more purposeful. Like Noseda, he once worked under Valery Gergiev in St. Petersburg. He is about to take over the Orchestre de la Ruisse Romande. The Zurich Opera orchestra proved exceptionally alert, engaged musically, engaged operatically.  Not as perfect as the Met Orchestra, but a better orchestra. The chorus is excellent. 

Arnarsson, who is Icelandic, enjoys a distinguished career as a theater director. He brings to Tannhäuser a wicked intelligence kindred to Wagner’s own (but not in this particular opera). For the Entrance of the Guests in act two, every guest is individually caricatured – a ditzy spectacle that transpires while the Langdraf is silently rehearsing his windy speech to come. Because Tannhäuser is a man wholly apart – estranged from the world, estranged from himself – Arnarsson’s Wartburg is no less dissolute than the Venusberg. Here and elsewhere, the production delights and startles the eye without wasting a fortune on special effects. In fact, there’s no expensive gimmickry whatsoever.

The star of the show is not Tannhäuser or Elisabeth but Wolfram. He is the baritone Christian Gerhaher, chiefly known as a singer of Lieder, cast against type. His Wolfram (photographed above among the act two Guests) brandishes no creamy legato. At times, the delivery more resembles a parlando recitative at the softest possible dynamic. At the Met in 2023, this impersonation was merely anomalous. In Zurich – a tiny but richly decorated house with 1,100 seats – it complements Arnarsson’s meddlesome dramaturgy. Wolfram enters recklessly driving a car (never mind why), a creature of cunning intelligence. His deep affection for Elisabeth comes as a surprise.

Wagner begins the final (and best) act of Tannhäuser with Wolfram sympathetically observing Elisabeth in prayer. Gerhaher steps to the lip of the stage and addresses the audience directly – a Shakespearean move. From that point on, we are led to experience the drama through Wolfram’s eyes and ears. Wagner’s Wolfram is a bit of a milquetoast (this is early Wagner); though he laments Elisabeth’s death, he greets Tannhäuser – his rival — with utterly self-effacing compassion. When Gerhaher’s feckless Wolfram tells Tannhäuser he’s seized with empathy, he is obviously dissimulating. Tannhäuser’s ensuing Rome Narrative, the opera’s compositional high point, is an anguished plea for understanding. Wolfram first stands apart, then gradually succumbs. Gerhaher’s gripping deportment partners Tannhäuser’s soliloquy. 

The Zurich Tannhäuser is an American, Eric Cutler. If he lacks the clarion heft this role requires, his hymn to Venus, in act one, artfully conveys an undercurrent of ennui. His handling of the act three narrative is more than artful – the pacing, both musical and dramatic, the verbal and expressive detail are magnificently rendered. Tannhäuser’s desperation and Wolfram’s transformation are made equally credible. I was startled to read in the program book that he is singing the role for the first time.

The opera’s third principal is Christina Nilsson, miscast as Aida at the Met a year ago. She holds her own. Like Gerhaher’s, like Cutler’s, hers is not a big voice. Perhaps all this is today what Wagner can best become. The epic performers (listen to Tannhäuser with Lauritz Melchior or Lotte Lehmann or Lawrence Tibbett) are a thing of the past. (Personally, I don’t experience Lise Davidsen as another Birgit Nilsson or – to cite an Elisabeth of electrifying nervous instability, kindred to the Dutchman’s Senta or Lohengrin’s Elsa – Leonie Rysanek.)

OK, important things are lost in the Zurich Tannhäuser. Arnarsson is no Frank Castorf, eagerly deconstructing the composer’s intentions. But not every aspect of his re-interpretation tells, at least by my reckoning. I find he underplays Elisabeth’s intensity by stressing her imposed conformity (she begins and ends the show as a statue that Tannhäuser must ultimately smash). The act one transformation scene, so magically realized by Wagner when the sulfurous Venusberg dissipates to yield a fragrant mountain valley, is in no way attempted. When Albert Niemann, the first Tannhäuser, insisted on cutting a part of the second act finale – the outburst “Erbarm dich mein, der, ach! so tief in Sünden”– in order to conserve his voice, Wagner was apoplectic. “Sing the second act finale as if you were to end the evening with it!” It is a Tristan moment of superhuman intensity.  

Are superhuman Wagner tenors wholly a thing of the past? Maybe. We live in a different world today. 

For a blog about the state of things at the Metropolitan Opera, click here.

Senar

Switzerland’s idyllic Lake Lucerne, bounded by majestic mountains, was famously the site of two composer’s homes. Sergei Rachmaninoff built Senar (an acronym for SErgei and NAtalia Rachmaninoff) on land purchased in 1930. From 1932 until 1939, it was his annual residence from May to August. Richard Wagner rented Tribschen, a short boat ride from Lucerne, from 1866 to 1872.

Both homes proved ideal retreats. Senar hosted the happiest years of Rachmaninoff’s exile in the West. Wagner, in Swiss exile, enjoyed his happiest years anywhere. Both accommodated large and close-knit households, including children and dogs. Both hosted distinguished visitors. Each furnished a sanctum without becoming cut off from the world. 

Senar, built to Rachmaninoff’s specifications, was notably progressive for its time. Its clean lines, its eschewal of clutter and adornment document a Bauhaus influence. Both the house and grounds are spacious. This is where Rachmaninoff envisioned being buried — but his death occurred in wartime and the grave, incongruously, is situated in a cemetery north of New York City. Thanks to the Rachmaninoff Foundation, the house remains largely as Rachmaninoff left it. To the original furnishings, the foundation has added a deft assortment of photographs and memorabilia. The music room includes Rachmaninoff’s piano and his composer’s desk with its pencils, pens, and cigarettes. Visitors stroll the house and grounds as they wish. There is no gift shop.  His friends Alexander and Katherine Swann, in a much-quoted reminiscence, perceived Rachmaninoff as “alone in spirit and everlastingly homesick for Russia. The Russian spirit and habits were all-powerful in him.” They also reported that they “practically never saw him annoyed, displeased, fussing, or excited.” And that “he did everything quietly and firmly; hesitation was alien to his nature.” Today, Senar palpitates with the composer’s unseen presence. It evokes his implacable poise and sovereign humanity.  

Tribschen

Tribschen, centuries old, is a handsome three-story manor house on a hill. As with Senar, the site is close to the water. Though the original furnishings are not preserved, the downstairs rooms are decorated with appropriate paintings and furnishings. The wide staircase is where Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was first performed – as a surprise birthday gift to his wife Cosima, in bed upstairs with their newborn son Siegfried. This legendary vignette is revived with each performance of the work, in which the slumbering child is sublimely evoked amid whimsical allusions to the heroic exploits of his operatic namesake.

Wagner’s remarkable Tribschen output additionally included parts of Die Meistersinger, Siegfried, and Gotterdammerung. At Senar, Rachmaninoff’s dormant creative gift revived. He there composed his Third Symphony and – a masterpiece in which the rhythms of American jazz infiltrate a succession of pungent mood pictures — the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (facsimiles of both manuscripts sit on his composer’s table, inviting inspection).

Tribschen is administered by the city of Lucerne, which also oversees an adjoining swimming facility.  Leaving the small wooden dock and climbing the path to the house, I was surrounded by sun-bathing youngsters. Inside, I discovered the third floor closed. The entire second floor was devoted to an exhibit titled “Wagner Taboo? Jewish Perspectives.” To be sure, Wagner’s anti-Semitism is an inescapable fact and – alas – newly pertinent in today’s Europe. It is also an inexhaustible focus of scholarship and debate. Any exhibit attempting to frame it will itself be incomplete and controversial. 

“Wagner Taboo?” comprises a series of installations featuring notable Jews, not always musicians, who condoned or condemned Richard Wagner. Additional attention is devoted to Wagner’s notorious 1850 essay “Jews in Music” – a pamphlet both egregious and harmful.  The conductor Hermann Levi, the pianist Carl Tausig, and the soprano Lilli Lehmann, among the most prominent Jews who effusively admired Wagner the man, are all represented. Among the naysayers the curators have chosen Albert Einstein, who hated Wagner’s music, and the tenor Heinrich Sondheim, who refused to sing Wagner and once engaged in a public altercation with him. Though the precise circumstances of this shouting match will never be known, the exhibit implies that Wagner’s antagonism was aroused by Sondheim’s religion.  But this cannot be the whole story. For – as the exhibit, so far as I could tell, never acknowledges – Wagner’s wide circle of friends and acquaintances was at all time packed with Jews with whom he maintained warm relationships. This was as much a signature of “Wagner and the Jews” as his anti-Semitic rants. 

“Wagner Taboo?” omits, for instance, the impresario Angelo Neumann, who toured the Ring throughout Europe and wrote an affectionate book-length memoir, Recollections of Wagner, in which he describes himself reeling at the news of Wagner’s death (“I felt within my soul that a god had left this earth”). Is Albert Einstein, who never met Wagner, a more credible authority? From the panel featuring Leopold Sachse we learn that he directed Ring performances at the Met in the 1930s. Far more prominent, in those same performances, were the conductor Artur Bodanzky and the singers Friedrich Schorr and Emanuel List – all Jews (with Schorr a cantor’s son). The panel for Gustav Mahler cites Mahler’s well-known description of Mime, in the opera Siegfried, as a neurotic “Jewish type.“ Does this mean that Mahler condemned Wagner? The rest of that Mahler quote, uncited, reads: “I know only one Mime, and that is me. You wouldn’t believe what there is in that part, or what I could make of it.” Notwithstanding the historic premises, notwithstanding the photographs and paintings, Wagner’s own presence at Tribschen is today extinguished except as a fiendish specter requiring urgent remedial attention.

Rachmaninoff, too, is a permanent topic of controversy. I’ve never heard anyone accuse him of anti-Semitism. But he has long been reviled in some quarters as a recidivist merchandiser of kitsch. More substantively, his relationship to the contemporary world is complex and elusive. Rachmaninoff was no revanchist snob, only in love with the past. He adored piloting his motorboat. Driving a motor-car, he testified, evinced an “inner clam” resembling the satisfactions of conducting an orchestra. He spoke up for Gershwin, relished Art Tatum, and once wrote that “the seed of the future music of American lies in a true Negro music.”  His transcription of Tchaikovsky’s “Lullaby” – the last music he wrote – ends with a bluesy nightclub progression. 

At home, Rachmaninoff spoke Russian and maintained Russian customs. He took American citizenship belatedly, in 1943. He considered it “disgraceful” that he never fully mastered English. He courteously adapted yet stayed an interior course anchored by a loving family and loving friends, by servants, a chef, and a chauffeur all of whom were Russian. 

On rare occasions, American journalists were privileged to glimpse the magnitude of Rachmaninoff’s displacement. In 1926, a New Yorker reporter visited his five-story Riverside Drive home and left a description that Senar recapitulates: “While waiting for the appearance of one of his daughters, who were always his emissaries, the caller became conscious of a suzerainty of order; of punctilious nobility of a fair, natural elegance.” A year earlier, the Musical Observer witnessed an encounter in Rachmaninoff’s Carnegie Hall dressing room. Konstantin Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre was performing in New York:

“The actors and actresses . . . almost surrounded him. Some of the men kissed him and he them in real Russian stye. They exchanged a few words in the tempo of a chant before an altar. Then for a minute or two they spoke not a word. The Moscow players simply looked at the great Moscow musician in reverent silence. Such devotion, such poise, such childlike sincerity, I never saw before . . . Then [the actors] walked away one by one, like so many children . . . The master’s gaze was fixed on them, and he waved at the last actor who looked back as he went out of the door. . . I am not ashamed to admit that the sanctity of this scene moved me to tears. And from the quick movement of his eyelids I could notice that the master’s eyes were not altogether dry either. . . . It was a sacrament.”

Spurning the modernist thicket, Rachmaninoff the composer was to some cowardly. He could equally be understood as defiant. All this, and more, could generate a timely Rachmaninoff exhibit. It’s the kind of thing the Rachmaninoff Foundation does. Its current projects include a commissioned orchestration of the Corelli Variations and a Zurich Opera “Rachmaninoff Tryptic” comprising the composer’s three one-act operas . At Senar, the foundation presents concerts and lectures (including the talk with music on “Rachmaninoff and Nostalgia” that I delivered last Friday). But Senar would not be an appropriate location for an exhibit of any kind – it would impinge. 

And Tribschen is not the place to inquire whether Richard Wagner’s operas should be taboo.

To read a pertinent blog post arguing that Wagner was “not a monster,” and exploring his personal relationships with Jewish colleagues and friends, click here.    

I’ve received three memorable responses to my recent blog – also posted on Arts Fuse — pondering whether the Kennedy Center might become, or might have become, a genuine “national cultural center.”

The first, from a prominent arts administrator in mid-America, simply reads: “ It all comes down to leadership.”

The second, from Douglas McLennan of ArtsJournal, concludes: “Perhaps this is a wakeup call for arts leadership in America. An opportunity to rethink the model. To organize around an idea of what culture could be, what an *American* culture could be. Not to dictate, but to explore and encourage and experiment and showcase. It takes leadership.” It’s appended it below.

The third response, again anonymous, concludes: ”A fine arts administrator summed up the Trump takeover perfectly: ‘The Kennedy Center has never been as culturally relevant as it is now. By having to define and defend its very need to exist.’” It’s also appended below

The third writer’s resounding reference to George Templeton Strong bears some explication. Strong’s programmatic “Sintram” Symphony is to my knowledge the only notable late Romantic American symphony in the Lisztian/Wagnerian mode. It was premiered to acclaim by Anton Seidl and the New York Philharmonic in 1893. I don’t believe it has since been performed in the US. In 1897, Strong moved to Switzerland – where Ernest Ansermet championed this hour-long work. Joseph Szigeti also performed Strong’s music abroad. The only recording, on Naxos, features a Swiss conductor and a Russian orchestra. Only in the US could a native symphony of such stature be forgotten. 

I once had a pertinent conversation with the Estonian conductor Neeme Jarvi, who championed late-nineteenth century American works more than any American. Jarvi told me that he considered the Andante cantabile from George Chadwick’s Third Symphony (1894) the most beautiful slow movement from any American work. (You can hear his recording here.) I countered with the Langsam of the “Sintram” Symphony. Jarvi listened to it and reported that he agreed with me. You can listen to that right here.

Were a major American orchestra to perform and record the “Sintram” Symphony, and if those efforts were properly contextualized, they would be noticed. It would be an event.

Outside of Jarvi, Chadwick’s foremost recent proponent has been Jose Serebrier – born in Uruguay. Like Jarvi, he comes to Chadwick without prejudice. We Americans were sold on what I’ve called the modernist “standard narrative,” which holds that American classical music begins around 1910. That confusion is the central topic of my book Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music. 

Here’s the anonymous post:

This is very good. Great history, and further evidence that America can’t get out of its own way in curating its own art. Exceptions might be painting (which only needs walls) and poetry (which is singularly created for a singular reader, without need for critical mass.) Music of the past goes unplayed. Historical theatre pieces not staged. Classic films lost through decomposition. Radio and television lost in the ether. Novels out of print and dumped by libraries. Indigenous music unrecorded. 

The Kennedy Center built oversized concert halls and stages, but had no endowment to shore up the deficit between production and ticket revenue. 

If the music of George Templeton Strong were to become a two-week festival, the Kennedy Center would need a good symphonic stage and 800 seats for a limited audience. Tickets would be scarce. Buzz and critical assessment would make it a hot ticket. It could add performances if demand warranted. 

But the Kennedy Center wound up with bloated halls like almost every American city. 

And this gnashing of teeth over the dismissal of the previous regime irritates me. Trump took something uncreative and sleepy and made it worse. And I have no doubt that there are deferred maintenance issues long unaddressed. Again, on every rare occasion where Trump is right, it’s for the wrong reason. 

The KC should be the place where Americans make pilgrimages to gather in a space to experience the art that America has created and continues to create. The Kennedy Center should bring the South Dakota Symphony to be in residence every other year, could have helped fund the recent production of Douglas Moore’s Pulitzer-winning “Giants in the Earth” and brought it to DC. The current model negates that possibility as it competes with moribund resident companies that look like all the other companies in America. 

A fine arts administrator summed up the Trump takeover perfectly: “The Kennedy Center has never been as culturally relevant as it is now.” By having to define and defend its very need to exist.

And here’s the post from Doug McLennan:

Joe – you’re right on about the compromise of the original intention for the KC as a national and international showcase for the best art the world has to offer. 

Is the Kennedy Center really America’s showcase in its recent form? It’s Washington’s performing arts center. But Carnegie Hall is more prestigious. Lincoln Center has more artistic oomph. Do Americans look to the Kennedy Center for a particular vision of culture? I’m not so sure. And these days as culture has fragmented and reassembled in versions far removed from the time when the KC was created, is there even such a vision that could be coherent? Just the fact this is a real question suggests that a KC artistic vision hasn’t been articulated in a compelling enough way. 

Is the KC a complex of buildings or is it an idea? What do the component parts really add up to? And does this offer something unique or worthwhile? Nonetheless, it is enormously symbolic, and, along with the NEA and NEH, is America’s primary way American government expresses support for the arts. 

But I think it’s unfair, as Anonymous does, to characterize the Kennedy Center’s former incarnation as “uncreative and sleepy.” The KC ran some 2000 programs and productions per year and made significant and substantial efforts on behalf of the arts. Many hard-working, creative and dedicated people worked at the Kennedy Center to bring artists to work and be presented there. 

But the model is problematic. And I think, oddly enough, perhaps the practicalities of real estate may have compromised the opportunity for larger vision and leadership. Why are these resident organizations cohabiting a space? What’s the artistic reason? Yes, share resources and branding and the backend. But do they share a common vision that is enhanced by being in the same complex? Or are they competing with one another for space and resources? 

Worse — in a big unwieldy structure, with many mouths to feed and competition for resources, the whole can end up constricting the pieces and making the messaging and branding generic, corporate. Everything is Kennedy Center. The National Symphony, for example, doesn’t raise its own money, and doesn’t even operate its own website. Does central planning really promote the most creativity or artistic risk? 

Perhaps this is a wakeup call for arts leadership in America. An opportunity to rethink the model. To organize around an idea of what culture could be, what an *American* culture could be. Not to dictate, but to explore and encourage and experiment and showcase. It takes leadership.