Nothing, my Florestan

Another observation in the perennial argument over words and the music in opera:

To those who say that music is more powerful I often say that no composer can match Abraham Lincoln's prose. Copland's Lincoln Portrait is okay, but he doesn't allow a single speech to dominate. And is there a composer in the world whose phrases could match the length of thought in Lincoln's letter to the bereaved mother, Mrs Bixby:  "I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save."

I would also note that the most powerful moment in many performances of Beethoven's Fidelio is not musical. After Leonore has risked her life at the end of a gun to save her husband, he turns to her and says, "My Leonore, what have you done for me?" In the German original there is an exchange of dialogue, but in Klemperer's 1962 recording her answer is reduced to "Nichts, nichts, mein Florestan." (It was nothing, nothing, my Florestan.) It needs no music right at that moment, it is throat-swallowingly moving, although then the duet ('O namenlose Freude') swells up.

The odd thing is that in Bernstein's recording he omits this exchange and goes straight from the thwarted murderer Pizarro's exit to the duet. I have always thought Bernstein understood words (he composed some gems for Candide), but this is a real dramatic moment missed.

      

Aaron Copland's "Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson"

Continuing my series of program notes:

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

Eight Poems of Emily Dickinson

Nature, the gentlest mother

There came a wind like a bugle

The world feels dusty

Heart, we will forget him

Dear March, come in

Sleep is supposed to be

Going to Heaven

The Chariot

1846 or 1847 daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson

With works such as Appalachian Spring, Rodeo and Fanfare for the Common Man, Aaron Copland’s music became the quintessential expression of ‘the American’ in music. This could be considered ‘big skies’ music – bold vigorous rhythms, declamatory themes, bright orchestral colours. As subject matter the poems of Emily Dickinson, a New England recluse, might seem a change of direction. Yet these too are quintessentially American. Indeed, Martha Graham had based what Irving Kolodin called ‘the first authentically American Ballet’ on Dickinson’s poetry (Letter to the World, with music by Hunter Johnson) the year before she commissioned Copland's Appalachian Spring.

Copland began setting Dickinson’s poetry in March 1949 with The Chariot, the poem in which Dickinson imagines herself accepting a ride in Death’s coach. From there Copland conceived settings of three poems, then six. A year later, he had completed 12 (each dedicated to a different composer friend), placing them in order after they were written. These were first performed by Alice Howland in New York on 18 May 1950 with the composer at the piano. There has been much discussion of the angularity of the vocal part, the poet’s voice, in these settings with praise for the way in which Copland uncannily captures Dickinson’s unique punctuation (even though he worked from the ‘cleaned up’ texts pre-dating the 1955 authorised edition of her works). With his orchestration of eight of the songs in 1958, Copland uses the orchestra to amplify the metaphorical role that Copland biographer Howard Pollack describes the piano accompaniment as having.

The poems concern death, nature both benign and malevolent, and the poet’s own struggles with faith. ‘Nature, the gentlest mother’ is followed by the destructive force of the wind coming in like a bugle. Copland’s orchestration becomes warmer with strings as we approach the central numbers of the set: ‘The world feels dusty’ and ‘Heart, we will forget him’. ‘Dear March’, balancing ‘There came a wind’, celebrates springtime ‘whimsically portrayed as a house caller’ in the words of Pollack, who also says ‘[‘Sleep’] affirms an exalted, messianic vision of life and death’. In ‘Going to Heaven’ Dickinsons expresses her own doubts about heaven, but takes comfort in the fact that deceased friends (or relatives) had faith. In ‘The Chariot’, she envisions her own funeral ride to the cemetery.

With this work Copland seems to have reached the heart of Dickinson’s poetry. He spent months researching what he called the ‘unique personality’ of a woman who, in her 30s. had started communicating with people through a closed door rather than face-to-face and he visited Dickinson’s home in Amherst, Massachusetts to get a sense of the extraordinary mind, the ‘undiscovered continent’, that sustained her in her isolation. In some ways, he felt that his work the previous year on The Heiress, for which his film score won an Academy Award, prepared him for entering the mind of an isolated, unmarried young woman. Said the soprano, Phyllis Curtin: ‘It is my conviction, after having sung these songs hundreds of times, that nobody has ever understood her as Aaron does. It was Aaron who found the musical voice for Emily Dickinson, and the times when I sang them best, I had the feeling that she was speaking.’

Yet this work also marked a change for Copland. The public statements of Appalachian Spring and Fanfare for the Common Man had given way to private utterance. It is noteworthy that around this time Copland made his first foray into the cerebral possibilities of 12-tone technique in his Piano Quartet. The Eight Poems proves there’s more to overt Americana than meets the eye, or ear. A complex psychological underplay is going on here beneath a spare, New England exterior.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2013


This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

Edward Elgar's Froissart, published 2 July 2013
Aaron Copland's A Lincoln Portrait, published 3 July 2013
Franz Waxman's Carmen-fantaisie, published 6 July 2013
Jan Sibelius's Oceanides, published 8 July 2013
Richard Wagner's Tristan and Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod, published 12 July 2013

Aaron Copland's "A Lincoln Portrait"

Continuing my series of program notes (this one to mark 4 July):

Aaron Copland (1900-1990)

A Lincoln Portrait

Alexander Gardner's 1863 portrait

To further the patriotic effort as America entered World War II, conductor André Kostelanetz wrote to a number of American composers requesting musical portraits of significant US national figures which he could include in concert programs. By the early 1940s, Aaron Copland was known as the composer of El salón Mexico and the ballet Billy the Kid. Kostelanetz wrote to Copland eleven days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, suggesting as possible subjects "George Washington, Paul Revere, Walt Whitman, Robert Fulton, Henry Ford, Babe Ruth…"

Fellow composer Virgil Thomson decided to portray Mayor Fiorello La Guardia of New York and journalist Dorothy Thompson. Copland at first considered portraying the poet Walt Whitman, until he discovered that Jerome Kern was doing Mark Twain, another literary figure. Jefferson was a possibility, but Copland settled on Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States who had held the Union together during the Civil War, a period of like crisis.

Virgil Thomson warned Copland about the problem of portraying such a lofty figure. Copland's solution was to employ selections from Lincoln's own speeches. He may have been inspired by Earl Robinson, who in the 1930s had won lessons with Copland from the leftwing Downtown Music School and impressed Copland with a song Old Abe Lincoln which interspersed spoken with sung text. According to biographer Vivien Perlis, Copland wrote to Robinson, "Earl, I’m stealing some of your thunder." But Copland made his own masterly selection from Lincoln's speeches, and brought to it the hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic music which he was beginning to conceive as characteristic of America's plucky and heroic spirit. 1942 would see Copland also compose the iconic Fanfare for the Common Man.

Copland sketched A Lincoln Portrait in February 1942, composed it in mid-April, and completed scoring a few weeks later. The 13-minute work is in three sections, and is strikingly simple. Copland believed in simplicity almost as a Puritan virtue, but he also knew the danger of overstatement in works of this kind. According to Copland’s description given in Perlis’ book Copland: 1900 through 1942, the soft opening is intended to suggest the "mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality [Lincoln was assassinated in Washington’s Ford’s Theatre at the point of victory in the Civil War]…the challenge was to compose something simple, yet interesting enough to fit Lincoln – I kept finding myself back at the C-major triad." The second subject is based on the folksong Springfield Mountain. This leads into a fast section meant to illustrate the colourful times in which Lincoln lived. There is modified use of another folksong, Camptown Races, before the final section which Copland says "was meant to draw a simple but impressive frame around the words of Lincoln himself."

Lincoln is of course famous for the Gettysburg Address and its opening phrase "Four-score and seven years ago…" But you won’t hear that phrase in this work, nor "conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Copland knew the overwhelmingly resonant potential of Lincoln’s words, and selected passages that the music could complement and build to a climax "that government of the people, by the people and for the people shall not perish from this earth." The selections are taken from the seventh of Lincoln’s debates with Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s opponent in the 1858 senate campaign (Lincoln lost); a remark made in August that same year; President Lincoln's Second Annual Message to Congress in 1862, after the battles of Bull Run and Wilson's Creek saw the Southern rebel states on the rise; and the last 67 words from the Gettysburg Address dedicating the Gettysburg battlefield in 1863.

A Lincoln Portrait has become an American work for important national occasions. In America the narrator is usually someone prominent in public life, be it Gen. Schwarzkopf, Katherine Hepburn or Walter Cronkite. Musicologist William Austin voted Ambassador Adlai Stevenson as the Portrait's best speaker, and Stevenson, who knew from those 13 tense days at the UN during the Cold War what it was to coin words in a crisis, allowed Copland’s (and Lincoln’s) eloquence to speak through him. But the work also promoted American values in the world, and in the 1960s the United States Information Agency translated Copland's text into Arabic, Bengali, Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese and Hindi (to merely begin the list).

Copland fell foul of authorities during the McCarthy era. A Lincoln Portrait was scheduled to be performed at President Eisenhower's inauguration concert, January 1953. But an Illinois congressman named Fred Busbey objected that Copland had belonged to communist front organisations. A Lincoln Portrait was dropped. Claire Reis of the League of Composers fired off an angry telegram which in estimating Copland's stature just about got it right: "No American composer, living or dead, has done more for American music and the growth of the reputation of American culture throughout the civilized world than Aaron Copland." When the University of Alabama subsequently cancelled one of Copland's speaking engagements Copland wrote to the university in words recalling Lincoln: "It makes clear that freedom of thought is endangered in America if a large university such as yours can be intimidated by the allegations of a single individual." The bloodhounds of 'un-Americanism' failed to notice what would later be accepted in general: that Aaron Copland and A Lincoln Portrait showed America in a good light to the rest of the world.

G.K. Williams

Symphony Australia © 2004

This note first appeared in program booklets of orchestras associated with Symphony Services International (http://symphonyinternational.net/). Please contact me if you would like to reprint this note in a program booklet. If you would like to read more of my notes on this blog please see:

More to love about LA

'...[A] settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic; daring, decent and fair.'

I've sometimes asked musician friends if they can identify the source of this quote. Aaron Copland, Elmer Bernstein (the creators of 'Big Sky' music)? No, it's from Ronald Reagan's second inaugural address. Whether the speechwriter (Peggy Noonan?) was thinking of 'The Open Prairie' sequence of Copland's Billy the Kid ballet I don't know, but it reminds me that I share Reagan's love of the open spaces of the West.

I was struck by this love when we were at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley earlier this year. It's the reason for the site.

And I caught my breath again recently when we saw the San Fernando Valley from back of the Hollywood Hills.

This landscape doesn't have Central Australia's ribbons of ochre and mauve hills diminishing into vapoury blue peaks, but it still has the heart-swelling invitingness of open space. I love the feeling.

I love also the way you pass through different language areas in LA. Of course there's always Spanish, but you might pass through a Korean precinct

and the other day down Victory Boulevard we saw a script we couldn't identify - Russian, Thai? The woman sitting next to us on the bus filled us in. She was reading Los Angeles' Armenian-language newspaper.

These zones you pass through give the clue to how to see LA. It's not a city in the traditional sense of something derived from the old walled-city concept. It's a conurbation of old ranches (some maps show where they were), farms, orange groves, movie lots...Tarzana was once the ranch of novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, who named it after his most-famous character. Calabasas Junction, where I went swimming at the lap pool last week, was an old stagecoach stop.

As a city, LA's quite diffuse. You have to get most nearly everywhere by car (though we've walked from Kittredge to Ventura Boulevard and back, and they're restoring the public transport). And it may not have the compressed excitement of a Manhattan. But there's citrus and sunshine and birdsong as compensation. And it's no less active nor vibrant for all of that.