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 "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:

Pivoting

A documentary film-maker recently observed to me that "the way you get out of a film is not always the way that got you in". I think I knew what he meant. Back in 1996 I had wanted to write a dramatisation of the whole life of T.G.H. Strehlow. It was not until some years later that I wrote something that I could complete (Journey to Horseshoe Bend) which was based on only ten days in Strehlow's early life.

Apparently, this kind of re-focussing has a term - 'pivoting'. You start off intending to do one thing (and I think by definition not getting anywhere) and end up refining your intention which then produces a successful outcome.


I've been thinking about this in relation to Abraham Lincoln. It took him nearly three years of warfare to refine the purpose of the US Civil War in the Gettysburg Address as "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal". Until then the war had been about preserving the union - not exactly a galvanising invitation.

I also wonder whether 'pivoting' took place in the creation of the Spielberg film, Lincoln. Back in 2009 I read that Lincoln was to be based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals. It's a wonderful book - a four-or five way biography describing how Lincoln chose his cabinet from among his nomination rivals (Seward, Chase, Stanton, Blair); an influence on President Obama - but (I wondered) how dramatic?

Lo and behold, the film is actually about Lincoln's effort to try to ensure the congressional vote for the 13th amendment (making slavery unconstitutional) before the war is won and people such as the pro-slavery Unionists decide there is no longer any urgency to do anything. How smart is this from a screenwriting point of view? - suddenly there's a race on, the pressure's up. I noticed in a recent edition of The New Republic that the screenwriter Tony Kushner acknowledges Michael Vorenberg's book about the passage of the 13th amendment Final Freedom as one of "20 or 30 books that were significant to me" though he denies that it was his principal source (Doris Kearns Goodwin still gets the screen credit for 'parts of' Team of Rivals). But, I wonder, at what point did Kushner and Spielberg decided to focus on the 13th amendment fight? How did this come about, and was it an example of 'pivoting'? I could look into this and find out I suppose, but for the moment I'm content to speculate.

And this is something else I'll speculate and pivot on. I reckon the next Lincoln film could be based on Nora Titone's My Thoughts Be Bloody. (The title is a quote from Hamlet.) Titone's book covers the rivalry among the Booths, the greatest theatrical family of the 19th century. Edwin was the greatest actor of his generation, inheritor of his father Junius's mantle. Younger brother, John Wilkes couldn't hold a candle to him.

Edwin Booth as Hamlet, c.1870. Photograph J. Gurney and Sons, New York

John Wilkes, Edwin and Junius Booth Jr in Julius Caesar, 1864

Yet, John Wilkes worked out how to upstage his brother once and for all - the Confederate sympathiser shot President Lincoln on Good Friday, 14 April 1865. It was a dramatic last act, as Booth jumped from the presidential box to the stage at Washington's Ford's Theater and spun around to the audience with the phrase "Sic semper tyrannus" [Thus to all tyrants], forever fusing the Booth name with villainy.


Can you imagine this as a film, since so much of Titone's book is also about acting as it was practised in those days?

"Shall we have an editor?" (with apologies to John Jay, who originally wrote "a king")

Apparently, Thomas Jefferson used to send people copies of his draft of the Declaration of Independence. He didn't like Congress's edited version. Bill Bryson once observed that Jefferson, like most writers, thought his version was better than the edit; and that like most writers...he was wrong.

I was discussing editing with a former newspaper editor only yesterday. We both agreed that we could cut a piece to any length, maintain the tone and weight, and convey the same depth of research that had gone into the original longer draft. But editing is more than that.

Some of America's greatest politicians have been great editors (is there something in that?). There is a book called Ask Not by Thurston Clarke which examines the editorial work John Kennedy did on his first inaugural address (of course the title of the book comes from the speech's famous phrase - 'Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.') And one of the highlights of Garry Wills' Lincoln at Gettysburg is the side-by-side comparison of Secretary of State William Seward's draft of Abraham Lincoln's First Inaugural Address and Lincoln's touch up.

Seward, for example, wrote: "The mystic chords which, proceeding from so many battle-fields and so many patriot graves, pass through all the hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent of ours, will yet harmonize in their ancient music when breathed upon by the guardian angels of this nation."

And Lincoln lifted it to: "The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

I guess what I'm getting at is that an edit can ratchet up the meaning. The example I can think of with real punkt is again from the Declaration of Independence. In the great clause about all men being created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among them Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, Jefferson originally wrote: "We hold these truths to be Sacred and Undeniable..." In a hand that looks like Benjamin Franklin's, "Sacred and Undeniable" is crossed and above the line someone has written (a word that is perfect and unarguable): "self-evident".

Which first - music or words? (thoughts stemming from Rodgers & Hammerstein)

In Ethan Mordden's book, Rodgers and Hammerstein, I just read the phrase, '...all the lovely and characterful music in the world can do nothing till it has something honest to work with.' He's praising Hammerstein's words of course (books and lyrics for Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I). But I kind of agree with it, because I think he's lit on one of the most powerful tools of a librettist - context. The context in which the music is played can affect its impact.

In our symphonic cantata Journey to Horseshoe Bend I had the lines:

But God cannot be known
Nor made to answer men.
No use in us demanding
The meaning of our pain.

At one stage this was in the words of the pastor, Carl. It's his opinion. It was later placed in the mouths of the chorus. There it suddenly became editorial, as befitted what I thought of as part of the core meaning of the work.

This may not exactly be context. But changing location or time of night or day can alter the effect of a scene as effectively as this.

I have two much-treasured instances of music that hooked me at least as much because of the context in which I heard them.

In Alice Springs at Easter in 1981, I happened to pick up on one of the Melbourne radio stations 2,258 kms (1,403 miles) away that year's Bayreuth Festival production of Wagner's Parsifal. I wasn't listening to it on the best of equipment but it sure was a moving experience in my little flat in the backyard in Willshire Street. I don't know if I would have found it more moving if I'd actually been sitting in the Festpielhaus in Germany.

Also, when I was a kid, Radio 3DB in Melbourne used to broadcast a concert at 11 o'clock Sunday nights. I was supposed to be asleep in bed, but I would sneak a small transistor under the blankets and tune in, with the volume down low. One night I forgot to put the radio on until about 11.50. When I located the station I was knocked out; it was spectacular - like Catherine Wheels going off in my head, plumes of flame spinning from revolving wheels. It was the climax to Scriabin's Poem of Ecstasy.

Alexander Scriabin who thought he would write a piece that would end the world, but died instead from an insect bite

I've loved the piece ever since. It may not be a flawless masterpiece (although close), it may not have enough intellectual content for the real aficionados, and I was listening to it on a crappy tranny. But it's one of the best musical experiences of my life. And I think a great deal of the overwhelming experience lay in the fact that I heard this gigantic outpouring in an unexpected context, listening 'illegally' in the cocoon of my bed.

I sometimes wonder if contemporary opera suffers from the fact that we've gotten used to thinking that the effect of the piece comes down almost solely to the music, and not the music and action and words working in tandem to be more than the sum of their parts. The music provides the emotional content perhaps - it's the verb - but it doesn't guarantee the whole effect.

And in fact, I question whether words cannot sometimes match music's emotional impact. Let me move on to another tangent. Could any music match the majesty of Abraham Lincoln's words to Mrs Bixby (which I quote as well I can from memory to prove how they ring):

'Dear Madam

I have been a paper in the files of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts to the effect that you are the mother of five sons who have died on the glorious field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless are any words of mine that could seek to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming, but I cannot refrain from tendering to you the humble thanks of the republic they died to save,' etc...

Lincoln, whose prose could be more majestic than music. Alexander Gardner's 1863 portrait

Who gets close to Lincoln? Bach? but not in an exact setting of these words.

Nah, opera is meant to be an ensemble effort, truly a gesamtkunstwerk. Musical theater is.