Emotional or Cooler Mahler?

In an earlier posting I raised the question of why in some periods audiences and other listeners will prefer a more emotional performance of a Mahler symphony, say, by Bernstein, and why at other times a cooler variety, say by Boulez, takes preference.

I once conducted a poll on the Mahler List as to why the Mahler boom had occurred, and the majority of respondents, I think maybe 20 people, said it was the advent of the LP and the new high fidelity and stereo sound systems. But the advent of the new technology would not fully suffice, because then any composer whose works appeared on LP and were playable on a terrific stereo system should have had his/her boom as well. No, something more than technology was behind the sudden popularity of Mahler. I think that in the decades of the 60s and the 70s, the emotional interpretation caught the imagination of a listening audience for whom the horrific tragedies wrought by the Nazis during WW II had immediacy, a people desperate to find expression for the traumas of mass murder, genocide, and the crushing of European humanism. The Mahler boom took off because, Mahler, even though he died in 1911, was victimized by anti-Semitism and could represent in music the victimization of millions during the European catastrophe. For Bernstein, Mahler's music in toto became a vast musical work in which the Knabenwunderhorn songs, the Wayfarer Songs, the symphonies, the Ruckert Lieder and the Kindertotenlieder, and Das Lied von der Erde, especially Der Abschied, all form a great work, at once, Mahler’s autobiography, at once, European Jewry's Great Memorial and Requiem, at once, a 20th century European tragedy. I think this is what drew so much attention in the 60s and 70s. What compelled audiences in those decades was the great emotional, tragic power that was realized by Bernstein and by Walter, Mahler’’s protégé, and others, among them Haitink, who, conducting the (as it was known then) Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in its great concert hall, provided the Dutch with their own historic references to a great pre-war Mahler tradition and their own memorial to their horrors under the Nazi occupation.

Now as to Boulez: As time went on, the generations that had sought and attended this Mahlerian musical tragedy had perhaps exhausted their own needs for powerful cathartic release. Mahler's music had been long enjoying its high place in the canon, and audiences, older as well as younger members, were seeking new ways to enjoy Mahler. And so the less emotional, cooler Boulez and similar interpreters.

To conclude: Bernstein was a great tragedian who realized the tragic powers so manifest within Mahler's music. Boulez and the cooler approach satisfies others who for whatever reasons have less investment in the historical, tragic Mahler.

Hanns Eisler and the FBI

Apropos of the posting regarding Hanns Eisler, there is a very fine article by Jame Wierzbicki, "Hanns Eisler and the FBI," in the latest edition of the on-line journal, Music and Politics.

This issues contens include:

• Michael Beckerman, “The Dark Blue Exile of Jaroslav Ježek“

• Jame Wierzbicki, “Hanns Eisler and the FBI“

• Brana Mijatovic, “’Throwing Stones at the System’: 
Rock Music in Serbia during the 1990s“ 


• Damien Sagrillo, translated by Lee Rothfarb, “The Notion of Humankind According to the Music-pedagogical Conception of Former Socialist States, Exemplified in the Former German Democratic Republic“
  

• Dard Neuman, “Music & Politics in the Classroom:
 Music, Politics and Protest
“
  

• Eunice Schroeder, ”Recent Books on Music and Politics”

Regarding this journal, the editors write:

Music and Politics welcomes submissions of any length that explore the
interaction of Music and Politics. Areas of interest include, but are
not limited to, the impact of politics on the lives of musicians,
music as a form of political discourse, and the influences of ideology
on musical historiography. In addition, we seek articles that examine
pedagogical issues and strategies pertaining to the study of Music and
Politics in the undergraduate classroom. We also welcome suggestions
and/or submissions of articles on Music and Politics that have already
been published in another language and that would benefit from
dissemination in English translation. Submissions are encouraged from
both established scholars and graduate students. Because Music and
Politics is an on-line journal, authors are welcome to take advantage
of the media capabilities of the web (sound files, hyperlinks, color
images, and video).

Alex Ross versus Tom Wolfe on Bernstein

In his December 15 New Yorker article, “The Legend of Lenny” (cited and linked in a posting below), Alex Ross criticized Tom Wolfe’s 1973 "Radical Chic" characterization of Leonard Bernstein and his wife Felicia as socialites patronizingly dabbling in the civil rights movement. (The occasion was a party held by Felicia Bernstein to support the Black Panthers’ defense fund.) Ross goes on to write about the FBI’s criminal Counter Intelligence Program attempt to exploit the issue and destroy Bernstein and his wife Felicia’s reputation. In a letter published in the January 5, 2009 New Yorker, Re: The Legend of Lenny , Wolfe responds to Ross by reiterating his claim that the episode was “hysterically funny.” Ross in reply writes that “A ‘sensitive reassessment’ is needed not least because of the damage that ‘Radical Chic’ did to Bernstein’s image.”

Ross is indeed right: Bernstein was terribly hurt by Wolfe’s mean-spirited attack and the subsequent FBI harassment, and right in calling for a reassessment of Bernstein’s record and beliefs. Such a reassessment will be helped by my forthcoming book, which documents Bernstein’s activities in support of the civil rights of black Americans that were underway back in the 1940s, when such activities could fill one’s FBI dossier – which is exactly what happened in Bernstein’s case. Nor were those activities the end of Bernstein’s engagement with the civil rights movement. In 1965, he traveled to Montgomery, Alabama to greet those who had marched from Selma to Montgomery, knowing full well that that he could have been in the cross hairs of a Klansman’s rifle telescope sight. Nor were his activities extra-mural: one should pay some attention to Bernstein’s 1977 “Songfest” where he sets music to, among others, Langston Hughes’ “I Too, Sing America” and June Jordon’s “Okay, ‘Negroes” -- both angry statements about racial discrimination. Nor does the record stop there. Bernstein was outspoken in support of civil rights in the 1988 election when, it will be remembered, the Republicans were running their racist "Willy Horton" television ad and attacking American liberalism. Bernstein's defense of the liberal record on civil rights was, and remains, stirring.

In short, Bernstein was no dabbler: he was committed to the protection and advancement of civil rights and civil liberties all his life.

Regarding Hanns Eisler

Leon Botstein, conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra and a first rate musical scholar (and president of Bard College) discusses East German music, politics and culture in a video, "Music of the Other Germany: Five Composers Writing Under the Banner of East Germany. One can learn of the ethos within which composers such as Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau worked. You'll learn quite a lot from Botstein's rich discussion. I should add that Eisler had been in the US during W.W. II where he co-authored a famed book on music for film with the philosopher/musician Theodore Adorno. Eisler was brought before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1948 for his political beliefs, and received much support from his friends, including Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland and the playwright and film script writer Clifford Odets, but to no avail: he was deported from the US. Like his colleague Bertold Brecht, who left the US before he could be deported, Eisler decided to live in East Germany, and spent the remainder of his very productive life in that country. He died in 1962. Both he and Dessau composed music with texts by Brecht. Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra will be concertizing at Lincoln Center on Sun. Jan. 25, 2009, at 3:00 pm, and will be devoting this summer's program at Bard to these composers.

On Blogging

I read with some fascination Andrew Sullivan's article in the November 2008 Atlantic, "Why I Blog." Among the many interesting things he's got to say is that the blogger is more free with his/her thoughts than the writer whose work appears in paper format. The blog is more a record of the momentary, the ephemeral, the happenstance, of one's reactions to the event in virtual real time. Moreover, the blog creates the possibility of an immediate conversation with the reader. But unlike paper publications, there is also the chance of that conversation deteriorating into the low-level vituperative. The probability of this latter possibility appearing on this blog will remain low to zero. Nevertheless that's the risk one takes in the blogospheric medium.

For example, if I claim that Leonard Bernstein's Colombia/Sony recording of Mahler's Third is the greatest, someone else may answer, "Oh Yeah? Sez who?!" But if I support my claim by pointing out that in the last movement it is Bernstein's symphonic forces who rise to the highest emotional peak, then anyone who might otherwise argue against my position will be forced to listen to this recording. My opponent will now have to point to his/her candidate recording, to which I will now be forced to listen. The conversation becomes reasoned discourse. Not only that, but in a short while the conversation will turn from "best" to what is a far more interesting question, for example, whether Mahler intended the kind of wrenching emotional response that Bernstein elicits, or the cooler approach of, for example, Pierre Boulez. And that discussion will hopefully give way to another, say, why audiences at any particular time will opt for the emotional, and why audiences at other times opt for the cooler approach. I have my theories about this last question; I'll devote a future post to what think.

Individual Autonomy, Artistic Expression and Social Context

Are artists autonomous or are they responding, consciously or not, to prevailing social, political and economic forces? The critic Jed Perl's answer, which he argues in his essay, "Private Lives," in the December 4, 2008 New Republic is that "Art ... represents the triumph of private feeling over public pressures, or at least the ability of private feeling to assert itself in the face of public pressures and public values." He goes on to argue that his position seems to fly in the face of much current critical opinion, which holds that cultural expression is inevitably conditioned by the artist's location within the social order and response to it; and by the expectations and needs of the artist's audience. Perl responds: "It is true that there is no artist who has ever stood entirely apart from his or her time. But whatever the complexities of the artist's shifting social and economic situation, the artistic act is also an individualistic impulse rooted in the sense of self that is at the heart of the human condition."

Perl is thus arguing that no individual is reducible to a mindless cipher, that in the end we are always making choices, be these aesthetic or ethical. Any two people living within the same if not identical social conditions may make radically distinct choices, develop radically distinct programs and plans. As Sartre said of the poet Paul Valery, Valery was a petit bourgeois, but not every petit bourgeois is a Paul Valery. But even a Paul Valery was working under certain conditions, stylistic conventions, a given technology, world views and ideological horizons.

Can we then formulate how individual autonomy and social conditions intersect? This is the kind of question we will be posing, and working at, as these posts continue.

Alex Ross and "The Legend of Lenny"

The December 15, 2008 edition of The New Yorker carries a piece by Alex Ross, "The Legend of Lenny," that reminds us of the multifarious ways in which Bernstein contributed to the enrichment of the American public sphere.