Musical America Blogs

By James Conlon

I can barely remember a time when I didn’t know Dick Horowitz.

The Metropolitan Opera’s Principal Timpanist first joined the orchestra in 1946 and retired only three years ago, in 2012. Those sixty-six years are a record: the longest-serving musician in the history of the Met’s orchestra. It has been estimated that he played tens of thousands of performances. He passed away on November 2, leaving a unique legacy.

I first met him in 1969 when I was studying with Jean Morel at the Juilliard School. As Morel had been a timpanist before he became a conductor, he had a special relationship with Dick (as he was known to all). Despite his well-known fierce Gallic character, Dick was clearly among Morel’s favorites.

He introduced us, explaining that I was one of his students, and that I had a particular interest in opera.  Dick had also studied with him. He asked me a lot of questions, and we discovered that we had not just a teacher in common, but also an Alma Mater, from which I had graduated the previous year–the High School of Music and Art.  After our meeting, knowing I wanted to conduct, he then “adopted” me.

Long before I started conducting at the Met, he used to invite me to sit behind him at rehearsals. I was able to absorb the inner workings of the orchestra from his perspective. I noted with what special care he marked his part as if it were a detailed roadmap with cues from all over the orchestra. From his perch, with his acute ears, he heard everything that went on. When I first came to conduct at the Met a few years later, he was there, lending a hand, support, advice and counsel (and, of course, generously making batons for me, which he loved to do).

He loved his work and he loved the orchestra. He was affectionately known to some as “the Phantom of the Opera,” as he could be found in the Met corridors at almost any hour of the day. He lived in northeastern Queens, close to where I grew up, so I understood why he didn’t want to deal with the commute more than once a day.  When I was still living with my parents, he drove me home late at night after performances on more than one occasion. We discovered that one of his cousins had been my English teacher in Junior High School. These were a few of the nonmusical links that we shared.

For the first twenty years of my career, I always consulted him as I added opera after opera to my repertory. He gave me photocopies of his own annotated parts for every one of them. Dick always “corrected” the pitches of the timpani that were discordant. All of the nineteenth century Italian operas were written before the pedals on the timpani allowed for quick changes of notes. The pitch was less distinct at the time and so the notes that did not fit harmonically were probably not disturbing to contemporary ears. That was no longer true in the modern era and Dick went about correcting them systematically for hundreds of operas.

The public hears the orchestra in a pit as an entity, a collective. An opera orchestra is less visible to that public. Consequently many of its individuals are less well known and sometimes unrecognized. To all of us who worked with and knew Dick Horowitz, he was an inspiring presence. His sixty-six years at the Met stand as a monumental record. His great legacy is now preserved, thanks to the release of the archives of the Met broadcasts. He was a great and unforgettable musician who earned the respect of all who worked with him and the affection of all who knew him.

By James Conlon

“Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming… Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated.  For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.”  – Oscar Wilde

I had an extraordinary experience in Rome on a recent trip. That is almost saying the same thing twice because, if there is one city in the world where the exceptional is not an exception, it is Rome.

Overdue for a haircut, in anticipation of the Roman summer heat, which had arrived early this year, I asked a friend to recommend a barber. His was the best in all of Rome he told me (they all say that). A cousin, I asked?  No, he said, just the best. So I made an appointment.

His name was Piero and he had made his way as a young man to the city to which all roads lead where he felt he could best fulfill his ambitions to be a barber.

Not just any barber, but a great one. In short order he recounted his life and ended by pointing out that, though he was 78 years old, he was healthy and energetic because he has done what he loved.

He was talkative and further explained that his profession and its old traditions were at risk of extinction. Those who knew the art as it had developed over a millennium were disappearing. The proliferation of the larger beauty salons and increased financial pressures were slowly crushing the independent barbershops. Much like small bookstores and pharmacies, they were becoming an endangered species. He was even indignant that the word “barber” did not command the respect that it used to and, he felt, should still command today.

Which led him to bring up the name of Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the creator of Figaro, the quasi-autobiographical hero of three plays: Le Barbier de Seville, Les Noces de Figaro and La Mère Coupable. He was fascinated (and pleased) that this brilliant, versatile 18^th century iconic French writer made a barber the protagonist of his works. He wondered why he had done so, and was frustrated at not finding answers. I told him a lot of what I knew. Never have I had a conversation even remotely like this one, while having my hair trimmed.

His surprise, upon discovering that I actually was well acquainted with Beaumarchais and his works, was only surpassed by my own, at having met someone, outside of France, who had a similar interest.

I recounted my childhood experiences and how Rossini’s Barber of Seville had propelled me from baseball to classical music and to a keen interest in Beaumarchais as well. By coincidence, a few months earlier, I had conducted four operas (by Paisiello, Rossini, Mozart and Corigliano) based on his works. He in turn spoke eloquently on the meaning Beaumarchais’ character held for him.

The linear conversation was interrupted only to make space for a curious ritual in which he lit several matches and proceeded systematically to singe the tip of all the freshly cut hair. I asked him why he was doing that.  He explained that it stimulated and reinvigorated the remaining hair. Really, I asked? Yes, he insisted. Despite the lack of scientific proof, the scorching was beneficial, it just was.  So there were no two ways about it. It added, he said, an extra dimension to the experience. Cause and effect aren’t important, but the feelings evoked are. The value of this quasi-sacramental ritual was obvious to him, and … when in Rome ….I just sat back and enjoyed it. Why not?  His methods seemed to be confirmed by the evident fidelity of his clientele.

Are you still with me? If you have gotten this far, you might ask what this story has to do with anything. Well, to me it does.  It has to do with his world of barbering and our music world. I saw in him a mirror of something that we are, could be, or need to be.

This devotee of Figaro has lived a long, productive life, in the place Wilde described as “the one city of the soul.”  His barbershop is approximately midway between the Teatro Argentina, (site of the premiere of Rossini’s Barber), and the point where Via Gioacchino Rossini and Via Giovanni Paisiello (named after the first composer to set the Barber of Seville to music, who died in Rome shortly after his 24-year-old rival had effectively consigned his masterpiece to an undeserved oblivion) intersect.

He is dedicated to a profession he believes imperiled. It is not enough to cut hair in a certain way; he wants to see the small personal barbershop maintain itself in the face of the large commercially dominant beauty salons. I felt a kinship with him.

Our occupations are different, but the predicaments we face are not. We both want to see our professions thrive within a world in which our adherents are admittedly numerically few and our economic importance relatively small. People will always need haircuts but barbering, for him, is more than that. Audiences will always want to be entertained, but classical music is more than that. Much more. It is in that more where the difference resides. It separates the artist from the professional, and the craftsman from the functionary.

There are many factors that will continue to make our roads bumpy. There are those who see “ugly meanings in beautiful things.” Classical music and its institutions come under relentless criticism. The barometers by which music is often measured are extrinsic to the art form itself. Classical music’s presence in our society is worth defending. It is not the music’s problem if it is not popular, not economically viable, deemed irrelevant or not to everyone’s taste. It is our problem.

Those of us who believe in its value must be the defenders, not because it is in our personal interests to do so, but because the survival of the art form is vitally important for society. The conviction of the convinced is essential; the vacillation of the lukewarm, the apologetic and the self-serving is dangerous.

Despite our small demographic, if we are devoted, passionate and deeply attached, we can make a difference. We, a minority of sorts, have to live for art with a depth of conviction and devotion that others, whose lives and tastes place them squarely in the vast majority, need not. There is hope when, like Wilde’s “cultivated,” we find and communicate “beautiful meanings in beautiful things.”

My new friend, Piero, is an inspiration. He continues on his way, believing in what others might see as a dying way of life. I am sure he would not exchange his profession for any other, as I would not my own. It is conviction like his that would give our young artists the strength not to dilute their art with the waters of careerism, conformism and conventionality. It would give us the courage to differentiate and choose quality over popularity, substance over buzz, knowledgeable and competent artists over the trendy.

There could be a renaissance if all classical musicians and the custodians of our cultural institutions were like Piero and Wilde’s elect, “to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.”

PS: The haircut was great.

By James Conlon

Question:

What do Arnold Schoenberg, Edouard Manet, Francois Rene Chateaubriand and Titus Andronicus have in common?

Answer:

My spell-check doesn’t recognize their names.

About eighteen months ago, bending under a barrage of criticism and pressure to start tweeting, I began.  Entering the world of social media was not my thing. Remarks like “Get with it, Dad!” were the last straw.

I called my friend and colleague Esa-Pekka Salonen, who was already a tweeter, to ask how it worked. His presence on Twitter lent the whole thing some respectability. He was very helpful and, feeling slightly more comfortable and marginally less embarrassed, I proceeded.

A short time ago I saw one of his tweets, which are highly imaginative and invariably humorous. He recounted that he had entered the word “Sudafed” in some text he was writing, and his spell-check corrected it to “Dudamel” (because, I suppose, the auto-correct on Esa-Pekka’s device had “learned” the word Dudamel and was helpfully “assuming” his true intent…).

I am constantly astonished at what my spell-check doesn’t recognize. It was certainly not created with classical music or musicians in mind. I started to collect examples, like artifacts.  After reading Esa-Pekka’s tweet, I decided to share some of my findings. I offer:

AN ABC OF AUTO-CORRECTION  (only the tip of an iceberg):

The composer is on the left (you knew that) and the suggested alternative on the right.

ADES                          HADES

BERLIOZ                     BELIZE

BRITTEN                     BRITTANY (AS IN FRANCE)

BRUCKNER                 TRUCKER

COPLAND                   SCOTLAND

DVORAK                     DORKS

FAURE                        FARCE

GERSHWIN                 GEARSHIFT

HINDEMITH                HINDERMOST/INDEMNITY

IBERT                         LIBERTY

JANACEK                    JAMAICA

KORNGOLD                CORNFIELD

LUTOSLAWSKI            GLUTTONS/LOUTS

MILHAUD                    MILKMAID

ORFF                          DOFF/RUFF

PROKOFIEV                 PORKPIE/PUFF

RACHMANINOFF         RANCHMAN/DRACHMA

SALONEN                    SALOON

SCHOENBERG             SCHEMER/SCORNER/SCHOONER

TAKAMITSU                STALAGMITES/THALAMUS

ULLMANN                   MULLIGAN/SULLIVAN

VARESE                      OVARIES

WEILL                         DWELL/SWELL

XANAKIS                    ANTACIDS/HANKIES

YSAYE                        SAUTE/SPAYED

ZWILICH                     ZILCH/ZIPLOC

I guess classic music hasn’t quite made it yet.  But neither have Matisse , Manet, Van Gogh, Pissaro, Toulouse-Lautrec.

I need a Sudafed!

JAMES CONLON           COLON/COLONY/COLOGNE

By James Conlon

Since arriving in New York in mid-October to rehearse Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the Metropolitan Opera, and until finishing my last concert with RAI National Symphony Orchestra (Torino) on Friday night, I have not conducted a note of music that is not Russian.  I flew to Europe immediately after the last performance at the Met to attend a new, beautiful production of Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina at the Vienna State Opera.  I then conducted three performances of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony (“The Leningrad”) with the Orquesta Nacional in Madrid and two concerts in Torino (the program consisting of Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky). I have Russian music, which I love, and Russia, on my mind.

As are many people, I am saddened to see the gradual dissolution of the friendlier feelings between Russia and the United States that emerged in the 1990s. I am troubled by what appears to be a re-emergence of Cold War sentiments on both sides. I am not qualified to make informed judgments about any of this, and I am not conversant enough with the facts and arguments surrounding most of the issues to proffer a public opinion. It does seem to me, however, that no one will be better off in the future should this continue to escalate.

I would further suggest that although we classical musicians, constituting a tiny fraction of the world’s population, may have minimal influence on world events, we can nevertheless do our part to keep communication open and meaningful.

Last Wednesday night, after rehearsal with the orchestra in Torino, I turned on CNN in my hotel room and heard the news that President Obama was about to announce the beginning of normalizing relations with Cuba.

That same evening, in a remarkable coincidence, The National Ballet of Cuba was opening a run of guest performances in the Teatro Regio (where, as part of its long history, the young Arturo Toscanini conducted the premiere of La Boheme in 1896). My wife and I had been invited to attend and were preparing to do so. The announcement was made at 6:00 P.M. Italian time, and by 7:30 we were being given a back stage “tour” before the performance. The news had just broken amongst the dancers, and the emotion was palpable. I am no expert about classical ballet, but the performance clearly reflected the best of the splendid influence of Russian tradition and discipline that is a part of this superb company’s history.

By an equally remarkable happenstance, at that very moment, our two daughters were in Havana. Luisa, the elder, was there for the second time and Emma, the younger, for the first. Among their weeklong activities, they went to Matanzas, the city of their maternal grandmother’s birth, to better acquaint themselves with a part of their roots. They visited the little park, where a portion of her ashes had been spread.  My mother-in-law, who lived to the age of ninety-nine years and seven months, left Cuba in 1923.  She returned once in the 1930s to fulfill a dancing engagement. She attempted to visit in the 1980s but, advised not to risk being detained, canceled her plans.

Together with my father-in-law, they spearheaded the creation of the Cuban Institute, which was a part of the University of Iowa in Iowa City. The purpose was to help integrate recent exiles into their new communities as well as to function as an epicenter where Cubans could continue to congregate and preserve a certain degree of their own culture. My mother-in-law never shed her Cuban-Spanish identity, never outlived her longing to go back, and never ceased to empathize with her newly “adopted” immigrants and their plight.

They both would have been happy to see the events of last Wednesday. They were not political, but would have understood the many competing emotions and viewpoints surrounding these changes today. But remembering the day our two countries’ diplomatic relations were broken (as I still remember it), they wanted nothing else but to see families, friends and cultures reunited.

The blockade, which lasted half a century, is a remnant of the Cold War. It is ironic, as one of its last vestiges is dismantled, that the same type of hostility which produced it, is reviving. As I watched the ballet on Wednesday evening, I could not help thinking that a few hours earlier, our governments were still officially antagonists in a now defunct struggle for world domination. That struggle has had nothing to do with the mastery in evidence on the stage. Nor did it have anything to do with countless performances of works written by Classical composers who lived and created in countries that at one time or another were our “enemies.”

Classical music and ballet unite human beings not only across geographic and political borders, but also across the centuries. Music is healing and salutary for the human spirit. The performing arts, the survival of the Classical arts, and contemporary cultural exchange, are all essential for humanity’s peaceful future. Musicians and dancers are human beings who bring music and dance to other human beings. We must not lose sight of that fact. Their art and endeavors transcend political, nationalistic, religious and philosophical differences.

The heritage and patrimony of the Classical arts are fundamental and necessary for all peoples. That is why it is important to continue defending and supporting the arts. They are worth the fight.

By James Conlon

On the occasion of the opening of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Dimitri Shostakovich’s opera, I have revisited an article that I wrote for Opera News in 1994 at the time I conducted the opera in its first presentation at the Met. I have expanded and re-written a great deal of it, while preserving its core. For the passages that I have retained, I acknowledge Opera News’ kind permission to reprint.

“I would say that Lady Macbeth could be called a tragi-satirical opera. Despite the fact that (Katerina) murders her husband and father-in-law, I sympathize with her nonetheless. I have tried to impart to her whole way of life and surroundings, a gloomy satiric character.” [Dimitri Shostakovich]

“There is no situation, however loathsome, to which a human being cannot grow accustomed, and in each and every one of them he retains, so far as possible, his ability to pursue his meager joys; but Katerina Lvovna needed to make no adjustments: she could see her Sergei again, and in his presence even the road of penal servitude would blossom with happiness.” [Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District]

“To make a tragedy the artist must isolate a single element out of the totality of human experience and use that exclusively as his material. Tragedy is something that is separated out from the Whole Truth, distilled from it … chemically pure…It is because of its chemical purity that tragedy so effectively performs its function of catharsis…
… [I]n recent times literature has become more and more acutely conscious of the Whole Truth — of the great ocean of irrelevant things, events and thoughts stretching away endlessly in every direction.” [Aldous Huxley, Music at Night]

 
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District is, in my opinion, the most important Russian opera of the twentieth century, a masterpiece of tragedy and satire. Dimitri Shostakovich’s achievement is staggering. In depicting the environment of stifling boredom and dreary monotony that drives a vital young woman of 19^th-century Russia to first commit adultery and then murder, he produced a work that served as a metaphor for the hypocrisy and brutality of his contemporary Soviet society. The opera represents a quantum leap in the growth of Russia’s greatest 20^th-century composer, comparable to the jump that Nabucco and The Flying Dutchman represented for Verdi and Wagner.  In one great gesture he created a musical and theatrical vocabulary of his own, using the orchestra with novel mastery and virtuosity. His genius for satire and social commentary, previously evidenced in The Nose, is now assimilated into a massive theatrical entity connecting a personal domestic drama to a portrait of its time. With newly found depth and breadth, this violent tale of passion touches and brings to life a multi-layered and complex society through novel means. On the same scale as Modest Mussorgsky’s two great historical dramas, Shostakovich evokes “the great ocean of irrelevant things” and the “Whole Truth” to which Huxley refers.

Drawing the substance from a short story by Nikolai Leskov (1831­-95), the composer saw in it “a most truthful and tragic portrait of a talented, clever and exceptional woman perishing in the nightmarish conditions of prerevolutionary Russia.” The result: a domestic drama in a specifically nineteenth-century czarist environment, tacitly suggesting Soviet Society circa 1930 metaphorically rendered universal. No other opera score has so successfully fused “bourgeois drama,” social commentary, satire, high passion, and its own brand of tragedy.

Shostakovich wrote: “In the opera I have arias, duets, trios, large choruses. Recitative–in its old tradition guise–is almost totally absent. My orchestra does not accompany but plays a leading role together with the singers.” Customary operatic formulas abound: passion, jealousy and murder, airs of longing, monologues and love duets, a ghostly apparition, an interrupted wedding feast, drunken songs and choruses of lamentation. All of this, and more, is used, and misused in an original and innovative manner.

Few successful modern operas have subsequently fallen victim to the crushing political force that met Lady Macbeth. Premiered in 1934 and banned in 1936, it remained unperformed in the Soviet Union for the rest of the regime’s existence. It was allowed to re-emerge in the 1960s in a tamed, somewhat bowdlerized form and re-titled Katerina Ismailova.

Historically, censorship historically limited the scope of political subjects in opera during most of the form’s existence. Personal dramas thrived, as they were just that: personal and largely apolitical. But in Russia of the 1930s, the personal was politically incorrect. Given the repressive climate and the regime’s opposition to what it considered self-indulgent individualism in art, writing Lady Macbeth was an act of outrageous bravery. Its depiction of boredom and loneliness, love and lust, cruelty and fear would rub up against the regime’s expectation of Socialist Realism, where none of this had a place. Shostakovich’s biting portrayal of the police and explicit eroticism could not be left unchecked. He was to pay the price the rest of his life, and 20^th-century world of opera would be deprived of a giant.

The tantalizing question: what would he have produced if only…? Had Verdi and Wagner ceased to write at a comparable age, their final completed works would have been Oberto and Das Liebesverbot. What would Shostakovich’s Falstaff or Parsifal have been? His enforced banishment from the theater was to transmute his dramatic genius into absolute music, generating, amongst other genres,  the fifteen symphonies and string quartets where he could “say” what he wanted with total deniability.

In one view the title character, Katerina, is first an adulteress and then a criminal. If she is so, the composer’s music suggests, it is because she is brutalized and humiliated by her environment. The opposing view would see her as heroic, brave and daring: a woman sunken beneath a patriarchy, rebelling and claiming for herself (and by extension for other women) the right to happiness. Married young to a rich landowner, subjected to constant abuse from her father-in-law, she is desolate in a loveless marriage and surrounded by a cruel, uncaring, petty and provincial world. She murders twice and incites to murder. She marries her accomplice, leading to his and her condemnation. She yearns, desires and loves with a passion that disdains all boundaries and defies all obstacles. It is clearly Shostakovich’s intention that she win and retain our sympathy, even our admiration.  She murders to attain the love she craves and, in so doing, provokes sympathy and antipathy, compassion and condemnation.

Lady Macbeth is not a tragedy in the classical sense. The characters are not highborn, morally enlightened or meant to fulfill great destinies. The opera’s universality lies more in its resonance with the mythical/Biblical stories concerning the futility of the pursuit of power, and with humanity’s shared experience of suffering. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is a tragedy because the moral potential of a man born to lead is corrupted. No one in Lady Macbeth is “great,” so there is no fall from heroic heights. The power Katerina hopes to attain is not that of a kingdom, but rather control over her own life.

Katerina’s greater dimension lies in her embodiment of the yearning and quest for love, a force to which Shostakovich connects the listener with his deep, empathic music. She demeans herself with her crimes, but is motivated solely to attain and then maintain her Tristanesque love for Sergei, a recently arrived farm worker.

She implores him to “kiss me so it hurts my lips … and the icons fall from their shelves.” Katerina’s milieu does not provide her with any possibility to sublimate her drives. This is Shostakovich’s main social critique. She openly defies society, one from which she was already inwardly alienated. Though she incites in the listener both compassion and repugnance, she never sells her soul. In the operatic pantheon, she is situated somewhere between Isolde and Salome.

We can almost condone Katerina’s first murder. Slaying her cruel stepfather, Boris Timofeyevich, is an act of vengeance. He has brutally whipped Sergei and promises to continue the next day. She is a creature of instinct and has a primitive sense of justice. We sympathize with Tosca, who does the same. Sergei is neither noble nor heroic. His talent is seduction, his target, his employers’ wives, and his ambition, social advancement. He is intrinsically amoral.  Katerina sacrifices her “kingdom” and life for this illusory, elusive partner. But Leskov’s title already tells us that the story is neither his nor the couple’s, but Katerina’s.

Shostakovich goes further by showing that if there is nobility of spirit to be found anywhere in this shabby society, it is only in the woman and in her capacity to shower love on unworthy objects. She typifies the Russian woman’s boundless soul, the immense capacity for caring, passionate, spiritual and sensual love. Katerina is not a murderess by nature. The composer finds Dostoevsky’s  “failed saint” at the heart of the criminal. Katerina exhibits inexhaustible devotion and forgiveness as does Marfa in Moussorsky’s Khovanschina. Both women commit suicide. Marfa goes in determined harmony with her community, convictions and conscience, while Katerina, in a final act of vengeance and humiliation, murders her last rival while taking her own life. The spiritual gulf that separates Katerina from Marfa is a reflection of their diverse environments but not of their innate qualities. Both, in their Russian way, are counterparts to Wagner’s self-sacrificing heroines.

That the composer wanted to strengthen our sympathy for Katerina is evidenced by his decision to excise the short story’s third murder: of an innocent young nephew. Just as Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes (an opera clearly influenced by Lady Macbeth) is rendered less unsympathetic by the elimination of another murdered apprentice, Shostakovich’s Katerina is spared an action, which would decisively alienate the audience.

Nothing escapes Shostakovich’s icy gaze. Before the listener might become swayed by pathos or melodrama, the satiric ax falls. He allows neither a Wagnerian catharsis of redemption, nor the despairing eroticism of Puccini. He shunned the moist-eyed self-indulgence of the late nineteenth century. The use of parody and satire, trademarks in all Shostakovich’s orchestral works, is as intrinsic as Mahler’s interwoven “vulgarity” is in his symphonies. The composer distances himself by ironically quoting or alluding to Rossini, Mahler  Smetana, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss.

Shostakovich’s view of the all the other characters in Lady Macbeth is harsh. Katerina is from innocent, but almost seems so by comparison. The character of the Shabby Peasant (also known as “A Seedy Lout”), a debauched successor to Mussorgsky’s Simpleton, exemplifies the atmosphere of decadence. The holy fool, or yurodivy, a permanent presence in Russian culture, is a mystical clairvoyant. He is able to hear and see what others cannot, and to communicate these visions in an enigmatic language. At times, both Mussorgsky and Shostakovich perceived themselves as yurodivy. The Shabby Peasant, an Unholy Fool wandering in and out of backyards, bedrooms and wine cellars seemingly at will, personifies two national vices: that of the alcoholic and the informer. As reported by the Russian prima donna assoluta Galina Vishnevskaya, the great circus interlude that follows the Peasant’s discovery of the husband’s corpse is, in the composer’s words, “a hymn to the dynamo of Soviet Society: the informer.”  Fed by, and dependent on, such information, the police state is corrupt, tyrannical and Philistine. The scene in the police station (which doesn’t appear in Leskov’s story) acidly ridicules the entire political/military apparatus. Shostakovich’s  music, at times graphically and explicitly sexual, titillated and shocked.  The famous pornophonic trombone glissando (which was rumored to have offended Stalin) is explicit in its upward thrust and its detumescence. Shostakovich pays the weak husband, Zinovy, the ultimate insult of making him a secondary tenor and assigning the alto flute, with its placid and flaccid timbre, to introduce and to follow him around. When he reappears to surprise the lovers in his bed, his ranting is driven by a Rossini-like fanfare, attached to a distorted polka and galop.  The driving two-note motif for the workers’ molestation of Aksinya, the cook, is closely related to the violence of the lovers’ first erotic encounter.

The revered Mussorgsky is quoted at several important junctures . Shedding crocodile tears for her father-in-law whom she has just murdered, Katerina virtually screams a citation from the prelude to Boris Godunov, easily recognizable as a parallel of forced and false lamentation. Leskov’s reflection on a quotation from the Book of Job, “Curse the day that thou wast born, and die,” seems to articulate the essence of Shostakovich’s musical vocabulary; “Those who do not wish to pay heed to these words, those to whom the thought of death, even in this sorry situation, appears not a blessed release but a cause for fear, must try to drown out these wailing voices with something even uglier than they. The ordinary man understands this perfectly: at such times he gives free rein to all his brutish ordinariness and proceeds to act stupidly, jeering at his own feelings and at those of other people. Not particularly soft-hearted even at the best of times, he now becomes positively nasty.” (Leskov)

Hurling itself at the listener, Shostakovich’s orchestra screams and whispers, storms and laughs, excites and stupefies, bites and caresses. It shifts from expressivity to editorializing, from tone painting to parody…. Its angry violence, akin to the early iconoclasm of Stravinsky and Bartók, overwhelms and pummels the stage into submission only to, in turn, evoke pathos, loneliness, yearning, and despair. Whereas Wagner’s orchestra has been likened to the inarticulate voice of the subconscious, Peter Conrad writes that Shostakovich’s “orchestra pit is the cellar where the stinking body… has been discarded.”

The Old Convict on the way to Siberia is the only other sympathetic character. He is the spokesperson for all of suffering humanity. In the final moments, the chorus of convicts (guilty and innocent alike) echoes the cry of the Simpleton (yurodivy), with his two-note motive clearly implanted in the cello and contrabass section as it is at the end of Boris Godunov. The parallel is unmistakable and could not have been overlooked by the public in Moscow and St. Petersburg at the premieres. It is an outpouring of compassion for the lost people of Russia — and by extension, for the world. It is here that the work becomes universal. We are all prisoners. Katerina, through her suicide, has escaped by the only means possible. The rest of us will live out our days in our terrestrial labor camp. Shostakovich, assuming the Mussorgskian mantle on his shoulders, took on a role that would become his disguise in the decades to come. Though forced to curb his youthful candor, he nevertheless continued to speak through his music by adopting the paradoxical character of the yurodivy.  He was to become accustomed to his situation and, as in Leskov’s words, “retained his meager joys.” Through Lady Macbeth, he reveals Huxley’s “Whole Truth,” stretching “endlessly in every direction.”

Even before Stalin’s reprimand, he delivered himself of an enigmatic, paradoxical work that speaks as if in tongues, in a language that simultaneously reveals and obfuscates, confesses and denies, equivocates and speaks truths, accuses and forgives.

 By James Conlon

The following post is adapted from James Conlon’s Keynote Address at the symposium “Music, Censorship and Meaning in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: Echoes and Consequences” on August 9, 2014 presented by the Ziering-Conlon Initiative at the Colburn school with the cooperation of the Orel Foundation.

A public cannot clamor for what it doesn’t know. It can only be hoped that a public can be motivated by curiosity, and made to be open to what it doesn’t yet know.

And so, oblique as it may be, there is a powerful invisible force that is actually functioning to separate out works based on their monetary worth. Classical music, from the time of the Medicis has always depended on patronage. It has never–and I believe cannot–stand the test of a for-profit business venture. It loses, not makes, money. The decisions made in performing arts administrations is rarely about what will make money, but rather, what will lose less.

Which brings me to the point of some of the challenges of bringing “Recovered Voices” composers into the contemporary environment. The problems encountered are not unique to the lesser-known composers who were suppressed during the Nazi Regime. They are extensions of phenomena already described.

The eventual goal of “Recovered Voices” is to integrate this music into concert programming so that it need not fall under any category related to the life experiences of the composer, nor the historical conditions under which they wrote.

The most common obstacles I have encountered in trying to interest people in “Recovered Voices” are attitudinal. Their refrains are familiar. “There are no lost masterpieces” (what would they have said to Felix Mendelssohn in 1829, when he first presented the Matthew Passion in Leipzig; do they think that only masterpieces survived the destruction of Pre Columbian Art by the Conquistadores?), and the corollary, “How good can it be if I have never heard of it?” (Implying that one’s own acquaintance with a piece of music is a prerequisite for any possible worth it might possess.) That many so-called music lovers ignore certain works is due to …yes, their ignorance of the works. The oblique censorship in those attitudes aggravates the difficulties in interesting the public in lesser-known works.

The problems are not limited to the public. Many musicians themselves are very conservative in their tastes, and also resistant to new music, whether contemporary or something from the past that is new to them. Some of the press is well informed, objective and constructive. Unfortunately not all: some are content with facile and flippant reactions, passing judgment on the basis of limited knowledge of the terrain.

When asked, as I often am, how this music is received, my answer is: generally, quite well. The problem is not so much getting people to like it, but getting them to listen to it in the first place. At LA Opera we generally gave a maximum of four performances of each “Recovered Voices” opera, but the audience that was there was vociferous in its appreciation. There were some who returned more than once to hear these operas. Many people still will not buy a ticket, but those who have tend to return for more.

I am not now, nor have I ever suggested, that under the very broad umbrella term of “Recovered Voices” that there are hundreds of lost masterpieces. First, I am not inclined to throw that term around promiscuously. Every piece cannot, by definition, be a masterwork.  Nor need it be.  We do not live by masterworks alone. A Rembrandt pencil sketch is not the Night Watch, but it is still Rembrandt. Bastien und Bastienne or Mitridate, Re di Ponto are not Don Giovanni, but they are still Mozart. My mission is to play many of the compositions that were weeded out, not by objective musical judgment, but by the Nazi regime for self-serving political and racist motives.

When they are played and listened to by a larger segment of our concert-going public, and played repeatedly by fine, committed musicians, it will be a more appropriate time to make judgments about their ultimate worth and where–and whether–they fit into that ever-evolving canon of works which are referred to as classical.  Those judgments are now being made mostly on the basis of fleeting acquaintance if not downright ignorance. I am advocating that we make more of an effort to play a sizeable amount of very good music that had been arbitrarily removed from our cultural patrimony by unqualified individuals.

The oblique censor militates against this. I am not insisting that everyone like every piece from this period. De gustibus non disputandum est. I just want to be sure that everyone has a chance to taste this music before they decide whether or not they want it as nourishment on a more regular basis.

By James Conlon

The following post is adapted from James Conlon’s Keynote Address at the symposium “Music, Censorship and Meaning in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: Echoes and Consequences” on August 9, 2014 presented by the Ziering-Conlon Initiative at the Colburn school with the cooperation of the Orel Foundation. 

Is it justified to speak of censorship in our country, which was founded on the principle of freedom of speech and whose history, with occasional deviations, has upheld the values flowing from it?

Strictly speaking, the answer would be no. The subject of my enquiry today is not any visible authorized body of censorship that affects what classical music is played or written, but a less visible factor that strongly influences performing arts institutions on their choices of what they produce.

This less tangible factor is the economic return or the popularity generated by a particular composition or composer; better known in everyday parlance as “box office appeal.”

Whereas overt official bodies of censorship have existed (whether governmental or religious, or offshoots of political opportunism or vigilantism) they have largely disappeared or have a diminished function, only to be surreptitiously replaced by very practical economic factors.

Most performing arts organizations are habitually faced with trying to calculate which works will do well at the box office, and which will not. Gradually those that do not sell adequately are performed less often. They become, so to speak, less popular. And then a vicious cycle comes into full play: the less well known a work, the more likely it will not be performed: the more rarely it is performed, the less known it will become.

For a piece of music to be played regularly, it must be popular. That is very a tidy construction, fulfilling both the Founding Fathers’ vision of democracy (the vote of the populace will rule) and our economic credo: the best product will sell the best.  In other words, it is as American as apple pie.

But, viewed from the perspective of a performing artist, or a serious lover of classical music, it is simply unacceptable to confuse a work’s popularity with its inherent quality. Galileo’s vision of the universe was a minority opinion, for which he was condemned, but he was right. I refuse to believe that the works of Alban Berg, Leos Janacek and Benjamin Britten are intrinsically inferior to, for example Carl Orff.

As an insider, I see how choices of repertory are made across the spectrum of performing arts organizations in our country. Box office considerations have had, and continue to have, a profound effect on the dampening of our musical culture. There is no question that in times of economic difficulties, all institutions, intensifying their risk-averse impulses, will move toward the “tried and true,” responding to their perception of what the public will buy. Experiments, unfamiliar works, world premieres, outside-the-box projects, unknown composers–all are put on hold, sometimes indefinitely.

There is no malice. There is no authoritarian body judging the political, philosophic or religious validity or danger of a given piece of music and its suitability for performance. Is adherence to box office “values”” literally censorship? Absolutely not. Does such adherence have similar results? Absolutely yes.

The problem as I see it, is that the intrinsic values of pieces of music are now being judged by their commercial viability. The number of classical music lovers in the U.S. is already a small fraction of the population; but even those with more than a passing interest are influenced by a given piece’s “popularity” or salability. Lack of familiarity, a cumbersome title or even a work’s length become confused with quality.

A somewhat amusing example from one of my early experiences might serve as an illustration. More than three decades ago, I was making a program with the artistic administrator of one of America’s leading orchestras for a program that would also feature its very fine chorus. I proposed Benjamin Britten’s Cantata Misericordium, a work I love. After several days of reflection, the administrator contacted me and said it would be best if we did not include it on the program. Any work with the word “misery” would be a “downer” at the box office. I tried in vain to explain that Misericordium came from a Latin root meaning compassion or pity, that the cantata was a retelling of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and that there was nothing “miserable” about it. The cantata went unplayed–at least on that occasion.

The word “long” has become synonymous with boredom in many minds. One hears often: “I don’t like Wagner; it’s too long.” Or “I wouldn’t go to a performance of the Matthew Passion; it’s too long.” Cultural differences play a role in these perceptions. German audiences are generally more capable of sitting and concentrating at a concert or opera than we are (the word Sitzfleisch is testimony to this). In my years as Music Director of the Rotterdam Philharmonic, we presented the Matthew Passion every year on the Thursday and Friday preceding Easter to sold out houses; the audiences were filled by people who only went to a concert once a year. “Long” is not a value judgment in those two cases.

But unfamiliarity, either with a composer’s name or with a particular lesser-known work, is perhaps the leading culprit at the box office.  The very presence of such a name on a program is deemed capable of emptying the house, even when it is shares the program with “big sellers” like Tchaikovsky or Beethoven. It takes no leap of imagination to understand why this is a major stumbling block in attempting to introduce the music of composers suppressed in Nazi Germany.

More as collateral damage than by design, the voice of many compositions is stifled by these phenomena. Although not censorship in any literal meaning of the word, the results are the same. The problem will intensify in the future, if this trend continues, because less familiar, will become unfamiliar, and unfamiliar will be unknown.

By James Conlon

The following is adapted from James Conlon’s Keynote Address at the symposium “Music, Censorship and Meaning in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union: Echoes and Consequences” on August 9, 2014, presented by the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices at the Colburn School in Los Angeles with the cooperation of the Orel Foundation.

The history of Classical Music has been interwoven with various forms of censorship, however benign some may have been. There is a continuum from complete freedom to write and present music to a public, through a large gray area of constraints designed to please an exacting patron or appeal to the tastes of a specific audience, all the way to the point of the suppression to a totalitarian force that literally dictates what may or may not be presented in public.

This address will posit that although censorship in the strict sense is virtually absent in our country (though not entirely), box office demand has replaced it as a potent force in selecting out what music will or will not be performed for a large segment of our concert-going public. As it is not adjudicated by any established ruling body, driven by any political or religious viewpoint nor presided over by any individual, its source is intangible and invisible. Its effect nonetheless, is real. However oblique its trajectory, its effect is widespread.

The long history of censorship implies a tacit recognition that music has the power to move us, affect our emotions, our hearts and our brains, alter our perceptions, and influence our religious and political views.  Or at least it appears capable of doing so, or is feared by persons in authority who feel musical expression can upset the status quo.

Plato thought so, too. Chapter 36 of the Book of Jeremiah tells the story of the burning of Jeremiah’s writings, said to be too dark and pessimistic.  Similarly Confucius’ works were destroyed in 250 B.C.E. by an unsympathetic subsequent dynasty. The arm of Michelangelo’s David dropped off when irate Florentines threw rocks at it; Venus de Milo was censored; The Bowdler Family gave rise to the eponymous practice of cleansing great but “impure” works and was responsible for ‘The Family Shakespeare” and “The Family Gibbon.”

Lily Hirsch, in her book Music in American Crime Prevention and Punishment, also reminds us:

One of the earliest philosophers of music, Plato, recognized music’s potential use toward good and bad: “Music, the most celebrated of all forms of imitation . . . is the most dangerous as well. A mistake in handling it may cause untold harm, for one may become receptive to evil habits.”  To avoid music’s potential danger to society, recognized in ancient Greece and thereafter, Plato thus had advocated the censorship of musical activity and the punishment of transgressors by force if necessary. During the Roman Empire, this recommendation was implemented in the position of the censor, who, among other duties, monitored singing. If singing was found insulting or “evil,” the singer, according to the legal code of the Twelve Tables, 450 B.C.E, could be punished with death by clubbing. But Plato extolled music’s ethical effects when handled “correctly”— for example, in his discussion of music education in the third book of the Republic, which maintains that music education helps man become “noble and good.”

She continues:

…During the nineteenth century, within Romantic aesthetics as conceived by Hegel, music was more consistently assigned an unrivaled, though vague, power over the soul. At this time, Plato’s conception of music— as moral and immoral— was cut in half, and philosophers celebrated music’s redemptive powers. This thinking was not lost on Romantic composers such as Felix Mendelssohn. He wanted more than success: He wanted to further humanity, communicating ethical meaning through music. This goal, a part of what the music scholar and conductor Leon Botstein terms the “Mendelssohnian Project,” resulted in several compositions, including the Lobgesang Symphony and the oratorios Paulus and Elijah. In these works, Mendelssohn sought to promote a sense of community, foster ethical sensibilities and faith in God, and educate society about tradition. In his use of music to promote morality, Mendelssohn may have also been influenced by his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, and the aesthetics and theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher, who believed music should heighten emotion in the service of religious faith.

 …As the author of Poetry and the Romantic Musical Aesthetic, James H. Donelan, argues, “Before Mozart, Western art music had two fundamental purposes: to proclaim the glory of God in his churches and to provide musical decoration for the powerful in their courts and homes.” In this way, before the Romantic era, music was valued based on use. Moreover, the value of music in use was generally not high. The arts associated with contemplation and theory were privileged above music making, which, connected to the use of the hands, was related to manual activity rather than mental pursuits. In the wake of the Romantic era, however, music was theorized as the ideal art. Part of music’s changing valuation had to do with the sudden end of the patronage system toward the close of the Classical era. For survival as an independent artist, composers had to justify and promote themselves and the worth of their art form. This promotion gave way to ideas that music both performs good and is good. With this change in status, Romantic writers also established the concept of classical music— a term introduced in the nineteenth century to classify preceding works by Bach and Beethoven, among others, as great. The initial idea of classical music therefore corresponded to other attempts to valorize music in keeping with the general repositioning of music as high art.

In America we pride ourselves on being an open-minded society (whether or not we are as much as we imagine is another subject), and on our constitution and laws that largely uphold freedom of speech (and expression). But our history provides many examples of the opposite:  Anthony Comstock’s 1868 raid on an “offensive” bookstore, and the 1873 Anti Obscenity Act which he inspired, are 19^th Century examples. With the support of police, Comstock swooped down on the Arts Student League in 1906 objecting to nude models and “obscene, lewd and indecent” photos that are “commonly but mistakenly called art.” A year earlier he had condemned George Bernard Shaw as an “Irish smut dealer.” Shaw rewarded him by creating the term “Comstockery,” which he defined as “the world’s standing joke at the expense of the U.S.  Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate, country-town civilization after all.”  H.L. Mencken was even more succinct on Comstock and his zealotry: “More than any other man, he liberated American letters from the blight of Puritanism.”

Books are no longer banned, though sometimes burnt in postwar rural America–a type of vigilante substitute motivated by the same censorious impulse.  Robert Atkins, in his 1994 essay “A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Censorship” chronicles some of those book burnings in recent decades in rural America.  A compilation of six surveys by librarians and libertarian organizations identified the ten most attacked books in the U.S. between 1965 and 1994; they were The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank), Black Like Me, Brave New World, The Catcher in the Rye, The Good Earth, The Grapes of Wrath, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Go Ask Alice, and A Farewell to Arms.

The McCarthy era spared neither composers nor performers if they appeared on its zealous radar: Eisler, Copland, Bernstein and a long list of Hollywood producers and actors exemplify the use of blacklisting as an effective form of censorship.

Despite these and other similarly negative examples, American composers and performing arts institutions have never been subject to the powerful censorship historically exercised by, for instance, the Roman Catholic Church (especially in Italy). As early as 1703 Pope Clement XI banned opera as immoral. The oratorio developed partially out of the prohibition against setting biblical and religious subjects in theaters. Nor have our composers been subject to the type of years of unrelenting interference that Giuseppe Verdi continually faced with the censors on the not-yet-unified Italian peninsula. None faced a Stalinist regime as Shostakovich did, nor, as we are discussing at length this weekend, the cataclysmic suppression of the Nazi Regime.

Is it justified to speak of censorship in our country, which was founded on the principle of freedom of speech and whose history, with occasional deviations, has upheld the values flowing from it?

By James Conlon

Last Friday night, May 9, I conducted a program at Carnegie Hall, the penultimate concert not only for this year’s installment of Spring for Music, but, it would seem, forever. In the audience, it seemed to me, was an enormous (they usually are) and benevolent elephant.

I appeared there with the forces of the Cincinnati May Festival (of which I am celebrating thirty-five years as Music Director this season), The Cincinnati Symphony, May Festival Chorus and an array of soloists.

The program consisted of two disparate American works from the twentieth century: John Adams’ Harmonium (1980) and R. Nathaniel Dett’s oratorio The Ordering of Moses (1937). The latter, by a still relatively unknown and unsung African American (born in Canada, raised and educated in the U.S.), had its world premiere at the May Festival in 1937 and was reprised there in 1956 with a cast that included Leontyne Price and William Warfield.

It has been a long time since any presenting organization has not only encouraged programs featuring lesser-known works, but also virtually required them. The artistic success of Spring for Music resided in its giving artists the opportunity to perform works that others would not risk in today’s economic environment. The fact that it drew large enthusiastic crowds was only partially explained by its encouraging of hometown fans to travel to New York. The ticket prices were $25 apiece.

And there he was, the elephant in the audience. Nobody wants to say it out loud in certain circles, but many music lovers are not willing or able to pay today’s prices. Maybe that wasn’t true fifty years ago (even adjusted for inflation I suspect they were largely less expensive), and perhaps it will not be true again in fifty years. But that is irrelevant because it is true today.

We are told that the public will not come to hear—take your pick—unknown pieces, music of composers whose names are unfamiliar, contemporary (and not so contemporary) “modern music” and so forth. All true, and the Chief Financial Officer of any symphony orchestra or opera house can point to the figures.

But what that proves is only that a large number of people will not pay a large amount of money for tickets. What Spring for Music has proved is the opposite: for inexpensive tickets, people are delighted to go out and take a chance, while we, on stage, have an excellent opportunity to experiment with new, different, “out of the box” and “off the wall” (if you will) ideas.

I noted that the public did not rush out at the end of Friday’s performance as they can do. They stayed around to express their enthusiasm before I invited them to honor a sixty-four-year-old May Festival tradition. They sang Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” along with all the forces onstage accompanying them.

So if our classical-music-loving elephant tells us that ticket prices are too expensive, who then will pay for the performances? There is the rub.  Every orchestra, opera company, classical music festival, chamber music and recital series is fighting to keep afloat.  I do not know where the money will come from. I do know that

1. classical music will never pay for itself (it never has);
2. it will depend on the generosity of strangers (it has since the days of the Medicis); and
3. it is unrealistic to expect funding to come from any source at this time in history other than from the private sector.

In Los Angeles we have just completed an extended homage to Benjamin Britten. He is another composer who is regularly cited as being one who “doesn’t sell.” But on several occasions we saw concert halls, churches and cathedrals filled to capacity, aided by modest tickets prices. Another example: in certain countries in Europe (Germany and Austria in particular), I am continually struck by the massive numbers of inexpensive tickets that are available to students on a daily basis. Here at home, I don’t see how it is possible to plan for a future without nurturing concert-going as a basic part of our educational system.

So please, let’s not continue to repeat to ourselves (until others uncomprehendingly repeat it ad nauseum) that no one is interested in classical music, or, even among those who are, that no one is interested in “off-beat” repertory. When he ran for election, candidate Bill Clinton’s advisors famously kept reminding him and his team to stay focused on the primary issue of the 1992 election, “It’s the economy, stupid.” “It’s the ticket prices…..” might serve just as well for us in our own campaign.

The popular and critical success of Spring for Music would seem to support that thesis. Music lovers will come out in large numbers when they can afford to. And the necessity to continue and to encourage similar projects (until they become normal) is clear.

As Anthony Tommasini aptly observed in his May 12 New York Times review, “That financial support could not be found to extend this invaluable project is very dispiriting. What made Spring for Music exceptional is something that should be commonplace in classical music…Shouldn’t the seasonal offerings of ensembles everywhere be a weekly succession of musical adventures?”

They can be, and we will need a lot of deeply committed and devoted patrons and sponsors with vision to help us accomplish this. We have many such people already in this country, and with more, this noisy “death of classical music” drumbeat can be muffled. Maybe our friendly, music-loving elephant will help us trample it.