HERBERT VON KARAJAN-PREIS
Dezember 2014

Meine sehr geehrten Damen und Herren,
liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen,

Kunst oder sagen wir besser die Künste öffnen uns – und davon bin ich zutiefst überzeugt – oft verschlossen geglaubte Türen zu unserem Innersten für die großen Fragen und Geheimnisse des Daseins.

Sie sind es, die es uns ermöglichen gleichzeitig auf Vergangenes, Gegenwärtiges und Zukünftiges zu blicken. Durch sie erfahren und wissen wir heute mehr als gestern und morgen mehr als heute. Vorausgesetzt natürlich, sie werden mit einer solchen Ernsthaftigkeit und Professionalität, mit einer solchen Hingabe und Demut, gepflegt wie es Herbert von Karajan vorgelebt hat und wie es seit ihrer Gründung vor über 150 Jahren die Wiener Philharmoniker so vollendet demonstrieren.

Heute wird diesem unvergleichlichen Orchester die Ehre des Herbert von Karajan-Musikpreises zuteil. Dabei geht es allerdings nicht nur darum, das Andenken an eine außerordentliche Künstlerpersönlichkeit lebendig zu halten. Es geht auch nicht nur darum, eine der weltweit wichtigsten, berühmtesten und angesehensten kulturellen Institutionen in den Mittelpunkt zu rücken oder ihre singuläre Stellung in der Musikwelt gebührend zu feiern. Nein, der Herbert von Karajan-Musikpreis steht für viel mehr. Er ist eine ehrenvolle Anerkennung und gleichzeitig eine Verpflichtung. Beginnen wir aber zunächst mit der Anerkennung.

In seiner ausführlichen Begründung für die diesjährige Vergabe an die Wiener Philharmoniker streicht Dr. Clemens Börsig vor allem zwei Punkte hervor: der Preis ehrt zum einen die „philharmonische Idee“ und zum anderen den „Klang“ der Wiener Philharmoniker. Die Besonderheit dieses Orchesters liegt genau darin: Zwei vermeintlich einfach zu definierende Fundamente, deren Bedeutung jedoch komplexer nicht sein könnte. Die philharmonische Idee beginnt bei der Selbstverwaltung – also einer demokratischen, künstlerischen und unternehmerischen Eigenverantwortlichkeit – und endet bei einem gemeinsamen Ziel: nämlich einen spezifischen Klang zu erzeugen und diesen über Jahrzehnte, eigentlich Jahrhunderte zu erhalten. Sich dieser Herausforderung überhaupt stellen zu können, erfordert unendliches Engagement jedes einzelnen Mitglieds und die Bereitschaft, sich der gemeinsamen Idee unterzuordnen.

Richard Strauss schrieb anlässlich der 100-Jahr-Feier der Wiener Philharmoniker im Jahre 1942 – und diese wunderbaren Worte gelten heute wie damals: „Die Philharmoniker preisen heißt Geigen nach Wien tragen. Doch schätze ich das Piano der Bläser, den Glanz ihrer Harfen und die unerbittliche Pauke nicht minder. Eure künstlerischen Leistungen werden von den begeisterten Zuhörern der ganzen Welt umjubelt. Ich möchte mein Lob heute nur in zwei kurze Sätze fassen: ‚Nur wer die Wiener Philharmoniker dirigiert hat, weiß, was sie sind!’ Doch das bleibt unser eigenstes Geheimniß! Ihr versteht mich schon: hier – wie am Pult!“

Der „Wiener Klang“. „Weicher, schmiegsamer, runder, fülliger, glänzender, satter, feiner schattiert, ausgewogener“ als der von anderen Orchestern charakterisierte ihn der bedeutende Musiksoziologe Kurt Blaukopf. Um freilich gleich danach anzumerken, dass es sich dabei bestenfalls um Metaphern handeln könne. Denn wirklich entschlüsseln könne man das Geheimnis dieses typischen Wiener Klangs nicht. Selbst durch die Tatsache, dass die Wiener Philharmoniker zum Teil andere Instrumente – wie die Wiener Oboe oder das Wiener Horn – verwenden, die Fagottisten auf spezielle Griffkombinationen schwören, die Trompete über eine etwas engere Mensur verfügt, bei den Schlagwerken alle Fellinstrumente grundsätzlich mit Naturfellen bespannt sind, lässt sich dies bestenfalls zum Teil erklären. Denn Instrumente sind immer nur eine Sache, wie sie gespielt werden, eine andere. Und genau das macht die Wiener Philharmoniker, wie es einer ihrer besten Kenner, der Dirigent Hans Knappertsbusch, einst geschrieben hat, unvergleichlich: ihre besondere Art zu musizieren. Sie ist die Basis für diese Weichheit des Tones, diese glitzernde Brillanz, diese unverwechselbare Natürlichkeit der Phrasierung.

Dies persönlich zu erfahren, hatte ich im Herbst 1988 erstmals Gelegenheit. Leonard Bernstein lud mich ein, gemeinsam mit den „Wienern“ die „Kindertotenlieder“ aufzuführen. „Was für ein Klang“ dachte ich, als ich die erste Orchestereinleitung im Goldenen Saal des Musikvereins hörte; ein idealer Raum, der seit 1870 durch seine akustischen Qualitäten den Klangstil und die Spielweise des Orchesters prägte. Etwas Beseelteres hatte ich nie zuvor gehört. Was für eine beglückende Erfahrung, mich im Kreise solcher Musikerpersönlichkeiten wiederzufinden und gemeinsam musizieren zu dürfen. Niemals hatte ich mich so musikalisch getragen gefühlt. Heute, viele Jahre später, bin ich stolz, vielleicht ein bisschen zur Philharmoniker-Familie zu gehören.

Die Wiener Philharmoniker sind ein außergewöhnliches Orchester in jeder Hinsicht. Ebenso außergewöhnlich wie das Genie Herbert von Karajan, dem dieser Preis gewidmet ist. „Jede künstlerische Leistung ist ein Sieg über die menschliche Trägheit“ hat er einmal gesagt. Karajan ging es niemals ausschließlich um den Drang nach Ästhetik und Schönklang. Ihm ging es um mehr: Exzellenz, Verantwortung, Ehrlichkeit und – im besten Sinne – die Pflege der Kunst. Er glaubte an Vollendung, an Perfektion und Gestalt. „Wer die Form zerstört, beschädigt auch den Inhalt“ hat er immer wieder betont. Er konnte das Orchester dazu bringen, seine künstlerischen Vorstellungen bis ins Detail umzusetzen.

Allerdings darf sich das Bemühen um das Beste nicht nur im Ästhetischen erschöpfen oder zur oberflächlich hedonistischen Erfahrung kultivierten Klanges werden. Ich bin vielmehr davon überzeugt, dass große Kunst immer eine ethische Dimension hat. Schon Platon meinte, dass eine unauflösbare Verbindung zwischen dem Guten und dem Schönen besteht. An diese Verbindung glauben auch die Wiener Philharmoniker.

Eine Qualität, die das Orchester darüber hinaus im Sinne Karajans auszeichnet, ist die Tugend der Demut. Jede/r einzelne für sich – unverwechselbar und großartig – verschmelzen sie doch zu einem einzigen künstlerischen Ganzen, einem tönenden Zusammenschluss orchestralen Klanges. Was daran hörbar wird, ist die Einsicht, dass wir als Individuen in eine musikalische Gemeinschaft geboren wurden, in der alle vorangegangenen Generationen ihre Spuren hinterlassen haben – sie sagen uns, woher wir kommen. Auf diese Weise sind die Wiener Philharmoniker auch eine Art Gedächtnis.

Selbstverständlich verkörpern die Wiener Philharmoniker auch die Tugend der Verantwortung. Und das meine ich in zweierlei Hinsicht: Verantwortung gegenüber einem Erbe, das gepflegt werden muss, um weiter zu leben. Im Sinne des ehemaligen Musikdirektors der Wiener Philharmoniker, Gustav Mahler, der meinte: „Tradition ist die Bewahrung des Feuers und nicht die Anbetung der Asche.“ Verantwortung trägt auch das Wort Antwort in sich. So müssen wir Antworten auf jene Fragen finden, die uns frühere Generationen durch ihre Musik stellen.

Nun aber zum Auftrag, den dieser Preis bedeutet: Er fordert Verantwortung gegenüber kommenden Generationen. Sie haben wie wir das Recht, Fragen zu stellen. Waren wir den Herausforderungen gewachsen? Was haben wir für jene getan, die nach uns kommen werden? Haben wir die Geschichte fortgeschrieben oder unterbrochen? Sich gleichzeitig als würdiger Nachfolger und als würdiger Vorgänger zu erweisen ist ein gelebter philharmonischer Wert. Nicht als rein moralische Verpflichtung, sondern als Wert, der über Generationen hinweg weitergegeben wird.

Heute laufen Kunst und Kultur Gefahr, Teil der schnelllebigen Unterhaltungsindustrie zu werden. Ist nicht unsere eigentliche Aufgabe als Künstler, Kunst als Labor des menschlichen Daseins zu erklären und zu pflegen? Ist es ein utopisches Ziel, die Jugend von heute dafür zu gewinnen? Sicher nicht wenn man Herbert von Karajan fragen würde, der immer wieder betonte: „Wer all seine Ziele erreicht hat, hat sie zu niedrig gewählt.“

Meine Damen und Herren, Wissen ist nicht ein Rucksack voller Qual, den man einem jungen Menschen aufbürdet, sondern die Voraussetzung für ein erfülltes Menschsein.

Ich möchte an dieser Stelle gerne einen meiner persönlichen Mentoren, den großen Nikolaus Harnoncourt, zitieren:

„Kunst ist ein imaginärer Bereich, der uns als Gegensatz zur materiellen Welt gegeben wurde. Wir bezeugen heute den Triumph der Nützlichkeit: Je mehr der Mensch besitzt, umso glücklicher glaubt er zu sein. Daher ist es auch natürlich, uns zu überzeugen, dass Kunst und sie zu erlernen unnötig ist.“

Hören wir genug auf die Dichter, die Komponisten, die Maler? Beachten wir ihren Beitrag zu einer besseren, vernünftigeren, menschlicheren Welt? Gehen wir heute verantwortungsvoll mit unserer Kunst um? Wenn sich Kunst nicht als wirtschaftlicher Zweck rechtfertigen lässt, zählt sie oft nicht und wird oft als elitär denunziert. Ich denke aber, dass die Kunst nichts tun muss. Sie ist kein Marketinginstrument und kein Werkzeug der Provokation. Die Kunst hat nichts zu beweisen. Sie ist das Tagebuch unseres Daseins! Wir müssen von ihr lernen, hinzuhören wie andere Menschen denken, fühlen, spielen, flüstern, lieben und leben.

Ja, wir leben in einer Zeit tiefgreifender Veränderungen und neuer Chancen, aber auch des globalen Wertewandels. Die Allgegenwärtigkeit des Mittelmäßigen und der Ignoranz ist nicht zu übersehen. Eine Institution wie die Wiener Philharmoniker und der philharmonische Gedanke sind ein Schutz vor der Versuchung davor die Augen zu verschließen. Ihre Existenz bringt Licht in Bereiche des Schattens. Daher ist es unser aller Aufgabe, dieses Licht zu beschützen und zu ehren.

Die Musik der Wiener Philharmoniker beglückt Jahr für Jahr Millionen von Menschen in aller Welt. In ihrer Funktion als Leuchtturm, entzünden sie mit ihren Jugendprogrammen, die von Musik-Akademien über Masterclasses bis hin zu Operncamps reichen, überall Begeisterung. Sie öffnen jungen Menschen die Türen zu einer Welt des musikalischen Dialogs und ermöglichen ihnen so ihr eigenes Tagebuch des Daseins zu schreiben.

Dafür haben wir ihnen Respekt zu zollen, ihnen zu danken und ihnen aus ganzem Herzen zu ihrer heutigen Ehrung zu gratulieren!

Vielen Dank!

Thomas Hampson
Classical:NEXT Keynote Address | May 14, 2014

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great pleasure to see you all here at this Classical: NEXT conference. Welcome to Vienna, the adopted birthplace of every Classical Musician.

You have invited me to offer a “key-note,” and as you settle into your four-day sequestering, contemplating questions of a classical nature and the anticipating of what the “NEXT” could look like: I sincerely hope that the note struck is in a recognizable key.

If you don’t get that pun, I hope you are not in fundraising.
In many ways, simply focusing on the reason for this community meeting writes its own notes, and that will be the key to your contemplations and interchanges.

After all, we’re all passionate about something: music, and in this case music which we have mislabeled as “classical.” And we are all in various stages and capacities prepared to contemplate a…“next.”

I remember the first color television. The moon landing. The fax machine and birth of the digital revolution. The day that “podcast” became a new word in the English dictionary. And I reveled, considering myself a “modern artist of a new world,” when the very convenient miracle of the Internet website would eventually free me from press kits–which, as many of us remember, were physically sent, at significant cost, and to myriad presenters, opera houses, and other stations of employment…and now would be possible with just the click of a download button.

However, although I was ready for the NEXT thing, most of the presenters or opera houses had no Internet connection.

So fast forward, and here I stand before you tonight, still deeply passionate about the values inherent in something we call “classical” music–and having experienced, a couple times, that something called NEXT–still addicted to the rush of new perspectives and innovations in our musical world which will also become, inevitably, through time, as unbelievable or even laughable as our recent past.

A startling statistic to come out of recent studies of the effectiveness of MOOCs (massive open online courses), is that, in the monitoring of attention spans, it would seem that if you haven’t made your point in the first four minutes, no one will be listening after 12.

So, please give me your undivided attention for the next…4 minutes…3 times…

Not surprising, I would like to speak to you about:

1. the phrase “Classical Music” 2. the notion of “NEXT,” and

3. how a fundamental understanding of those two very different conversations empower us to address the real problem, which is “US”.

***

I remember a scene from a couple of years ago, when I was playing in a Pro-Am golf tournament, for which I was to sing a small evening concert of “popular classics” seasoned with something called “crossover,” and hopefully landing some “happy show tunes”.

(That shows you.. I will do anything to play golf.)

My wife was sitting next to a very successful businessman whom I had been playing with, who knew something of the multimedia world, but not much of me.
He asked her “What does your husband do,” and my wife said “He’s a musician.” The man said “Ah cool, what does he play?,” and she said “He doesn’t, he sings.” So, he says “Where, with what band?,” and she says – not without some pride – “Oh no, he’s a world famous opera singer singing with the San Francisco Opera.” After a significant pause, readjustment of his glasses, perhaps to hide a faint cynical grin, he turns and says to my wife, “Ah, those are the musicians that don’t make very much money”…

Seriously though,… I am sure many of you in this room have had similar experiences.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes, as a classical musician, labeled an “ambassador for the Arts,” I feel like Sisyphus (yes, that’s his real name), the mythological character that is doomed to push that very very very very large and heavy rock–metaphorically speaking this evening. classical music—up the very very…long… UN-ending Hill…of …reality.

***

Why has the idea of classical music become such a compromised connotation? What went wrong, that music, of any genre or style, could be somehow collectively lumped into a misappropriated metaphor for an event that is assumed by many to be irrelevant?

Well, clearly we need to start with some sort of definition of what “classical music” is.

No less than the legendary Leonard Bernstein tackled this problem over 40 years ago, for a bunch of randomly interested schoolkids – my colleagues of the time – in that immensely popular series, “Young People’s Concerts”.

Lenny, as he preferred to be called, was equally frustrated with the idea of a “classical music.” Being a composer, he said, “It seems to me that the phrase ‘exact music’ would be more to the point”–however clumsy it may be to use.

His biggest concern however, was that we not use adjectives like “serious” or “good” music, thereby insulting other kinds of music. The worst offender of course being the idea of “high- brow” and “low-brow” music. Or even “E” music and “U” music. And that, of course, brings us to probably the most regular accusation leveled towards “Classical Music,” and that is one of “Elitism”.

Let’s look at that for a minute:

The label “classical music” that we use today should be thought of as a distinctive set or “class” of musics over many hundreds of years, as opposed to either the style of music from the late 18th century or the notion of “classics,” such as Homer or Herodotus. The phrase was probably coined by some well-meaning persons who wished to compare the idea of the value of permanence with the monumental symphonic achievements of Beethoven.

Now I would be hard pressed to argue against that but that is not our “key” tonight.

Our search for clarity brings us to three very important aspects that this body of music, encompassing many centuries of “Beethoven moments,” have in common:

1. The creation of “classical music” is as Lenny admonished, “exact” by definition, in its specific use of its own musical devices, The music created, is in and of itself its own “musical idea” and therefore a language.

It is “art music” – which in this case should be understood as structure, and therefore the effort to achieve the understanding of a specific context of the human experience.

The word “ART” acts like a verb, according to Richard Wagner who said (and I paraphrase) that “ART” becomes the active “transcender” of style or epoch.

2. “Classical music” is essentially shaped by very different functions and expectations than popular music, in that the plurality of our society and it’s market place is not, nor should it be, it’s raison d’être.

That classical music relates to the immediacy of everyday life, but not immediately, and creates for our contemplation a significantly longer historical perspective about life. That, of course, lives at odds with the dominant values of popular culture.

3. “Classical music” is always created from a specific desire to say something equally specific about human life, it’s ultimate purpose being the suspension of life’s successive moments for the reflection of a greater present.

In fact, the canon of music we now call “classical” was born of the unstoppable realization of the individual at the tumultuous close of the 18th century that catapulted us into a new world of “The Modern Man” in the 19th century. We understand this revolution as “Romanticism”.

It was this new-found fervor of individual freedom of thought, and the search for values and meanings of life, independent of the fundamentalism of religious and political paradigms of the time, that brought music into the households of a new phenomenon called the “middle” class.

It was the democratic right “bursting through doors” as Whitman said, to express and choose your own path to enlightenment that gave us what has become the world of “classical music” today.

If this were not true how could we have become such experts of music that for so long was held hostage? Because we are now individuals with our cultural freedoms; we study and perform regularly that which only existed behind the doors of those very possessive and elitist societies.

All these perspectives of what classical music is are true.

The principle difference to the ever-mutating and relative world–and certainly sporadically entertaining world of popular culture–is the right that classical music demands for any self in its search for meaning.

As Julian Johnson offers us in his brilliant book Who Needs Classical Music: “

So you have to ask: should not those forces in society that constrain, or even by their default misguided political policy, prohibit the opportunity of its members to search out, either individually or collectively, the possibility of their greater human potential, be held accountable for ELITISM?

Music banned from the classrooms indeed! What’s NEXT, book-burning?

Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis 2013
Laudatio für Mariss Jansons

Guten Abend meine Damen und Herren,
Dearest Mariss and Irina,

Nicht alle Jugendträume gehen in Erfüllung – und manchmal ist es auch gut so.

Oder könnten Sie sich, meine Damen und Herren, Maestro Mariss Jansons als Fußballspieler vorstellen? Aber mit acht Jahren wollte er partout Fußballer werden, und Talent muss er gehabt haben, sonst hätte nicht der Trainer der Rigaer Fußballmannschaft „Daugawa“ seine Eltern aufgesucht und ihnen versprochen, aus ihrem Sohn einen erfolgreichen Fußballspieler zu machen. Die wollten davon allerdings nichts wissen. Eine Ironie des Schicksals, dass Mariss Jansons heute Chefdirigent in zwei Städten ist, die mit Ajax Amsterdam und Bayern München zwei der weltbesten Fußballmannschaften haben. Wem er wohl die Daumen drücken würde, wenn sie gegeneinander antreten? Mariss Jansons hat darüber nie gesprochen.

Der Musikwelt wäre jedenfalls viel verloren gegangen, hätte sich der junge Mariss durchgesetzt und seinen Traum von einer großen Karriere als Sportler verwirklicht. Aber hätte das gegenüber seiner eigentlichen Berufung, der Musik, Bestand gehabt? Man darf es bezweifeln. Schon als Kleinkind hatte er nichts anderes im Kopf als Musik. Aus Nadeln, Knöpfen und Holzstücken baute er sich ein Orchester, das er selbst dirigierte. Natürlich aus einer Partitur, auch wenn er sie noch nicht lesen konnte. Selbst wenn er einmal krank war, ließ er nicht vom Dirigieren. Er hatte auch schon klare Vorstellungen von den Stücken, die er mit seinem Phantasie-Symphonieorchester aufführte. Das einzige Orchester, das ihm nicht widersprochen hat, soll er später einmal gesagt haben.

Mit der Bühne, welche erst recht bei ihm die Welt bedeutet, ist Jansons schon in frühester Kindheit in Berührung gekommen. Wo anders sollte er auch diese Jahre verbringen, wenn der Vater im Theater von Riga dirigierte und seine Mutter dort sang, beide aber keinen Babysitter für ihren Sohn wollten? Kein Wunder, dass er bald das gesamte Repertoire des Hauses kannte und sich die Namen sämtlicher Musiker einprägte. Übrigens: eine Eigenschaft, mit der er in späteren Jahren zahlreiche seiner Orchester verblüffen sollte.

Riga – man kann es in einem bewegenden Film sehen, der zu seinem 70sten. Geburtstag gedreht wurde – war eine der glücklichsten Episoden im Leben von Mariss Jansons. Hätte er es entscheiden können, wäre er von hier nicht weggezogen oder zumindest länger dort geblieben. Aber mit dreizehn Jahren war Schluss. Das konnten auch zahlreiche Tränen nicht verhindern. Vater Arvid Jansons, der neben dem legendären Jewgenij Mrawinski zum Dirigenten des besten Orchesters der UdSSR, den Leningrader Philharmonikern aufgestiegen war, wollte, dass endlich auch seine Familie nachkommt. Für den jungen Mariss war dies schon deswegen eine schwierige Situation, weil er kaum russisch konnte – abgesehen davon, dass er aus dem geliebten Freundeskreis gerissen wurde. Bald wurde er aber auch in Leningrad, wo er die Musikschule und anschließend das Konservatorium besuchte, heimisch. Rückschauend betont er, könne er dem Herrgott nur danken, dass er ihn so geführt hat. Beschützt muss ihn der Herrgott übrigens schon von Anfang an haben, denn seine Mutter musste ihn heimlich im jüdischen Ghetto von Riga auf die Welt bringen. Dass sein Grossvater und sein Onkel von den Nazis umgebracht wurden, hat er erst viel später von seinen Eltern erfahren. Beide sind ihm bis heute Vorbild – die Mutter, eine aufgeschlossene Jüdin, die ihn lutherisch taufen ließ und ihm Werte wie Ethik, Verantwortungsgefühl und Gewissenhaftigkeit beibrachte, und der Vater, der ihm mit seinem Leben vorzeigte, dass nur harte Arbeit zum Erfolg führt. Ohne Arbeit, vor allem ohne Dirigieren könnte er sich ein Leben nicht vorstellen.

Eine Einstellung, die seine ganz nach oben führende Karriere erst ermöglicht hat. Ohne sie wäre er bei den grossen Schwierigkeiten, die sich diesem Hochbegabten anfangs in den Weg stellten, gescheitert. Als 1968 Herbert von Karajan mit seinen Berliner Philharmonikern erstmals in Leningrad gastierte, leitete er ein Seminar mit 12 angehenden Dirigenten. Jansons, der Jüngste unter ihnen, fiel ihm sofort auf. Er wollte, dass er bei ihm weiterstudiere, aber selbst ein geharnischter Brief an die damals allmächtige Kulturministerin der UdSSR, die gefürchtete Jekaterina Furzewa, nutzte nichts: Jansons durfte nicht in den Westen ausreisen. Zumindest nicht zu Karajan. Wenig später ermöglichte ihm ein Austausch, ein Studienjahr in Wien beim berühmten Dirigentenlehrer Hans Swarowsky, aus dessen Meisterschmiede auch Claudio Abbado, Zubin Mehta oder Giuseppe Sinopoli kamen.

Dieses Jahr in Wien hat den in der UdSSR auf höchstem Niveau ausgebildeten Mariss Jansons künstlerisch vermutlich am stärksten geprägt. Täglich war er neben dem Studium bei den Professoren Hans Swarowsky, Karl Österreicher und Friedrich Cerha bei Proben oder Aufführungen in der Staatsoper oder im Konzert. Er hat Karajan mit den Beethoven-Symphonien im Musikverein und, am selben Abend, Bernstein mit „Fidelio“ im Theater an der Wien gehört, aber auch den damals gerade wieder nach Wien zurück gekehrten Josef Krips. „Ich habe mich wie im Paradies gefühlt“, hat Jansons diese Zeit einmal beschrieben.

Dass er von diesen vielen Stehplatzbesuchen mit Blut unterlaufenen Sohlen in die Heimat zurückgekehrt ist, erwähnt er stets nur nebenbei. „Wer ein Musiker werden will, der muss schuften. Was man früher mit Strenge und Disziplin erreichte, das erreicht man heute eher durch die freie Entfaltung der Persönlichkeit“, kommentierte er unlängst zur heutigen Situation.

Nach seinem Erfolg  beim Herbert von Karajan Dirigentenwettbewerb 1971 wurde Jansons Assisten, aber nicht, wie es die Statuten vorsahen, bei Herbert von Karajan, sondern bei Jewgenij Mrawinski, der den jungen Dirigenten nach Leningrad zurückholte. Dessen strenge, unnachgiebige Art, dessen völliges Aufgehen in die eigentliche Sache, die Musik, sein striktes Ablehnen von Äußerlichkeiten oder gar Personenkult sind ihm bis heute Vorbild. Bis 1999 wirkte Jansons, der wie sein Vater bald zum zweiten Dirigenten dieses exzellenten Klangkörpers aufstieg, bei den Leningrader Philharmonikern. Von 1991 bis 2000 lehrte er zusätzlich Dirigieren am Leningrader Konservatorium.

Bekannt wurde er einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit aber nicht durch seine Arbeit in Leningrad – heute wieder St. Petersburg, wo er seinen Lebensmittelpunkt hat -, sondern durch sein Engagement als Chefdirigent des Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. Innerhalb von zwanzig Jahren führte er das, bis dahin außerhalb Norwegens wenig bekannte Orchester, an die europäische Spitze und spielte mit ihm viele von Publikum und Kritik gefeierte, mit zahlreichen Preisen bedachte Platten ein, vorallem sämtliche Tschaikowsky-Symphonien, die bis heute eine Referenzaufnahme bleiben.

Dabei hatte er auch in diesem Zusammenhang mit Widrigkeiten zu kämpfen. Die Sowjetverantwortlichen untersagten ihm einen Vertrag zu unterfertigen und erlaubten ihm nur zwei Arbeitsperioden obwohl die doppelte Anzahl mit dem Orchester vereinbart war. Aber irgendwie gelang es, diese Klippen zu umschiffen. Der unbändige Wunsch zu dirigieren und dabei das Beste zu leisten, ließ Jansons diese schwierigen Jahre überstehen. Erst mit dem politischen Tauwetter zwischen West und Ost wurde alles leichter.

1992 wurde er für fünf Jahre Erster Gastdirigent des London Philharmonic Orchestra. 1997, drei Jahre bevor er seine Tätigkeit in Oslo beendete, verpflichtete ihn das Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra als Musikdirektor. Wie der Manager des traditionsreichen Orchesters damals betonte, „Gerade rechtzeitig“, „denn jetzt führt der Weg von Mariss noch weiter, ganz nach oben.“ Er sollte Recht behalten.

Als Jansons am Ende einer konzertanten LA Bohème-Aufführung in Oslo mit einem Herzinfarkt zusammenbrach, war dies ein Schock für die Musikwelt und eine Zäsur in seinem Leben. Erst recht, als er wenig später einen zweiten erlitt. Er sehe keinen Sinn in seiner Aufgabe als Dirigent, wenn er sie nicht hundertprozentig erfüllen könne, ließ er die um ihn besorgten Ärzte wissen. “Er sei Druck seit seiner Kindheit gewohnt und besitze einen großen Sinn für Verantwortung”.“Er müsse”, so sein unumstößliches Credo, “von sich mindestens so viel fordern wie von seinen Musikern”, entgegnete er ihren wohlgemeinten Ratschlägen, dass er künftig kürzer treten solle.

Seine Rückkehr verdankt Jansons neben der Kunst der Ärzte und seinem unbändigen Willen, bald wieder am Pult stehen zu können, vor allem seiner Frau Irina. Schön, diskret, gleichzeitig bestimmt, nimmt sie ihm alles ab, was ihn belasten könnte. Stets ist sie da, an seiner Seite, wo Mariss sie braucht.

As I was thinking of the appropriate anecdote to describe their remarkable dualisam, I suddenly remembered one of the most passionate opera moments written – first by Irina’s landsman Pushkin and hallowed in music by Janson’s idol Tchaikovsky. In the third act of Eugene Onegin, prince Gremin – otherwise unnoticed in the dramatic narrative – echos the sentiments of those who have found profound life orienting love. He says in short:

“Love is no respecter of age, its transports, bless alike, those in the bloom of youth yet unacquainted with the world – and the grey headed warrior tempered by experience!”

…and he continues:

“She shines like a star in the night’s darkest hour, in a pure, clear sky, and to me she always appears in the radiant, radiant nimbus of an angel!”

We thank you Irina that you make Mariss possible.

Heute konzentriert sich Mariss Jansons vor allem auf seine Aufgaben als Chefdirigent zweier exzellenter Klangkörper, des Symphonieorchesters des Bayerischen Rundfunks und des Königlichen Concertgebouw Orchesters Amsterdam, die er beide an in der Weltspitze etabliert hat. Aber selbst nach einem umjubelten Konzert oder einer ebenso gefeierten Opernvorstellung, wofür er in den letzten Jahren bedauerlicherweise nur selten Zeit gefunden hat, zeigt er sich selten zufrieden. „Es geht immer noch besser“, entgegnet er gerne seinen begeisterten Gratulanten. Nur wenn man immer nach Höherem strebt, gelinge es das Außerordentliche zu erreichen.

Nur wenige Dirigenten verfügen über ein so breites Repertoire wie Mariss Jansons. Allein seine, mit einer Vielzahl begehrter Preise, ausgezeichnete Discographie reicht von der Wiener Klassik bis zur Gegenwart. Man fragt sich, wann Jansons die Zeit für das Studium dieser Werke findet? Im Konzert reicht die Palette der von ihm dirigierten Werke ja sogar noch weiter als bei seinen Einspielungen. Schließlich berücksichtigt er in seinen thematisch wohl überlegten Programmen immer die spezifischen Möglichkeiten und Vorlieben der Orchester, mit denen er auftritt. Dazu zählen neben seinen beiden Klangkörpern in Amsterdam und München, vor allem die Wiener und Berliner Philharmoniker, zu deren besonders geschätzten, mehr noch: geliebten Gastdirigenten er seit Jahren zählt.

Aber egal, wo er dirigiert, seinen Musikern schenkt er nichts. Er probiert so lange, bis eine Phrase, eine melodische Linie seinen Vorstellungen entspricht und mit größtmöglicher Präzision und Plastizität modelliert wird. Selbst bei scheinbar längst Bekanntem gelingt es ihm neue Facetten herauszuarbeiten, auf bisher kaum wahrgenommene Einzelheiten hinzuweisen ohne den großen Bogen zu vernachlässigen. Aber bei aller Genauigkeit, die er fordert, zeigt er immer Verständnis und Achtung für die Musiker, mit denen er arbeitet. Ich habe es selbst oft erlebt: Es ist faszinierend, wie Jansons Musik erklärt, wie er versteht, seine Begeisterung auf andere zu übertragen, so dass man harte Arbeit bald nur mehr als Vergnügen, ja als willkommene Erweiterung des eigenen Horizonts wahrnimmt. So erging es auch mir bei unserem ersten gemeinsamen Musizieren. Die wechselseitige Leidenschaft für die Musik Mahlers hat unsere Freundschaft begründet. Sein geradezu selbstverständlicher Zugang zu Mahlers Musik macht Mahlers Welt unwiederstehlich. Das ist ein Erlebnis, eine seltene Kunst.

Wenn Jansons von sich sagt, dass er „den Kopf eines Letten, aber das Herz eines Russen hat“, dann spielt er damit auch auf seine Lebenseinstellung an. Disziplinierte Leidenschaft und leidenschaftliche Disziplin.

Unstillbar sind auch seine Neugier und sein Lerneifer. Nicht nur sein Wissensdurst ist schier unstillbar, auch seine Probenleidenschaft um das vom Komponisten gewünschte Ideal zu erreichen. Schließlich gelte es immer wieder die Tradition und die eigenen Überzeugungen in Frage zu stellen. Er nutzt jede Gelegenheit, um Kollegen bei ihrer Arbeit, sei es in Proben oder bei Aufführungen, zuzusehen. Aber auch wenn einer seiner Schüler auftritt, kann man Jansons unter den gespannt zuhörenden Besuchern im Publikum finden.

Von Victor Hugo stammt der Satz: „Die Musik drückt das aus, was nicht gesagt werden kann und worüber es unmöglich ist zu schweigen“.

Mariss, yours is a conciousness of the spheres, where the immortal vibrations of life, heard in a language we call music, echos in those, of any time, who listen.

Wir feiern mit Dir heute abend den Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis 2013 und danken Dir zutiefst für Deine grosszügige Widmung. Möge dies den Grundstein für ein neues Heim für Dein grossartiges Orchester legen.

Your time, your now, is our heard humanity.

We love you.

Despite my lack of talent in music – I cannot even carry a tune – I have been deeply affected by it throughout my life. My mother and grandmother filled our house with beautiful piano music; and a great music teacher in my elementary school near Philadelphia, Jean Staples, imparted an infectious enthusiasm for American songs. When I sing in the shower even today, it is usually those songs. My wonderful wife Marjorie, who really can sing, has endured these sounds for 48 years.

When I was in high school I discovered American musical comedy – especially the accessible melodies of Jerome Kern and Victor Herbert. My lifelong love of opera began by listening to Louise Lurch in the early 1940s, one of the few American coloratura sopranos at the Metropolitan Opera in the Gatti-Casazza era. Her husband hired me to catalogue his collections of recordings and books. After listening to her singing in the background, I became a supernumerary both for the Met (which performed in Philadelphia on some Tuesdays at that time) and for the local company in Philadelphia.
As a scholar specialising in Russia, I became captivated by Russian music, and, as a cultural historian, I was surprised at how rarely scholars related music directly to major historical developments. Yet, in the 19th century, art was often shaping history. Garibaldi, the father of the 1848 revolution in Italy, had roomed with an Italian tenor on Staten Island, and his dramatic entries and exits during the revolution resembled those of Verdian tenors. Performances of Rossini’s La gazza ladra in 1820 and Auber’s La muette de Portia in 1830 actually started revolutions. I wrote on die link between opera and revolution in my book Fire in the Minds of Men, and I have written about opera in my two books about Russia: The Icon and the Axe and The Face of Russia.

In recent years, as the Librarian of Congress, I have been entrusted with the world’s largest collection of music – copyrights, sheet music, 20th-century music, recordings, folk music, scores, movies and shows. We are building a tunnel to connect the Library’s beautiful Jefferson Building with the Capitol and bring many more visitors to the new Center for American Creativity. A ‘coming out’ party in the autumn of 2007 will highlight our new interactive exhibits that take the visitor through acts of creation. These might include drafts of Irving Berlin’s discarded lyrics for ‘There’s no business like show business’ or Alexander Graham Bell’s original drawing of the telephone he later changed.
In the meantime, the Library of Congress is sponsoring a tour of 11 cities with Thomas Hampson singing songs from the Library’s rich collection of American music. I have always admired him as an opera singer, and also as an enthusiastic proponent of those songs I sing so badly, but that had such an influence in my childhood.
Tom will visit teachers to help get art back in the classroom and our website (www.loc.gov) will feature all the songs online so everyone in the world can enjoy every aspect of the tour. The Library will bring to each city important examples of creativity from our collections along with our curators.

‘It’s our way of keeping alive the memory of melody… the golden age of American song’

We are also bringing into being a state-of-the-art National Audio-Visual Conservation Center to house our vast collections of films and sound recordings. The Library and its founder, the US Congress, have been shepherding this music and video storage-and-retrieval centre at a Cold War-era bunker in Culpeper, Virginia. Now, it is almost done. It is funded almost entirely by a private donation from the Packard Humanities Institute that totals more than $120 million. The original building belonged to the Federal Reserve and stored millions of dollars in gold bullion, coins, and cash. Now it will house and preserve for posterity something much more priceless: the largest collection of recorded sound and audiovisual material in the world.

Long before radio, television, and all the home entertainment available today, people sang by a piano at home. The golden era of American song has been largely forgotten – along with the style and quality of singing that went with it. The Library of Congress is, in a way, America’s memory. Bringing concerts, manuscripts and sheet music of another era back today is a way of keeping alive the memory of melody. And it is our way of taking out to the nation more broadly music that we have not only commissioned and collected here, but have been playing on the radio and here on Capitol Hill since the 1920s.

IN MY PLAYER

Song of America
Hampson; Trischka et al
EMI Angel ©314645-2

‘Thomas Hampson has personally researched America’s most beautiful songs at the Library of Congress. Here are some of those inspirational songs by one of Amercia’s most remarkable artists.’

Dr James H Billington is the 13th Librarian of Congress, the oldest federal cultural institution in the US. It is the research arm of Congress and the largest library in the world, with more than 130 million items on 530 miles of shelves, including more than 29 million books and printed materials, > 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps and 58 million “manuscripts.

The GRAMOPHONE | January 2006

One of the great voices of America reveals himself as a zealot … on behalf of song and singing. And he’s taking the message to the nation, he tells Anastasia Tsioulcas

Thomas Hampson is a man with a mission. When the singer speaks during our meeting in New York in mid-November, words just tumble from his mouth in an amazing display of acuity, exuberance, and truly dizzying speed. He speaks with the zeal of a true evangelist.

Hampson has plenty of reason to be keyed up about his latest project. Working alongside the Library of Congress, the silken-voiced 50-year-old is celebrating the achievements of American composers and poets old and new in his ‘Song in America’ initiative. The project’s nucleus is a season-long, 12-city tour of the States, which kicked off with November dates in Kansas City and Fort Worth and continues on to Philadelphia, St Paul, New York, Detroit, West Palm Beach, Oxford (Mississippi), Chicago, Omaha, San Jose, and Denver next spring.

Hampson’s performances only form part of the project’s scope, however. Along the way, he will also offer masterclasses and open rehearsals to local voice students and teachers. And the Library of Congress is mounting exhibitions in each tour-stop city that will include items of local interest.

The Library is coordinating educational programmes for teachers and hosting special events, including document preservation workshops for the public, and screenings of classic American movies. The Library’s Folklife Center will also collect oral histories from notable citizens of each region.

The singer is quick to note that all these activities are not an end in themselves, or the summation of past efforts. ‘This is just the kick-off of something much bigger,’ he proudly forecasts. One of the project’s foremost long-term goals is to get the American public better acquainted with one of the country’s greatest cultural treasures, the Library of Congress.

Taken as a whole, the project fuses together several of the baritone’s deepest personal passions. It combines an examination of the deep intersections of American poetry and music, a study of the place of music within American society, an opportunity to shore up the song recital as a living art-form, the chance to enhance musical and arts education in the US, and – a natural for this gear-head artist – the prospect both to explore and to enhance the possibilities presented by new technology.

Hampson’s live performances will undoubtedly touch upon some of his signature music.

However, he confesses: ‘I haven’t quite finalised the repertoire for each concert.’ Choices will vary from city to city, built on the idea of contextualising and honouring regional contributions.
One highlight, undoubtedly, will be the world premiere in St. Paul of a new song-cycle by Stephen Paulus. The texts are tied into the Library of Congress theme: Paulus has set works by the US Poet Laureate, Nebraska-based Ted Kooser.

‘If someone had said to me, “Tom, make us the great American sampler”,’ Hampson muses, ‘I probably would have thrown myself out the window. There is so much fantastic stuff in our massive output.’ Still, some choices are easier than others, and Hampson’s latest CD release offers clues to this richness. To mark the tour, Hampson’s label, Angel/EMI Classics, has issued a compilation featuring great American songs the baritone has recorded over the past 15 years.

The album encompasses traditional tunes like Shenandoah and The Erie Canal to Stephen Foster’s iconic Hard Times Come Again No More. Not surprisingly, though, Walt Whitman’s poetry takes centre stage, courtesy of a dazzling array of settings by such notables as Kurt Weill, Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem (not to mention rarities by Elinor Remick Warren and Henry Thacker Burleigh). ‘I can’t imagine this project without Walt Whitman,’ says Hampson.

Both the tour and album provide ample opportunity for Hampson to ‘connect the dots’, as he puts it. ‘I’m not big on questions like “What’s your favourite role?” “What’s the best opera?” “Who’s the most interesting song composer?’” he confides. I’m not convinced that the most interesting focal point of music is to follow a composer and his or her development. I’m not good at pyramids. Instead, what interests me more is the larger process, and to link various eras in our history to other cultural currents, like sociological phenomena and philosophical schools.’

To the singer, that process is also about watching American identity take shape over time. By this, he means not just the answers and conclusions American composers and poets have given in their work, but the questions that they have asked in folk music and art music since the nation’s earliest days: Who are we as a people? Who is that ‘we,’ anyway? Can there ever be a singular ‘we’ in the United States?

‘Part of the reason for asking those questions is of course to work through those questions for ourselves,’ he says. ‘But we ask ourselves about these issues so that others can look at us and understand who the hell we are. That’s part of my life, certainly.’

‘I deal daily with people who have a very perverse notion of what America is’

‘I live a great deal of my life in Europe [he largely divides his time between Washington State and Vienna] and I deal daily with people who have, in my view, a very perverse – even if it’s positive, still a perverse – notion of what America is, and why America is.’
‘Actually, the idea of codifying our national identity interests me more than the question of whether or not our creative minds have gotten the answers right. I love the process. I think that every generation is part of the decision process, and that conversation takes us farther.’

Hampson feels strongly about one goal of this project: to lay claim not just to American music, but also to help ignite passion among singers, pianists, and audiences for the song recital itself.

‘I sing at a lot of non-concert functions, like golf tournaments,’ he says. ‘And those guys love the music! I’ll sing, for example, “Hush you bye, don’t you cry”,’ – the words that start off “The Little Horses,” a lullaby that Copland used in his Old American Songs – and suddenly the guys listening remember that their grandmothers sang them that tune. But the act of singing, and certainly the concert song, doesn’t seem to be as self-understood as we singers take it.’

I suggest that perhaps part of the reason for that dissolution of meaning and memory is because we, as a culture, have largely left song out of the rhythm of our daily contemporary lives. Usually the public is happy to leave singing, whether classical or pop, to the professionals.
‘Absolutely,’ Hampson agrees. ‘But the acute situation is this: the idea of a concert song, the act of having a person sing without a microphone, standing with a piano and giving an almost ballad-like narration, has become pretty strange for people.’

From Hampson’s perspective, though, one of the primary goals of ‘Song in America’ is to create interest in the incredible free resources that the Library of Congress offers, both in terms of what is available online and what hopefully awaits down the road. These resources come not a minute too soon for internet-buff Hampson, whose edifying website (www.hampsong.com) has been up and running for years.

Backing the new technologies:
podcasting and the internet can provide
endless educational possibilities,
says Thomas Hampson

‘The Library is the great repository, and one of the last great experiments, that Western civilisation got right,’ Hampson asserts. ‘It is the great descendant of Alexandria, and yet most of the general public doesn’t have a direct connect to it. What the Library can do for any citizen in the world, but especially for an American, most of us don’t know.’
Helping to assemble online resources is a particular pleasure. ‘I love this stuff,’ he enthuses. ‘With podcasting, and video podcasting – not to mention Internet! – the educational possibilities are endless. It’s all just too exciting for words.’

Indeed, he muses that his zeal for all things digital might mean a career change. ‘It may very well be that I just move slowly but surely off the front line of performing and more into the back line of database building.’

‘Give me the money and I’ll turn into the Google of recording!

The database he has in mind is one that would, in a perfect world, fully account for the development of American song, making scores, recordings, and other materials available to performers, students, and the public alike. ‘Give me the money, and I’ll turn into the Google of the recording industry!’ he half-jokes.
In the meantime, though, the singer is doing all he can to fan the flame of interest in American song: ‘I’m keeping the pot boiling. It’s my watch, it’s my time, and I’m not going to let the fire go out.’

On Thomas Hampson’s 2005 Salzburg Recital

An essay by Jens Malte Fischer
English translation by Ben Letzler

How It Began

On May 10, 1933 (the new regime wasted no time), the books of unfavored authors were burned on the Opernplatz on Unter den Linden in Berlin, and in other German cities as well. Among those authors were many writers who had played a major role in the Weimar Republic: Alfred Kerr, Kurt Tucholsky, Carl von Ossietzky, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Mann, and Erich Kästner. ‘Classics,’ too, were banned and symbolically destroyed: Sigmund Freud, still living, was discredited in the form of the ‘Freudian School,’ and a much older author of world-historical significance was consigned to the flames with the slogan, ‘Against class struggle and materialism, for national community and idealist living’: Karl Marxówhich made clear that the National Socialist furor for extermination very much thought historically. The book burnings of these May days came just after the boycott, which went off according to plan, of Jewish shops and businesses on April 1, 1933, and they showed with brutal clarity what the new rulers, and the millions of enthusiastic Germans who followed and celebrated them, were capable of, and would be capable of. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear could clearly discern the true character of the regime. With these two actions, the April boycott and the May book burnings, the spring of 1933 had already seen the start of the inexorable process which led from discrimination to ostracism, then to deportation, and ultimately to the physical extermination of all those who had not placed themselves out of reach of violence, and could no longer escape it. Heinrich Heine’s much quoted, truly prophetic phrase proved true to a terrible extent: ‘Wherever they burn books, they will, in the end, burn people!’

The Anti-Semitic Components

The exclusion and persecution of ‘undesirable elements’ soon came to encompass not only regime opponents from the left of the political spectrum, but also, with radical consistency, Jewish Germans and all European Jews. Anti-Semitism was the glowing core, hardly a secret, of the National Socialist worldview, not for Adolf Hitler alone, though in him to an extreme degree. A swift succession of legal measures forced German Jews out of every field and profession; they were bullied and, little by little, robbed of their civil rights. This applied to doctors and shopkeepers, lawyers and university instructors, and of course to writers and musicians as well. There was nonetheless no ‘notes burning’ comparable to the book burnings. In musical matters, the National Socialists deprived individuals of their rights in a less spectacular fashion than was the case in the field of literature. It is easy to explain why this was so: Liberal or outright leftist writers, writers who had defended the Weimar Republic or had dared, before 1933, to speak out against the gathering storm of poisonous National Socialist ideology, were easy to identify, whether Jewish or not. On the other hand, nothing, with the exception of hard left struggle anthems, is known of compositions directed against this poisonous ideology before 1933. The art of music, traditionally many-faceted and purportedly unpolitical, always had an easier time staying out of the battles of the day. There was no way to find a ‘Jewish’ or ‘Aryan’ dominant seventh chord, even if the triad had been successfully identified as ‘Germanic,’ whereas atonal or twelve-tone music was ascribed to the ‘Jewish Ungeist.’ Nor were there composers before 1933 who could clearly be identified as leftist, Hanns Eisler, and to a lesser extent Kurt Weill, notwithstanding. Here the criterion of ‘Jewishness’ had to serve as the defining characteristic of choice. For the National Socialist subordination (Gleichschaltung) of all cultural life, Goebbels created the Reichskulturkammer, which in its subgroupings encompassed all ‘cultural artists’ of the German Reich. Those who were not members of this organization soon had no chance to work in a profession related to writing, painting, composing or performing. As early as April 1934, the Reichsmusikkammer issued guidelines for the acceptance of ‘non-Aryans’ into the trade associatons, and made unmistakably clear what was meant: ‘Non-Aryans are to be regarded as fundamentally unsuitable as bearers and tenders of the German cultural heritage, and must therefore show particular proof of the reliability and suitability required.’ It is almost needless to say that proof of particular suitability for non-Aryans, that is, for Jews, could be furnished only in exceptional cases, and these exceptions, too, quite soon grew obsolete.

That German culture needed purification from ‘un-German elements,’ termed jointly or separately ‘cultural Bolshevism’ and ‘Jewish intellectualism,’ was hardly an idea that had to be invented after January 1933. Here, as in all fields, the National Socialists were only talented revivers and radicalizers of second-hand ideas that had largely arisen at the end of the 19th century and then found new life amidst the confused and uncertain feelings of the Germans and Austrians who, after 1918, had suffered a devastating defeat and had dim prospects for betterment in a republic that was thoroughly disapproved of, and at best unloved. In the realm of culture, these ideas, taken together, were captured in the term ‘degeneracy,’ and the history of this term culminated in two hate exhibitions, the Entartete Kunst exhibit in Munich in 1937, proverbial even today, and Entartete Musik in Düsseldorf in 1938, which elicited much less attention, but was symptomatic and fateful nonetheless.

Exclusion and Persecution

Both were visible expressions of a swiftly implemented ‘purification’ of German musical life from ‘elements foreign to the German people and race.’ There were, characteristically, no bans on individual works or composers. Rather, it was simply very soon clear to directors of opera houses, radio editorial staff, concert agents and symphony orchestras which composers and works could no longer be performed, which ‘non-Aryan’ musicians and directors had to be removed from orchestras and boardrooms. The situation was clear: Anyone with too many Jewish grandparents (and the questionnaires expressly inquired after them) first had to prove exceptional dependability, as mentioned above, and soon there were no transitional rules any longer. Two handbooks existed to assist with any possible unclarities: the quite vulgarly anti-Semitic Musikalisches Juden ABC (1935), and following on it the significantly more serious Lexikon der Juden in der Musik (1940), officially sanctioned by the Reichsmusikkammer. In the latter book, one could read, for example, of Franz Schreker: ‘It was altogether fitting for the age of decay [meaning the Weimar Republic] to place a ‘poet-composer,’ who made the most varied sexual aberrations the subject of his musical works for the stage, at the head of the foremost music academy of the Reich.’ With every indication of contentment, the Schreker article of this lexicon concludes as follows: ‘In July 1932óalready under the sign of the coming political change in GermanyóSchreker had to resign his post as director of the Berlin Hochschule für Musik.’

This lexicon, along with the Düsseldorf exhibition Entartete Musik of 1938, was the ideological lining for countless intrusions into the biographies of individual musicians. The exhibition’s initiator, the Weimar theater director Hans Severus Ziegler, set a tone in the accompanying text in which the will to exterminate cannot be ignored: ‘What has been collected for the exhibition Entartete Musik reflects the witches’ sabbath and the most frivolous sort of spiritual-artistic cultural Bolshevism, and reflects the triumph of subhumanity, of arrogant Jewish impudence and utter spiritual feebleness.’ The exhibition itself put in the stocks, in sound and pictures, such individuals as Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, Kurt Weill, Ernst Krenek, Leo Fall, Otto Klemperer, and Paul Hindemith. Incidentally, neither Hans Severus Ziegler nor the other exhibition organizers were ever held responsible for this act of spiritual terrorism. Ziegler’s career in the theater was over in 1945, to be sure, but he found a job all the same as a teacher at a north German boarding school.

There existed, in addition to the Jewish composers and musicians, a smaller group of non-Jewish artists who had already been pursued by the National Socialist press before the seizure of poweróand they, too, fell victim to the exclusionary measures. For a brief transitional period, well-wishers still entertained illusions that this process could be deflected (prey to this illusion was, among others, Wilhelm Furtwängler), but soon the seriousness of the situation could be ignored no longer.

One must recall how this process of banning and banishments drained musical life in Germany (and soon in Austria too), a process carried out with all the perfection of a properly functioning civil service and which had the character of torture, of turning the screws tighter and tighter. Only a few representative names can be mentioned here. Among those driven out, expelled and persecuted were the composers Paul Abraham, Ralph Benatzky, Alban Berg, Paul Dessau, Hanns Eisler, Berthold Goldschmidt, Friedrich Hollaender, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Ernst Krenek, Karol Rathaus, Arnold Schoenberg, Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff, Robert Stolz, Wladimir Vogel, Franz Waxman(n), Kurt Weill, Egon Wellesz, Stefan Wolpe, and Alexander Zemlinsky. Among the conductors driven out and persecuted were Maurice Abravanel, Leo Blech, Gustav Brecher, Fritz Busch, Oskar Fried, Erich Kleiber, Otto Klemperer, Erich Leinsdorf, Hermann Scherchen, Hans Wilhelm (William) Steinberg, Bruno Walter, and Fritz Zweig. Among the singers driven out and persecuted were Alexander Kipnis, Lotte Lehmann, Emanuel List, Richard Tauber, and Joseph Schmidt; among those engaged in music criticism, Theodor W. Adorno, Paul Bekker, and Alfred Einstein; among instrumentalists, Emanuel Feuermann and Arthur Schnabel. Lastly, those who were driven out, persecuted and murdered in Auschwitz and other camps were those who sought to save themselves by going, so to speak, in the wrong direction: Among the composers might be mentioned Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Erwin Schulhoff, and Viktor Ullmann. These are only a few names, only the best-known. Of the countless violinists and clarinetists of Jewish extraction to be driven out of German and, after 1938, Austrian orchestras, often only names, not even individual fates, are known. In a short period in 1938 following the Anschluss, the Vienna Philharmonic lost 21 members. The case of the violinist Alma Rosé has attained a melancholy fame, in particular because she was the niece of Gustav Mahler: She was a highly gifted violinist who founded a successful women’s orchestra for entertainment music. Though her family emigrated to London, she herself continued to travel on tour. She was arrested in France in 1942 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943, where she conducted the camp orchestra until she died of an illness in the camp in 1944.

A second example is one of the composers from our program. Only these individual biographies allow something approaching an understanding of the terrorist quality of the intrusions into the lives of the individuals who, taken together, made up the immense mass of millions of the persecuted and ultimately the murdered.

The Case of Viktor Ullmann

Viktor Ullmann was born in Teschen in 1898, the son of Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism. (In the age of racial anti-Semitism, conversions to Christianity no longer offered protection from discrimination and persecution). Ullmann studied composition in Vienna, under Arnold Schoenberg, among others. In 1919 he went to Prague, where he worked as choir director and répétiteur at the Deutsches Theater, the musical director of which was Alexander Zemlinsky. From Prague, Ullmann went, in the late 1920s, to Aussig as opera director, then to Zurich, where he conducted music at the Schauspielhaus and achieved success with his first compositions. His acquaintanceship with the anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner changed his life: He became head of a specialist bookshop in Stuttgart, then left National Socialist Germany quite early, in 1933, and returned to Prague, where with difficulty he started over and began composing again. Slowly the new successes came, and Ullmann was on his way to becoming known as a composer of the avant-garde when the Germans marched into Prague in March of 1939. Ullmann, declared a Jew, was forbidden any public activity as a musicianóthough this did not hinder him from continuing to compose. In September 1942 he was brought to the Theresienstadt concentration camp, which the National Socialists, with unparalleled cynicism, used as a ‘model camp.’ There a rich cultural life among the prisoners was all but subsidized to create the illusion of normality, and it is no coincidence that four of the most important persecuted composers, all of Bohemian-Moravian extraction, lived in Theresienstadt at the same time and were able to work under the circumstances, as indeed the camp directors encouraged them to: Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása and Viktor Ullmann. Also worthy of note is the Czech conductor Karel Anc?erl, later world-famous, who would be among Theresienstadt’s few survivors.

Theresienstadt was not an extermination camp, and the living conditions were significantly better than those in other camps, though deceptively so nonetheless. Altogether unjustified was the illusion of many prisoners that they could survive there, or that here they were somehow protected, for example owing to their intensive artistic involvement in the realm of music. How people could do creative work under the conditions is simply inexplicable. Viktor Ullmann, for example, wrote an entire opera, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, which he finished at the end of 1943, and which has shown its expressive power in numerous performances since its rediscovery some years ago. Shortly after the opera’s completion, the inconceivable radicalization of the extermination measures carried out in the second-to-last year of the war destroyed all illusions: The so-called Artist Transport of October 16, 1944, brought Haas, Klein, Krása and Ullmann to Auschwitz. Haas, Krása and Ullmann were sent to the gas chambers in a matter of days. Gideon Klein, the youngest and strongest, had to do forced labor for a time, then was murdered during the evacuation of the camp in January of 1945. Four of the most important German composers of their generation thus fell victim to the genocide.

Richard Wagner’s Fateful Role

Once more, our view must travel back, and our historical perspective must expand, to explain the basis on which musicians, not only (but in particular) Jewish, could be persecuted and deprived of their rights. In this, the insane National Socialist terror was able, unfortunately, to base its claims on a star witness with a mighty reputation: Richard Wagner. Under a pseudonym, Wagner published the pamphlet Das Judentum in der Musik (‘Jewry in Music’) in a well-known music journal in 1850. He published the same text again 19 years later, this time as a brochure and under his own name, which by then had become known throughout Europe. Das Judentum in der Musik is, and one cannot put it more mildly, a central document of 19th-century anti-Semitism, with significance far beyond the musical context. The work’s central thesis is that Jews might be exceptionally clever interpreters in the field of music, but are incapable of original creative work, and thus worthless as composers. The Jewish influence on musical life in Europe is portrayed as ominous, and as something to be fought against. Felix Mendelssohn and Giacomo Meyerbeer are made particular examples of these theses. Wagner attacked the former, with whom he had been well acquainted, in relatively moderate fashion. But Meyerbeer, Wagner’s competitor in the field of opera, and from whom he had received personal support (of which he made no mention), Wagner attacked with the worst sort of rancor. The pamphlet, and in particular the second edition of 1869, created a tremendous sensationóthe discussion went as far as England and the USA, and numerous translations were published.

From that moment on, nothing could get rid of the prejudice that Jewish composers were only clever eclecticists, assembling material stolen from various sources, spreading their works with the help of other Jews, and earning a great deal of money in the process. This suspicion was entertained not only by radical anti-Semites, but rather throughout broad circles of the educated European bourgeoisie, a group which grew increasingly receptive to anti-Jewish prejudicesóoften hardly recognized as such by those affectedóin the closing years of the nineteenth century. Giacomo Meyerbeer’s operas, once worldwide triumphs, had already begun to lose favor with the public in that period. By the beginning of the 1930s, the operas were so seldom to be heard that no further defensive measures were necessary from the National Socialist administrations.

Mendelssohn – Meyerbeer – Mahler

Mendelssohn, whose symphonies, concertos and lieder had remained a basic part of bourgeois music culture, was another matter. The composer, who had converted to Christianity as a child, was eliminated step by step from German musical life: In 1936, the Mendelssohn monument in Leipzig, where he had lived and worked for many years, was destroyed under cover of darkness, and the family descendants were bullied and forced into exile. A famously absurd attempt was made to replace Mendelssohn’s music for Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The music, today the composer’s most popular work, had been banned, but it had traditionally been used for performances of the play. Hans Pfitzner refused to provide a replacementóin contrast to the ambitious young Carl Orff.

In the years around the fin de siècle, a third ‘Music Jew’ came to the prominence alongside Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn: Gustav Mahler. He, too, was helped little by his conversion to Catholicism. This permitted him the office of artistic director of the Vienna Court Opera, but did not protect him from the anti-Semitic campaigns which began as soon as he took on a leading position in Viennese cultural life and which followed him, with varying intensity, for the rest of his life. These campaigns, to be sure, were nonetheless directed less against Mahler the conductor than against Mahler the composer. Mahler sought to escape this problem through suppression and concealment, and to a certain extent he succeeded. After his death, however, the discussions of the futility of his artistic efforts and of the absence of ‘true German depth’ in his works continued with unabated intensity. One must consider, as drastic as it is, the truth: Had Gustav Mahler not died in 1911, he would have had to experience, at the age of 78, Hitler marching into Vienna and his enthusiastic reception there. He would have been bullied and deprived of his rights, as happened to Sigmund Freud, and had he notóas Freud didóchosen emigration in his old age, he would have been, and this may be said with certainty, deported to an extermination camp, as happened to his niece Alma Rosé.

To recall how the approach taken with these three composers of international reputationóin the spirit of Richard Wagner, to whom go back all demonizations of Jewish composers óset the tone for what happened to living composers and musicians, whether Jewish or, though non-Jewish, undesirable, whether politically or because proponents of avant-garde music (Neutöner), one might have a look at the 1939 work of the National Socialist musicologist Karl Blessinger, MendelssohnóMeyerbeeróMahler. Drei Kapitel Judentum in der Musik als Schlüssel zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (‘MendelssohnóMeyerbeeróMahler. Three Chapters of Jewry in Music as Key to the Music History of the Nineteenth Century’). The formulation alone explains why works of these three composers form the basis of the program for Thomas Hampson’s concerts, even though they were not directly affected by exile and persecution.

The ‘cardiac asthma of exile’ (Thomas Mann) found its most compelling poetic formulation in the words of the emigrant Bertolt Brecht. A verse from his poem An die Nachgeborenen (‘To Those Born After’) reads thus:

I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out your brief time without fear
to get by, too, without violence
to repay evil with good
not to fulfill your desires but to forget them is thought wise.
All this I cannot do:
Truly, I live in dark times!

The composers of our lied project lived, like Brecht and millions of others, in truly dark times. Whatever their personal fates, they survived in their music. To remember this is our obligation. In the words of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer: ‘What is of value is not the conservation of the past, but instead the redemption of past hope.’

The author, born in Salzburg in 1943, studied German literature, history, musicology and voice. 1982-88 professor of literature at the University of Siegen, from 1989 on professor of theater studies at the University of Munich. Author of many books, including Grosse Stimmen: Von Enrico Caruso zu Jessye Norman (1993), Jahrhundertdämmerung: Ansichten eines anderen Fin de siècle (2000), Richard Wagners ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (2000), Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute (2003).

© Thomas Hampson and Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold

Here the frailest leaves of me and yet my strongest lasting,
Here I shade and hide my thoughts, I myself do not expose them,
And yet they expose me more than all my other poems.

In his 1860 Calamus poems Walt Whitman chose the metaphor of fragile leaves to suggest not only the most naked thoughts which lie beneath his verse, but also the bond of intimacy that links poet to reader. Frail might the leaves have been, but hardy too, for such is the meaning of the calamus image – the grass which stands firmly rooted in earth, blowing freely in the wind, delicate and defiant. The calamus metaphor runs throughout Whitman’s verse from the 1860’s onward and with it the recurring themes of the love of comrades, the bond of male love (both erotic and platonic), the wonders of the human body, and the charge to a young nation to cast off the chains of convention and celebrate the myriad of human experiences.

One fragile Calamus leaf was found among the scraps of paper that constituted Whitman’s manuscript for Democratic Vistas: the scribbled pencil text of a nine line unpublished poem, To What You Said. Composer Leonard Bernstein, attracted by the cachet of mystery surrounding this lost poem, chose the text to represent the Bard in his 1976 cycle Songfest. The Bernstein setting (together with recent performances and recordings of the song) has underscored the puzzles of the poem: the questions concerning its dating; its addressee; the reasons for its remaining unpublished; a probing of its textual relationships to other poems; and the enhanced, revealing, and even transforming dimension music brings to meaning.

Although almost nothing has been written about poem in any organized critical way – among the editions of Whitman’s poetry the text appears only in the Comprehensive Reader’s Edition – the assumption there and among scholars has been that it is a Calamus poem dating from the 1860 period; that its content is clearly homosexual; and that the very confessional nature of the lines caused Whitman to abandon them. A closer study of the manuscript itself and of Whitman’s letters and diaries, a re-examination of crucial biographical events, an extensive comparative textual analysis, as well as a response to the subtleties revealed when the written word is sung, suggest some new hypotheses about the poem’s context and a new interpretation of its significance.

The place to begin such an inquiry is in an examination of the hard evidence – the fragile manuscript in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection of the Library of Congress. The poem is nestled away on the verso of page 30 of the manuscript for Democratic Vistas, which was ultimately published in 1871. It is written in the poet’s broad, loping hand in pencil on a 6 x 8 yellowed sheet of paper with small perforations that substitute for water marks; a portion of the bottom of the sheet has been torn off irregularly, and there are coffee stains. The recto, which contains a penciled page of Democratic Vistas, shows a similar hand. The top of the poem side is the bottom of the Democratic Vistas side, perhaps suggesting that Whitman simply grabbed a sheet from a pile of other papers and reutilized it as he was drafting Democratic Vistas.

Whitman’s habit of reusing paper makes his manuscripts a particular nightmare for scholars, and Democratic Vistas is especially problematic. It consists of what Whitman, himself, called “a collection of memoranda… passages of it written at widely different times.” This is immediately apparent: there are scraps of varying size and vintage, some as small as a torn-off slip with dimensions less than 3 x 5, others written on the back of recycled printed circulars or torn-up larger sheets, and some pasted together with glue. Among the versos of the manuscript which have printed material are a flyer for the YMCA, a tax document from the City of Williamsburg, and a torn-up 1793 legal document. The group of recycled official documents clearly indicates that this was paper salvaged during his tenure in the Attorney General’s Office (it looks as if he may have scavenged the wastebaskets) sometime after 1865 but before the 1867 magazine publication of part 1 of Democratic Vistas and the 1868 magazine publication of part 2. All the scraps are numbered in the poet’s own hand; they were clearly assembled this way prior to the book publication of Democratic Vistas in1871 and sent to the printers to be deciphered. A very rough galley was then prepared which Whitman edited, making many revisions in pencil on the printed proofs. There are also three pages that are written on the verso of notes in Whitman’s own hand: one is a large page of penciled jottings on a historical theme, the second a historical notation about Washington, and the third, on the verso of page 58, a faint but terribly revealing and interesting fragment. It reads: “Some peculiarly candid and courageous souls there are in the States;/Them I charge to diffuse these words among the young men.”

Whenever Whitman revised something, even the fragmentary and pasted together draft of Democratic Vistas, he not only crossed out as he went along, but most often he wrote down ideas and then went back to them; this is clear from the mixture of pen and pencil on a single page and from the completed thoughts, later scratched out and reworked. In contrast, To What You Said appears to have been written in a single sitting; the cross-outs and corrections are made mid-sentence; an idea once begun is often not finished before the bold scratch-outs let Whitman move on to a new thought, and only in the most heavily revised middle section are there several false starts. The final version reads:

To what you said, passionately clasping my hand, this is my answer:
Though you have strayed hither, for my sake, you can never belong to me,
nor I to you,
Behold the customary loves and friendships – the cold guards
I am that rough and simple person
I am he who kisses his comrade lightly on the lips at parting,
and I am one who is kissed in return,
I introduce that new American salute
Behold love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious
Behold the received models of the parlors – What are they to me?
What to these young men that travel with me?

An examination of the changes Whitman made, however, suggests the poet’s thought process and indicates the directions he wished to take the poem. Line 1 obviously began with “What”(capital W) and then inserted “To,” raising the interesting possibility that he meant the “To” as an address to someone, then integrated it into the syntax of the revised line. The first draft read “What you said wringing my hand this is my “(changed to “the” and back to “my) answer”; clasping is an obvious gentling of “wringing”; “my” a gentling of the hard cold “the” In line 2 “you do not belong to me” was replaced with the softer “can never belong” – equally firm, and clearly inevitable, but far less threatening – while the penning of the first part of that verse is remarkably sure, the possible autobiographical circumstances of someone straying never in doubt. Line 3 is also unrevised; this key idea is surely and swiftly penned in manuscript as “the customary loves and friendships, the cold guards.” In line 4 “scornful” is replaced by “simple” though not crossed out – as if it were a considered alternative he never got back to, and as such it is again softer, less belligerent, more considerate of the addressee’s feelings.

Lines 5 bears the most intense revisions – clearly Whitman was struggling to find the correct expression for what he must have regarded as the most crucial message of the poem. What became “I am he who kisses his comrade lightly on the lips at parting” went through the following changes: 1) ” I am he introducing the parting from his”; 2) .”..the new American salute; And I am one who is kissed in return”; then further toying with a) “And I am he”; b) “that one who parting kisses”; c) “who kisses at parting and who is”; d) “who is lightly kissed by him in return.” Line 6, “I am he introducing the new American salute,” became the far more aggressively active “I introduce that new American salute,” while line 7, “Behold the love choked, correct, polite, deferential to..,” grew into “Behold love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious.”

In contrast to the multitude of revisions for the previous three verses, line 8 is unrevised, indicating how easily the image of “the received models of the parlors,” came to Whitman. He changes line 9, “What to the young men with me?” to “What to these young men that travel with me?,” thus introducing not only the metaphoric journey, but also reinforcing the theme of comradeship and including the element of distance that the demonstrative pronoun and the less personal “travel” bring.

What can one conclude about the origins and inspiration of the poem from the evidence of the manuscript itself? Certainly, a positive dating of To What You Said is impossible based solely on the hard copy evidence, though one can make some reasonable assumptions: 1) while Whitman reused paper regularly, the scraps (i.e. the government forms) point to the period he was actually writing Democratic Vistas; 2) it is not likely that Whitman carried around a Calamus scrap for eleven years only to use its backside to scribble a page of Democratic Vistas! It is more logical to conclude that Whitman reused unneeded paper; the Democratic Vistas manuscript, after it had been printed, would have become scrap, itself. This suggests that To What You Said was written in 1871 or later. The significance of the textual revisions raises even more interesting issues. All the changes Whitman made indicate that he was moving to soften the harshness of the poem and to transform the personal into universal and the merely confessional into the prophetic. If To What You Said is addressed to someone specific, as the “To,” the tone, and the unchanged boldness of the statement about “straying hither” suggest, then it was clearly gentled in order not to hurt feelings. Moreover, one sees from the manuscript that the area of greatest philosophical concern for the poet was the middle section, where Whitman fussed with how best to articulate the bond among comrades – how to shade the kissing. The changes he ultimately settled upon move the poem from a declaration of male love to a statement of an elevated act of reciprocal, soul-deep bonded affection in which the images of the American salute, the parlour conventions, and the metaphoric journey figure boldly as part of the main theme. Indeed, the journey concept is a familiar one – as old as first edition of Leaves of Grass – and yet as recent as some of the late poems where the journey grows even lonelier, as in Whispers of Heavenly Death, Songs of Parting, Passage to India, and the Prayer of Columbus.

Whitman recycled not only paper but also themes for his poetry. Leaves of Grass, after all, grew organically; the Song of Myself was the kernel which took root and blossomed into other verse. And while it is true that virtually every major image contained in the first edition is also present in the deathbed edition, it is also true that there is an evolving pattern of images that argues compellingly against an earlier dating of the poem. The journey theme, for example, is an ever present Whitman subject, but one which increases in frequency between 1869 and 1871, especially in poems like Darest thou now O Soul, The Last Invocation, Whispers of Heavenly Death, Joy, Shipmate Joy!, Untold Want, Portals, Now Finalè to the Shore, Passage to India, Prayer of Columbus, Gliding Over All. All of these poems endow travel with a new metaphysical aspect. We need only examine the references to the voyage of the intellect and soul, the mystic marriage, and the journey of the soul to primal thought in Passage to India to understand this intensified significance. The same is true of Whitman’s notions of the “customary loves,” “the cold guards,” and “the received models of the parlours” – which are repeatedly invoked in Democratic Vistas: “I should demand a programme of culture drawn not for a single class alone or for the parlors or lecture rooms..”; “not dapper little gentlemen from abroad who flood us with their sentiments of the parlors, parasols, and piano songs.”

Less frequently employed is the key image of the “new American salute.” The only place this appears at all in the same form is in the Calamus poem, Behold This Swarthy Face (“that salute of American comrades”) where we also find the lines about “kissing lightly on the lips” and “kissing in return.” This might offer a significant clue about the dating of To What You Said were it not for the fact that Behold This Swarthy Face underwent a revision process from its first printing in 1860 to the time of its final draft in 1871- a process which parallels the progressive change in Whitman’s entire body of imagery over the decade. An examination of the changes in this Calamus poem indicate that Whitman began in manuscript with a guarded reference to the love of comrades, toyed with revisions to make it more intimate and personal in the galleys and first changes, and eventually in 1871 returned to a more distanced approach, very much in keeping with the spirit of the revisions in To What You Said, where the poet added a mythical dimension to this love of comrades.

Another 1871 poem, Gods, sheds similar light on the progression of this core theme. The poet starts with an enumeration of his gods, beginning with the personal and erotic admiration of the male body (“Lover divine and perfect comrade”) – a theme first sounded in Children of Adam – and then he moves onto the Platonic notion of Ideal Man and then to subsequent abstractions like “Death” (the crossing) and “Ideas, Time and Space.” Gods serves as a summary of the evolution of the notion of the divine in the poet’s mind: a concept that begins in fleshy love and ends in the worship of the highest intangibles. That evolution from the private, personal delight of the Calamus poems to the integration of the love of comrades into Whitman’s larger mystical and democratic philosophy is very much a function of the poet’s post-Civil War thinking. In poems like the 1870 O Star of France, where he mentions the “dear love of man for his comrade” as well as in the innumerable citations in Democratic Vistas, Whitman increasingly demonstrates his concern to graft onto the initial Calamus usage of “comrade” the dimension of the fraternal bond – comrades as brothers and sisters as well as lovers and friends – and to place this concept within the context of a truly democratic society. This revision culminats in Whitman’s 1876 Preface to Two Rivulets, where he claims the “special meaning of Calamus mainly resides in its poitical significance.”

Whitman’s shifting connotation of “comrade” is reflected in the developing etymology of the word, derived from the 16th century Spanish “camarada” (feminine collective noun) or “camarado” (masculine singular noun), meaning “one who shares the same room – a chamber fellow,” especially in the military context. The more abstract usage of the word to signify “associate” had been employed as early as the 1601, but it was not until the nineteenth century that this more universal meaning took permanent root, reinforced by the various Socialist movements that adopted the term and grafted a political significance onto it. Interesting, too, is the fact that the word was almost exclusively applied to male friendships until the nineteenth century, when women like George Eliot and George Sand, following in the footsteps of radical feminists like Mary Wollonstonecraft, asserted the intellectual, emotional, and social equality of women.

Whitman clearly used “comrade” in both its senses. In Calamus he actually writes “Camarado” and uses the word in the context of a male bedfellow – albeit with a cachet of idealized friendship. Increasingly, though, he began to graft onto comrade the more generalized meaning as well, especially in Democratic Vistas, where he uses the word to indicate perfect friends bonded together in solidarity. The military origins of the term may also account for the heightened frequency of the image whenever Whitman talks about his Civil War experiences, where “caritas” rather than “eros” was his motivation.

Just as Whitman, the poet, permitted his images to evolve toward a heightened mythicism and sense of socio-political responsibility, so, too, did Whitman, the prose writer, demonstrate his growing concern for establishing a visionary democracy – perhaps no where more vividly than in Democratic Vistas, which forms not only the physical context for To What You Said but, in an uncanny way, also the intellectual framework for the unpublished poem.

The theme of the prose tract is the moral crisis facing post-bellum America, in need of a new breed of teachers, workers, lovers, poets and prophets. Whitman had been reading Carlyle’s criticism of America’s democracy, as well as steeping himself in Shelley’s concept of poets as the prophets of mankind and in Emerson and Thoreau’s ideas that the function of the government is neither repression nor law but the training of communities to begin and end with the individual. In Democratic Vistas the poet speaks as reformer: he talks frequently of liberating men and women from the “fossil and unhealthy air which hangs around the parlours”; he calls for fresh sanity in literature – “America demands a poetry that is bold, modern, all-surrounding and cosmical as she is herself.” Then from that political-social premise, Whitman moves upward to the increasingly metaphysical – “only the mightiest original, non-subordinated Soul can ever really lead,” and he speaks of the Soul as the creator of literature. But in typical Whitmanesque fashion, he opts for a poetry that stretches toward the ether while also remaining rooted in flesh: he advocates the “intense and loving comradeship, the personal passionate attachment of man to man” as the profound saviour of the nation – “I say democracy infers such loving comradeship as its most inevitable twin” – and he expands the one-to-one into a one-to-all relationship in which “the races [are] comrades and fraternizing all…in Solidarity.”

At first glance the assumption that To What You Said dates back to the 1860 Calamus cluster seems sound. Its themes resemble those of Calamus in a generic way. Whitman’s emphasis shifted in the years between Calamus and Democratic Vistas: he moves from the erotic celebrations of fleshy love in Children of Adam, and the intimate and personal qualities of Calamus to a far more idealistic, pan-world vision of love. Finally, the Calamus poems are very rarely addressed to anyone specific; in these poems the love of comrades, however personally inspired by individuals it may have been, is most often addressed to shadowy, unnamed lovers – which is not the case with To What You Said with its apostrophic form. This is precisely the direction of the poet’s revising in To What You Said. Further, the tone of the poem, though gentled in its opening, grows militantly aggressive in its middle section, proclaiming the poem’s affinities to the missionary fervor of Democratic Vistas.

All of these factors suggest that the poetic voices of Democratic Vistas and To What You Said derive from the same period and spiritual source. Into both works, Whitman has plunged his own erotic, personal – even narcissistic – love of comrades from his Calamus days into the crucible of the Civil War and has emerged with a new kind of awareness. In Whitman’s poetry from the 1870s and 1880s the love of comrades encompasses not only emotional and sexual attachment but also the ideals of charity and democracy. Central to the poet’s definition of democracy is what he called “Personalism” or the interplay of the individual with the aggregate society.

Now let us turn to the biographical details of the period surrounding the 1871 publication of Democratic Vistas and its subsequent reprinting in 1876 to see if any events in this period shed further light on the poem. Whitman’s Daybooks entries have been decoded by scholars to suggest that the poet resolved on July 15, 1870, to pursue Peter Doyle no more. Not long before his resolve to give up the pursuit of Doyle, Anne Gilchrist had published An Englishwoman’s Estimate of Walt Whitman in the Boston Radical in May 1870 – a sensitive and passionate piece of literary criticism which touched Whitman deeply. Years later he would recall to Traubel: “You cannot imagine what a thing her Estimate meant to me at that time. Almost everybody was against me – the papers, the preachers, the literary gentlemen, nearly everybody with only her a dissenting voice.” At first his communication to Anne Gilchrist was through their mutual friend William Rossetti, but on Sept. 3, 1871, Anne went into the English fields near her home and poured out her soul to Whitman in a long love letter, which deeply moved the poet but bewildered the man. It took Whitman three months to respond, as he finally did on Nov. 3, with a cautious letter in which he apologizes, saying he was “waiting for the right mood to answer your letter in a spirit as serious as its own with the same unmitigated trust and affection,” and goes on to add that he is “not insensible to your love. I too send you my love,” but cautions that his “book is my best letter, my response, my truest explanation of all.” From 1871 until her “trans-settlement in America” Anne wrote most of the letters to Walt, who responded much less frequently and much more cautiously, though always sending tokens of esteem and friendship – his writings, clippings, even a ring – which indicated the value he placed on her intellectual companionship. On March 20, 1872, he wrote Anne to discourage her idealization of him saying: “The actual Walt Whitman is a very plain personage and entirely unworthy of such devotion.” In 1876 Anne moved her entire family to Philadelphia to join Whitman. Even though the poet’s prior letters “disapprove[d] of this American trans-settlement,” Anne wrote back on March 30, 1876, urging Whitman not to warn her against a “purpose resting on strong faith since 1869” and saying she was determined to have Whitman “take me to your breast forever and forever.” When she arrived in Philadelphia on September 10,1876, Whitman took John Burroughs with him to meet her and her family at their Philadlephia hotel. Finding with relief that he actually liked them all, he became fast friends with the entire Gilchrist clan and for the duration of her sojourn in Philadelphia became a frequent visitor in Mrs. Gilchrist’s home, where she set aside for him a room to accommodate him.

During this time Whitman’s visits to Timber Creek, where he carried on a tumultuous and sexually fraught relationship with Harry Stafford, balanced the time spent at the Gilchrists, though he kept these realms separate and sacrosanct. When Anne surprised him with a visit to Timber Creek, Mrs. Stafford reported that Whitman was as angry as she had ever seen him. That the poet liked his friends in distinct categories is the most probable explanation, though one cannot help speculating whether the visit might have given Anne a forbidden glimpse of an intimate – and heretofore undisclosed – side of the poet’s life and whether this discovery could have, in any way, prompted Anne’s ultimate decision to leave Philadelphia in the Spring of 1878.

While the correspondence between Anne and Whitman is copious – at least on her part – in the years 1871-1876 and then again from 1879 to her death in 1885, the documentary evidence from this Philadelphia period is scant – in part because the pair saw each other almost every day – but also because Whitman’s friends all maintain a discreet Victorian silence about the relationship. Whitman’s friend, Edward Carpenter, alludes to the fact that he “could see Mrs. Gilchrist was suffering.” Herbert Gilchrist, too, chose to make no comment in his editing of his mother’s papers – a task in which he was hardly helped by Whitman’s refusal to part with the ones he had in his possession. “I can hardly furnish any good reason, but I feel to keep these utterances entirely to myself,” the poet wrote Herbert. Then, too, to complicate the epistolary evidence even further, there are uncomfortable indications in the apologetic and falsified explanation that Whitman’s literary executor, Thomas B. Harned, offered in editing and publishing the Gilchrist-Whitman letters: Harned claimed Whitman could not have returned Anne’s love in 1870-71 because he was in love with a married woman! Confused and vacillating, Anne decided finally to return to England, and in June 1879, she and Whitman had one final meeting before the Gilchrists left.

These biographical events make the strongest case for placing To What You Said in the period of his relationship with Anne Gilchrist, very possibly in the 1876-1877 Timber Creek days. The particular coincidence of events, memories, and associations of those two summers offer, as well, a very probable explanation as to why the poem reminds of the earlier Calamus verse, without actually sharing the philosophical mindscape of the pre-Civil War collection.

Why exactly Whitman declined to publish the poem is a bit more problematic. Perhaps Whitman’s caution had more to do with the personal nature of the poem. In the more generic Calamus works the theme of male love supercedes any specific identification of the poems’ subjects. Not so in To What You Said, where the reader, especially after seeing the manuscript’s shaping of the “To,” yearns to discover to whom the poem is addressed. That the inspiration might be a man seems unlikely since the poem celebrates male companionship as an idealized contrast to another – obviously female – bond. Furthermore, Whitman’s biography reveals no male who “strayed hither” for him or anyone from whom he would have wanted – during their relationship – to disengage himself. (If anything, he tried to cling to Doyle and Stafford far longer than they were willing to make commitments to the poet, and the boys in the Civil War hospitals may not have ever understood the complexity of Whitman’s sentiments; their needs – convalescence or dying – were far more immediate.) That the poem could have been addressed to another woman such as Ellen O’Connor is, of course, possible, though improbable, for the likelihood of such a passion erupting after long years of placid domestic friendship seems remote. More probably To What You Said was addressed to Anne Gilchrist, the only person in Whitman’s life who did literally “stray hither for his sake.” If this is true, the gentling of the tone corresponds to the poet’s sensitive dealings with her, and the hypothesis, in turn, sheds more light on dating the manuscript and on Whitman’s abandonment of it.

A case can be made for Whitman’s having penned the poem sometime after his receipt of Anne’s September 3, 1871, letter and his November 3 reply. At that point, the Democratic Vistas manuscript would have just been returned to him from printers and might well have been lying around for scrap paper; his November 3 letter, for all the cogitation it cost him, was remarkably forthright and mostly unrevised in the original draft; could Whitman have experimented with the sentiments in any other form before writing the final epistle? A second, more convincing possibility is that the poem was written sometime later during the 1871-1876 correspondence with Anne. The fact that many of the poet’s letters to Anne are missing (Anne alludes to correspondence or responds to letters that do not exist in the Harned or Feinberg collections) suggests that the poem might have been a verse draft of a missive intended for her during those years. What mitigates most tellingly against either of the above speculations is the line “though you have strayed hither.” The third and best supported hypothesis is that the poem was written in 1876-1878: Anne had literally strayed hither in 1876; the relationship with Harry Stafford was passionate and emotionally consuming; the Timber Creek/Calamus symbolism could not have been lost on an aging poet with erotic memories/desires – all of which were set in sharp relief by his first serious intellectual and emotional attachment to a woman not one of his relatives. Anne was no one to dismiss; her determination, her intellect, and her devotion to Whitman prompted the poet after her death to tell Traubel: “I have that sort of feeling about her which cannot easily be spoken of….love.” And while almost a conspiracy of silence surrounds the intimate details of the Gilchrist-Whitman friendship, a watershed clearly occurred in their relationship in 1877-1878, an event that led her to accept – as the tone of subsequent correspondence indicates – the truth that a carnal bond was never to exist between them. Her departure from Philadelphia, her initial silence thereafter, and then her gradual coming to terms with a new kind of friendship – one interspersed with nostalgia and fueled by a deepened comprehension – demonstrates that by 1879 Anne had made her peace with whatever revelations or epiphanies she had shared with Whitman and that she was prepared, despite any disappointment she may have endured, to remain his best critic and warmest champion until her death.

Still, accepting the hypothesis that To What You Said was penned as a response to Anne Gilchrist does not explain why Whitman never published the poem – or, as far as can be ascertained, ever sent any version to her. The notion that it was too personal a homosexual declaration – both for public consumption and for Anne’s sensibilities – does not seem viable. First, as already argued, other Calamus poems are equally, if not more, revealing and explicit. That he might have hesitated to address such a subject to someone who could easily be identified (surely not only Anne but also his friends would have recognized the intended recipient) might have been a partial motivation – a function of Whitman’s delicacy toward a woman he respected and for whom he cared deeply. But, surely, he could not have wished to hide the truth from a soul as near to his as Anne Gilchrist’s, and a closer examination of Anne’s letters challenges another of the frequently-asserted scholarly misapprehensions about the relationship: that Anne’s unrequited love for Whitman was a scenario of pathetic proportions in which an overly romantic Victorian widow entirely missed the sexual inferences of the Calamus poems. Rather, it seems clear that Anne understood very well indeed from first to last the meaning of these poems, and Whitman appreciated her courageous acceptance of the wholeness of their message. “Mrs. Gilcrhist insisted, even to the last, that Leaves of Grass was not the mouthpiece of the parlours… no, but the language of strength, power, passion, intensity, absorption, sincerity,” he told Traubel after her death. In her Estimate Anne defines the theme of Calamus: “What it means for a man to love his fellow man? These evangel poems of comrades and of love speak of the abiding, penetrating power of prophecy of a new and superb friendship” and goes on to defend the concept without which

“the brotherhood of the human race would be a mere flourish of rhetoric. And brotherhood is naught if it does not bring a brother’s love with it. If the poet’s heart were not a measureless ocean of love that seeks the lips and would quench the thirst of all, he were not the one we have waited for so long. Who but he could put at last meaning into that word “democracy’ which has been made to bear a burthen of incongruous notions.”

Anne understood the love of comrades in all the myriad ways which Whitman did, though she placed special value on the idealistic, democratic aspects of the concept. Nonetheless, she was aware of the so-called “shocking” implications of the idea, and as a true child of the Romantic era, she responded with passionate, radical conviction that the poet were no poet “if he were not bold and true to the utmost and did not own in himself the threads of darkness mixed in with the threads of light and own it with the same strength and directness that he tells of light.”

If her reference to the dark and light aspects of personality foreshadows Jung, her actual point of reference was William Blake’s doctrine of contraries: those opposing dynamic forces whose counterpoint becomes an holistic co-existence when man is prepared to set aside what Blake considered the hypocritical dualism of Christianity: good vs. evil, body vs. soul. Anne, who had completed her husband Alex’s biography of Blake, surely embraced the poet’s bold assertions that “Energy is Eternal Delight, Shame is Pride’s Cloak,” and that “The Head Sublime, the Heart Pathos, the Genitals Beauty, the Hands and Feet Proportion.” From Blake to Whitman she traced a spiritual bond that defied the conventions of Victorian morality, though she was also a prudent enough woman of her age to caution and try to protect her beloved Walt. As late as the year of her death she advised Whitman to order his new edition of poems by placing in the first volume Democratic Vistas along with poems of sweeping social import in order “to lift the reader up to the true point of view and make him all your own before he comes into the inner sanctuary of Calamus…” Anne may have feared others would misunderstand, but she never did. She never negated the intimate sexual meaning of the Calamus poems, nor did she find the homoerotic implications incongruous with the possibilities for heterosexual love (in this she believed firmly in Whitman’s own assertion that he was both mother and father, male and female – the androgynous and all-embracing Bard). More importantly, she shared with Whitman the belief that comradeship – whatever its manifestation – was the highest human calling. Even in the years when her correspondence was most passionate, the love she offered the poet was far too comprehensive and compassionate to be merely romantic or sexual: in a 1874 letter she articulated a vision of devotion that was a combination of domestic caring and intellectual sharing. At the height of Whitman’s infirmity she promised a

“Mother’s love that cherishes, that delights so in personal service, that sees in sickness & suffering such dear appeals to an answering limitless tenderness – wife’s love – ah you draw that from me too, resistlessly – I have no choice… comrade’s love, so happy in sharing all pain, sorrow, toil, effort, enjoyments, thoughts, hopes, aims, struggles, disappointment, beliefs, aspirations…”

And again in the same letter she adds: “I ask nothing more of time and of eternity but to live and grow up to that companionship that includes all.”

Whitman felt keenly Anne’s sympathy: after her death he called her “a human miracle,” and told Traubel “she was subtle; her grasp on my work was tremendous, so sure, so all around, so adequate.” He believed the spiritual bond between them to have been one of the truest in his entire life. While he would never have wanted to wound her, he would never have shied from honesty in his dealings with her. Thus, if To What You Said contains a response to Anne Gilchrist – a real or imagined conversation or epistle – there can be several hypotheses as to why he never published it. One is that Whitman simply did not consider the poem good enough. The manuscript indicates that the text was written in a short space of time, revised as he went along, but never returned to with the kind of scrutinizing attention he paid to other works. The direction that the revisions lead is from the personal to the mythic. Did Whitman lack either the time, the desire, or the momentary ability to treat the theme with the universality he would have wished at that point in his career? Or were his reasons more practical: had the poem served as a draft for a letter now lost or a communication delivered in private? Or had he discarded the text because he had been able to utter its words in some other manner? Was there no longer any need to express the sentiments contained therein? The themes had been raised in other poems in more polished form, and perhaps this hastily scribbled document of the moment had become redundant. Somewhere between 1876 and 1878 Anne came to understand consciously what she had already perceived in the more metaphorical sense. The idealized and real Whitmans merged, and the strength of her understanding stilled into superfluity the poet’s voice.

Taken in the light of the documentary, textual, and biographical evidence presented above, To What You Said emerges – despite its unfinished form – as a highly complex poem that eschews any single simplistic explication. Just as To What You Said is not a mere confession of sexual preference, nor a simple unsent letter to an anonymous subject, so must it not be regarded as a failed poem. Rather, the spontaneous nature of the text, discarded but whole in its first flush of inspiration, should be viewed instead as a fruitful grappling with ideas that are central to Whitman’s entire body of thought.

Of these the first is the notion of the American salute – the kiss of man to man on perhaps intimate terms, but also of friend to friend, democrat to democrat, human being to human being. The salute is a symbol of the love of comrades – of men loving other men, but even more importantly, of men loving mankind – of the solidarity and brotherhood of those striving together as kindred spirits. And for those souls who resist the confines of convention – the fetters of the parlor and who insist on an energetic, unique expression of love that defies any boundaries, be they sexual, political, or spiritual, the poem becomes an affirmation of the right to be different: the right of the individual to express his uniqueness and the right of the democratic whole to be comprised of innumerable unique parts which somehow – through solidarity and love – coalesce. In these terms, it becomes Whitman’s declaration that he must belong to this larger truth, that he cannot belong to the addressee of the poem for what may be personal reasons, and beyond this, that he can belong to no one person because as Prophet-Poet he must be the representative voice of all.

In many ways, To What You Said is a crystallization of Whitman’s sense of self as well as his boldly gentle and joyful celebration of his creative calling as Poet, as the One able to inhabit all living souls and become a transmigrating spirit who is the sum of all contraries. Furthermore, the poem is a statement of the poet’s ability to take a singular experience and fashion that into a communal one, while still retaining its essential core. That Whitman chooses a kiss as the poem’s central metaphor is significant, for the kiss, erotic as its roots may be, here takes on here a far more comprehensive symbolism. In To What You Said the American salute of comrades embracing becomes a statement of the courageous commonalty among all living creatures.

This commonalty born of differences is the very theme of Leonard Bernstein’s 1976 Songfest, a cycle composed for the nation’s Bicentennial. In Songfest Bernstein sought to set to music the words of a divergent group of American poets, whose heritages, roots, persuasions, and experiences all helped define the melting-pot ethic of American culture. Accordingly, the composer’s musical idioms vary to suit the poems’ speakers, and the entire cycle has that distinctive American trait of eclecticism – born of the multifarious inspirations of the songs and poems.

In its original 1976 version, Songfest was an orchestral score for piccolo, two flutes, two oboes, English horn, E-flat clarinet, two B-flat clarinets, two bassoons, contra bassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, piano, clelesta, electric keyboard and bass guitar, harp, timpani and twenty-five other percussion instruments plus the usual complement of strings; Bernstein followed the October 11, 1977, Kennedy Center premiere of these twelve songs for six singers with the publication of the piano-vocal edition. Of all the songs in the cycle, To What You Said comes closest to being a pure “mélodie”; its deeply persuasive lyric inspiration survives in the subtly colored piano transcription as well as in the careful nuancing for the voice. The song opens with a bold introduction that modulates into a sweeter, softer deployment of the piano to serve as an accompaniment to the poet’s gentled refusal and his quiet affirmation of the beauty and nobility inherent in his choice. The C major prelude transforms itself into the dissonance of F# to signal the startling revelation, while an ostinato on low C maintains a confident sense of equilibrium before resolving itself, following the extended postlude, into final serenely transcendent ppp cadence. The effect is of individual musical moments – each verse a unit of thought that requires a different musical world, each phrase a baring of the composer’s and the poet’s souls.

What drew Bernstein to this little known poem which a friend brought him in a newly published Whitman paperback edition? According to his colleague, Jack Gottlieb, Bernstein was drawn to To What You Said because it was unpublished and because it would be new to his listeners. But what struck a very special chord was that he saw in Whitman’s text “a repressed poem on a repressed subject” that appealed to him in the time of his own identity crisis in 1975-1976.

Not only does Songfest demonstrate a multi-cultural ethos, but each individual song reflects the prismic facets of the composer’s own personality: Leonard Bernstein as husband, father, lover, comrade; Bernstein, the leftist and radical; LB, the defier of convention; and Lenny, the beloved creature of contraries, responded to Walt Whitman’s impassioned plea for a human decency that would be unchained from Puritan morality. Like the poet, the composer was both pragmatist and idealist, realist and mystic; like Whitman he was able to capture and convey in his art a blend of challenge and confidence, all the while creating an illusion of perfect intimacy. In To What You Said one glimpses the LB willing to revel in unabashed emotion, unafraid of the chiarascuro of Dionysian and Apollonian. One senses the composer’s irresistible attraction to the mysterious inner life of the poem, his desire to become one of Whitman’s “peculiarly candid and courageous souls” and to disclose its secrets in a musico-poetic statement that clothes naked truth in transcendent harmony – one which demonstrates irrefutably not only the mammoth complexities of this forgotten Whitman text, but also the singular gift of song to supplement the inadequacies and ambiguities of the word with the cohesive dimension of melody.

If these leaves, penciled tentatively and unpublished as they are, are among the frailest Walt Whitman ever penned, their musical setting, like the calamus grass which sprouted in the poet’s youth and grew to philosophical maturity in his nonage, is ever hardy, ever confident – ever proof that the verbal mystery of poetry can elicit instant and intutive response when encased in the permanence of music.

(© Thomas Hampson and Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold)

An essay by Thomas Hampson, Renate Hilmar-Voit, and Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold (1996)

Four years elapsed from the time that Robert Schumann completed what he termed his great Heine cycle and its ultimate publication in an altered version as the Dichterliebe. Fortunately for scholars a great many documents from those four years have surfaced, and these, when taken in context, come together to reveal a unique story.

Schumann completed 130 songs in his annus mirabills 1840 – a considerable vocal output for a composer who had previously produced instrumental music. The manuscripts for all of these songs, bound in three volumes, exist in the collection of the Berlin Staatsbibliotek, and it was here under the title Zwanzig Lieder und Gesänge aus dem Lyrischen Intermezzo im Buch der Lieder für eine Singstimme and das Pianoforte that we found the original version of the Heine cycle, composed between May 24 and June 1, 1840. An examination of the manuscript revealed not only the four additional songs, but also a significant number of difference in notation, dynamics, and even text. These differences led us to investigate the reasons for the changes.

We began with Schumann’s correspondence from the period, seeking to place the 20 Lieder in its context. Several interesting clues emerged. On May 25, 1840, for example, when he was already in the process of composing the songs, Schumann wrote to his bride, Clara: Several days ago a Berlin publisher spoke to one about my songs but I do not like the idea of editing them so much. […] Their name is Bote and Bock. One day after completing the last Heine song – (Schumann had inscribed End after the twentieth song in the manuscript), he sent the following letter to a newly opened publishing house in Berlin:

I have just now completed a great song work and I am proud to enclose the list of titles; the work itself, shall follow within fourteen days. I would be happy to see this entire group of songs which has been conceived of as a whole to appear in its entirety. […] Concerning the format of the plates I would be pleased with something that looked liked your edition of Kinderszenen. How successful these songs may be in public, I cannot really say. I can say, however, that I have never before written anything with such love as when I was composing this group. With my numerous connecting passages it as also easy for me to create preludes and arrangements for the songs.

The publisher, however, refused to print the songs because, he said, the cycle was too significant and in our view not suited to our firm – probably a euphemism of its being too expensive for a house which prefered to print little piano pieces.

Of the numerous songs completed in 1840, three groups were issued in that same year by three different publishers: the Heine Liederkreis, Opus 24 by Breitkopf und Härtel; Myrthen, Opus 25, Schumann’s wedding present to Clara, as well as Opus 30. Three others – Opus 31, Opus 35, and Opus 37 – followed in 1841 with other publishers, while publication of the rest of the 1840 output was not completed until 1850 – understandable given the number of songs. From 1840 until 1843 there is no further documentation of Schumann’s efforts to get the 20 Lieder und Gesänge published; he appears to have left them untouched. But on August 6, 1843, Schumann then addressed himself to Breitkopf und Hartel in the following letter, which is not without some contradictions:

May I be so bold as to inquire if you would be willing to print a Lieder work I have written. I have worked on this for two years (!) and tried to sell it and it may be that for the time being I will end my career as a song composer with these Lieder. They are a cycle of twenty songs, which has been composed as a whole, but in which each separate entity represents a complete unit unto itself. If it could be ready for Easter 1844, that would be lovely.

It is remarkable that an otherwise extremely detailed a composer could have miscalculated by an entire year, and it also cannot be correct that he had been continuously busy preparing these songs. Nevertheless, because he had at the same time offered the publisher songs Clara had written, Breitkopf showed him the courtesy of inviting him to a verbal discussion about his large volume of songs. We do not know whether or not this conversation actually took place, but on August 31 Schumann withdrew his offer from Breitkopf. Finally in October he proferred the cycle to a third firm with whom he had never before worked. This was the house of C.F. Peters in Leipzig, who ultimately did publish the Dichterliebe. To Peters, Schumann offered three works, (among them his Second Symphony); the first of these was his song cycle now entitled Zwanzig Lieder and Gesänge für eine Singstimme mit Begleitung des Pianofortes, Opus 47(!) Peters was willing to print the songs, and Schumann entrusted his copyist with the preparations. In his household accounts for October 26, he has noted costs to Bruckner for copying the Heine Lieder. On November 14 the manuscript was sent to the publisher in its unaltered, unedited form, as we can tell from the fee to which Schumann refers:

I hereby enclose to you gentlemen my Heine Lieder cycle. On the title page it might be nice, as customary to print the opening lines of the various poerns. I confirm the honorarium of twenty gold Louis to be paid upon receipt of the manuscript. I also ask for six free copies. If the cycle can be ready for Christmas to surprise my wife, that would please me, but this is only a wish, not a condition.

Peters did not succeed, after all, in getting the Lieder out by Christmas, but Schumann, himself, may not have minded as he was busy with other pressing matters. He was preparating for a major trip to Russia, which was to last from January 25 until May 31, 1844; he conducted in December the Leipzig premiere of Paradies and die Peri – (which was a great success and led to his reconciliation with his father-in-law Wieck) – and, as Clara’s wedding diary indicates, until his departure he was very busy correcting proofs for that oratorio, which Breitkopf subsequently published.

Nevertheless, he did try to pay attention to the printing of the Heine cycle. In a transcript of a recently discovered letter from December 27, 1843, Schumann requests galleys from Peters:

Because I am about to embark on a major trip twelve to fourteen days from now, I would be very pleased if I could receive my galleys of the Liederkreis Dichterliebe before I go. In the events that the plates will be finished, could you please send them with someone as quickly as possible.

This is the first reference to the title Dichterliebe, which does not appear again in any correspondence until August 1844 when the printing of the sixteen songs as Opus 48 was completed and delivered to Schumann and he wrote, asking for his free copies. Implicit in that letter is something Peters’ longtime proofreader Roitzsch is said to have recounted much later: that Schumann made a great many changes in the Dichterliebe in the first set of galleys and then in the final revision so that the first printing ultimately had to be redone.

But what constituted this first printing? It is clear from the aforementioned documentation as well as from the appearance of the manuscript that no changes or shortening of the cycle were made between June 1840 and October 1843. It is further clear that for years Schumann had placed a special emphasis on printing the 20 Lieder as they were intended: a complete cycle. It is also true that for years after the publication of the Dichterliehe Schumann continued to think of the Heine cycle in its original format. A diary entry from July 1846 says:

I have composed almost all of my works – even the smallest pieces – in an inspired frame of rnind, many in a remarkably brief time – my First Symphony in B Major in just four days, a cycle of twenty songs in a very short period, and Die Peri in an even, relatively speaking breifer time. From 1845 onward where I began to find everything there in my brain, I began an entirely new approach to composition.

Why then the revisions? When and by whom were they authorized? And what was the effect of these changes? The most obvious conundrum is what happened to the four songs which were cut. We only know that they were first published posthumously as part of Opus 127 and Opus 142, and therefore, they are often misconstrued to be late works of Schumann. More difficult to answer is the question of when and why the manuscript was altered because to date there is a dearth of evidence or documents from the time of the actual printing. Not even correction copies are available, as they are for Schumann’s other works. All this opens the door to speculation about the process of changing and editing which took place.

The obvious incongruities and subsequent speculation have been historically a “problem” with the Dichterliebe. The first major study of the two versions, manuscript and first edition dating from 1914 was by A Dr. Viktor E. Wolff. This study, long since out of publication, has been a welcome, clarifying influence on this recording.

Before the above mentioned letters and documents had come to light, the common assumption was that Schumann must have cut the four songs himself, and that the changes were naturally made for the better. The arguments in support of this theory are based on a variety of premises ranging from biographical ones to musical and textual speculations, as if Schumann were trying to manipulate textual sources to his own autobiography. The efforts to establish such evidence tend to lead to an even broader view that a creative person like Schumann thought about his spiritual output at different times in different ways and that with the years it was quite possible he had changed his views about his songs. There is no musical, autobiographical, or historical evidence to be found anywhere, to support the conclusion that Schumann changed his rnind or later came to view the cycle with a different purpose. Such arguments are fallacious, and the facts indicate a more complex historical sequence of events. Rather than autobiography, Schumann was interested in articulating his understanding of Heine. From beginning to end, the 20 Lieder and Gesänge is about the great poet’s thought encased in Schumann’s music.

What is it that attracted Schmann to Heine? When, how long, and in what ways did he explore those connections? What did he hope his 20 Lieder would say about his understandings of the poet?

In 1828 the then eighteen year-old Schumann had met Heine in Munich and had described the poet: On his lips there played a bitterly ironic smile but it was a lofty smile aimed at the trivialities of life and a scorn for petty men. The notion that Schumann either ignored or tried to soften Heine’s irony is a widespread one that has not been frequently enough challenged. Schumann later referred to the issue of the irony in his writings in almost Heinesque terms – (one can almost imagine the words come from the Lyrisches Intermezzo itself:) At certain points in time poetry dons the mask of irony in order to conceal its usage of pain; perhaps for a moment the friendly hand of a genius may lift that mask so that wild tears may be transformed into pearls.

We know that in May 1840 Schumann had begun to set a series of poems from Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo, though he had not yet finalized in his mind the exact number or sequence of the songs – a process which would take him a few more days. In the first edition of the Buch der Lieder, which we know Schumann owned and used to compose his cycle, the Lyrisches Intermezzo contains sixty-six songs and a prologue. In this prologue a dreamy poet called a knight, is abruptly catapulted back from the fairyland of his illusions about life and love into a lonely poet’s attic. It is essential to read the entire cycle of poems from this self-ironic premise, and naturally, Schumann had read it this way himself in 1840 when he began to compose. Heine’s poetic diction employs practically the entire repertory of Romantic symbols and images to give the poems a metaphorical dimension as well as to inject into them his own brand of irony. The way Schumann captures these dimensions in his songs belies any naieveté on his part or any lack of understanding of the ironic implications, though the naive label has remanned persistently and mistakenly attached to the Dichterliebe. Thus, knowing the original version of the complete Heine cycle contributes to understanding Schumann’s appreciation for and interpretation of Heine.

In the songs which were later cut, the dream world with its shadowy depths is all the clearer, just as it is that much more present in the first versions of the sixteen remaining songs before they were altered. For example, dark intimations already surface in Dein Angesicht before peaking in the self-pitying and self-ironic closing lines of Es leuchtet meine Liebe: When I am in the grave, only then will this fairy tale be ended. In Mein Wagen rollet langsam (Nr. 16) there is a close motivic/musical connection to the next song, Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet (Nr. 17) that demonstrates unmistakeably how the dream of one song influences the next and adds to it another level of meaning. Knowing the original also reinforces the stylistic interconnectedness of the songs and the poems. In the first version the clarity of the text is even more pronounced against the melodic line, and the rhythms are closer to speech. In a song like Nr. 11, Das ist ein Flöten End Geigen, the melody – indeed, the entire song – is clothed in a different ambiance. In the manuscript above the postlude, one finds the marking vivat hoch which captures spontaneously and vividly the fluid key structure. The accompaniment in the first version is also often patently unprettified; many dissonances may jar at first hearing, but they very quickly serve to establish the semantic reference. The phrasing of the piano part is frequently rhythmically differentiated, shifting with the fluctuation of the singing voice and therefore the syntax of the German language, as so graphically manifest in a song such as Nr. 14. Some postludes, which were, in fact, longer often belie a youthful search for harmonic inventiveness. Even thematic material often disjointed or isolated in the known Dichterliebe is in Schumann’s first draft actuary more obvious in its connectedness.

Beyond all of these difference, the manuscript of the twenty songs offers its interpreter a few more opportunities to observe divergent details. Persistently repeated printing errors can be corrected by studying the manuscript. Not only did the published version contain printing errors, but some dynamic markings differed; many tempo and phrase indicators from the original manuscript were absent; and the lower-lying tessitura of the original was tailored to fit the treble voice of the piano part.

Citing all these details is, in no way, meant to suggest that the “discovery,” performance and recording of the first version of Schumann’s Heine cycle devalues or impugns the significance of the printed Dichterliebe. Rather it argues for the uniqueness and importance of both versions, which, standing side-by-side, illuminate the creative process of one of our great geniuses and enrich the repertory.

Ein Essay von Thomas Hampson

Das Lied ist eine Metapher für Phantasie, es ist ein zu Musik verdichteter poetischer Gedanke. Die Idee von “Amerika” hatte immer verschiedene Bedeutungen sowohl für die Menschen die dort leben, als auch für den Rest der Welt. Diese “Neue Welt” – noch formbar, lebendig und voller Ideen und Ideale – kann für alle so tiefgreifend und real werden wie sie sie sich vorstellen mögen.

Eine Untersuchung des Liedes in Amerika lädt mehr als andere Disziplinen ein, in die Psyche dieser Neuen Welt vorzudringen. Den Fäden ihrer eigenen nationalen Identität folgend, mit Europäischen Ursprüngen verwoben, haben Amerikanische Komponisten eine unverwechselbare und lebendige Lied-Tradition geschaffen, die unsere Kultur prägte, zur Entwicklung der Amerika-eigenen Formen von Folk, Jazz und Musiktheater beitrug, und während des letzten Jahrhunderts gesteigerte Beliebtheit bei internationalen Musikern und Zuhörern gewann.

Unsere Nation, aus deren Boden der Baum der Freiheit entsprang, wie Jefferson sagte, “mit dem Blut von Märtyrern gegossen”, bot jenen, die den Preis der Freiheit gewonnen hatten, die Möglichkeit, aus einer Vielfalt alter Traditionen und dem Rohmaterial der letzten großen Grenze dieser Erde, eine neue Welt zu schaffen. Eine einzigartige Kultur entstand aus unserer Gründerväter Versprechen von “Leben, Freiheit und dem Streben nach Glück,” eine Kultur, die sich weiter herausbildet aus den scheinbar endlosen Ressourcen ihres Volkes.

Francis Hopkinson, einer der Unterzeichner unserer Unabhängigkeitserklärung, wird die Komposition des ersten Amerikanischen Kunstliedes, My days have been so wondrous free, datiert 1759, zugeschrieben. Obwohl dieses und weitere seiner Lieder stark vom Englischen und Italienischen Repertoire des mittleren 18. Jahrhunderts beeinflusst waren, erkannte Hopkinson seinen einmaligen Platz in der Amerikanischen Musik. In einem folgenden Band seines Werkes für Harpsichord und Forte-Piano, das auch acht Lieder enthält, schrieb er in seiner Widmung an General George Washington: “Wie klein auch der Ruf sein mag, den ich von diesem Werk erringe, so kann mir nicht, denke ich, der Status verwehrt sein, der erste Bürger der Vereinigten Staaten zu sein, der eine Musikkomposition geschaffen hat.” Er fügt noch einen prophetischen Kommentar hinzu: “Falls dieser Versuch nicht zu streng behandelt wird, mögen andere ermutigt sein, einen Pfad zu gehen, der in Amerika noch unbeschritten ist, und in Folge wird die Kunst bei uns Wurzeln fassen und gedeihen.” Hopkinsons Nachfolger waren Komponisten wie Benjamin Carr, James Hewitt und Oliver Shaw, die Lieder im Englischen Stil nach Texten Englischer Schriftsteller komponierten.

Nach der Niederlage der Briten im Krieg von 1812 bis zum Amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg hatte das Amerikanische Kunstlied seine Englischen Ansprüche abgelegt und begann, Genres und indigene Einflüsse in sich zu vereinen, was einen unverwechselbaren Amerikanischen Stil entstehen ließ. Stephen Foster, dessen Vorbilder der Irische Lied-Komponist Thomas Moore und der Schottische Dichter Robert Burns waren, ist der bemerkenswerteste Komponist seiner Zeit. Foster, der in seinen 200 Liedern mit großem Effekt Italienische Oper und Europäisches Kunstlied, genauso wie populäre Liedstile und Melodien fahrender Musikanten seiner Zeit verwendete, trug einen großen Anteil zur Entwicklung des Amerikanischen melodischen Idioms bei. William Treat Upton nennt ihn in Art Song in America “die wahre Verkörperung unseres Volksgeistes in spontanem Gesang.”

Während der Vor-Bürgerkriegsperiode drang auch eine Begeisterung für das Deutsche Lied in das Amerikanische Bewusstsein, teilweise auch Konzerten der gefeierten “Schwedischen Nachtigall” Jenny Lind zuzuschreiben, die bei ihrem Amerikanischen Publikum mit Deutschen Liedern einen so großen Erfolg verbuchte, dass Schumann Lieder, die sie bei ihren Tourneen vorstellte, schon 1850 und 1852 in Amerika veröffentlicht wurden.

Mit dem Aufkommen des Interesses an Deutscher Musik wurden Amerikanische Komponisten in ihren Liedkompositionen ehrgeiziger. Viele gingen nach Deutschland, um zu studieren, und kamen mit neuen Ideen, die sie vom Deutschen Lied und Französischen Melodien gesammelt hatten, in die Vereinigten Staaten zurück. Nur wenig ist heute vom Werk dieser bahnbrechenden Amerikaner bekannt. Trotzdem haben sie mit ihrem Schaffen eine erste Unterscheidung zwischen “Populärmusik” und “Kunstlied” erreicht.

Es dauerte noch eine weitere Generation, um die auf der anderen Seite des Ozeans gesammelten Ideen mit dem schon bekannten Amerikanischen Idiom zu verschmelzen. Das 19. Jahrhundert brachte daher in Europa geschulte Komponisten wie Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, George W. Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, James H. Rogers, Ethelbert Nevon, Sidney Homer und Henry F. Gilbert hervor. Foote und Chadwick waren die ersten dieser Gruppe, die den Status des Amerikanischen Liedes auf einen höheren Level von Persönlichkeit und Qualität gehoben haben. MacDowells Lieder, ebenso gut ausgeführt, tragen die Spuren seiner Deutschen Ausbildung. Auch die Werke von Harry T. Burleigh sind beachtenswert, einige davon sind Arrangements von Spirituals, die internationale Anerkennung errungen haben. Burleigh selbst hatte sie Dvorák vorgespielt.

Der Einfluss des Französischen Impressionismus während der ersten zwei Dekaden des 20. Jahrhunderts kommt im Werk vieler Amerikaner zum Ausdruck, darunter John Alden Carpenter, Charles Loeffler und Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Am Beginn seiner kurzen Karriere komponierte Griffes Lieder für Deutsche und Französische Texte, ließ fremdsprachiges Material später jedoch zurück, ohne allerdings seine Impressionistischen Einflüsse zu opfern.

Mit dem Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges befreite Amerika sich von den Fesseln der Europäischen Musikkultur und nahm Dvoráks Herausforderung an, “sich um die eigene Volksmusik zu bemühen.” Arthur Farwell, der 1902 den Verlag Wa-Wan Press gründete um Amerikanische Musik zu veröffentlichen, begann mit intensiven Studien der Musik der Amerikanischen Ureinwohner, des Ragtime und der “Neger” Musik. Seine weitreichenden Interessen umfassten auch die Lieder aus Frankreich, Deutschland und Russland. Charles Wakefield Cadman schrieb mehr als 300 Lieder, zwei davon von Indianischen Stammesmelodien abgeleitet, die häufig aufgeführt und aufgenommen wurden.

Charles Ives war das erste Amerikanische “Original” in der Musik und der erste Amerikanische Komponist, der internationale Anerkennung genoss. Seine Musik ist so einzigartig, dass sie sich nicht in die Grenzen des Wortes “Stil” zwingen lässt. Seine musikalische Welt war eine völlig autonome, hatte jedoch auch Wurzeln in seinen New England Ursprüngen. Er entwickelte eigene komplexe Techniken und Effekte, die sogar die Parodie umspannen konnten. Seine frühen Lieder hatte er auch zu Deutschen und Französischen Texten geschrieben.

In der Zeit zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen etablierte die Amerikanische Musik ihre eigene Identität als eine lebendige kulturelle Kraft, die weltweit anerkannt wurde. Die Entwicklung des Phonographen und die Institution des Radios nach 1920 und Sendenetz-Programmierung 1926 brachte große Künstler mit dem Programm der Amerikanischen Komponisten in die Wohnzimmer von Millionen von Amerikanern, die vielleicht niemals eine Live Aufführung besucht hätten. Trotzdem viele Amerikanische Komponisten dieser Periode andere Genres verfolgten, schrieben Aaron Copland und Samuel Barber auch wichtige Werke für Solo Singstimme. Andere Amerikaner, die in dieser Zeit beachtenswerte Kunstlieder geschaffen haben, sind Richard Hageman, Henry Hadley, Louis Campbell-Tipton, Elinor Remick Warren, Wintter Watts, A. Walter Kramer und William Grant Still.

William Treat Upton bemerkt in seinem Buch eine signifikante Entwicklung in der Ausbildung des Amerikanischen Kunstliedes in dieser Periode der Geschichte: “… es wird mehr und mehr erkannt klar werden, dass modernes Liedgut nicht mehr nur als Text plus Musik oder Musik plus Text gesehen werden kann, sondern eher Text multipliziert mit Musik oder Musik multipliziert mit Text ist; Text, der so mit der Musik reagiert, Musik, die so mit dem Text reagiert, dass die zwei Elemente unauflöslich miteinander verbunden werden, das eine ohne das andere nicht komplett ist. Faktisch scheint mir, dass dies der Test für modernes Liedgut ist…”

Amerikanischen Komponisten verlassen sich also zugunsten ihrer eigenen Stimmen immer weniger auf Europäische Texte. Es existiert eine Faszination mit den spirituellen Ideen der Transzendentalistischen Dichter und dem Amerikanischen Barden, Walt Whitman. Whitman inspirierte eine neue, dynamische und forsche, demokratische Sprache, deren innewohnender musikalischer Rhythmus sowohl hier als auch im Ausland gut in das Lied zu transportieren war.

Nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg festigten neue Richtungen in der Amerikanischen Dichtung, die sich früher durch Dichter wie e.e. cummings und Gertrude Stein etabliert hatte, das Konzept des Dichters als gleichwertigen Partner des Komponisten im kreativen Prozess. Komponisten wie Virgil Thomson, John Duke, Marc Blitzstein, Gunther Schuller und Celius Dougherty profitierten von diesem einzigartigen Gedeihen der “neuen” Dichtung.

Nach 1945 traten zwei unterschiedliche Richtungen in der Musikwelt auf, die das Amerikanische Kunstlied stark beeinflussten: Komponisten, die im Bereich der Tonalität weiterschrieben, und jene, die mit einer völlig neuen Welt einer erforschenden Tonalität auf der Reihentechnik von Schönberg und Webern basierend, arbeiteten. Hauptbeispiele von Amerikanischen Komponisten, die in tonaler Tradition schrieben sind Samuel Barber und Ned Rorem, dessen überaus produktives Schaffen über ein Spektrum an Gegenständen reicht, das mit Ives konkurrieren kann. Theodore Chanler und Paul Bowles schrieben unvergessliche tonale Lieder. Nachkriegs-Komponisten, die dem breiteren Pfad der Avantgarde folgten sind zum Beispiel John Cage, Ruth Crawford, Milton Babbitt, Wallingford Riegger, Ernst Krenek und George Rochberg.

Das 21. Jahrhundert, obwohl noch in seinen Kinderschuhen, hat Amerika mit wiederholten Schlägen gegen seine Institutionen kämpfen sehen. Zu dieser entscheidenden Zeit in der Geschichte bietet das Amerikanische Kunstliedgut eine Möglichkeit mit der einfachen Schönheit von Wort und Musik die Wahrheit einer Nation, die aus einer das Individuum feiernden Ideologie geboren ist, zu kommunizieren. Diese Sprache von Herz und Hirn sagt alles über die Kultur, die sie geschaffen hat. Und wenn wir unsere eigenen Lieder singen werden die, die uns hören, das Beste erleben, was Freiheit des Denkens und Bestimmung durch die Erschaffung großer Kunst erreichen können.

(Thomas Hampson, December 2004; übersetzt von Andrea Richter.)

Ein Essay von Stefan Drees.

Während sich im 19. Jahrhundert die amerikanische Kultur noch weitgehend unter dem Eindruck europäischer Standards entwickelte, geriet umgekehrt etwa seit dem Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts das genuin Eigene der amerikanischen Kultur auch in Europa in den Blick. Alte und Neue Welt wurden zu zwei kulturellen Polen, die jedoch obgleich von vielen Künstlern offen gegeneinander ausgespielt – immer auch untereinander in Verbindung standen. Hiervon erzählt das heutige Konzertprogramm mit seinen Gegensätzen: Da ist zunächst der Deutsche Kurt Weill, der, ein Opfer der politischen Umstände, in die Vereinigten Staaten emigriert und dort in europäischer Tradition Lieder auf Texte des amerikanischen Poeten Walt Whitman komponiert; und da ist der Amerikaner Aaron Copland, der nach Europa kommt, um während dieses kurzen Aufenthalts seine eigenen kulturellen Wurzeln zu entdecken. Diesen beiden Protagonisten lassen sich zwei weitere Komponisten zuordnen: auf der einen Seite Karl Amadeus Hartmann, der sein den europäischen Komponiertraditionen verpflichtetes Ausdrucksbedürfnis gegen die Gewalt einer repressiven Weltordnung setzt; auf der anderen Seite Charles Ives, dessen Komponieren von der Philosophie Ralph Waldo Emersons und Henry David Thoreaus beeinflußt ist und sich dabei auf eine tief empfundene amerikanische Identität stützt.

Aaron Copland, als Sohn litauisch polnischer Einwanderer im Jahr 1900 geboren, begann früh mit dem Klavier und Kompositionsstudium. Er wuchs in Brooklyn auf, besuchte die dortige Highschool und studierte dann Harmonielehre und Kontrapunkt bei Rubin Goldmark, einem tüchtigen, aber konventionellen Lehrer. Erst ein Studienaufenthalt in Frankreich in den zwanziger Jahren brachte die amerikanische Seite von Coplands künstlerischer Persönlichkeit zum Vorschein. Hier wurde er von seiner Lehrerin Nadia Boulanger dazu ermutigt, seinen eigenen musikalischen Weg zu gehen. In Paris entdeckte er auch den Jazz und vereinnahmte diesen neuen Klang sogleich für sein eigenes Komponieren.

Vor allem in den Jahren zwischen 1935 und 1955 wurde Copland zu einem der bedeutendsten Wegbereiter Neuer Musik in den Vereinigten Staaten. Während dieser Zeit greifen einige seiner Werke auf sogenannte “borrowed melodies” zurück, verwenden also musikalische Einflüsse aus der Folklore als Basismaterial – ein Verfahren, das für die Komposition “El salón Mexico” (1933-1936) genauso typisch ist wie für die berühmten Ballette “Billy the Kid” (1938), “Rodeo” (1942) und “Appalachian Spring” (1943/44). In den fünfziger Jahren wandte sich Copland allerdings von dieser Sprache ab und widmete sich mehr und mehr einem Komponieren nach den Prinzipien der Zwölftontechnik, bevor er sich immer weiter aus der Komponistenszene zurückzog.

Während des Zweiten Weltkrieges trat Copland hauptsächlich mit sehr patriotischen Orchesterwerken an die Öffentlichkeit. 1942 komponierte er die “Fanfare for the Common Man”, ein kurzes und eingängiges Stück für Blechbläser und Schlagzeug, das er kurze Zeit später als Einleitung in das Finale seiner Dritten Symphonie (1944-1946) integrierte. Der feierliche Charakter und der ausgreifende Fanfarengestus dieser Miniatur sind ein knappes und markantes Beispiel für Coplands Eigenart, durch seine in den Grundzügen zweifellos moderne Musiksprache hindurch in einem populären Stil zu schreiben. Ungeheure, über Musikkreise weit hinausreichende Popularität erlangte die “Fanfare for the Common Man” allerdings erst 55 Jahre später, als sie 1976 anläßlich der Olympischen Sommerspiele in Montreal zum musikalischen Motto der Wettkämpfe gewählt wurde.

Eine ganz besondere Stellung innerhalb von Coplands durch Volksmusik inspirierten Werke nehmen wohl ohne Zweifel die “Old American Songs” ein, die er 1950 und 1952 in zwei Serien zu jeweils fünf Liedern zunächst in einer Version für Singstimme und Klavier veröffentlichte. Bei diesen zehn Liedern handelt es sich um Arrangements amerikanischer Volksweisen aus dem 19. Jahrhundert. Mit ihren oftmals naiven Melodien und sentimentalen bis humoristischen, aber auch frommen Texten repräsentieren sie eine Sphäre der Ursprünglichkeit und waren somit ein wichtiges Stück eigenständiger amerikanischer Kultur. 1957 instrumentierte Copland den Klavierpart der Lieder für Orchester. Die jeweils verwendeten Instrumente ordnen sich vollkommen dem Inhalt des Gesungenen unter; die sparsame, aber dennoch raffinierte Verwendung von Klangfarben wird durchweg zur Verdeutlichung der Textinhalte verwendet.

In einer ganz anderen historischen Situation als Coplands Volkslied Adaptionen entstanden die “Four Songs of Walt Whitman” (1942) von Kurt Weill. Weill, Ende der zwanziger Jahre als Komponist der “Dreigroschenoper” international bekannt geworden, gehörte als sogenannter “Kulturbolschewist” zu den prominentesten deutschen Opfern nach Adolf Hitlers Machtübernahme. Bereits im März 1933 entzog er sich dem Zugriff der Gestapo durch seine Flucht nach Frankreich, der 1935 die Übersiedlung nach New York folgte. Dort war er mit mehreren Produktionen am Broadway erfolgreich und stellte seine künstlerischen Fähigkeiten ganz in den Dienst der Ausbildung eines eigenständigen amerikanischen Musiktheaters.

1942, wenige Wochen nach dem japanischen Angriff auf Pearl Harbor, vertonte Weill drei Gedichte des großen amerikanischen Lyrikers Walt Whitman (1819-1892); erst 1947 komplettierte er diese Stücke durch ein viertes Lied zu einem Zyklus. Ursprünglich für Singstimme und Klavier gesetzt, wurden die Lieder später von Weill und Irving Schlein sowie von Carlos Surinach für Stimme und Orchester bearbeitet. Der behutsam modellierte Klavierpart der Originalversionen und die Feinheiten, mit denen Weill die komplexen poetischen Strukturen in Musik umsetzte, verdeutlichen, daß seine Vertonung am Textverständnis eines Komponisten der europäischen Liedtradition geschult ist, obgleich er an einzelnen Stellen auch ein entschieden amerikanisches Idiom benutzt.

Der Griff zu Whitmans Gedichten war kein Zufall. Entstanden in der Zeit des amerikanischen Bürgerkriegs, gewannen die Texte am Vorabend des Eintritts der USA in den Zweiten Weltkrieg ungeahnte politische Aktualität. Nach der japanischen Aggression schien der Aufruf zu einem gerechten Krieg wieder Sinn zu machen. Die zyklische Struktur der Liedabfolge beginnt mit der Aufforderung zum Kampf, die der Komponist in einen aggressiven Marschton packt und damit durchaus an den polemischen Weil! der letzten deutschen Jahre erinnert. Doch die Trommeln und Hörner des Krieges, die hier beschworen werden, lassen bereits die bevorstehenden Opfer erahnen. Sie kehren denn auch im abschließenden “Dirge for Two Veterans” wieder, in jener Klage um den Tod zweier einfacher Soldaten, die Weill 1947 nachkomponiert hat und die gewissermaßen die Essenz der bitteren Kriegsjahre enthält. Der Ruf nach dem lauten Erschallen von Hörnern und Trommeln, der am Ende von “Beat! Beat! Drums!” erklingt, wird hier ins Gegenteil verkehrt: Die Kriegsinstrumente werden zu Instrumenten einer Trauer Prozession, deren Klänge angesichts der menschlichen Verluste Trost versprechen.

Auch die beiden mittleren Lieder des Zyklus beschäftigen sich mit der Trauer um die Toten. Während in “O Captain! My Captain!” die gefallenen Führer der Nation beklagt werden, kontrastiert “Come Up from the Fields Father” Bilder von Herbst und Ernte im Farmland von Ohio mit dem Kummer einer Mutter, die durch einen Brief vom Tod ihres Sohnes erfährt und damit selbst zu einem Opfer des Krieges gemacht wird – und auch hier klingen die Hörner des Krieges aus der Ferne durch die musikalische Idylle des Beginns hindurch. Mag sein, daß Weill durch die Vertonung von Whitmans Gedichten den Kampf gegen den Faschismus bejahte; doch sind die “Whitman Songs” keine kriegsverherrlichenden Propagandastücke, sondern ein nachdenklicher Zyklus, der zwischen Notwendigkeit und Trauer schwankt und dabei eine sehr persönliche Entgegnung auf den Krieg zwischen Weills beiden Heimatländern in sich birgt.

Während Weill in seinen Liedern den Krieg und dessen Folgen durch die Augen des Lyrikers Walt Whitman hindurch betrachtet, findet das Zeitgeschehen auf ganz andere Weise sein Echo in einem symphonischen Werk, das fast zur selben Zeit in Deutschland entstanden ist. Mitten im Kriegsgeschrei, nach Hitlers blitzartigen Überfällen auf Polen, Frankreich und die Benelux Länder, schuf der Komponist Karl Amadeus Hartmann im Sommer und Herbst 1940 die “Sinfonia tragica”, die er dem Belgier Paul Collaer widmete. Zusammen mit der symphonischen Dichtung “Miserae” (1933/34), der Kommeroper “Simplicius Simplicissimus” (1935/36), der Ersten Symphonie “Versuch eines Requiems” (1933-1955), dem “Concerto funebre” (1939), der Symphonie “Klagegesang” (1944/45) sowie der Klaviersonate “Sonata, 27 April 1945” (1945) gehört die “Sinfonia tragico” in eine Reihe von Kompositionen, denen die Reaktion auf die Brutalität der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft gemeinsam ist. “In diesem Jahr [1933] erkannte ich, daß es notwendig sei, ein Bekenntnis abzulegen, nicht aus Verzweiflung und Angst vor jener Macht, sondern als Gegenaktion.” Diese Worte aus einer autobiographischen Skizze Hartmanns verdeutlichen die besondere Stellung des Komponisten: Trotz seiner Mitgliedschaft in der Reichsmusikkammer, die ihm das Recht verlieh, musikalisch tätig zu sein und Werke aufführen zu lassen, verweigerte er sich aus politischem Protest dem Regime und vergab Aufführungen nur ins Ausland. Aus dieser Haltung einer “inneren Emigration” heraus verharrte Hartmann im heimatlichen Deutschland und schuf eine Reihe von Werken, in denen er seine nationale Umgebung scharf ablehnte. Ohne die Tatsachen bei ihrem wahren Namen zu nennen, bediente er sich in diesen machtvollen Plädoyers der Mittel eines Richters oder Anwaltes, indem er auf historische Analogien – Ereignisse, Texte oder Musik – verwies oder sich der Möglichkeit des Zitats befleißigte und damit eine “Ästhetik des Widerstands” schuf, von welcher seine Musik mehr oder minder versteckt, aber doch kontinuierlich durchzogen wird.

Hartmanns musikalische Zitate stammen daher vorwiegend aus Werken jener Komponisten, die von der nationalsozialistischen Kulturpropaganda als “entartet” ausgewiesen wurden. So ist die aus zwei etwa gleich langen Sätzen bestehende “Sinfonia tragico” nicht nur von flüchtigen Hinweisen auf das Violinkonzert, den “Wozzeck” und die “Lyrische Suite” Alban Bergs durchsetzt, sondern enthält unter anderem auch Verweise auf die Symphonik Gustav Mahlers, auf Paul Hindemiths “Mathis der Maler”, auf Anton Weberns “Sechs Stücke für Orchester” op. 6 und auf die “Musik für Saiteninstrumente, Schlagzeug und Celesta” von Bela Bartök. So spannend wie die Musik selbst ist auch die bewegte Geschichte des Werkes, galt doch zumindest der zweite Satz lange Zeit als verschollen, während Hartmann das Adagio mit einigen leichten Änderungen zum Finale seiner Dritten Symphonie (1948/49) machte – eine Entscheidung, die angesichts der engen musikalischen Verflechtung beider Sätze in der “Sinfonia tragica” schwer verständlich scheint. 1973 wurde eine Kopie der Originalpartitur im Archiv des Belgischen Rundfunks gefunden; die Uraufführung des Werkes fand erst 1989 in München statt.

Auch der Beginn einer ersten umfassenden Rezeption des unkonventionellen Schaffens von Charles Ives fällt in diese Zeit. Die späte Anerkennung des erfolgreichen Versicherungskaufmanns, der nur in seiner Freizeit komponierte, aber bereits 1918 nach einem schweren physischen Zusammenbruch diese Tätigkeit stark einschränkte und sich etwa ab Mitte der zwanziger Jahre nur mehr mit der Revision älterer Kompositionen befaßte, war mit Sicherheit zum Teil der Aufbruchssituation zu verdanken, die sich in der damaligen musikalischen Gegenwart abzeichnete.

Die Motive der Begeisterung für Ives’ Werke waren denn auch offenkundig, hatte der Amerikaner doch in staunenswerter autodidaktischer Unbekümmertheit mit der Überlagerung verschiedener Ebenen von Rhythmik, Metrik und Tonalität, mit der Berührung der Grenzbereiche von Dynamik, Register und Klangfarbe, mit dem Einsatz von Vierteltönen und Clusterklängen, der räumlichen Disposition mehrerer getrennter Orchestergruppen, mit Collagetechniken und mit improvisatorischen Elementen oder statischen Klangfeldern im Verborgenen all jene Kompositionstechniken antizipiert, auf deren Freisetzung insbesondere das Selbstverständnis und das Selbstbewußtsein der europäischen Nachkriegs Avantgarde beruhte.

Ives, 1874 in Danbury/Connecticut geboren, wurde musikalisch vor allem durch seinen Vater beeinflußt, der seinen Musikerberuf mit vielen freizügigen Ideen über die Natur der Musik und einer ungezügelten Lust am Experimentieren in musikalischen Grenzbereichen verband. Obgleich Ives im Alter von 19 Jahren höchst originelle Psalmvertonungen unter gleichzeitiger Verwendung mehrerer Tonarten und anderer unüblicher Prozeduren verfertigt hatte, sah es nach seinem Studium bei Horatio Parker in Yale zunächst danach aus, als würde aus ihm ein relativ gewöhnlicher Komponist werden. Nach dem Studienabschluß begann er eine Karriere als Versicherungskaufmann, wodurch das Komponieren zu einer reinen Wochenendaktivität wurde. Dabei entstand eine Fülle höchst origineller Werke, die sich durch unorthodoxe Handhabung des kompositorischen Handwerks ebenso auszeichnen, wie ihnen der Verzicht auf alle gängigen Regeln gemeinsam ist.

In Ives’ Schaffen nimmt die dreisätzige Komposition “Three Places in New England”, zwischen 1908 und 1914 entstanden und 1931 in New York uraufgeführt, eine ganz besondere Stellung ein, handelt es sich doch um eine sehr persönliche Hommage an seine neuenglische Heimat. Jede der drei musikalischen Szenen steht für einen bestimmten geographischen Ort, aber auch für eine spezifische historische und soziale Situation und wird mit ganz eigenen kompositorischen Mitteln dargestellt. Der erste Satz – “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Shaw and his Colored Regiment)” – bringt das Denkmal St. Gaudens im Common, der großen Grünanlage nahe dem Stadtzentrum von Boston, ins Spiel. Ives bezieht sich damit auf eine Episode aus dem amerikanischen Unabhängigkeitskrieg, in der Oberst Shaw und sein Regiment aus Farbigen eine wichtige Rolle spielten; er last diese Zeit durch eine Zitat Collage aus alten Liedern wieder lebendig werden und bettet die Melodien, die er während vieler Jahre gesammelt hat, in einen langsam dahinschreitenden Klanghintergrund der Streicher ein.

Im zweiten Satz – “Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut” – sind drei verschiedene Zeitebenen übereinandergeschichtet und durch jeweils unterschiedliches musikalisches Material gekennzeichnet. Mit deutlichen Anklängen an Militärmusik spielt Ives erneut auf den Unabhängigkeitskrieg an, nämlich auf das Winterlager von General Putnam im Jahr 1778/79 und auf einen Soldatenaufstand, dessen Gedenktag zu seiner Jugendzeit in Connecticut begangen wurde. Von dieser historischen Begebenheit ist der Wachtraum eines Jungen während eines Picknicks am 4. Juli, dem Unabhängigkeitstag, beeinflußt – eine Schicht, die sich durch fröhliche Tanzmusik mit Quick Step und Ragtime Klängen, aber auch durch das abgebrochene Zitat der amerikanischen Nationalhymne kenntlich macht. Die dritte Ebene, eine introvertiert wirkende Schicht aus leisen Streicherakkorden, ist schließlich die eigene Reflexion des Komponisten über dieses Ereignis. Auf diese Weise stehen hier drei musikalische Ebenen einander gegenüber, ohne daß sich ihre jeweiligen Idiome vermischen. Allerdings ereignen sich in der Musik ständige Perspektivenwechsel: Zeitlich Distanziertes rückt näher, Nahes tritt zurück an die Peripherie der Wahrnehmung. Dabei entstehe – so Ives in einem Kommentar – im Wachtraum des Jungen “das Bild der Göttin Freiheit”, deren sorgenvolles Gesicht die Soldaten anfleht, die Sache der Freiheit nicht zu vergessen.

Der dritte Satz – “The Housatonic at Stockbridge” bezieht sich auf ein Gedicht von Robert Underwood Johnson. Inspiriert wurde die Musik jedoch nach Worten des Komponisten von einem SonntagmorgenSpaziergang in der Nähe von Stockbridge (Massachusetts), den Ives und seine Frau gemeinsam im Sommer nach ihrer Hochzeit unternahmen: “Der Morgennebel hatte sich noch nicht ganz aufgelöst, und die Farben, das fließende Wasser, das Ufer und die Bäume verflossen zu einem unvergeßlichen Eindruck.” Auf ähnliche Weise entstehen in der Musik aus amorphen musikalischen Klangnebeln ganz allmählich die Umrisse musikalischer Gebilde.

Ein Essay über das Amerikanische Lied von Thomas Hampson

Das Lied ist eine Metapher für Phantasie; es ist ein zu Musik verdichteter poetischer Gedanke. Poesie mag viele Formen haben, folgt aber stets dem uralten Trieb, die Geschichte des Daseins zu erzählen.

Die amerikanische Lyrik erzählt besonders reich davon, was es bedeutet, ein Volk zu sein und zu einer Kultur zu werden. Einer Kultur, gehauen aus wildentschlossener Unabhängigkeit von Geist, Herz und Seele und auf ewig verwurzelt in der Unzahl der Geschichten ihrer Völker.

Die Nation “Amerika” hatte für verschiedene Völker schon immer unterschiedliche Bedeutung. Der Ort, den wir die Neue Welt nennen, ist nicht weniger bedeutsam oder real als die Vorstellung von ihr. Unzählige Gedichte und Musikstücke inspirierten sich an echten und imaginären Reisen in ein Land, in dem die Dinge neu gedacht werden konnten. Und während wir vielleicht jetzt im 21. Jahrhundert von “amerikanischer Poesie und Musik” sprechen, kommen wir der wahren Geschichte näher, wenn wir “Poesie und Musik in Amerika” sagen.

Die Erforschung von Lyrik und Lied in Amerika führt wie wenige andere Disziplinen in die Psyche der Neuen Welt. Dichter und Komponisten in Amerika setzten sich stets gleichermaßen mit ihrer Existenz als Künstler wie mit ihrem Kunstschaffen in Amerika auseinander.

Diese Selbstanalyse weist auf eine größere kollektive Erfahrung, genannt “the American Experience”: die Leidenschaft, sich selbst zu verwirklichen; die Herausforderung, als einzelnder unter vielen zu existieren; die Billigung von Individualität im Kontext des Allgemeinwohls; die heftige Haßliebe in der Auseinandersetzung mit Form, sei sie politisch, sozial, religiös oder musikalisch; die verwirrende Obsession mit dem Gegensatz “Kunst” und “Pop”; und natürlich die ständige Sehnsucht, “das” als “amerikanisch” zu definieren.

Der große Philosoph, Poet und Prediger Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) forderte vom Dichter und Seher, das ursprüngliche Selbst daraus wiederherzustellen, woraus “Sonne und Mond entsprangen” und den Körper als “Umfang der Seele” zu sehen, und inspirierte damit Walt Whitman (1819-1892) zu einer neuen, kraftvollen und glühend egalitären Stimme, wie man sie noch nie zuvor gehört hatte. “Die Vereinigten Staaten sind das größte Gedicht” (Leaves of Grass/Grashalme, Vorwort), und weiter im Sinne Emersons: “Dichter, nicht Präsidenten sind die Schiedsrichter” (“Their presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall.” As I sat alone by Blue Ontario Shores, Leaves of Grass/Grashalme.) einer Nation. Sie nehmen die Traditionen der Vergangenheit (aller Vergangenheiten aller Völker) auf und verwandeln sie in etwas Neues und eindeutig in ihrer Heimat Verwurzeltes. Zu finden ist dies in einer Sprache, die man laut Whitman an ihrer “volltönenden Kraft, Bandbreite und Aufrichtigkeit” erkennt.
Alexis de Tocqueville hörte diesen Wohlklang, als er weitblickend schrieb, daß “Dichter in demokratischen Zeiten die Schilderung von Ideen und Passionen der von personen und Errungenschaften vorziehen werden (…) das zwingt den Dichter unter die Oberfläche (…) des für die Sinne Fühlbaren (…) um das Innerste der Seele zu lesen”. So sah er diesen “auf sich selbst gestellten Menschen” abseits der massiven physischen und mentalen Strukturen Europas auf den unendlichen Reichtum und die beängstigende Leere blicken, aus denen es die Neue Welt zu erdenken, zu erschaffen und zu verwirklichen galt.

Die “Geburt der Moderne”, wie der Historiker Paul Johnson die von Beaumarchais, Wordsworth, Byron, Heine und Baudelaire eingeleitete Epoche so treffend beschreibt, fand persönlichen, entschlossenen Widerhall in den fernen Stimmen von William Cullen Bryant, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, Dickinson, Thoreau und Melville.
Die starke persönliche Identität, die ins 20. Jahrhundert einbrach und Länder und Kunstformen gleichermaßen zerstörte und wiederaufbaute, war schon immer von einer spirituellen, ja metaphysischen Beharrlichkeit, die sich oft in Sentimentalität und Melodrama zu äußern scheint, in Wahrheit jedoch das Wagnis einer subjektiven Narration eingeht.
Dichter dieses Jahrhunderts wie T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Theodore Roethke und Paul Goodman schenkten Whitmans Aufruf Gehört und stellten sich ihren “Traditionen”, zeigten ihre “Heimat” in neuem Licht und gingen unter die Oberfläche, wissend, daß, wie Wallace Stevens es formulierte, “die ursprüngliche Idee nicht von uns kam”.
Diese Ideen, nun Gedanken und Worte einer neuen Welt, stellten einen großen kreativen Impuls für die Komponisten der letzten 125 Jahre dar; Musik in Amerika, die das Beste widerspiegelt, was in den Künsten spontan und per definitionem eklektisch ist.
Diese Episode von “I Hear America Singing” versucht ausgehend von nichtamerikanischer Musik die poetische Narration auszuloten, von Komponisten, die zwar entweder aus Europa stammten oder in ihrer künstlerischen Entwicklung europäisch beeinflußt waren, aber dennoch fanden, was für die zur Erfahrung der Neuen Welt werden sollte.

Wobei die Komponisten in diesem Projekt in drei große Gruppen eingeteilt werden können: erstens europäische Komponisten, die Europa nicht verließen und aus der Ferne fasziniert und angeregt wurden, amerikanische Poesie zu vertonen. Diese Gruppe umfaßt Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze, Paul Hindemith, Ralph Vaughan Williams und Charles Stanford.
Die zweite und größere Gruppe sind in Europa geborene und ausgebildete Komponisten, die Amerika als neue Heimat wählten und ihr musikalisches Erbe mit den Gedanken und Worten ihrer neuen Welt verschmolzen. Zu ihnen zählen Sam Adler, Jean Berger, Ernest Gold, Kurt Weill, Sergius Kagen, Wilhelm Grosz und Ruth Schonthal.
Die letzte Gruppe befaßt sich mit der Entwicklung von Komponisten, die in Amerika geboren wurden, ihre unverwechselbare “amerikanische” Stimme jedoch durch Studium und die Aneignung fremder Sprachen in Europa fanden. Zu ihnen gehören Ernst Bacon, Charles Griffes, Edward Macdowell, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein und Ned Rorem.
Während noch viele andere europäische Komponisten in und für Amerika komponierten und zum Teil auch durch amerikanische Literatur dazu inspiriert wurden, konzentriert sich das Projekt einzig auf die Vertonung von in Amerika geschriebener Lyrik.

Einem Kaleidoskop gleich bietet jeder Abend eine Vielzahl von Dialogen, Impulsen und Widersprüchen aus persönlichen, kulturellen, ethnischen, politischen und sogar akademischen Traditionen im kreativen Versuch, Wort und Ton verschiedenen Ursprungs zu vermählen.
Denn gerade das ist für mich der Herzschlag des Lieds: daß es das Leben in der Betrachtung einer größeren Gegenwart für Momente in der Schwebe halten kann und so dem Individuum Gelegenheit gibt, zu sich selbst zu finden.

Wien, Juni 2001
Translation by Stefan Drees.

An Essay by Stefan Drees.

While American culture developed primarily in conformity with European standards during the 19th century, native elements began to receive attention in Europe beginning in the early 20th. The old and new worlds became two cultural poles which – despite the fact that many artists openly played one off against the other – have always been linked, and the contrasts in today’s concert program provide proof of this fact. There is the German composer, Kurt Weill, who emigrated to the United States after suffering under the National Socialist regime. Following European tradition, Weill composed songs to the poetry of Walt Whitman. Another composer, the American Aaron Copland, went to Europe to investigate his own cultural roots. The lives and careers of two others have a number of similarities: Karl Amadeus Hartmann, who composed in the European tradition to express his opposition to a violent and repressive world order, and Charles Ives, whose work was influenced by the philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and founded upon a profoundly American identity.

Aaron Copland, born to Lithuanian Polish immigrants in 1900, began to study piano and composition at an early age. He grew up in Brooklyn, attended a local high school and then studied harmony and counterpoint under Rubin Goldmark, a competent though conventional teacher. The American facet of Copland’s artistic personality appeared while he was studying in France in the 1920s. His teacher, Nadia Boulanger, encouraged him to follow his own musical path. It was in Paris that he came into contact with jazz and incorporated this new style in his own work.

In the years from 1935 to 1955 in particular, Copland was one of the most important musical innovators in the United States. Some of the works he composed during this period were based on “borrowed melodies” – from folk music and hymnody – examples being “EI salon Mexico” (1933 1936) and the well-known ballets “Billy the Kid” (1938), “Rodeo” (1942), and “Appalachian Spring” (1943/44). In the fifties, Copland abandoned this source of inspiration to concentrate increasingly on 12-tone music.

At the time of the Second World War, Copland briefly turned to creating patriotic orchestral works. In 1942, he composed “Fanfare for the Common Man,” a short and memorable piece for brass and percussion which he later used to introduce the finale of his Third Symphony (1944-1946). The festive character and expansive fanfares of this miniature provide a concise and striking example of how Copland wrote popular music in his thoroughly modern musical grammar. “Fanfare for the Common Man” became wildly popular, peaking when it was chosen as the theme of the 1976 Summer Olympic Games in Montreal.

“Old American Songs,” two series of five songs each, which Copland composed between 1950 and 1952 and first published in a version for voice and piano, stand out among his folk-music inspired works. The songs are rearrangements of 19th-century American folk tunes. Many of them have naive melodies and sentimental, humorous or religious texts, and they possess an originality and genuineness, making them important elements of independent American culture. In 1957, Copland successfully arranged the piano part of his songs for orchestra. In each, the instruments are subordinated to the lyrics, and the sparing though clever use of various timbres serves to enhance the texts.

Kurt Weil! composed his “Four Songs of Walt Whitman” (1942) in a historical context quite different from Copland’s. Weill, who gained international renown in the late twenties as the composer of “The Threepenny Opera,” was one of the best-known German victims of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and was termed a “cultural Bolshevist.” In March of 1933, he escaped the clutches of the Gestapo by fleeing to France and then moved to New York in 1935. Several of his Broadway productions were successful, and Weill devoted his artistic talents entirely to the development of an independently American musical theater. In 1942, a few weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,

Weill set to music three works by the great American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). Five years later, he completed the series by adding a fourth song. Originally for voice and piano, they were later adapted for voice and orchestra by Carlos Surinach and the team of Weill and Irving Schlein. The carefully fashioned piano part of the originals and the fine sensibility with which Weill transformed the poetry’s complex structures into music provide obvious evidence of his training in the European song tradition. At the same time, he employed a decidedly American idiom at certain points.

The choice of Whitman’s poetry was not entirely coincidental. Originally written during the Civil War, the material gained topicality on the eve of America’s entry into the Second World War. After Japan’s attack, the call to join a “lust war” seemed to make sense again. The cyclic structure of this series of songs begins with a call to battle the composer wrapped in an aggressive, march-like tone reminiscent of the polemical style of his last years in Germany. But the martial drums and horns anticipate the victims to come. They appear in the concluding “Dirge for Two Veterans,” a bitter lament for the death of two soldiers. The call for drums and horns at the end of “Beat! Beat! Drums!” is turned around here: These instruments of war are used in a funeral march which offers comfort at the loss of human life.

The two middle songs in this series also deal with mourning. While the nation’s fallen leaders are lamented in “O Captain! My Captain!,” “Come Up from the Fields Father” juxtaposes contrasting images of fall and the harvest in Ohio’s farmland and a mother’s grief at learning of her son’s death, making her a victim of war as well. Once again, the trumpets of battle can be heard from the distance and through the musical idyll of the beginning. While Weil! may well have chosen Whitman’s poetry to show his support for the fight against fascism, the “Whitman Songs” cannot be considered pro-war propaganda. On the contrary, they are thoughtful, alternating between recognition of the necessity and mourning, and at the same time they contain Weill’s personal response to the war between his old and new homes.

While Weill’s songs examine war and its consequences through the eyes of a poet, the events of the day were reflected in a quite different manner by a symphonic work composed in Germany at almost the same time. Surrounded by the war’s turbulence after Hitler’s attacks on Poland, France and the Benelux countries, Karl Amadeus Hartmann wrote his “Sinfonia tragica” in the summer and fall of 1940. “Sinfonia tragica” is one work in a series of musical reactions to the brutality of the Nazi regime composed between 1933 and 1945. “[In 1933], I realized it was necessary to make a statement, not out of desperation and fear of the powers that be, but as a counteraction.” This quote taken from an autobiographical sketch illustrates the composer’s personal position: In spite of his membership in the Reichsmusikkammer, the government-sanctioned musicians organization, which entitled him to work and have his compositions performed, he rejected the regime and as a political protest responded only to commissions from abroad. Hartmann remained in this “inner emigration” and penned a number of works sharply critical of the state of the nation. Using veiled terms, he employed the rhetorical style of a lawyer by referring to historical analogies, events, texts or music – and used quotations to create an “aesthetic of resistance” which is always, although usually subtly, in evidence. Most of Hartmann’s musical quotations were taken from the works of composers described as “degenerate” in National Socialist cultural propaganda. “Sinfonia tragica,” which comprises two movements of nearly the same length, contains brief references to works by Berg, Mahler, Hindemith, Webern, and Bartók. The excitement conjured up by the music is equaled by that of the work’s history: The second movement was lost for some time. In 1973, a copy of the original score was found in the archives of the Belgian Radio, and the work was performed for the first time in Munich in 1989.

It was around 1950 that the unconventional works of Charles Ives began to be noticed by a relatively wide audience. The successful insurance executive composed in his spare time, and after experiencing serious health problems, he virtually stopped by 1918 and turned to revising his older compositions. The late date at which his work began to achieve some recognition was certainly due in part to the fundamental changes taking place in the world of music at that time. The reasons for the enthusiastic, if belated, reception of Ives’s works in America were obvious: With the nonchalance of an autodidact, he anticipated a number of compositional techniques by overlaying various levels of rhythm, meter and tonality; exploring the border areas of dynamics, register and timbre; employing quartertones and tone clusters; varying the spatial disposition of orchestral groups; and with his collage techniques, improvisational elements and static fields of sound. The liberation of these techniques formed the foundation of the European postwar avant-garde’s identity.

The music of Charles Ives, born in Danbury, Connecticut in 1874, was influenced primarily by his bandmaster father, whose liberal ideas concerning the nature of music were accompanied by an unbridled love of experimentation. The 19-year-old Charles was already creating rather unconventional music to the texts of Psalms, particularly as regards the use of polytonal techniques. But after completing his musical studies at Yale (chiefly under Horatio Parker), he began a career selling insurance, with composing relegated to the status of a weekend hobby. His numerous early works show a high degree of originality and demonstrate unorthodox compositional methods.

“Three Places in New England,” composed between 1908 and 1914, was first heard in 1931 in New York, with Nicolas Slonimsky conducting. An homage to the composer’s native New England, “Three Places” plays a central role in Ives’s oeuvre. Each of the three musical scenes uses unique musical devices to represent both a certain place and a specific historical and social context. The first movement, “The ‘St. Gaudens’ in Boston Common (Col. Show and his Colored Regiment),” deals with the monument by the sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens in Boston. Ives was making a reference to an episode in the American War of Independence in which Colonel Shaw and his regiment, comprised of black soldiers exclusively, played an important role. The composer brought this event to life with a collage of quotes from songs of that period, embedding melodies he had collected over many years in a slowly evolving background played by the strings.

In the second movement, “Putnam’s Camp, Redding, Connecticut,” three different time periods have been layered and marked with specific musical themes. The similarity to military music is another allusion to the Revolutionary War, more specifically General Putnam’s winter camp in 1778/79 and an uprising of soldiers which was still celebrated when Ives was a boy in Connecticut. The musical portrait of this historical event, influenced by a boy’s daydream at a Fourth of July picnic, is distinguished by its joyful character with quickstep and ragtime elements and a fragmentary quote of the national anthem. The introspective third layer, with its quiet string chords, is the composer’s reflection on this event. Here, three musical layers have been juxtaposed yet maintain their distinct musical idioms. At the same time, the perspective changes constantly: Events of the distant past come closer while other, more current elements are pushed to the periphery of our perception. As Ives commented on his piece, “the image of the Goddess of liberty” forms in the boy’s dream, and her worried expression admonishes the soldiers not to forget the goal of freedom.

The third movement, “The Housatonic at Stockbridge,” refers to a poem by Robert Underwood Johnson. According to the composer, this section was inspired by a Sunday-morning stroll near Stockbridge, Massachusetts, taken by yes and his wife in the summer after their wedding: “The mists had not entirely left the river, and the colors, the running water, the banks and trees were something one would always remember.” In a similar way, the music coalesces gradually from an amorphous mist of tones to form the contours of a musical structure.

Translated and adapted by Steve Wilder and Herbert Glass English notes are provided by the Edgar Foster Daniels Foundation.

An essay by Thomas Hampson and Carla Maria Verdino Süllwold

Our great national poet Walt Whitman chanted the SONG OF MYSELF, but as he well knew that Self was both singular and collective. Whitman once said that the proof of the poet or the songmaker was that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

Song is a metaphor of the imagination; it is poetic thought encapsulated in music. It is born of the fusion of those Walt Whitmanthoughts in spoken rhythms, framed with melodies and harmonies. The recreation of those myriad inspirations arriving from the world of the humanities acts simultaneously as a prism of creation and a door to the imagination. Its performance depends on a partnership between singer and pianist. This experience for artist and listener alike permits the close examination of life’s successive moments for the reflection of one’s fuller existence. Our great national poet Walt Whitman chanted the SONG OF MYSELF, but as he well knew that Self was both singular and collective. Whitman once said that the proof of the poet or the songmaker was that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it. American song has been, in many ways, the mirror of our nation.

“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear…Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.”
-Walt Whitman

Song-singing-sound and words – these are the primary impulses of LEAVES OF GRASS, the book of verse which Walt Whitman first published in 1855 and which grew with him throughout his life. For America’s Bard of Democracy, the voice – spoken or sung – was emblematic of the soul of a nation. And America, he believed, was a land in need of “a race of singers and poems differing from all others. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he declared – one which “awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.” Telling our story with the largeness our sprawling nation demands has always challenged America’s creative voices, not the least among these, our songmakers who, by transforming deeds into words and enhancing text with music, have fashioned a diary of our unique consciousness-a straightforward, purposefully naive, sometimes eccentric, ever eclectic history.

The earliest stirrings of the concert song actually occurred at the time of the Revolution when Francis Hopkinson, a colleague of George Washington and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, penned the first American art songs. But it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that the first recognizably American voice emerged out of the chorus of cultures that sang across the land.

In 1855 Stephen Collins Foster’s songs were on the lips of virtually every American. In the over 200 songs he wrote are to be found the beginnings of our popular songs, the seeds of jazz, and the roots of the American sentimental ballad that soon became a staple in American home life. One of the chief ingredients of Foster’s genius lay in his ability to hear the heart and humor in the longings and aspirations of those around him and to voice them with a soothing nostalgia . While Foster was deeply influenced by the Irish poet-balladeer, Thomas Moore he also wrote early minstrel songs and later “plantation” songs. Though we now recognize these as northern white impressions of southern slavery, Foster’s music must also be credited for having formed an early bridge between the world of the white and the African-American peoples, not just in his observation but in his direct sympathy for the exile and ostracism of blacks in America.

Stephen Foster was a link not only between black and white, but between a folk tradition which grew into an art song tradition. Here on the soil of a new continent indigenous and European roots intertwined to produce a distinctive new voice of richness and diversity. Music in the new land at first consisted primarily of the hymns and work songs brought by the European settlers of In the woodsthis nation, but soon these imported sounds began to intermingle with the songs of Africa sung by black slaves to produce the rich tradition of spirituals. Eventually these spirituals would develop a secular side that was first seen in minstrels, later became vaudeville, and is now recognized as containing the vocal and instrumental roots of blues and jazz, respectively. These strains cross-bred and produced other branches on the tree of music that extended the resources of songwriters and further blurred the lines between the folk, the popular, the ballad, and the art song.

From Foster until the end of the 19th century, America produced literally dozens of song composers who caroled with rich diversity. Some of their songs won immediate acceptance, though many were lost in the frenetic pace our nation of pioneers set for itself: clearing our land & extending our frontiers. A climate conducive to intellectual and artistic exploration needed to be nurtured. In the mid 1800’s, in the more established towns of the Eastern seaboard, a confluence of men and women – poets, philosophers, and artists – began to challenge the dominance of industry and progress with matters of the spirit and the mind… The American Renaissance and its prime movers – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, the Alcotts, Margaret Fuller, Thomas Cole and the Hudson River Painters – were all deeply influenced by European Romanticism, most especially by the Anglo-German traditions.

“We have listened too long to the courtly Muses of Europe,” wrote Emerson, exhorting his fellow Americans to become American Romantics, rooted in known traditions but, metaphorically speaking, wandering in search of the self-expression that would bear them new forms of their art. Yet listening and looking proved inspirational for mid-late19th century American artists. Thomas Cole’s and Asher B. Durand’s shimmering landscapes, while they captured the topography of the Hudson Valley, owed much to the atmosphere of Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings. Whitman and Dickinson, for all their aggressive individualism, were spiritual kin to William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, while Emerson and Thoreau acknowledged a debt to Thomas Carlyle. The poetry of the Transcendentalists, the paintings of the naturalists, and the music of composers like Charles Tomlinson Griffes and Edward MacDowell all reflect the assimilation and transformation of European values into distinctly American voices.

One such distinctive voice – quirky, iconoclastic, but possessed of a visionary honesty and soaring moral force – belonged to Concord’s native son, Henry David Thoreau. In 1845 he came

“to the woods to live (as he later wrote) deliberately, to front the essential facts of life and see if [he] could not learn what it had to teach and not, when it came time to die, discover that [he] had not lived.”

On a wooded slope above Walden Pond, he built his tiny cabin, planted his bean field, observed his wildlife, meditated on social justice and civil disobedience, and evolved in his journals and poetry a Walden Pondphilosophy of pacifism and pantheistic reverence for all living things. Thoreau’s Walden sojourn, which lasted two years, was but one of the many utopian experiments which grew out of Transcendentalism, a belief in the ability of man to transcend his own senses and attain a higher spiritual and moral understanding of life. Poets like Whitman and Dickinson, writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Harriet Beecher Stowe stood at the vanguard of social change, advocating causes ranging from abolition to women’s suffrage, temperance, and educational reform. Concord, the tiny New England village where the first shots of the American Revolution had been heard round the world and where many of the philosopher-poets lived, became the symbolic and emotional center for liberal free-thought – a place of pilgrimage for successive generations of creative spirits.

Thus it was no surprise that in 1908 to the grassy knoll known as Authors’ Ridge in Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery came Danbury-born composer Charles Ives and his bride Harmony Twichell to tap the heartbeat of his ancestors’ intellectual life and to listen, as it were, to the vibrations of Thoreau’s lyre…

“His meditations are interrupted only by the faint sound of the Concord bell, a melody as it were, imported into the wilderness. At a distance over the woods the sound acquires a certain vibratory hum as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept…”

wrote Ives in the spoken introduction to his song portrait of the philosopher. It was this quintessentially American lyre that was to reverberate through the composer’s soul, causing eclectic musical memories to coalesce into one of the truly great voices of the American repertoire.

Charles Ives had also fallen under the spell of European music during his years at Yale when he was under the tutelage of the renowned American pedagogue Horatio Parker, But there were even stronger influences on Ives – the innate questioning and searching for Romanticism, the quirky music of his father, a one-time Civil War bandmaster, now organist and music teacher, the Protestant hymns of the Yankee and Revivalist traditions, the melodies of Stephen Foster and folk tunes – and these fused in him to produce songs that in their ruggedness and individuality could only be labeled intrinsically American.

An insurance tycoon by day, for over three decades he composed nights and weekends, creating well over 100 songs as well as numerous instrumental, chamber, and choral works – each pulsing with the spirit of innovation, energy, and eclecticism. Leonard Bernstein, a prominent champion of Ives’ music was fond of calling the Pulitzer-prize-winning Connecticut composer “our Lincoln, our Edison of music.” His songs, in their amazing range and moving splendor serve as an imaginative diary which looks back and again forward over almost a century of American experience. “Do I contradict myself/ Very well then, I contradict myself,” Whitman says in SONG OF MYSELF. The history of American song is full of seeming contradictions – opposing styles and inspirations – which give dynamic tension to our music. Existing simultaneously with the European sensibilities of MacDowell and Griffes and the rough-and-ready experiments and musical excursions of Ives was a homey, more genteel body of American song that owed a debt to English folk songs and British sentimental ballads. These composers of what – for want of a more precise label – might be called the ballad school drew their narrative impulse from the current state of national affairs – from the politics and events and poetry which shaped our vision.

Recovering from the wounds of the Civil War in the later 19th and early 20th century, America focused her energies on expansionist policies – both abroad, where she evoked the 1845 doctrine of Manifest Destiny, and on the home front, where settlers, seeking to tame the primeval wilderness, pushed Westward, shamelessly routing Native Americans from their ancestral lands. At the same time, however, sensing the tragedy which lay in store for the Native American culture, photographers such as Edward Curtis and musicians like Charles Wakefield Cadman, who collected Indian melodies, or Arthur Wa-Wan PressFarwell, who founded the Wa-Wan Press to give voice to the progressive and polycultural inspirations of American song, sought to reclaim the richness of this indigenous artistic heritage and translate it into images and sounds accessible to mainstream settlers. However financially mistreated and ill-fated, Farewell’s Wa-Wan Press was one of the most significant and idealistic efforts in our cultural history – the attempt to encourage our own voices by publishing and disseminating their songs and poetry. Farwell’s and Cadman’s nationalist proclivities were part of a world wide web of growing awareness of and sensitivity to the Folk Tradition as a resource for art song. From Ralph Vaughan Williams and Charles Stanford in England to Antonin Dvorák in the New World, early 20th century musicians and artists placed an increasing value on directness of emotion and purposeful naiveté of form – all of which lent an intimacy to art song.

Another contributing factor to that intimacy was the early performance milieu of these compositions. The American concert song, as well as all song, was actually born for personal consumption and nurtured in the home, where virtually every middle-class 19th century parlor had a piano and genteel ladies were taught to accompany themselves in song. So it is not surprising that throughout the history of the genre women have made significant contributions to the repertoire. One of the earliest recognized women composers was Boston-educated Amy Beach. A precocious piano virtuoso, talented recitalist and accompanist, Mrs. H.H. Beach enjoyed a long performing and composing career in which she produced operas, symphonies, chamber works, choral pieces, and songs, whose craftsmanship and success heralded the later compositions of Margaret Bonds, Carrie Bond Jacobs, Peggy Granville Hicks, and Eleanor Remick Warren.

Big operatic love songs like Mrs. Beach’s setting of Robert Browning’s AH, LOVE BUT A DAY! were made famous on the concert platform by American stars like contralto Louise Homer, whose husband was one of our most prolific song composers. Like Beach and John Alden Carpenter, (whose delicious When I bring you colour’d toys from his cycle Gitanjali on texts by the Bengali poet-mystic Rabindrinath Tagore),Sidney Homer relied heavily on soaring stretches of liquid melody,that were wedded effortlessly to the verse, One of Homer’s masterpieces, GENERAL WILLIAM BOOTH ENTERS INTO HEAVEN is a shining example of the genre of “old songs” that continues to enthrall listeners with its compelling narrative, psychological drama, and heart-on-sleeve emotional appeal. Inspired by the mesmerizing incantation of Vachel Lindsay and responding to the sounds of evangelical preachers and camp meetings of the Great Revival’s religious fervor, Homer partners the creation of a powerful tale of the Founder of the Salvation Army’s triumphal entry into heaven.

The spontaneity and syncopation of the jazz rhythms evoked in Lindsay’s poetry proved to be an enduring and irresistible force in American music, reaching out from the halls and clubs of New Orleans, Chicago, Harlem, and St. Louis to the concert stages where art song is performed. Expatriate writer Paul Bowles captured the smoldering anger and raunchy wit of Tennessee Williams in his settings of the poet’s BLUE MOUNTAIN BALLADS. Another of the so-called Jazz Poets, Langston Hughes, joyously gave voice to the flourishing African-American spirit of the 1920’s and 30’s Harlem Renaissance. Along with writers like Countee Cullen and Zora Neale Hurston, Hughes focused the world’s attention on the beauty and majesty of what poet, historian, and sociologist William E. B. Du Bois called the souls of black folk. According to DuBois, the first of three gifts that African-Americans have bequeathed to their nation has been the gift of story and song–a gift whose reverberations transcend race. They can be felt in GENIUS CHILD, contemporary composer Ricky Ian Gordon’s cycle set to Hughes’ poetry from which the song MY PEOPLE comes.

Finding a voice for the myriad peoples of our nation – a voice which respects both the fierce independence of mind and heart and soul as well as the melting pot ethic – has ever been a feature of American thought and art. In the years between the two global conflicts, in a century of violence and political instability, in an era where ties to Europe had been traumatically shaken, American song came of age. American composers finally felt freer to utilize without apology our own native resources. The fusion of so-called “high art” with a folk art that dominates 20thc century American art song can be seen as the culmination of our quest for national identity – an identity that refuses to see eclecticism as pejorative, that embraces the hybrid roots of our music, and that unabashedly celebrates a dazzlingly high-quality mosaic of thought and sound.

Composers like Aaron Copland or Samuel Barber, combed America’s poetic and musical past with a new reverence and understanding. Not only did the Brooklyn-born son of Jewish immigrants seek traditional tunes for a collection like his OLD AMERICAN SONGS, but Copland also turned to one of the most individual voices in all American poetry for twelve of his most accomplished art songs. In choosing to set Emily Dickinson, the composer revealed his affinity for Dickinson’s microcosmic world – a world circumscribed physically by her reclusiveness yet liberated spiritually by the visionary fervor of her unbounded mystical imagination.

In much the same way that Dickinson, together with Whitman, Ives, and Copland, charted new musico-poetic territory, so, too, did Samuel Barber, the nephew of Sidney and Louise Homer, prove himself to be one of the most authentically independent and masterful voices of 20th century American music. Barber’s forty-seven songs – (some of which have only recently been published) – demonstrate the composer’s catholic appreciation for fine poetry as well as his stunning ability to create an equipoise between a subtle perfection of classical form and an unrepentant expression of Romantic emotion.

That balance of Romantic and “modern” owed much to Barber and other 20th century American composers, poets (James Agee), and artists'(Walker Evans) ability to use irony as a cornerstone for their work. One need only think of the subtle blend of humor an nostalgia in the illustrations of Norman Rockwell or the sharp-edged satire in the paintings of Grant Wood, in order to comprehend how intrinsically wedded are faith and doubt in American art. A composer like John Duke captures this tenuous struggle in his settings of Edwin Arlington Robinson, which mourn the loss of innocence, expose the parochialism of small-town life, and dare to question the American dream. Satire takes on a lighter-hearted tone in the witty cabaret songs of William Bolcom or in the whimsical settings of Gertrude Stein by Virgil Thomson. Thomson, whose music criticism remains a model of the genre – explored in his songs a poetic universe ranging from the mysticism of William Blake to the tender, chiding lyricism of Kenneth Koch. Like Barber’s and Thomson’s, Ned Rorem’s song opus offers a stunning array of themes, styles, and thoughts. Active as a songwriter for over fifty years, Rorem’s prolific and diversified piano-vocal compositions embody the dynamic vitality of the art song in America.

Throughout the course of the 20th century more & more composers have turned their attention to the writing of songs, while more and more singers, beginning with the great American recitalists of the past like David Bispham, Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes or John Charles Thomas, have commissioned songs and fought to elevate American works from encore status on the recital platform. Today American song is alive and thriving. All barriers seem removed, and composer and poet dare, as Whitman wished, “to explore that unknown region where all waits undream’d of.”

Perhaps no one more than Leonard Bernstein appreciated the eclecticism at the heart of the American experience. In TO WHAT YOU SAID he chose an unpublished Whitman text, composed most likely as a private “letter” to his friend Anne Gilchrist, but written more importantly to champion “that new American salute” – the bold freedom to revel in difference and find strength in diversity. Walt Whitman issued the injunction that at sunset the door to his tomb at Harleigh Cemetery should be left ajar, so that his spirit could ramble onward on the universal journey.

“I tramp a perpetual journey, come listen all.” Like Whitman each of the poets and composers we hear in I HEAR AMERICA SINGING issued invitations to their countrymen to travel with them – to explore shared thoughts and emotions. Song is, after all, nothing more or less than the soundtrack for the human experience. It is born of historical events and poetic vision, inspired by single moments in thousands of individual itineraries whose paths ultimately intersect and fuse. In the melting pot that is these United States, American songs have provided and will continue to provide the signposts on the road map of our collective journey.

“I sing… the body electric, a song of myself, a song of joys, a song of occupations, a song of prudence, a song of the answerer, a song of the broad-axe, a song of the rolling earth, a song of the universal…”

Walt Whitman caroled throughout his verse. For the Bard of Democracy, as America came to call our great poet, music was a central metaphor in his life and work, both as a metaphysical mindset and as a practical reality. Whitman was blessed with an extraordinary ear for inner rhythms which he then articulated in the radically free, rolling, thrusting verses which revitalized the entire world of poetic language. That same ear led him to the appreciation of classical music. For the poet this was a largely self-taught quest in which he relied on both his innate musicality and his experience as a music journalist to formulate aesthetic principles that would carry over into his poetry.

In the Broadway Journal of November 29, 1845, Whitman wrote his now-famous essay, Art-Singing and Heart-Singing in which he denounced as decadent “the stale, second-hand foreign method with its flourishes, its ridiculous sentimentality, its anti-republican spirit and its sycophantic influence, tainting the young taste of the Republic.” The poet claimed he preferred untutored voices and folk groups like the Hutchinsons and the Cheney sisters to trained songbirds like Jenny Lind, whom he found “too showy.” His initial objections stemmed from the same wary reserve he applied to all imported forms of culture, insisting America needed to create its own new frontier voice, vigorous and free.

“I say no land or people or circumstances ever existed so needing a race of singers and poems differing from all others,” Whitman wrote in A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads. Yet despite his Emersonian insistence on “ignoring the courtly Muses of Europe,” it was only by exposure to European opera and art song that Whitman began to discover the essentiality and universality of classical music’s language. That exposure came during the 1840’s and 1850’s when the poet served as a member of New York City’s working press, reviewing musical performances at Castle Garden, Palmo’s Opera House, the Astor Place Theatre, and the Academy of Music. After enjoying a year of press seats for the Brooklyn Eagle, Whitman admitted that foreign music was exercising an elevating influence on American taste. From the late 1840’s onward his critical posture gradually shifted from a stance of tolerance to one of sophisticated pleasure and finally to one of total passion for classical music, especially for opera.

Whitman’s conversion to Italian opera probably occurred in 1847 when he saw Don Francisco Marti’s Italian company from Havana at Castle Garden. Years later in Specimen Days the poet wrote: “I yet recall the splendid seasons… the fine cool breezes… the unsurpassed vocalism… No better playing or singing ever in New York.” Among his favorite artists were Guilia Grisi, Giovanni Mario, and baritone Cesare Baldiali, whom he called “the finest in the world.” He was also profoundly influenced by George Sand’s novel, Consuelo, with its emancipated contralto herione, and he imagined that the popular Marietta Albioni was a real-life incarnation of Sand’s heroine. He called Albioni the supreme singer of all time, recalling toward the end of his life the impact she made on his youthful soul: “I doubt if ever the senses and emotions of the future will be thrilled as were the auditors of a generation ago by the deep passion of Albioni’s contralto.”

Indeed, it was passion that became not only the key to Whitman’s appreciation of and response to singing but also became the hallmark of his emerging style as a journalist and ultimately as a poet. His vocabulary had an unabashed enthusiasm that is woefully absent from today’s criticism. For example, in describing tenor Geremia Bettini in La Favorita at Castle Garden on August 11, 1851, he rhapsodized:

His voice has often affected me to tears. Its clear, firm, wonderfully exalting notes, filling and expanding away; dwelling like a poised lark up in heaven; have made my very soul tremble.

Though he never learned (nor perhaps never cared to learn) a formal musical vocabulary – he referred to orchestras as “bands,” for example, throughout his writings – he replaced formula with freshness, as his language in describing music became increasingly metaphysical:

…a sublime orchestra of myriad orchestras – a colossal volume of harmony, in which the thunder might roll in its proper place; and above it the vast, pure Tenor – identity of the Creative Power itself – rising through the universe, until the boundless and unspeakable capacities of that mystery, the human soul, should be filled to the uttermost, and the problem of human cravingness be satisfied and destroyed? Of this sort are the promptings of good music upon me.

“But for opera I would never have written Leaves of Grass,” Whitman acknowledged in his waning years. Indeed, the poet’s experience as a music journalist was a significant prelude to discovering and shaping the themes and style that were to become his mature voice when the first edition of his life’s work appeared in 1855.

Whitman’s verse is crowded with allusions to song and the singer. The singer is poet, prophet, bard, mystic celebrator of the self – of the poet in everyman, in the worker, in the individual, in America en masse. Whitman’s references to music are all-pervading and eclectic; in his various poetic songs he chants hymns to a range of people and experiences from “the plantation chorus of Negroes to the strong baritone of the big longshoremen of Mannahatta.” While he, ironically, disliked the piano (calling it a parlour instrument), he loved the wide range of orchestral instruments & used them as images to people his poems. Drums became the march of nations; birdsong the freedom of flight; bugles were calls to valor or funeral taps; trumpets suggested celebrations of joy and fanfares for ethereal bliss; the cello recalled a young man’s heart complaint. Whitman’s poems are, in fact, orchestrated with as full a range of color as any musical score – with voices which rise and fall in dialogue. Of these always emerges clearest and truest that of the poet. For Whitman the human voice was the most poignant and powerful of all instruments. To sing was to articulate both the soul and the Self.

Given the musicality of the poetry itself, it is a small wonder that over 1200 settings of Whitman’s texts exist; (in preparation for this recording Thomas Hampson unearthed over 400 settings for voice and piano alone!) As Ned Rorem asserts, “Whitman is content… A poet’s content in a musician’s form.” The earliest settings appeared in the last decade of the poet’s life, though the first major surge of compositional activity coincided with the 1919 centennial of Whitman’s birth. The range of styles, nationalities, and languages represented by these settings is as far-reaching as was Whitman’s influence on world literature. While there are songs to be found in German, Italian, French, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, and Russian translations of his poems, the focus of this recording is on the American and English repertoire.

In England, where Whitman already had a strong coterie of literary supporters (among them William Rossetti, Anne Gilchrist, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and John Addington Symonds), composer Charles Villiers Stanford, whose influence over several generations of famous pupils, made Whitman the poet of choice for the likes of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rutland Boughton, Frank Bridge, Cecil Dougherty, Gustav Holst, & Charles Wood. Stanford’s 1884 Elegiac Ode inspired Mrs. Gilchrist to write the poet “Your words will be sent home to hundreds of thousands who have not before seen them. How lovely the words read as themes for great music!”

Among American composers of art songs, many were born while Whitman was still alive; most were nursed on his verse as one of the shaping forces of American thought; and all who moved in the small communal circles of American music, inspired each other in choice of texts and style of setting. To cite but two examples of the interconnected chain of inspiration: William Neidlinger worked in choral societies where David Bispham sang, while Whitman was a familiar presence in Bispham’s Philadelphia boyhood; Charles Naginski, Charles Ives, and Leonard Bernstein all studied and worked at Tanglewood, while contemporary composers like Gerald Busby and Michael Tilson Thomas, and Craig Urquhart have been moved by Bernstein to create their own Whitman settings.

The early Whitman settings tended to fall into the big, Romantic genre of the late 19th century: songs whose musical idiom derived from European art song – Schumann, Brahms. They are songs which rely heavily on either the piano as a parlour instrument or on the piano as organ (for many of the composers had church affiliations). This vein continued into the 20th century with songs such as Stanford’s To the Soul, Vaughan Williams’ Joy, Shipmate, Joy! and A Clear Midnight, Bridge’s The Last Invocation, Neidlinger’s Memories of Lincoln, Dalmas’ I Saw the Ploughman Ploughing, and Remick Warren’s We Two.

Other composers, like Ives, Burleigh, Strassburg (and again Vaughan Williams), were attracted to the folk idiom of Whitman’s verse – the vox popoli with all its individuality and universality. Burleigh’s ability to capture the voices of the downcast African-American in Ethiopia Saluting the Colors, Ives’ skill in replicating the poet’s plain-spokenness in Walt Whitman, and Strassburg’s cantorial rhythms and melodies in Prayer of Columbus are but three examples of this genre.

Just as his literary descendants were drawn to the groundbreaking aspects of Whitman’s language and his thematic innovations, mid-20th century composers enjoyed experimenting with musical forms in their settings of the poet. Naginski and Rorem both effect a haunting impressionism in their respective renderings of Look Down Fair Moon; in Dirge for Two Veterans; Weill recapped his political/humanitarian message in a New World idiom; and Bacon (One Thought Ever at the Fore) and Hindemith, (Sing on There in the Swamp), also transplanted Europeans, looked to Whitman’s verse to infuse their musical language with the energetic essence of their adoptive country.

Contemporary composers continue to return to the great Bard, finding relevant chords in both his thought and his form. Rorem (As Adam Early in the Morning, That Shadow My Likeness, Sometimes with One I Love) Urquhart (Among the Multitude), Busby (Behold This Swarthy Face), Tilson Thomas (We Two Boys Together Clinging) and Bernstein have all immersed themselves in the poet’s liberated thought and in his passionate intellectual and emotional message. One of the most moving examples of this is found in To What You Said, Bernstein’s setting of an unpublished Whitman fragment – what may have been a private musing or an unsent letter to his friend Anne Gilchrist. With its combination of delicacy and militantism the song is at once an assertion of freedom and responsibility – a statement that the love of comrades is the highest human good and that that love may express itself in any infinite number of couplings – man to man, wife to husband – friend to friend, individual to society, and poet to democracy. To What You Said, appealed to Bernstein, we are told, because he read it as a “repressed poem on a repressed subject.” With his own psychological contraries, his unabashed Romanticism, his political activism and deep humanitarianism, as well as with his quest for an unique native idiom that blended American jazz and European melody, Bernstein found Whitman a kindred spirit. In that special fusion of thought, word, and music, composer and poet invite the listener to embark on a psychological, spiritual, and ultimately universal voyage in which matter is transformed into fleshy spirit, experience into art, and stasis into flux.

For Whitman, poetry, itself, was a journey and song the signposts along its path. “If you want me again, look for me under your boot soles,” writes Whitman at the end of Song of Myself. “Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged/Missing me one place search another/I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

And so the Bard beckons. In the last one hundred years artists and writers, composers and singers have responded in such generous measure that Walt Whitman would, no doubt, be pleased at the tenaciousness of his roots and the prolific offshoots of his imagination. With that inimitable voice of ego and humility, with the lèse-majesté of the democratic poet, Whitman paid his own tribute to the music in his head and his heart and ultimately his pen:

Composers! Mighty maestros!
And you, sweet singers of old lands, soprani, tenori, bassi!
To you a new bard is caroling in the West,
Obeisant sends his love.

(Notes by Thomas Hampson and Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold)

An Essay by Thomas Hampson

Song is a metaphor of the imagination; it is poetic thought encapsulated in music. The idea of “America” has meant various things to those within and beyond its borders. This “New World” – malleable, alive with a mélange of ideas and ideals – can become, for all of them, as profound and real as they might imagine it to be.

An exploration of Song in America invites one into the psyche of this New World as do few other disciplines. Following the threads of their own national identity, laced with the European origins from which they sprang, American composers have created a distinctive and vibrant musical tradition in song, which has shaped our culture, contributed to the development of the intrinsically American forms of folk, jazz, and musical theater, and, during the last century, increasingly won favor from international musicians and audiences.

Our nation, from whose soil sprung the tree of liberty “watered,” in Jefferson’s words, “with the blood of martyrs,” offered those who won the prize of freedom the means of shaping a new world out of a multitude of old traditions and the raw materials of the last great frontier on earth. From our founders’ promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” a unique culture emerged and is still emerging from the seemingly endless resources of its people.

Francis Hopkinson, a signer of this declaration of our independence, is credited with composing the first American art song, My days have been so wondrous free, dated 1759. Though this and subsequent songs published by Hopkinson were strongly influenced by the mid-eighteenth-century English and Italian repertoire, Hopkinson recognized his unique place in American music. In a subsequent volume of his works for harpsichord and forte-piano that also include eight songs, he wrote in his dedication to General George Washington “However small the Reputation may be that I shall derive from this Work, I cannot, I believe, be refused the Credit of being the first Native of the United States who has produced a Musical Composition …” He adds a prophetic comment: “if this attempt should not be too severely treated, others may be encouraged to venture in a path, yet untrodden in America, and the Arts in succession will take root and flourish amongst us.” Hopkinson was succeeded by composers such as Benjamin Can, James Hewitt, and Oliver Shaw, who composed songs in the English style, using texts by English writers.

Following the defeat of the British in the War of 1812 and continuing until the Civil War, the American art song shed its English pretensions and began to assimilate genres and indigenous influences that gave birth to a recognizable American style. Stephen Foster, his exemplars being the Irish composer of songs, Thomas Moore and the Scottish poet, Robert Bums, stands out as the most remarkable composer of his era. Foster, who used to great effect in his 200 songs Italian opera and European art song, as well as popular song styles and minstrel tunes of his day, contributed greatly to furthering the genesis of an American melodic idiom. William Treat Upton in Art Song in America called him “the true embodiment of the spirit of our people in spontaneous song.”

Also during this pre-Civil War period, a taste for the German lied crept into the American consciousness, in part due to concerts by the celebrated “Swedish Nightingale” Jenny Lind, who scored such a great success in introducing the German song literature to her American audiences that Schumann songs introduced on her tours were published in America in 1850 and 1852.

With the advent of interest in German music, American composers became more ambitious in song composition. Many went to Germany for study and returned to the United States with new ideas gleaned from the German lied and the French melodie. Little of the output from this pioneering group of Americans is known today. However, their work produced the first indications of a separation between what was “popular song” and what was “art song.”

It took another generation for the ideas gleaned across the ocean to meld with the American idioms already known to its young composers. Thus the late nineteenth century spawned such European-trained composers as Amy Beach, Arthur Foote, George W. Chadwick, Edward MacDowell, James H. Rogers, Ethelbert Nevin, Sidney Homer, and Henry F. Gilbert. Foote and Chadwick are the first of this group to raise the status of American song to a high level of personality and workmanship. The songs of MacDowell, equally well crafted, bear the imprint of his German training. Notable also are the works of Harry T. Burleigh, some of them arrangements of spirituals that have received international attention. Burleigh himself performed them for Dvorák.

The influence of French Impressionism during the first two decades of the twentieth century expresses itself in the work of many Americans, including John Alden Carpenter, Charles Loeffler, and Charles Tomlinson Griffes. Early in his short career, Griffes composed settings of both German and French texts, but later abandoned foreign textual material, though not sacrificing his impressionist leanings.

With the cessation of World War I, America freed itself from the bonds of European musical culture and took on the challenge of Dvorák to “go after our folk music.” Arthur Farwell, who founded the Wa-Wan Press in 1902 to publish music of America, began with the serious study of music of the American Indian, as well as ragtime and “Negro” music. His far-reaching interests also encompassed songs of France, Germany, and Russia. Charles Wakefield Cadman wrote over three hundred songs; two of which, derived from Indian tribal melodies, were sung extensively and recorded.

Charles Ives was the first American “original” in music and the first American composer to enjoy international attention. His music is so unique it cannot be forced into the boundaries implied by the word “style.” His was a completely autonomous musical world, but with roots in his New England origins. He developed his own complex techniques and effects that could encompass even parody. His early songs were also written to German and French texts.

During the period between the World Wars, American music established its own identity as a vital cultural force worthy of world recognition. Development of the phonograph and the institution of radio after 1920 and network programming in 1926 brought great artists singing the serious music of American composers to millions of Americans who may never have attended a live performance. Though this period found many American composers interested in working in other genres, Aaron Copland and Samuel Barber also wrote importantly for solo voice. Other Americans creating notable art songs during this era include Richard Hageman, Henry Hadley, Louis Campbell Tipton, Elinor Remick Warren, Wintter Watts, A. Walter Kramer, and William Grant Still.

William Treat Upton notes in his book a significant evolution in the development of the American art song at this period in its history: “…it is coming to be more and more recognized that modern song can no longer be regarded as merely text plus music or music plus text; it is rather text multiplied by music, music multiplied by text, text so reacting upon music, music so reacting upon text, that the two elements become indissolubly merged into one another, the one really incomplete without the other. In fact, it seems to me that this might well be our test of the modern song …

Here we also find the American composer relying less on European texts in favor of native voices. There is a fascination with the spiritual idealism of the Transcendentalist poets, and with the American bard, Walt Whitman. Whitman inspired a new, dynamic, and bold democratic speech whose innate musical rhythms translated readily into song, both here and abroad.

Following World War II, new directions in American poetry that had been established earlier by such poets as e.e. cummings and Gertrude Stein further solidified the concept of the poet as equal partner with the composer in the creative process. Composers such as Virgil Thomson, John Duke, Marc Blitzstein, Gunther Schuller, and Celius Dougherty benefited from this unique flowering of “new” poetry.

After 1945, two distinct directions emerged in the world of music that deeply affected the American art song: composers who continued within the realm of tonality and those concerned with a very new world of exploratory tonality based on serial techniques developed by Schoenberg and Webern. Chief examples of Americans writing in the tonal tradition would be Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem, whose prolific works range over a spectrum of subjects that rival Ives. Theodore Chanler and Paul Bowles wrote memorable songs in a tonal mode. Postwar composers who chose to follow the wider paths of the avant-garde include John Cage, Ruth Crawford, Milton Babbitt, Wallingford Riegger, Ernst Krenek, and George Rochberg.

The twentyfirst century, while still in its infancy, has seen America dealt repeated blows to its institutions. At this pivotal time in history, America’s art song literature provides a means of communicating, in the simple beauty of word and music, the truths of a nation born of an ideology whose language celebrates the individual. This language of heart and mind says everything about the culture that created it. And when we sing our own songs, those who hear us will have experienced the best of what freedom of thought and purpose can achieve in the creation of great art.

(Thomas Hampson, December 2004)

An Essay on American Song by Thomas Hampson.

Song is a metaphor of the imagination; it is poetic thought enscapsulated in music. Poetry, while having many forms, is driven by the basic instinct to tell the story of existence. The American poetic tradition is a particularly rich narration of both being a people and becoming a culture; a culture chiseled out of a fierce independence of mind and heart and sould forever grounded in the very myriad of racial histories from which it hearkens.

The Nation “America” has always meant different things to different peoples. The place we call the New World is no less profound or real than the imagination of that New World. So many poems and so much music has been inspired from the journey inward and outward to a land where things could be thought anew. And while perhaps now in the 21st century we speak of “American poetry and music” the real story is to be found when we speak of “poetry and music in America”. The exploration of poetry and song in America invites one into the psyche of the New World, as do few other disciplines. Poets and composers in America have always been as preoccupied with the contemplation of their existence as artists as with their own unique artistic effort in America.
This self-examination is indicative of the far greater collective experience we call the “American Experience,” i.e., the passion for self realization; the challenge of existence of the one among the many; the tolerance of the specific in the context of the greater good; the obsessive love/hate dialogue with form, whether political, social, religious or musical; the confusing preoccupation with “art” vs. “popular” as concepts and certainly, above all, the persistent longing to define “it” as “American.”

It was the great philosopher, poet, preacher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) who challenging the poet and seer to reconstruct the original self from whence “sprang the sun and the moon” and to see the body as the “circumference of the soul,” so inspired Walt Whitman (1819-1892) to burst forth in a new and vibrant and fiercely egalitarian voice as never heard before. “The United States are themselves the greatest poem,” echoing Emerson as he further exerted that “poets and not presidents are the common referees” of a nation. It is they who will absorb the traditions of the past, (of all the pasts of all the peoples) and turn them into something new and distinctly native. This will be found in what Whitman called a language recognized by ist “sonorous strength, breadth and openness.” Alexis de Tocqueville heard this sonority when he with foresight recognized that “poets living in democratic times will prefer the delineation of ideas and passions to that of persons and achievements… this forces the poet below the surface of the external… palpable to the senses… in order to read the inner soul.” It was his recognitiion of this “man alone” separated from the massive structures, both physical and mental, of Europe, gazing at a vast richness and terrifying absence that was the New World to be envisioned, created and realized.

The “Birth of the Modern,” as the historien Paul Johnson so aptly describes the age ushered in by Beaumarchais, Wordsworth, Byron, Heine, and Beaudelaire, found a resonance of personal determination in the distant voices of William Cullen Bryant, Emerson, Whitman, Poe, Longfellow, Dickinson, Thoreau, and Melville.
This intense personal identity that erupted into the 20th century destroying and rebuilding countries and art forms alike has always had a spiritual, even metaphysical insistence about it oft conveyed through what seems to be sentiment and melodrama but in fact is risking the subjective narrative. Poets of this century such as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W.H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, and Paul Goodman hearkening the challenge of Whitman, have embraced their “traditions,” re-hued their “native” and excavated below the surface, recognizing as Wallace Stevens puts it that “the first idea was not our own.” These ideas, now thoughts and words of a new world, have been a great creative impulse for the composers of the last 125 years; music in America reflecting the best of what is spontaneous and by definition eclectic in the arts.
In this episode of “I Hear America Singing,” the ambition is to explore from a distinctly non-American-music frame of mind the poetic narration just described, the composers being all of an inherent European heritage or influence in their artistic development albeit finding that which became for them the New World experience.

Three main groups separate for the sake of argument our composers in this project: The first being that of European composesrs remaining in Europe and from a distance being intrigued, inspired and compelled to set American poetry. These include: Benjamin Britten, Hans Werner Henze, Paul Hindemith, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Charles Stanford. The second larger group is that of composers born and schooled in Europe but then having chosen America as their new homeland coalesced their musical heritages and disciplines with the thoughts and words of their new world. These composers include: Sam Adler, Jean Berger, Ernest Gold, Kurt Weill, Sergius Kagen, Wilhelm Grosz, and Ruth Schonthal. The final group examines the development of those composers born in America but having found their unique “American” voice from significant studies, domestication and assimilation of foreign languages in Europe. These will include: Ernst Bacon, Charles Griffes, Edward Macdowell, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Leonard Bernstein, and Ned Rorem. And while many more European composers composed in and for America, this project is only about the musical setting of poetry written in America.

Each evening will provide like the turning of a kaleidoscope a myriad of dialogues, impulses, and contradictions of the personal, cultural, racial, political and even academic traditions that are juxtaposed in the creative search to wed word and sound of disparate origins. This seems to me the very heartbeat of song: the ability to suspend life’s successive moments and pulses for the expanded reflection of a greater present allowing for the individual to find the innermost of himself.

Vienna, June 2001