Ross Alex. The rest is noice

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

211

Banner” to convey, in Copland’s words, “the corruption of legal systems and

courts of law.” Clurman plausibly heard the orchestral piece Statements (1935)

as a portrait of Depression-era America, with a Shostakovich-like scherzo

movement (“Jingo”) mocking the shallow chauvinism of the Roaring Twenties.

The movement “Dogmatic” quotes the Piano Variations, blasting out the main

motif as if it were a slogan in a demonstration. Around this time, Charles Seeger

observed happily that Copland had moved “from ivory tower to within hailing

distance of the proletariat.” During a trip to Minnesota in the summer of 1934,

Copland walked into the proletariat’s midst, speaking at a full-blown political

rally for the Communist Party of the U.S.A. As he described it in a letter to a

friend:

We learned to know the farmers who were Reds around these parts,

attended an all-day election campaign meeting of the C.P. unit, partook

of their picnic supper and made my first political speech! If they were a

strange sight to me, I was no less of a one to them. It was the first time

that many of them had seen an “intellectual.” I was being gradually

drawn, you see, into the political struggle with the peasantry! I wish you

could have seen them—the true Third Estate, the very material that

makes revolution…When S. K. Davis, Communist candidate for Gov. in

Minn. came to town and spoke in the public park, the farmers asked me

to talk to the crowd. Its [sic] one thing to think revolution, or talk about it

to ones [sic] friends, but to preach it from the streets—OUT LOUD—Well,

I made my speech (Victor says it was a good one) and I’ll probably never

be the same!

This tale has a quality of make-believe. It is an extravagant fulfillment of

Copland’s old notion of “getting real” by washing dishes. The exhortation of the

peasantry reeks of big-city condescension; the “people” remain an airy

abstraction. All the same, Copland emerged from such political dabblings

charged with purpose.

Crucial to Copland’s transformation were his adventures south of the border, in

Mexico. He first went there in 1932, at the invitation of the Mexican composer

Carlos Chèvez, and appreciated the adulation that Chávez and others offered

him. “At last I have found a country where I am as famous as Gershwin!!” he

wrote to the Koussevitzkys. The National Revolutionary Party, which held

power, was hardly a paragon of democratic thought, but its cultural departments

did advance the socialist program of bringing art to the masses, along the lines

of Kestenberg’s initiatives in Berlin and Lunacharsky’s in Russia. José

Vasconcelos, the Mexican minister of public education from 1921 to 1924,

commissioned Diego Rivera and other Mexican painters to create murals of

workers, peasants, and other real-life heroes. Their counterparts in composition

were the crisply disciplined Chávez, who based his laconic modal melodies on

Amerindian folk music, and his more disorderly colleague Silvestre Revueltas,

who fell victim to alcoholism just as he was attaining mastery. Revueltas’s 1939

work La noche de los Mayas, originally conceived as a film score, has found a

second life as a Mahlerian symphonic canvas, moving from purposefully kitschy

dance episodes to stretches of openhearted Romantic lamentation and on to a

scary Mayan bacchanal that spills over into polyrhythmic mayhem.

212

Galvanized by the Mexican scene, Copland began sketching the tone poem El

Salón México, which, six years later, gave him his long-sought popular

breakthrough. El Salón is richly stocked with Mexican melody and dance

rhythm. At the same time, it retains the rhetorical punch of the composer’s early

modernist scores. As Michael Tilson Thomas has pointed out, the jaunty,

upwardleaping figures at the beginning of El Salón look back to passages in the

Piano Variations. Similarly, oratorical quarter-note utterances for the trombones

and horns in the closing pages recall the craggy fanfares that set in motion the

late-twenties Symphonic Ode. Such gestures serve to defamiliarize folkish

material, take it out of the realm of rearranged cliché. As the historian Elizabeth

Crist writes, El Salón is a utopian attempt to synthesize pre- and postindustrial

cultures, “rural peasants and the urban proletariat.” Crist adds that when the

music is divorced from its political context it devolves into a simplistic essay in

musical exoticism, which is how it now sounds at pops concerts.

Back in New York, Copland edged into more direct forms of musical activism.

He hung around the edges of the Composers’ Collective and tried his hand at

Hanns Eisler-style “workers’ music.” In 1934, in response to a competition

sponsored by New Masses, he set a poem by Alfred Hayes titled “Into the

Streets May First,” which contained the lines “Shake the midtown towers /

Crash the downtown air.” The Daily Worker Chorus essayed the song at the

second American Workers’ Music Olympiad, alongside performances by the

Pierre Degeyter Symphonietta and orchestras of balalaikas and mandolins. The

olympiad was organized by the American chapter of the International Music

Bureau, Eisler’s outfit.

This was as far as Copland would go. He never joined the Communist Party,

and advised his younger colleague David Diamond not to do so. He rejected the

idea that a good leftist American composer should be a “plain unpretentious

person,” as Seeger put it, accompanying himself on a banjo. In a 1935 essay in

the Communist-funded periodical Music Vanguard, Copland showed that his

interest lay more in finding a clear, communicative musical style than in

transmitting political content: “Those young people who just a few years ago

were writing pieces filled with the weltschmerz of a Schoenberg now realize that

they were merely picturing their own discontent and that the small audience

which existed for Schoenberg’s music could never be stretched to include their

own. Let these young people say to themselves once and for all, ‘No more

Schoenberg.’” That last slogan had little chance of seizing the attention of the

workers of the world. Copland was conducting a conversation with himself in

public, and, tellingly, his flirtation with radical activism ended when he found the

style-and the deeper experience of life-that he had long been seeking.

The first section of the ballet score Billy the Kid is called “The Open Prairie,” a

phrase that has become synonymous with Copland’s populist or Americana

style. Woodwind figures in rough-hewn parallel fifths cut across an emptied-out

musical space, conjuring the picture of a wagon train moving across some long,

dusty valley of the West. Yet the music comes straight out of the Parisian

Stravinsky. Keening lines for high clarinets and low oboe echo the “Spring

Rounds” section of the Rite of Spring, as do some folkish grace notes that are

added later. Copland delighted in pointing out that “The Open Prairie,” or “The

213

Open Prairee,” as he initially spelled it, was written in an apartment on the rue

de Rennes. Indeed, there is nothing intrinsically American about such sounds;

they could just as well be used to suggest the English countryside or the

Russian steppes. Still, they do create the illusion of a wide expanse, American

or otherwise. Later, a liberal sprinkling of cowboy melodies—“Great Granddad,”

“Whoopee Ti Yi Yo, Git Along Little Dogies,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and so

on-makes the Wild West association explicit.

Billy the Kid commemorates the legendary outlaw William Bonney, who, it was

said, stole from the rich, befriended the poor, charmed the ladies, and killed

twenty-one men. Earl Browder, the Communist Party chief, liked to portray the

America of the revolutionary period as a kind of proto-socialist utopia; the first

pages of Billy the Kid, likewise, evoke America in a prelapsarian state, before

the loss of innocence under capitalism. When the cowboy melodies are first

heard, they meet up in out-of-whack polyrhythms: Copland’s West sounds

rather like his Mexico. Yet this prairie Eden is threatened by the westward

movement of city-building settlers, whose grand designs already glimmer in the

brassy climax of the introductory “processional.” Eugene Loring, the

choreographer, based his scenario on a semimythical chronicle by the Chicago

journalist Walter Noble Burns, who painted Billy as a good-hearted outlaw in

rebellion against ruthless capitalist values. The first chapter of Burns’s book

contrasts Billy’s bygone world with a modern America covered in asphalt.

Copland hints at the paving of the West at the end of his ballet; after Billy falls

victim to Pat Garrett, the pioneer march becomes a juggernaut in three-quarter

time, accented by cymbals and bass drum. A new keyarea of E major clashes

with remnants of the heroic E-flat of the opening. Skyscrapers are rising on the

prairie, their hard forms glinting in the sun.

Leftist politics runs through other Copland works of this period-the school opera

The Second Hurricane, which teaches the Brechtian virtue of acquiescing in the

common good (though without the scary dogmatism); the CBS commission

Music for Radio: Saga of the Prairie, which may contain a concealed program

about the Scottsboro Boys (nine black youths imprisoned in 1931 on

unsubstantiated charges of rape); and the heart-catching Lincoln Portrait, which

arranges quotations from Lincoln’s writings into a vaguely socialistic narrative

(“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master”). But the radicalism

implicit in these pieces never comes all the way to the surface. Hence, they

have been appropriated by all manner of political and nonpolitical parties over

the years. Innumerable films, television commercials, news broadcasts, and

political campaign ads have used Copland music or Coplandesque imitations to

convey the innate goodness of small-town life-elderly couples sitting on

porches, newsboys on bicycles, farmers leaning on fences, and so on. By the

time of the presidential campaign in 1984, Copland’s open-prairie sound had

become such a universal quantity that a kitschy version of it was piped into

Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” commercials.

Copland probably never lost sleep over the uses and misuses to which his

music was put, although he might have relished the irony of a gay leftist of

Russian-Jewish extraction supplying the soundtrack for the Republican Party

platform. Pragmatic rather than radical at the core, he wanted to speak for the

214

entire country, even at the expense of diluting his message. In this sense, he

was the perfect musical counterpart of the thirty-second president of the United

States.

New Deal Music

Culture ranked low among Franklin Delano Rootevelt’s priorities. Music hardly

registered at all. To the extent that the president supported the arts, it was with

an obligatory aristocratic air. As Richard McKinzie has written, “Roosevelt was

willing to do the noble thing, and support painting, theater, and other creative

arts in the same way he supported them as the ‘lord’ of Hyde Park manor.” Alert

to all twitches of the political web, Roosevelt knew the dangers inherent in

federal funding of the arts. Only with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, the

adamantly liberal First Lady, did the experiment last as long as it did.

From the beginning Mrs. Roosevelt pushed the idea that the government had

“responsibility toward art, and toward artists,” as she put it in 1934. Her most

significant intervention in music came in 1939, when she resigned from the

Daughters of the American Revolution in protest of that organization’s refusal to

host a concert by the black singer Marian Anderson. That gesture set the stage

for Anderson’s legendary concert at the Lincoln Memorial, where the program

included an arrangement of “Gospel Train” by Dvořák’s old associate Harry T.

Burleigh.

The New Deal had a mighty impact on the arts for the simple reason that it had

a mighty wad of money to spend. Roosevelt dispensed $4.9 billion to relief

projects in 1935, whence came the Works Progress Administration, or WPA; of

that amount, some $27 million went to the Federal Arts Projects, also called

Federal One, and, of this amount, $7,126,862 funded the Federal Music Project,

or FMP. At its peak the FMP supported sixteen thousand musicians and

operated 125 orchestras, 135 bands, and 32 choral and opera units. Harry

Hopkins, the architect of the WPA, hoped that Federal One would become a

permanent agency. Eleanor, in her column “My Day,” wrote: “When the arts

flourished in the old days it was sufficient for an artist to have a rich patron and

then to develop under the protection of his important sponsor. All nobles had

their pet artists…Today, for the most part, this method of developing and

protecting art has passed out of existence and I am wondering if the WPA art

projects may not take their places.”

The challenge for any arts bureaucracy is to make sound decisions about which

artists to promote. Federal One, lacking a precedent, tended to fall back on the

Ivy League old-boy network and its attendant cultural connections. The earliest

New Deal arts initiative, the Public Works of Art Project, came about when

Roosevelt’s Harvard classmate George Biddle, a left-leaning artist who had

consorted with Diego Rivera in Mexico, asked the newly elected president to

fund an artistic homage to the New Deal’s “social revolution,” in the style of the

Mexican muralists. Roosevelt showed immediate interest and even laid out

some aesthetic precepts in remarks at an exhibition in the spring of 1934. The

215

president said that none of the paintings exhibited a “despondent theme,” that

they generally avoided “both slavery to classical standards and decadence

common to much European art.” Stalin and Hitler would have agreed with these

sentiments completely; the difference, of course, is that FDR lacked the means,

the will, or the desire to enforce them.

The Federal Music Project got under way in July 1935. “Through the program of

instruction carried on by the Federal Music Project,” a press release for an

education program said, “a tremendous, unsuspected hunger for musical

knowledge has been disclosed among the children of the underprivileged and

the relief population from which the classes are enrolled.” In Boston, opera was

thrown open to the masses, and a reporter pictured it as a storming of the

Bastille: “This was opera for the 4,000,000 and the sign warning, ‘Drivers,

chauffeurs, footmen not allowed to stand in the vestibule,’ might just as well

have been draped, for the drivers, chauffeurs, and footmen were occupying the

seats of the master and the madame at 83 cents per chair.” The New York

Police Athletic League reported that singing classes had proved surprisingly

popular among juvenile delinquents; the boys were suspicious at first of this

“sissy stuff,” but soon were singing out at full strength.

Big cities were not the only beneficiaries of the FMP. Live music spread out to

rural towns, such as Anadarko, Chickasha, and El Reno in Oklahoma. “For the

first time in the history of the state these smaller cities have been able to have

symphony concerts at home,” wrote the Oklahoma state director. “I wish that I

could portray for you a picture of hundreds of school children from rural districts

sitting in breathless suspense at a school concert.” Another report summons up

a scene out of Charles Ives, or, more appositely, Will Marion Cook’s “On

Emancipation Day”:

The highlight of Music Week Observation for the teaching project was the

statewide negro music festival which was held at Boley, the negro metropolis of

Oklahoma. An outstanding feature of this festival was a musical parade in which

over

one thousand pupils participated. Flags, banners, placards and gay

streamers added color to the parade which was made doubly interesting

by musical selections which were dramatized by choruses and class

groups as they marched to the music of three bands.

Large numbers of women played in orchestras for the first time. Dean Dixon, an

African-American, was featured in Time magazine as a rising WPA conductor.

The FMP also took up the cause of new music, setting up a series called the

Composers’ Forum-Laboratory, where composers could interact with the public

and thus break away from their presumed artistic isolation. A press release

explained: “A technic has been perfected by which the writer of music has

opportunity to amend or change his composition in the experience of audience

reaction. Following the program the composer answers any questions

addressed to him from his hearers.” The Composers’ Forum-Laboratory was

directed by Ashley Pettis, an active Popular Fronter and music critic for New

Masses. The first event in New York was dedicated to the young composer Roy

Harris, who used the occasion to call for “a very great virile music…music which

216

moves in its vastness at a very rapid rate, music of great color, music of great

mass, music which could only come out of an American civilization.”

Harris was another model New Deal musician. His background might have been

dreamed up by Great American Composer central casting: he was born in the

oil-boom town of Chandler, Oklahoma, in a log cabin, no less, on Lincoln’s

birthday. Time further noted that the log cabin had been “hewed by hand” and

that the young composer had driven a truck. The implication was that Harris

was no classical sissy or bourgeois darling. The work that won Harris

nationwide attention was his Third Symphony of 1938-an all-American hymn

and dance for orchestra in which strings declaim orations in broad, open-ended

lines, brass chant and whoop like cowboys in the galleries, and timpani stamp

out strong beats in the middle of the bar. Such a big-shouldered sound met

everyone’s expectations of what a true-blue American symphony should be.

When Toscanini deigned to conduct the piece in 1940, the owner of the

Pittsburgh Pirates wrote to the composer: “If I had pitchers who would pitch as

strongly as you do in your Symphony, my worries would be over.”

If the Federal Music Project was a well-meaning, hardworking organization that

never quite defined its purpose, the Federal Theatre Project (FTP), toward

which politically engaged composers gravitated, was too clear about its goals. A

few weeks before the first Composers’ Forum-Laboratory concert in New York,

Hallie Flanagan, the head of the FTP and an authority on Russian experimental

theater, gave a speech with the title “Is This the Time and Place?” in which she

set out her vision of a federally funded radical theater along the lines of

Meyerhold’s studios in Russia and Brecht’s projects in pre-Nazi Berlin. The

occasion was the first meeting of the regional directors of the FTP, which took

place in Evalyn Walsh McLean’s mansion in Washington, D.C. Flanagan said

that this palatial setting—whose owner wore the Hope Diamond—represented

“the conception of art as a commodity to be purchased by the rich, possessed

by the rich.” She was reminded, she said, of scenes that she had witnessed on

a trip to the Soviet Union ten years before:

During the first days in this house I was haunted by a sense of having

gone through this experience before; gradually that memory became

focused upon golden palaces of Soviet Russia now turned into offices

and orphans’ homes and theatres for the Russian proletariat. I

remembered a theatre meeting in the great Hall of Mirrors in Leningrad

where reflected from every side in those mirrors which once gave back

the image of the Empress and later the execution of her officers, I saw

the faces of Stalin, Litvinov, Lunachaisky [sic], Petrov and other leaders

of political, educational and theatrical life. They met to discuss their

mutual problem: how the theatre could serve in educating the people and

in enriching their lives.

That last image—Stalin’s face staring from a mirror—marked an unpromising

beginning for an American arts bureaucracy.

Flanagan’s projects had an obvious socialist realist flavor. Artists were

encouraged to create strong, simple scenarios in which working people played

217

heroic roles and moneyed interests were the villains. In the “Living Newspaper”

play Triple-A Plowed Under, which criticized the Supreme Court for striking

down the farm-subsidy system of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, one

actor played the role of Earl Browder, the head of the American Communist

Party. The ghost of Thomas Jefferson also chimed in, appearing to give

credence to Browder’s ideas. This revisionist picture of the Founding Fathers

matched Browder’s “Communism is twentieth-century Americanism” philosophy.

At the same time, Triple-A Plowed Under was a brief on behalf of Roosevelt,

who was sparring with the Supreme Court. The Republican Party properly took

umbrage at the use of a federally funded theater program to generate

propaganda on behalf of an embattled president in an election year. By

engaging in such blatant activism, Flanagan’s playwrights, directors, and

composers almost single-handedly doomed the entire arts program to oblivion.

The FTP’s most legendary production was Marc Blitzstein’s prounion musical

The Cradle Will Rock. The scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family, Blitzstein

received a first-class musical education from the likes of Alexander Siloti, a

pupil of Liszt’s; Nadia Boulanger, in Paris; and Schoenberg, in Berlin (“Go

ahead, you write your Franco-Russian pretty music,” Schoenberg told him).

Early on, Blitzstein disdained radical politics and dismissed Kurt Weill’s music

as “little more than drivel.” But disgust for the conventional classical world took

hold of him, and he was drawn politically to the left by the Berlin-born novelist

Eva Goldbeck, whom he married in an effort to disguise his homosexuality. He

went on to join the Communist Party. In 1935, through Goldbeck, he met Bertolt

Brecht, who challenged him to “write a piece about all kinds of prostitution-the

press, the church, the courts, the arts, the whole system.”

Cradle was Blitzstein’s attempt to follow through on Brecht’s command. It told of

the union’s fight for freedom in an abstract place called Steeltown, the villain of

the piece being a Brechtian capitalist named Mister Mister, an art-snob robber

baron. The satires of upper-class circles and the artists who aim to please them

are the most successful passages in the work; in general, the workers’ struggle

in Cradle is probably best understood as a metaphor for the artists’ struggle in

the American marketplace. At one point, Dauber the artist and Yasha the

violinist, in thrall to the patronage of Mrs. Mister, sing an ironic paean to the

ghetto in which American musicians had long dwelled:

Be blind for art’s sake

And deaf for art’s sake

And dumb for art’s sake

Until for art’s sake

They kill for art’s sake

All the art for art’s sake.

There follows a menacing quotation from the main theme of Beethoven’s

Egmont Overture-which, we earlier learned, plays on Mrs. Mister’s car horn.

Blitzstein is sneering at the upper-class cult of imported European art, which

covers up the machinery of exploitation and oppression.

218

The Broadway premiere of The Cradle Will Rock was scheduled for June 16,

1937, with the prodigiously gifted twenty-two-year-old Orson Welles directing. A

few days before opening night, the WPA temporarily shut down all theater

productions for budgetary reasons; the unsubstantiated rumor in the theater

world was that the administration wished to suppress Cradle because it feared

outbreaks of violence in steel towns across the country. Literally at the last

minute, Welles heard of a vacant theater twenty blocks to the north, and most of

the company marched there dramatically on foot. To get around the WPA ruling,

the singers performed from seats around the auditorium while the composer

played his score at the piano. Cradle was an immediate sensation among New

York leftists, and a sell-out run of performances followed. But Blitzstein wanted

more than press coverage and controversy. According to Welles, the composer

believed that his work could become a conduit for revolutionary energies on

American soil. “You can’t imagine how simple he was about it,” Welles said.

“They were going to hear it, and that would be it!”

The unlikeliest of Federal Theatre revolutionists was the Parisian expatriate

Virgil Thomson. Already in Four Saints in Three Acts Thomson had shown a

knack for exploiting musical Americana, and his plaintively powerful Symphony

on a Hymn Tune of 1926-28 anticipated aspects of Copland’s populist style. In

1936, Thomson served as musical director for Orson Welles’s production of

Macbeth, which came courtesy of the Negro Theatre Project, one of Flanagan’s

more commendable initiatives. Much of the music was supplied by a group of

African drummers, and at one point Thomson took it on himself to tell them how

proper voodoo music should be played. “It don’t sound wicked enough,” he said

to the group’s director, who happened to be the dancer, choreographer, singer,

and composer Asadata Dafora, a pioneer in the dissemination of West African

tribal culture. The same year, Thomson wrote violently percussive music for the

“Living Newspaper” play Injunction Granted, which was so strident in its

denunciation of capitalism and the courts that even Flanagan criticized it as

“hysterical.”

Thomson also scored two federally funded film documentaries, The Plow That

Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938). Both were commissioned by the

Resettlement Administration, which was relocating displaced farmers to model

communities around the country. Resettlement even had a Special Skills

Division, designing a model culture for model towns, with Charles Seeger as

musical adviser. The Plow That Broke the Plains, beautifully directed by Pare

Lorentz, depicts the devastation wrought by soil erosion on the Great Plains.

Thomson’s score, interweaving hymns, ballads, fugues, and jazz, creates subtle

counterpoint to the images on-screen, showing the grasslands in their primal

state-the Edenic mood again-and then the incursion of capitalist misuse. The

excellence of the product could not hide the dubiousness of the enterprise; as in

the case of Triple-A Plowed Under, a government agency was using an art form

to defend itself against political criticism and hostile judicial rulings. The

narration of The River, likewise, makes an aesthetically and ethically jarring

transition from Whitmanesque rhetoric (“The water comes downhill, spring and

fall; / Down from the cut-over mountains”) to bureaucratic boilerplate (“Down in

the Valley, the Farm Security Administration has built a model agricultural

community”).

219

Anthony Tommasini, Thomson’s biographer, paraphrases the position taken by

Roosevelt’s foes: “The German Führer had his Leni Riefenstahl; now FDR had

his Pare Lorentz.”

Circa 1936, Copland’s “commando unit,” his crack squad of young American

composers, consisted of five men: Thomson, Harris, Sessions, the elegant

neoclassicist Walter Piston, and Copland himself. By the early forties, with the

addition of Blitzstein, Paul Bowles, Samuel Barber, Morton Gould, and David

Diamond, it had grown to battalion proportions. For a time, these composers

seemed to be writing almost with one voice. Fast movements jumped along with

jazzy syncopations; slow movements cried out plaintively in empty spaces.

Scoring was brassy and brilliant. Climaxes transpired in high Shostakovich

style, all pealing trumpets and precisely pounding timpani, the better to punch

through the fuzz of radio static.

American composers had apparently worked out a common practice, a lingua

franca. Behind the scenes, though, the old style wars continued. In a 1938

article, Thomson divided music into three types of audiences, with three types

of composers to serve them:

1) The luxury-trade, capitalist Toscanini public riding with sedate

satisfaction in streamlined trains from Beethoven to Sibelius and back. 2)

The professor-and-critic conspiracy for internationalist or “contemporary”

music which prizes hermetism and obscurantism and makes a cult out of

the apparent complexities in systematically discordant counterpoint. 3)

The theatre-public of the leftist-front, a public of educated, urban working

people who want educated, urban spokesmen for their ideals.

Exhibit A in category 1 was Samuel Barber-cultivated Italophile, son of a

Pennsylvania surgeon, nephew of the Met contralto Louise Homer. He studied

composition and voice at the newly founded Curtis Institute in Philadelphia,

whose officials promoted him vigorously. In 1935 he appeared on NBC, singing

his own easefully beautiful setting of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” None

other than Arturo Toscanini was listening; and when the Maestro decided to

conduct two of Barber’s works, the Essay for Orchestra and the Adagio for

Strings, a minor media sensation ensued. Two years later Artur Rodzinski led

both the New York Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic in Barber’s First

Symphony, which owed a debt to the Sibelius Seventh. While so many of his

generation favored lean textures and brief motifs, Barber produced long melodic

lines and rich orchestral textures, leaving audiences with the feeling that they

had consumed a high-protein meal.

Barber’s rise stirred resentment among some musical operatives of the Popular

Front, who saw him as a useless bourgeois. R. D. Darrell, in New Masses,

called the First Symphony a “grotesque harlequinade of specious modernity

(which, it goes without saying, is about as ‘modern’ as Richard Strauss).”

Ashley Pettis, of the Federal Music Project, dismissed the Adagio as

“‘authentic,’ dull, ‘serious’ music-utterly anachronistic as the utterance of a

young man of 28, a.d. 1938!” But Copland himself, rarely doctrinaire or petty in

his reactions to colleagues’ work, came to admire the spellbinding quality of

220

Barber’s creation, and later said that it had the virtue of absolute sincerity. The

time-suspending atmosphere of the piece derives from a metrical trick that

Barber might have picked up from Sibelius: although the music streams by in a

steady flow, the ear has trouble detecting where the bar lines fall. The result is

something like a modern form of Gregorian chant, and it is no more or less

anachronistic than anything else written in a.d. 1938.

The university-intellectual composers, in Thomson’s category 2, resisted

Copland’s demand for “no more Schoenberg.” Their most articulate spokesman

was Sessions, who absorbed some of the values of the Schoenberg circle

during a Berlin sojourn that lasted from 1931 to 1933. In his Violin Concerto,

finished in 1935, Sessions pivoted from neoclassicism toward free atonal

expressionism, producing a Bergian mood of ambiguity and loss. He emerged

from his European years with the conviction that American composers should

obey only an inner creative urge-an “essential innerlich notwendig [inwardly

necessary] musical impulse,” as he put it in a letter to Copland-and not a

political or commercial obligation to write music for the masses (“forced and

essentially anemic Ersatz-Musik”). He failed to entertain the possibility that one

could write populist music out of inward necessity. In the 1930s, Sessions’s

attitude was a minority position, although it would gain traction in the postwar

period, not least through the writings and teachings of his student Milton

Babbitt.

Thomson’s three groups-traditionalists, elitists, populists-match up neatly with

the main musical parties of the Weimar Republic, the ones centered on Pfitzner,

Schoenberg, and Eisler. As in Weimar, the possibility lingered of a “great

fusion,” an agglomeration of classical and popular inheritances. Weill’s

Mahagonny and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess both aimed for approximately the

same synthesis. By cosmic coincidence, the composer of Mahagonny arrived

on American soil in September 1935, the same month as Porgy’s premiere.

Weill, who had been living in Paris and London since the Nazis took over, came

to America to compose the score for a sort of Jewish pageant-opera titled The

Eternal Road, with a libretto by Franz Werfel and a production by Max

Reinhardt. The music carried on the incisive populist style of Mahagonny, its

vigorous march rhythms again echoing the symphonies of Mahler. Weill came

to New York to attend the premiere; the production was delayed for several

months; and, as the situation in Europe worsened, Weill elected to remain on

American soil. Once again, he was starting from scratch, this time in the reallife

Mahagonny of Manhattan.

In quest of an American identity, Weill tested the waters at the Group Theatre,

where, Harold Clurman told him, people passed the time by singing The

Threepenny Opera. He did some work on an unrealized Federal Theatre Project

production titled The Common Glory, about “the socialist idea in early America,”

and also on Davy Crockett, in which the hero of the Alamo would have battled

capitalism in Tennessee. Weill’s first big American score was for the 1936

Group Theatre production Johnny Johnson, which won respect less for its

political message-it was antiwar, but in a wholesome way-than for its playful,

propulsive style, its sharp use of the American vernacular.