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In celebration of the Charles Ives Sesquicentenary, I’ve written a long piece on Ives and Gustav Mahler for The American Scholar. The topic is not new: these composers quite obviously have in common a radical propensity to juxtapose the quotidian with the sublime – parade bands and tuneful ditties with the most rarefied metaphysical strivings. But my perspective is, I think, … [Read more...] about Mahler, Ives, and Today’s Cultural Memory Crisis

In 1951, Leonard Bernstein, age 32, led the New York Philharmonic in the belated world premiere of Charles Ives’ Symphony No. 2 – music composed half a century earlier. The performance was nationally broadcast and widely noticed. Seven years after that, Bernstein began his tenure as the Philharmonic’s music director with Ives’ Second Symphony. In all, he performed Ives’ … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Four: What Happened to Charles Ives?

According to a well-worn anecdote, Johannes Brahms was heard to say: “I’ll never write a symphony, you have no idea what it feels like to hear the footsteps of a giant behind one” – the giant being Beethoven. And Brahms was all of 43 years old when he finished his First Symphony, whose finale alludes to Beethoven’s Ninth. If Brahms in fact felt intimidated by his mighty … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” — Take Three: Bernstein, Furtwängler, and Saying What You Think

J. Edgar Hoover When Jamie Bernstein told me about her father’s FBI file – and its disclosure of hate mail and picketers generated by the FBI in 1970, in the wake of the Bernsteins’ Black Panthers fundraiser -- I was impressed but unsurprised. A year before, J. Edgar Hoover had called the Black Panther Party "the greatest threat to the internal security of the … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” – Take Two

Leonard Bernstein’s musical odyssey – in some ways, not unlike the marital odyssey dramatized in the film Maestro – was ignited by ecstatic expectations that proved unsustainable. He eagerly anticipated a Great American Symphony, a new American species of musical theater, and a New World version of the New York Philharmonic. An iconic American journey, it yielded … [Read more...] about The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” – His Prophetic Disenchantment with What America Had Become