INTRODUCTION
1. New York Times Editorial Board, “What’s So Great About Fake Roman Temples?,” New York Times, February 9, 2020.
2. “The [Los Angeles] Philharmonic has played a significant role in the music that has been a part of films for the past 80 years,” says Smith. “So, there’s been this intertwined nature. When you think about back in the ’30s when the exiled composers like Max Steiner and Franz Waxman were coming here, those were composers that the Philharmonic was playing their concert works from when they were living and working in Europe. Out of that filmic symphonic sound was also born the sound of our orchestra. . . . The idea that the L.A. Philharmonic can exist in this space without having a deep relationship with the community of art makers that have made Los Angeles the center of creativity would be silly.” Maxwell Williams, “L.A. Phil Plans Centennial Season Featuring Oscar Performance,” Hollywood Reporter, February 7, 2018.
3. Rich Cohen, “Liberty Island’s Hidden History,” Wall Street Journal, July 13, 2019.
CHAPTER 1. A VIEW FROM 30,000 FEET
1. Anne Midgette, “People Are Upset When an Orchestra Closes. If Only They Went to the Concerts,” Washington Post, July 19, 2019.
2. Coming out of the pandemic that shuttered musical performances worldwide for more than a year, the New York Times reported on June 9, 2021, that Carnegie Hall’s 2021–22 season would be a “mix of familiar works and experimental music,” as if those were the only two options in classical music programming in the twenty-first century.
3. Jonathan Haidt, “2017 Wriston Lecture: The Age of Outrage: What It’s Doing to Our Universities, and Our Country,” Manhattan Institute, November 15, 2017.
4. Pierre Boulez’s influence cannot be overstated. He served as musical advisor and principal conductor of the BBC Symphony (1971–75), music director of the New York Philharmonic (1971–77), a principal conductor at the Bayreuth Festival during the 1960s and 1970s, and guest conductor with some of the world’s major orchestras (Chicago, Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles). The French government supported his experimental institute for “research and acoustic/music coordination” in Paris (IRCAM), which opened in 1977, awarding it 40 percent of the nation’s budget for contemporary music. The New York Times published two obituaries on January 7, 2016 and a photo on its front page.
5. David Brooks, “The Retreat to Tribalism,” New York Times, January 1, 2018.
CHAPTER 2. BRAHMS AND WAGNER
1. This should not be confused with futurism, which was unveiled in 1909 and articulated elements of the avant-garde. Wagner was writing about the future of music, which he saw as a return to the very beginnings of music drama by the ancient Greeks and the fusion of poetry and music in a state of endless transition.
2. Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, Vol. 2, Part 1 (2nd ed., 1908); trans. Piero Weiss in Piero Weiss and Richard Taruskin, eds., Music in the Western World: A History in Documents (New York: Schirmer Books, 1984), 122–26.
CHAPTER 3. STRAVINSKY AND SCHOENBERG
1. The Bloomsbury Group consisted of English writers, artists, and intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century—including Woolf, E. M. Forster, and John Maynard Keynes—many of whom lived in the West End of London in an area known as Bloomsbury. Many of them advocated for feminism, pacifism, and a liberal attitude toward sexual profligacy and gender fluidity.
2. Anne Midgette, “‘Written on Skin’ Brings Theater to Opera Stage,” Washington Post, August 12, 2015.
CHAPTER 4. THE LURE OF CHAOS
1. Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2013), xxiv–xxv.
2. Western music is based on an extremely simple matrix of rhythms and note lengths (whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, etc.) that are presented in consistently repeated groups (measures) of pulses. Entire works exist as a series of two beats per measure, while others might be exclusively in in three or four. By 1900, this simplistic pulse/rhythmic system was made exciting and complex by a performance practice that changed the pulse matrix by subtly slowing and speeding up—accelerations, distended “up beats,” the addition of a sudden breath (a luftpause). The new music from America confronted this tradition with a motoric, one-tempo music that found its energy in breaking up those twos, threes, and fours so as to create surprising inner rhythms. Imagine the European model as graph paper, with the size of the boxes being made wider or narrower, and then imagine a strictly even graph in which the boxes are colored in different-sized groups. The latter would be ragtime.
3. Next Level, an initiative of the U.S. Department of State, “Uzbekistan Final Concert,” Residency Recap,” posted August 5, 2018, https://www.nextlevel-usa.org/sca/uzbekistan.
4. Philipp Blom, Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918–1938 (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 370–71.
5. Notes can be imagined as the white notes on a piano—C, D, E, F, G, A, B. The black notes add the other five notes within the octave and are given names in relation to the white note nearest them. Each black note has two names—one based on the white note to the left, the other based on the note to the right. Thus, the same black note can be called F-sharp, because it is a little higher than (i.e., to the right of) the F key, or it can be called G-flat, because it is a little lower than (i.e., to the left of) the white note called G.
6. At the same time, a new political force, inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, was developing in China,—which would set the standard of international Communism in the twenty-first century. To celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021, President Xi Jinping announced plans for 300 officially approved operas, ballets, plays, and musical compositions—all of which would hew closely to the aesthetic demands of the Party, with music once again used as a symbol of a political system, a country, and its people.
CHAPTER 5. HITLER, WAGNER, AND THE POISON FROM WITHIN
1. Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann (1916–2010) survived the war, joined the Christian Democratic Union, and successfully entered the post-war West German business of political and market research. She was hired to serve on the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1978 and stated that she had fought the Nazis by “working from within.” She remained a highly respected figure in public opinion polling right up to her death at the age of ninety-three.
2. Sigmund Romberg (1887–1951) was trained in Vienna, came to America in 1909, and became an American citizen in 1919. The 1924 Student Prince was the longest-running show on Broadway during the 1920s and 1930s—running longer than Show Boat and every show by George Gershwin. In 2012, I performed the score with the WDR (West German Radio) Orchestra in Cologne. Although the work received a standing ovation, the head of the WDR told me that he had never heard a note of Romberg. The city’s chief music critic bested him by confessing that he had never even heard of Romberg’s name.
3. In other words, Abraham Lincoln was president of the United States when Strauss was born, and Harry Truman was in the White House at the time of his death.
CHAPTER 6. STALIN AND MUSSOLINI MAKE MUSIC
1. See John Mauceri, For the Love of Music: A Conductor’s Guide to the Art of Listening (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 21–22.
2. Respighi’s Pines of Rome may have “passed” through the Fascist filter thanks to the fact that the anti-Fascist Arturo Toscanini had conducted its American premiere in 1926.
3. John Mauceri, “Un incontro con l’uomo, un incontro con la sua musica,” Teatro Regio: Stagione d’Opera 1998–9 (1999), 97–100.
4. Harvey Sachs, Music in Fascist Italy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 129.
CHAPTER 7. THE MIRACLE OF A SECOND EXODUS
1. For the 1927 world premiere of the silent film adaptation of Der Rosenkavalier in Dresden, the projectionist (who was operating a hand-cranked mechanism) changed speeds to synchronize with Strauss’s conducting of the orchestral score! This system proved impossibly awkward and unacceptable because of the disruption of the image speed for the public. Strauss was, however, able to bring the silent film to London, and even recorded some excerpts from the film score for the Electrola label. He and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal—who had significantly changed the story by giving it a Marriage of Figaro ending with disguised lovers in a formal garden—had hoped to bring their operatic masterpiece into small cities, where the opera could not otherwise have been mounted. For this purpose, two orchestrations were made: one for the big cities that replicates the orchestra complement of the opera, and a much smaller “salon orchestra” version. While negotiating an enormous fee to bring the movie to New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the entire project became moot because of sound film technologies (and the film company, PAN Film, went out of business). The American premiere had to wait until March 29, 1974, when the Yale Symphony Orchestra and I presented it to an audience of undergraduates (black tie requested) and two important guests: the famous Viennese opera expert Marcel Prawy and the favorite soprano of Richard Strauss, Giacomo Puccini, and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Maria Jeritza (who was living in New Jersey at that time).
2. Steven C. Smith, Music by Max Steiner: The Epic Life of Hollywood’s Most Influential Composer (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020).
3. The entire sequence of Ratoff’s death on the operating table lasts approximately ten minutes and consists of two musical sequences. The first, lasting six minutes, accompanies the main character’s preparation to operate on his father. The operation itself is performed without music—a breathtaking two minutes and fifteen seconds of silence and sound effects, followed by one minute and forty-five seconds of music accompanying the isolation and horror of Ricardo Cortez’s character, who is left alone in the operating theater.
4. As an example of the enormity of the public that hears music composed for film, consider the national television broadcast of Ben-Hur on CBS (Columbia Broadcasting System). Although the film had already been seen by millions of people since its premiere in 1959, the telecast was viewed—and Miklós Rózsa’s two-and-a-half-hour orchestral score was heard—by 84.82 million people on one night, February 14, 1971.
5. Anno Mungen, “BilderMusik”: Panorama, Tableaux vivants und Lichtbilder als multimediale Darstellungsformen in Theater- und Musikaufführungen vom 19. bis zum frühen 20. Jahrhundert, 2 vols. (Remscheid: Gardez!, 2006).
6. A tableau vivant is a silent and stationary re-enactment of a scene or painting with living actors in costume in a painted setting.
7. In 1984, I managed to convince the legendary Stella Chitty, long-serving stage manager at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to follow this important indication in the score. She thought it might “break the mood” and that once the curtain began to move, there would either be applause or the audience would think she had made a mistake. I prevailed on her to give it a try, which she did. No one broke the mood. The audience immediately understood what was happening and the effect was indeed magical.
8. The question of how Hitler experienced King Kong was addressed by author/musicologist Brendan G. Carroll in a private email to the author on August 24, 2017: “King Kong was made in 1933. This is an important year as far as sound films are concerned because it was the year when the technical capability of post-synchronization of a separate music track finally became possible. . . . I cannot think of a reason why RKO would make a different version for Germany with stock music. So I think we can be sure Herr Hitler heard Maxie’s music.”
CHAPTER 8. A NEW WAR, AN OLD AVANT-GARDE
1. In 2016, contemporary artist Jeff Koons donated a sculpture, Bouquet of Tulips, to the city of Paris. However, it was actually a donation of an idea of the work—which required 3.5 million euros to make and install in October 2019.
2. Seventy years later, the New York Times published an article about the “entrepreneurial revolution” in the “new” music by Vick Chow for a soloist “armed with kitchen utensil noisemakers.” Steve Smith, “Make Your Selection of Sounds (Kitchen Utensils Are on the Menu),” New York Times, September 7, 2013.
CHAPTER 9. A COLD WAR DEFINES CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
1. Once the “Copland” sound was replaced in the concert hall with the international non-tonal style, it was preserved in film music. In 2016, composer Ennio Morricone accompanied the on-screen reading of a forged letter from Abraham Lincoln in his Academy Award–winning score to The Hateful Eight, making use of this American language in a musical cue called “La Lettera di Lincoln.” Composers such as Elmer Bernstein, Alfred Newman, Bruce Broughton, and John Williams have kept it alive in scores that accompany stories of the American South and West, and as W. G. Snuffy Walden did for the long-running television series The West Wing.
2. A few years later, on May 14, 1959, President Eisenhower would break ground on Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, a multi-million-dollar arts campus in mid-town Manhattan that projected America’s commitment to the arts during the Cold War, announcing that its “beneficial influence . . . will not be limited to our borders.”
3. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 1999), 408.
4. Vincent Giroud, in his biography of Nabokov, cites Nabokov’s 1953 article, after the death of Stalin, for Encounter magazine: “Why, [Nabokov] asked, had the expected musical homage to the dead dictator failed to materialize seven months after his death? . . . Taking the example of Prokofiev’s posthumous canonization, Nabokov suggested that ‘the only indispensable qualifications for entrance into the Pantheon of Russian classics were that (1) the composer must be dead and (2) he must on no account have composed any music that could be described as dissonant.’” “No Cantatas for Stalin?,” in Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 276.
5. We are not talking about marches and hymns with political words to them, since that “style” was precisely the same in every country, no matter what side of the political discourse one was on. Karlheinz Stockhausen demonstrated this with his 1967 score Hymnen (Anthems), which is a kind of electronic tour of the world. Stockhausen’s conceit is to imagine he had a shortwave radio and could pick up broadcast signals from every region of the planet to hear its various national anthems. With few exceptions, they all sound exactly the same.
6. In 1950, the New Yorker published an interview with Ernest Hemingway in which he said, “I use the oldest words in the English language. People think I am an ignorant bastard who doesn’t know the ten-dollar words. I know the ten-dollar words.” Lillian Ross, “How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?,” New Yorker, May 6, 1950.
7. Ben Brantley, “Review: ‘Moulin Rouge! The Musical’ Offers a Party and a Playlist, for the Ages,” New York Times, July 26, 2019.
8. Arnold Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899), Friede auf Erden, Op. 13 (1907), and Erwartung, Op. 17 (1909).
9. See Chapter 1, note 4.
10. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, “MATA Festival’s Sounds of Play,” New York Times, April 16, 2015.
11. Frank Wilczek, “The Hidden Meaning of Noise,” Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2020.
12. Jon Pareles, “Where Guitars Sound Like Orchestras or Brawling Geese,” New York Times, January 19, 2014.
13. Ernst Toch, “Glaubensbekenntnis eines Komponisten” (A Composer’s Credo), Deutsche Blätter, March/April 1945, 13–15. Ernst Toch Collection, Performing Arts Archive, UCLA, Box 106, item 22. Translated by Michael Haas in Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).
CHAPTER 10. CREATING HISTORY AND ERASING HISTORY
1. Hollywood is a district in central Los Angeles. After World War II, the word started to mean (in music) overblown, unacceptably melodic, melodramatic, superficial, manipulative, stolen, venal, the home of charlatans, and, by extension, anything a music writer does not like. Note: The European word cinema is for good things, movie is bad, and film is neutral. A cinematic performance would mean something is thrilling and epic, whereas a Hollywood-sounding piece of music, or a piece of music that sounds like movie music, is a bad thing. In 2014, the New York Times published the following: “As the piece [Triple Resurrection by Tan Dun] evolves, repeated-note rhythms signal a coming mood shift. Soon, percussive blasts and wailing orchestra chords lend the concerto a little ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ action. The instrumental writing includes the captivating amplified sounds of water being poured into basins. The piece is alluring until it turns Hollywoodish, when a soaring theme for strings breaks out.” Anthony Tommasini, “Ringing In the Chinese Zodiac’s Year of the Horse,” New York Times, February 2, 2014.
2. In March 2014, Pierre Boulez managed to take both sides in an interview posted by the international financial group BBVA’s Foundation, which had given him a €400,000 award in 2013. When asked if contemporary music is for an elite, he answered oxymoronically, “Of course. But the elite should be as large as possible.” Norman Lebrecht, “Pierre Boulez Video Interview,” March 12, 2014, https://slippedisc.com/2014/03/pierre-boulez-video-interview-i-am-a-composer-i-still-am-a-composer/.
3. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Korngold—not to mention Toch, Rózsa, and many others—lived in Los Angeles as American citizens. Weill and Hindemith were living in the same time zone on the East Coast. These composers were not friends in Europe and they were not friends in Los Angeles and New York—and why should they have been? However, quoting one to discredit the other is an effective technique to destroy both composers and justify not playing their music. Tchaikovsky didn’t think Bach was a genius, and Mahler thought Tchaikovsky was “shallow [and] superficial.” It is doubtful that changes your mind about Bach, Tchaikovsky, or Mahler—because you know their music.
4. Paul Goldberger, “Cuddling Up to Quasimodo and Friends,” New York Times, July 23, 1996.
5. Inspiration from other music has always been a fundamental part of the process of composing music. What made the twentieth century unique was the proliferation of source materials. It was possible for a Stravinsky to be inspired by the music of Carlo Gesualdo (1560–1613), Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), and Anton Webern (1883–1945); to subscribe to publications of ragtime and jazz; to incorporate tangos and marches into his aesthetic world; and to collaborate with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus, Walt Disney, and Breck Shampoo, all the while maintaining an air of bemused and elegant detachment from popular culture. He lived in Hollywood but is buried in Venice, Italy—not Venice, California.
6. The Cooperative Remittance for Europe (CARE) was created in 1945 for private citizens in America to send food relief to Europe.
7. According to the OREL Foundation, which encourages interest in composers suppressed as a result of Nazi policies, Krenek became a professor and head of the Department of Music at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1941, where his music was performed by the Minnesota Orchestra. He departed for the West Coast in 1947, where he continued to conduct, teach, write, and compose some 100 works before his death in 1991.
8. James Coomarasamy, “Conductor Held over Terrorism’ Comment,” BBC News, December 4, 2001.
9. Boulez’s abusive letters have been quoted in many sources, including Hugh Wilford’s The Mighty Wurlitzer and Vincent Giroud’s Nicolas Nabokov. See Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 110; and Vincent Giroud, Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 286.
10. Hans Werner Henze (1926–2012) was a German composer of international renown and strong political opinions. A Marxist and Communist, he left West Germany in 1953 to live in Italy as a protest over his country’s attitudes toward his politics and homosexuality.
11. Quoted in Stephen Hinton, Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
12. Alex Ross, “A ‘Serious’ Composer Lives Down Hollywood Fame,” New York Times, November 26, 1995.
13. Anthony Tommasini, “Seldom-Heard Symphony Resurfaces as a Novelty,” New York Times, March 6, 2010.
14. The author begs the indulgence of the reader. This sentence appeared in the Guardian (1996) in a review of his Decca recording Schoenberg in Hollywood. The author generally does not keep his bad reviews, preferring to memorize them.
CHAPTER 11. OF WAR AND LOSS
1. Recorded interview with author, 2015.
CHAPTER 12. A CENTURY ENDS
1. The twenty-first century actually began on January 1, 2001, not January 1, 2000, but few paid much attention to that fact, with the exception of Arthur C. Clarke.
2. Ricochet by Andy Akiho, performed by the New York Philharmonic; see Joshua Barone, “Watch Ping-Pong Make Its New York Philharmonic Debut,” New York Times, February 19, 2018.
3. Philadelphia Voices by Tod Machover, performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra; see Michael Cooper, “How a Philly Cheesesteak Goes from the Grill to Carnegie Hall,” New York Times, April 1, 2018.
4. Stockhausen’s comments at a press conference in Hamburg on September 17, 2001, were recorded by North German Radio (NDR) and published the next day by various news organizations such as the BBC and AP. See Julia Spinola, “Monstrous Art,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 25, 2001.
5. The behavior of the young and angry European youth who grew up in the rubble of World War II still reverberates in the obituary columns in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. On July 2, 2021, the New York Times ran a half-page article (with a photo) of the Dutch composer Louis Andriessen (1939–2021), referring to him as an iconoclast who then became “one of Europe’s most important postwar composers.” In 1969 he and a group of like-minded composers sabotaged and disrupted a concert of the Concertgebouw Orchestra with noise makers because they objected to the orchestra not programming the kind of music they were writing—post-war serialism. He went on to hold faculty positions at Princeton, Yale, and the University of Leiden.
6. Kate Murphy, “Zubin Mehta,” New York Times, August 30, 2014.
7. Seth Colter Walls, “Korngold’s Rarely Heard Opera Hints at His Future in Hollywood,” New York Times, July 29, 2019.
8. Not all of us Baby Boomers are children of peace. Some of us are the children of sexual violence. It has been well documented that the Soviet army was responsible for raping approximately two million German women in their offensive that ended in Berlin in April 1945 and continued for a number of years afterward. German doctors subsequently performed an alarming number of abortions and reported the rise in venereal diseases among their female patients. It is estimated that somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 living Germans are Russenkinder (Russian children), but because of the shame attached to this period, the real number will probably never be known.
9. Robert Lee Hotz, “Tuned to Music, the Coronavirus Sounds Like Zappa,” Wall Street Journal, June 27, 2020.
APPENDIX
1. RIAS stands for “Radio in the American Sector” of Berlin.
2. John Mauceri, “A Conversation with Abravanel,” liner notes to Die Sieben Todsünden, Decca, 1990.