By Fredric Dannen
In 1965, Leonard Bernstein took a sabbatical from conducting to compose the “Chichester Psalms,” a three-movement choral setting of poems from the “Book of Psalms,” in Hebrew. Bernstein knew he was writing in an unusual style; his music was both accessible and beautiful. It was a time when Dadaist composers like John Cage and serialists like Milton Babbitt held the high ground of academic esteem. For two months, Bernstein had tried his hand at writing nontonal music and found it was against his nature. He had achieved fame as a Broadway composer in 1957 with “West Side Story,” but he wanted recognition as a classical composer, and in 1965, he knew that he was inviting disapprobation and even ridicule by daring to write serious music that was melodic and a delight to the ear.
The Sunday before he conducted the debut of “Psalms,” Bernstein published a poem of apology(!) in the New York Times, which ran, in part, “These psalms are a simple and modest affair / Tonal and tuneful and somewhat square / Certain to sicken a stout John Cager / With its tonics and triads in B flat major.”
Six years later, Bernstein stepped down as music director of the New York Philharmonic and was succeeded by Pierre Boulez. Like his predecessor, Boulez was a composer and a writer, but in every other respect, Boulez was Bernstein’s antithesis. Boulez did not simply disapprove of composers who wrote tonal music—he excoriated them as “USELESS” (his capitals) and “irrelevant.” He refused to conduct works by Shostakovich, a composer Bernstein revered. Ten years before Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” Boulez wrote a chamber cantata called “Le Marteau sans maître” (the hammer with no master), a setting of surrealist poems by Rene Clair, devoid of any tonal center of gravity. It was hailed as a masterpiece.
Today, there is no question which composition has become a repertory standard—the “Psalms” —and which one turns up only desultorily in concert programs—“Le Marteau.” I would happily attend a concert that featured both, if well performed, but the Boulez will never evoke in me the emotional response I get from the Bernstein, a frisson that begins with the opening fortissimo B flat major chord and hair-raising tutti setting of the words from Psalm 108: “Awake, psaltery, and harp: I will rouse the dawn!” There is nothing “simple and modest” about Bernstein’s work, and an apology for having written it seems an absurdity.
The absurdity and the pity of the backlash against 20th-century tonal music are taken head on in conductor and music scholar John Mauceri’s superb new book “The War on Music: Reclaiming the 20th Century” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022). He writes, “It is surely time to ask why so much contemporary music played by our greatest musical institutions—and supported overwhelmingly by music critics—is music that the vast majority of people do not want to hear—and have never wanted to hear.”
No intelligent music lover, including Mauceri, would argue that nontonal works should not be composed or performed, and there are many such that I personally adore. His complaint is that a lot of 20th century tonal works of genuine merit have unjustly disappeared from the repertory—and, ironically, many of them are the works that Hitler had banned, either because the composers were Jewish (Erich Wolfgang Korngold) or condemned by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels as “degenerate” (Paul Hindemith).
Mauceri, a Bernstein protégé, has been a guest conductor for most of the world’s great orchestras and opera companies and for 16 years led the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, where he championed the music of émigré composers who were refugees from Nazi Germany, such as Korngold, Franz Waxman, and Kurt Weill. He has also made his mark as an excavator and restorer of works that had never been published or performed complete, such as Marc Blitzstein’s opera “Regina” and George Gershwin’s musical “Strike Up the Band.”
In one of several phone and Zoom conversations I have had with Mauceri in the past year, he jokingly described himself as “part Indiana Jones, part Dr. Frankenstein.” Conversations with Mauceri are always exhilarating and exhausting—his storehouse of knowledge, from music to literature, art, and world history—is vast. His ability to connect trends in contemporary music with geopolitics informs his new book.
I had always assumed it was simply academic snobbery that led to the wave of resistance against tonal works composed after 1930. Mauceri convincingly demonstrates that Cold War agitation was also responsible. Stalin had decreed that composing music too abstract for common folk was virtually a crime against the state, and similar strictures existed in the regimes of Hitler and Mussolini. Consequently, Mauceri writes, the U.S. military and state department believed (falsely, it turns out) that composers who wrote nontonal music during the war must have been anti-Nazi or anti-Fascist.
The result, he writes, was covert support for music that would prove distinctly unpopular with audiences and “the bonding of the avant-garde with the very institutions it was created to annihilate.” Such fascinating insights make “The War on Music” essential reading.
