Five Best: Jonathan Rosenberg on Music, Politics and Society - Wall Street Journal

Leonard Bernstein on the set of ‘Omnibus’ in the 1950s.
Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Jonathan Rosenberg

Feb. 7, 2020 10:46 am ET

Wagner Nights: An American History

By Joseph Horowitz (1994)

1. According to Joseph Horowitz, many New Yorkers in the late 19th century, especially women, were infatuated with Richard Wagner. Indeed, these committed Wagnerians were something of a cult. The German’s operatic output, Mr. Horowitz argues in this revelatory book, spoke to America’s women because it provided “an avenue of intense spiritual experience” and “activated” the “emerging New Woman.” Attending performances of Wagner, they were “transfixed and transformed.” Upon hearing “Tristan and Isolde,” the “bad effects of husband and bedroom were silenced by a musical-dramatic orgasm as explicit and complete as any mortal intercourse.”

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

By Alex Ross (2007)

2. In his superb traversal of 20th-century classical music, Alex Ross argues for its profound power, including the power to illuminate the past. During World War I Karl Muck, the German-born conductor of the Boston Symphony, was tossed into an American prison camp, a victim of xenophobia at a time when the U.S. was awash in anti-German animus. His transgression? It was said that Muck had refused to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner” and that he was also a German spy. Both charges were false. Twenty years later, Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District” was pilloried by Soviet authorities for its alleged ideological flaws. For years, Shostakovich and other Russian composers would be tormented by a brutal regime determined to control creative life in the Soviet Union. Hitler’s Germany was no less controlling. During the Cold War, Mr. Ross notes, the “music exploded into a pandemonium of revolutions, counterrevolutions . . . polemics, alliances, and party splits.” In his reflections on the challenging creations of composers like Babbitt, Boulez, Cage, Stockhausen and Stravinsky, Mr. Ross provides a portrait of a musical world in turmoil.

Toscanini: Musician of Conscience

By Harvey Sachs (2017)

3. Arturo Toscanini lived a long and remarkable life. In fact, the conductor’s life, writes Harvey Sachs, “began before Wagner and Verdi had written their final masterpieces and . . . ended in the era of Boulez and Stockhausen.” This luminous biography deftly interweaves the musician’s story with the 20th century’s most consequential events: World War I, the emergence of fascism, and World War II. It is a tale of extraordinary music-making and of irrepressible principled passion. Drawing on a trove of previously unknown sources, including personal letters and tape recordings of informal conversations, Mr. Sachs memorably depicts a musician who grappled with tyrants, sometimes at great personal risk, and used his status as a celebrated artist to weigh in on the critical questions of the day. Mr. Sachs offers readers a man who directed mesmerizing performances and made clear his disdain for Mussolini and Hitler. In Bologna, in 1931, Toscanini refused to conduct the Fascist anthem, despite official government demands that he do so. Two years later, in a move whose boldness resounded across Europe and America, he severed his relationship with Germany’s Bayreuth Festival when he concluded it had become a propaganda tool for the Nazis.

: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical

By Roger Allen (2018)

4. Although he died in 1954, Wilhelm Furtwängler remains enormously controversial. One of the two most important conductors in the first half of the 20th century (Toscanini being the other), the Berlin-born maestro decided to remain in Nazi Germany throughout the war. He continued to offer Germans his distinctive interpretations of Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner in the belief that such music reflected a nobler, older Germany, a land he hoped would re-emerge once the fighting ended. The Nazis, on the other hand, believed that performing German music in Germany and across occupied Europe advanced their ideological aims. In this insightful intellectual biography, Roger Allen considers Furtwängler’s life and thought. He makes clear that, despite the conductor’s view, in Hitler’s Germany art and politics were not separate. For the Nazis, a figure like Furtwängler was, Mr. Allen writes, “a convenient and potent tool.”

: The Political Life of an American Musician

By Barry Seldes (2009)

5. For Americans of a certain age, Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts provided an appealing introduction to classical music. At once amiable and articulate, the conductor made the music approachable. But Bernstein was a man of the left whose life and career reflected the ideological churnings of Cold War America. Even before World War II, the FBI had begun monitoring his activities, claiming he headed an organization that sponsored communist speakers. By the early 1950s, Bernstein’s reputation was tarnished. Labeled a subversive, he was kept off the podium. When the anticommunist fevers abated, his career resumed; in 1958 he became the New York Philharmonic’s music director. Emerging from the McCarthy era “scarred but triumphant,” Bernstein continued to embrace left-wing causes, most famously in 1970 when he hosted a Black Panthers fundraiser in his New York apartment. Attended by the conductor’s friends and various well-heeled celebrities, the event achieved immortality thanks to a merciless skewering by Tom Wolfe, who found in it his hilariously searing vision of “radical chic.” Barry Seldes reminds us that “to ignore the impact of political forces upon Bernstein is to miss out on much of what enlivened and motivated him.”

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