This Day in Classical Music History (Copland’s ‘Lincoln Portrait’ Performed on Barge)

July 4, 1942—Two months after its premiere in Cincinnati, Aaron Copland’s homage to America’s 16^th President, Lincoln Portrait for Speaker and Orchestra, was performed in a special way: on a barge in the Potomac River, narrated by the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, Carl Sandburg.

This setting, I would argue, couldn’t be more appropriate. The river had been connected indelibly, ever since the republic’s founding, to George Washington, who, in nearly all Presidential ratings by historians, is ranked immediately above or below Abraham Lincoln. The performance took place with the already-iconic Lincoln Memorial in the background.

(I must admit, though, that a river was just about the last place I’d expect a great work such as this to be performed. The only comparable instance of this in music history might have been Yale University’s Olympic-sized pool, the setting for Stephen Sondheim’s incidental music for a modern adaptation of Aristophanes’ The Frogs—a beyond-crazy production I discussed in a prior post.)

As for the date: Perhaps no President since the nation’s founding has been more responsible than Lincoln for making a reality of the central contention of the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.”  Perhaps my favorite quote from Lincoln is this one, in the concluding remarks in his Second Annual Message to Congress (December 1862): “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free -- honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve.”  

I can only wonder about the technical issues related to playing on a barge. Evidently, the audience on the boat must have been distracted, because, Copland recalled years later, this piece elicited no applause upon its conclusion.

No matter: It’s been receiving all the cheering it could want in the years since, including, no doubt, much on the Fourth of July. It’s a showcase not just for orchestras, but for celebrities who know how to sound every depth in the majestic Lincoln passages narrated in the second half of the 14-minute piece—by individuals as wildly disparate as Sandburg, Barack Obama, Adlai Stevenson, Charlton Heston, James Whitmore, Katharine Hepburn, Annette Bening, Margaret Thatcher, baseball slugger Willie Stargell, General Norman Schwarzkopf —and, on at least one occasion, with good friend Leonard Bernstein conducting, Copland himself.

(You can hear two of the more memorable voices, Henry Fonda and James Earl Jones, blended together in this YouTube clip.)

The piece, commissioned by conductor Andre Kostelanetz, came in a creatively fertile half-dozen-year period in the early 1940s, in which Copland also produced the soundtrack for the film Our Town, Fanfare for the Common Man, Appalachian Spring, and Rodeo. It was all part of an attempt by the composer at an accessible, "imposed simplicity.” Collectively, they functioned as a kind of musical Declaration of Independence, a turn toward and consolidation of indigenous American folk influences incorporated into the symphonic form. In their heightened, unabashed lyricism, they also struck a chord with a country that desperately needed to remember moments of past greatness.

A living piece of music will transcend the time of its original creation, but to appreciate it in all its fullness, I think, it still helps to consider the age from which it sprang. The hymnlike qualities of Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” for instance (never rendered more potently, I think, than in the reunion concert in Central Park with Simon’s former partner, Art Garfunkel, as seen in this YouTube clip), are at stark variance with the savage disillusionment and psychic exhaustion of the lyrics. (“When I think of the road we’re traveling on,/I wonder what went wrong.”)

In the year that “American Tune” was released, the Vietnam War was a wound that had stopped bleeding but remained open, and Watergate was corroding faith in government.  Many, then, would have identified with Simon's lyric about “the age’s most uncertain hour.”

In retrospect, that was profoundly shortsighted—but it was just like a baby-boom generation to feel it was all about them. Nearly every American generation has been faced with similar anxiety, and perhaps none would have possessed a better right to it than the generation that survived the Great Depression only to be called upon immediately afterward to defeat Fascism. “That’s all I’m trying—to get some rest”? They didn’t have time for that. Copland didn’t create Lincoln Portrait to soothe spirits, but to summon them—“the better angels of our nature” that Lincoln believed would eventually help “swell the chorus of the Union.”

The surprising thing about Lincoln Portrait is that Copland originally wanted someone else to memorialize. Kostelanetz’s original proposal, also sent out to composers Jerome Kern and Virgil Thomson in the month after Pearl Harbor, called for orchestral works that would celebrate "the qualities of courage, dignity, strength, simplicity and humor which are so characteristic of the American people." He suggested several Americans as possible subjects: George Washington, Paul Revere, Walt Whitman, Robert Fulton, Henry Ford, and Babe Ruth.

Thomson chose New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia (imagine a contemporary counterpart: a musical celebration of Mike Bloomberg!) along with Herald Tribune colleague Dorothy Thompson. Because Kern chose Mark Twain, Kostelanetz did not want a second writer celebrated in the trio of pieces, so Copland had to choose someone else besides the figure he wanted, Whitman.

A biography that Copland had recently read made him think of Lincoln as a possible subject. Working steadily with one aim in mind—“to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality…and something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit”—he had basically finished the piece by Lincoln’s birthday, well in time for the patriotic concert scheduled in May by Kostelanetz and the Cincinnati orchestra.

As fine as Kern and Thomson were as composers, their pieces for the May concert did not survive their moment in May 1942. In contrast, Copland’s is a hardy perennial of Presidents’ Day and Independence Day celebrations.

After his assassination, Lincoln became a symbol of nationwide unity. But by WWII, Republicans could only watch in annoyance as the first President from their party—one who, be it noted, was a prosperous lawyer for major railroads before he campaigned for the White House—was adopted with alacrity by liberal Democrats and those from more leftist parties. Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an effort to tweak his GOP opponents, had taken to quoting Lincoln approvingly, and the American volunteers who fought on the side of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

Copland, then, was not merely choosing a towering American hero in Lincoln, but one whose destruction of an old socio-political order--a kind of Second American Revolution--deeply appealed to those with similar ideological sympathies.

Just what those sympathies were became a matter of some contention in 1953, when Copland was hauled before Senator Joseph McCarthy to answer whether he had ever been a Communist. That confrontation held deep peril for the composer, who, while never a formal Socialist or Communist Party member, had in the 1930s shared a podium with the Minnesota Communist candidate for governor, S.K. Davis, and supported Communist presidential candidate Earl Browder.

The kindest interpretation of Copland’s testimony—which occurred only a few months after cancellation of a performance of Lincoln Portrait at the inaugural of Dwight Eisenhower, because of the composer’s left-leaning associations—is that it was deeply evasive. For two years thereafter, the foremost classical American composer of his day had trouble obtaining a passport, as charges of perjury were seriously weighed.

The eventual finding—that there were insufficient grounds to proceed with a prosecution—enabled Copland to reestablish his reputation. Like Lincoln, this once-controversial figure became a bipartisan patriotic symbol. Lincoln Portrait would be played at the second inaugural of yet another Republican President, Richard Nixon, and the House of Representatives that had once questioned Copland's patriotism gave him the Congressional Gold Medal, its highest civilian honor, in 1986.