I came out of the weekend boosted by a nearly forgotten optimism. Last Sunday afternoon we attended a full-scale performance of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra in Richardson Auditorium, a large, elegant, and acoustically superb concert hall on the Princeton campus. Among the cultural treasures of the town in which we have lived for more than half a century now is the PSO. This is a very high quality group of community musicians founded about 1980 by the late Portia Sonnenfeld. It is in a sense the Town Orchestra as opposed to the Gown Orchestra of student musicians.
Sunday’s concert was not strictly speaking the first live music we had enjoyed during the pandemic. The inventive director of the Princeton University Concert Series, which brings musical artists to Princeton from all over the world, had earlier managed to arrange some very small, meticulously socially distanced events that we were able to attend.
Those were imaginative and welcome palliatives. But Sunday’s event was different in kind, a real concert, with lots of people sitting next to one another in the permanent fixed seats of an auditorium. A spokesman for the orchestra prefaced the musical performance with a few words of welcome, noting that this was the first time in two years the orchestra had been able to perform in Richardson, fulfilling the shared desire of players and audience alike to be able to come together in proximity in pursuit of a pleasure all shared. The enthusiasm of the applause that greeted his remarks revealed a striking intensity of emotion in a usually restrained demographic of classical music lovers, many of us on the antique side. Everybody in the world is fed up with Covid and the often vacillating and incoherent measures adopted by political authorities to address it. Everyone was masked, of course, and we had to present vaccination credentials to gain admission. There was no reckless hugging or backslapping. But “symphony” means a joining of sound, and there was plenty of that both from the audience pit and the stage.
To this audience of the music-starved, any performance would have been a treat, but in fact the quality of this performance was very high. The two principal pieces played were of superb quality: the violin concerto of Sibelius, and Dvorak’s “New World” symphony. And in both, for differing reasons, I was able to find reassuring refutations of the heavy gloom of the pandemic. Music is called “the universal language” with good reason. Though like any language it must be learned in order to achieve its fullest eloquence, the mode of its communication transcends the cultural boundaries within which all the world’s spoken tongues are necessarily confined. Yet at the same time every piece of music is a cultural artifact bound up like all such artifacts in historical particulars and local and temporal specificities. And if simply being able to join in the truly social event of a musical concert felt like an act of self-liberation, the music we heard was of a sort to invite the mind beyond—or perhaps through—an aesthetic experience to an intellectual one.
I am not certain that I had ever heard even a recording of the Sibelius violin concerto before, but I am unlikely ever to forget this live performance. Though I am married to an excellent amateur violinist I could not identify the great professional players of the moment, except that one of them has to be the young soloist on the stage that afternoon, Alexi Kenney, a handsome, svelte, lithe fellow in his twenties whose bow is indistinguishable from a magic wand. Of course a concerto is a symbiosis; and here the orchestra played its coequal role perfectly. In contrast to the soloist, the concert’s conductor, Kenneth Bean, has the build of a football lineman. His affect was one of precise and encouraging steadiness rather than of theatricality: he supervised a perfect team. It was as though Bean and Kenney, animated by the spirit of Sibelius, became a trio of benign pied pipers, recalling us all from two years of pandemic torpor.
It has been said that the greatest example of American symphonic music was composed by a European, Antonin Dvorak. We had the opportunity to ponder that paradox after the intermission. The natural tendency of nineteenth-century European immigrants to America to stay in their familiar cultural clusters, not infrequently exacerbated by the disdain or hostility of anglophone “nativists” whose immigrant forebears got here a little earlier, created for a time odd linguistic islands throughout the plains and backwoods of the Middle Border, one such being the Czech community of Spillville, Iowa. The much-travelled and cosmopolitan Dvorak might be a cultural lion in New York, but even citizens of the world can get homesick. It was more practical to visit Spillville than Slovakia. At the time of the Columbian Exposition of 1892, America had reached a new level of self-confidence, not to say obnoxious chauvinism. But in Boston and New York the cultural mavens still tended to look toward London, Paris, and Berlin. Emerson had delivered his famous talk on “The American Scholar” in 1837. America had become a force in the international literary world through Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Mark Twain. What of American music?
That question is still being answered, and brilliantly. At a time of such political doubt and darkness one treasures the light all the more. And here Dvorak’s ideas continue to inspire. Part of his greatness as a musician was an extraordinary versatility. Music like all art is an intuition but also an expression, and music in its expressive aspect expressed something real, human life. Among Dvorak’s most thrilling works are the Slavonic Dances, based in what is perhaps the most elemental form of music, that of folk. Too few American cultural arbiters of the nineteenth century actually realized the artistic claims of democracy. There were some Walt Whitmans of the visual arts. Surely there should be some of music. I Hear America Singing. Dvorak astonished many and probably offended a few others by insisting that classical music in America should honor its own particular indigeneity, its “nativeness”, and especially the rich body of African and Afro-Carribean song that he had discovered here with such excitement.
His own great monument to this idea was his ninth symphony, the “New World Symphony” (1893). More precisely he called it “from the New World,” as he thought of it both as an announcement of and a gift from this extraordinary and still new place. We might call it the “Spillville Symphony.” Its haunting theme, a “folk” theme, is indefatigable but never itself tiring. Is our country still an extraordinary new place? There is plenty of reason for doubt, even despair. Yet each day in the news I see terrible reports of people drowned in their desperate attempts to reach our shores and others willing to set off on foot from Lima on a thousand mile walk through the Darien peninsula to the difficulties and dangers of the trek toward the Rio Grande. The testimony of the wretched of the earth has its own peculiar eloquence. I left Richardson Auditorium feeling not merely personally liberated but comforted by a larger, inner hope.
Music , Dvorak (Antonin), Covid liberation
