America's Golden Boy

I know the name, but not the music.


* MUSIC
* MAY 18, 2010

America's Golden Boy

By BARRYMORE LAURENCE SCHERER

Philadelphia

In this centennial year of the American composer Samuel Barber (1910-81), performances of his work are taking place throughout the nation and abroad.

Meanwhile, as I communed recently with his spirit at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, Barber's alma mater, a birthday bash was in full swing. Central to the festivities was a celebratory all-Barber concert by students and faculty in the handsome recital hall where the composer himself had performed as a student.

A child prodigy who had entered the newly founded conservatory at age 14, Barber was very much its golden boy when he graduated in 1934. Handsome, refined and well-spoken, he was a musical triple threat as well, achieving distinction there as a composer, pianist and singer.

Barber recorded his own setting of Matthew Arnold's poem "Dover Beach" with the Curtis String Quartet in 1935. The recording preserves not only the lovely tone of his light, nuanced baritone, but his superb diction. The voice and its music were central to Barber's creativity; even his instrumental works are guided by a born singer's lyrical sensibility. While unmistakably 20th-century in character, his melodies tend to move in singable arcs rather than the jagged declamation of much modernist writing.

Barber, who wrote an operetta at age 10 (to a libretto by the family's Irish cook), had revealed himself as worthy of professional rank while still at Curtis, and it wasn't long before his first major orchestral score, the sparkling overture to Sheridan's comedy "The School for Scandal" (1931), entered the symphonic repertoire. In 1937 his Symphony in One Movement (1936) became the first American symphonic work performed at the Salzburg Festival. In 1938 Arturo Toscanini conducted his "First Essay for Orchestra" and the "Adagio for Strings" on an NBC Symphony broadcast, and by the time his Violin Concerto appeared the next year, Barber's international position was secure.

Barber has been called many things—neo-romantic, eclectic, conservative—terms considered almost pejorative during the second half of the 20th century. During Barber's formative years, radical American composers such as Leo Ornstein, Henry Cowell and Charles Ives, happily experimented with new musical language, much of it bitingly dissonant. They exhorted young Americans to embrace the avant-garde. But Barber's musical development had been carefully guided from childhood by his aunt and uncle, Louise and Sidney Homer. She was a star contralto of the Metropolitan Opera during Caruso's heyday; her husband was a highly regarded composer of art songs. Uncle Sidney encouraged Barber to pursue his own artistic path regardless of outside pressures. At Curtis, Prof. Rosario Scalero, a prominent composer in his own right, further instilled in Barber a deep sense of traditional craftsmanship.

Hence, Barber held himself aloof from the controversies that honed the cutting edge of his time. Though he increasingly incorporated Stravinskian dissonance and complex syncopation into such works as the Violin Concerto, "Medea's Meditation and Dance of Vengeance," the "Capricorn Concerto" and Cello Concerto, he felt under no obligation to employ anything that interfered with his fundamental urge to write emotionally expressive, well-crafted music.

Composer David Ludwig, artistic chair of the Curtis performance studies department, observes that creating a good composition is like making a good story. "And like well-written stories, Barber's scores are structurally watertight."

Barber might today be indisputably regarded as the standard-bearer of 20th-century American music were it not for two contemporaries—Aaron Copland, 10 years older than Barber, and Leonard Bernstein, eight years younger. Both outlived him. Copland and Bernstein deployed the postwar media to greater advantage than Barber, conducting, teaching, writing books and making the most of a golden age of network-televised concert music that put them in the public eye much more frequently than Barber. Moreover, each produced a body of work that struck a chord among a wide range of audiences: Copland's homespun ballet scores captured in the popular mind the essence of rural America, while Bernstein's jazz- and Broadway-inflected music embodied urban America's cosmopolitanism and cultural malaise. Their works' immense popularity led to widespread performance and recognition. Because Barber never sought his own easily recognized all-American idiom, his music—however rich in invention and sheer beauty—did not achieve the same popular identity.

Nonetheless, having already received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1958 opera "Vanessa" (premiered at the Metropolitan Opera, and the first American opera to be staged by the Salzburg Festival), Barber seemed poised to consolidate his pre-eminence through the three commissions he received to inaugurate New York's Lincoln Center. His 1962 Piano Concerto, written for the opening week of Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall, garnered him a second Pulitzer Prize. "Andromache's Farewell," a concert scene for soprano and orchestra based on Euripides' "Trojan Women," was lauded as well. But the highest honor was supposed to be realized with the premiere of his opera "Antony and Cleopatra" to open the new Metropolitan Opera House in 1966. It was a fiasco primarily because of Franco Zeffirelli's overwrought production, and because preperformance hubris had set expectations unrealistically high. Nevertheless, it seemed as though the musical press were gunning for Barber at the time. Revised, and restaged by Barber's life-partner and sometime collaborator, Gian-Carlo Menotti, it was received far more positively at its second premiere at the Juilliard School in 1975. But on a personal level, Barber seems never to have regained the wind in his sails, and died believing himself forgotten.

On the contrary, Barber has remained among the most programmed American composers over the decades. His music represents the best meaning of "conservatism"—the conservation and perpetuation of what Barber felt was a living musical tradition stretching back two centuries. And Barber's work represents his lifelong pursuit of honest, meaningful expression. "There's no reason music should be difficult for an audience to understand," he said in an interview later in life.

Probably the most frequently performed Barber work has been the Adagio for Strings. Yet it has never become hackneyed. "Because it's perfect music," says Mr. Ludwig, "and ravishingly beautiful. I think there is something melancholic about it that appeals to everyone, almost a sense of loss that moves people deeply." He also says that while Barber's training is "Eurocentric, his music is not just American in style but very democratic. It's not just accessible to the most highly trained musicians but also to anyone out there in Rittenhouse Square. So its accessibility runs across the board. It's vibrant, it's full of energy, it's completely unpretentious."

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.

A New Fort, er, Embassy, for London

February 24, 2010 - Architecture Review
A New Fort, er, Embassy, for London
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

LONDON — The State Department’s announcement on Tuesday that it had selected a design by the Philadelphia firm KieranTimberlake for its new embassy in London was not exactly uplifting news.

The proposed building — a bland glass cube clad in an overly elaborate, quiltlike scrim — is not inelegant by the standards of other recent American Embassies, but it has all the glamour of a corporate office block. It makes you wonder if the architects had somehow mistaken the critic Reyner Banham’s famous dismissal of the embassy’s 1960 predecessor on Grosvenor Square — “monumental in bulk, frilly in detail” — as something to strive for.

The project as a whole, however, is a fascinating study in how architecture can be used as a form of camouflage. The building is set in a spiraling pattern of two small meadows and a pond that have as much to do with defensive fortification as with pastoral serenity: an eye-opening expression of the irresolvable tensions involved in trying to design an emblem of American values when you know it may become the next terrorist target.

It’s hard to think of a project, in fact, that more perfectly reflects the country’s current struggle to maintain a welcoming, democratic image while under the constant threat of attack.

The design was chosen after a yearlong competition following the department’s decision to relocate the embassy from its address in central London to an isolated light-industry zone south of the Thames River — a project that is expected to cost a billion dollars.

The present embassy, a Modernist landmark by Eero Saarinen that takes up the entire western end of Grosvenor Square, is still regarded skeptically by critics. Its main facade, an intricate composition of limestone window frames, sits uncomfortably alongside the Georgian-style town houses that flank the park to the north and south. A menacing gilded eagle caps the main entry.

Yet the old embassy was also an effort to project a progressive cultural image abroad, at the height of the cold war. One entry led straight from the street up a broad staircase to a public library and an art gallery that showcased postwar American artists like Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler and Philip Guston. (A longtime embassy employee remembers that security was so lax in the early days that a single guard stood at the door, supporting himself with a cane.)

The use of architecture and art as tools of cold war propaganda was already on the wane by the end of the 1970s, when a lack of space forced embassy officials to shut down the gallery and transform the library into a waiting room for visa applicants. But it was completely abandoned in the aftermath of 9/11.

A metal fence went up in front of the main entry stairs. Two small pavilions — their boxy Modernist forms apparently intended as a homage to Saarinen’s original creation — were built out front to screen visitors.

Even so, the embassy falls short of current security requirements, which include, among other things, a 30-meter defensive perimeter around the building. And the maze of bollards and fences that went up in the last decade caused an uproar among Londoners, many of whom saw it as a desecration of one of the city’s loveliest (and most expensive) neighborhoods.

The site for the new embassy solves some of these problems while raising others. A 4.8-acre lot midway between Vauxhall station and the abandoned Battersea power station, it is at a comfortable remove from the city’s dense historic center.

At any given time, there is rarely more than a handful of pedestrians passing along the street. A couple of warehouses and a car dealership flank the site on either side; a postal sorting center sprawls behind it. The city has zoned the area for residential and commercial development, but there’s no way to know how long such development will take.

You could read KieranTimberlake’s building as an ode to Saarinen. Like the earlier design, it is essentially a box wrapped in an elaborate skin, albeit one that is more in tune with our ecologically minded times.

The entire glass cube, which sits on a colonnaded base, is conceived as a kind of high-efficiency solar collector, with all four sides covered in a second skin of pillowlike panels of ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene, or ETFE — a high-tech plastic. On the south, east and west facades, which will receive the most direct sunlight, the panels are covered with photovoltaic cells and supported by a lightweight cable-and-strut frame. The north facade shade is a simpler skin designed to deflect heat from the interiors.

The building is surrounded by an elaborate landscape that reaches out to the surrounding city. A semicircular pond borders the structure on one side, and terraced meadows wrap around the other. Pathways running alongside the meadows would connect the site to a proposed public promenade (part of the city’s plans for the development zone).

A narrow park runs between the pond and Nine Elms Lane, the main approach from the Vauxhall tube station. Conceptually, the landscape continues right up through the building, with a series of terraces carved into the facade.

The abundance of green space contributes to the design’s environmentally friendly image. Circuitous paths weave through the park, which in renderings is full of young professionals. The main entry plaza for the building, which extends along the edge of the pond before slipping under one side of the colonnade, is conceived as a lively public space.

But the real function of these landscape elements is to serve as camouflaged security barriers. The northern pond is a reflecting pool — but also a castle moat. To the south, a concrete wall frames the outer edge of the lower meadow, which can be patrolled by guards.

Above it, walled off by a second barrier, the higher meadow can be used for occasional embassy events but will otherwise be closed to the public. To get to the plaza, visitors will have to pass first through a high-security entry pavilion, much as they do to enter the current embassy.

A result is an architectural sleight of hand. And the effect is likely to be oddly disquieting: an array of clearly visible public zones that will actually be inaccessible to the public. And it probably will convey a more mixed message than the architects and their clients intended.

But given the impossibility of their task, it is hard not to feel compassion for the architects (particularly since KieranTimberlake is a relatively young and little-known firm). Yet both Richard Meier and Thom Mayne of Morphosis turned in far more sophisticated designs. Mr. Meier’s, which breaks the building mass down into a Cubist composition of curves and planes, is one of his best in recent years; Mr. Mayne’s, a distorted horseshoe wrapped around a deconstructed version of the Capitol dome in Washington, packs the most symbolic punch. (If you want to dismiss them as “star architects,” be my guest, but the designs explain why they got their reputations.)

More vexing, though, is how few visions there were to choose from. Of 37 American firms that applied for the competition, only 4 were invited to propose detailed designs. (The New York firm Pei Cobb Freed & Partners also submitted a relatively conservative scheme.)

This is especially troubling at a time when American architecture has reached a state of crisis. A whole generation of talents has seen careers languish through lack of opportunity, while the reputations of their European counterparts have soared. Firms like Preston Scott Cohen, Daly Genik Architects and Greg Lynn Form, to name just a few, have been shut out of high-profile government commissions by a convoluted competition process that favors known quantities.

Who knows if they would have done better. But their inclusion would have made for a livelier, more informed debate, one that in itself would have been a step toward the democratic cultural identity the country is trying to promote.

Federico Garcia Lorca - Ode to Walt Whitman

In reading Ian Gibson's biography, Federico García Lorca : a life, I came across metnion of a Lorca poem, Ode to Walt Whitman.


Federico Garcia Lorca - Ode to Walt Whitman

By the East River and the Bronx
boys were singing, exposing their waists
with the wheel, with oil, leather, and the hammer.
Ninety thousand miners taking silver from the rocks
and children drawing stairs and perspectives.

But none of them could sleep,
none of them wanted to be the river,
none of them loved the huge leaves
or the shoreline's blue tongue.

By the East River and the Queensboro
boys were battling with industry
and the Jews sold to the river faun
the rose of circumcision,
and over bridges and rooftops, the mouth of the sky emptied
herds of bison driven by the wind.

But none of them paused,
none of them wanted to be a cloud,
none of them looked for ferns
or the yellow wheel of a tambourine.

As soon as the moon rises
the pulleys will spin to alter the sky;
a border of needles will besiege memory
and the coffins will bear away those who don't work.

New York, mire,
New York, mire and death.
What angel is hidden in your cheek?
Whose perfect voice will sing the truths of wheat?
Who, the terrible dream of your stained anemones?

Not for a moment, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies,
nor your corduroy shoulders frayed by the moon,
nor your thighs pure as Apollo's,
nor your voice like a column of ash,
old man, beautiful as the mist,
you moaned like a bird
with its sex pierced by a needle.
Enemy of the satyr,
enemy of the vine,
and lover of bodies beneath rough cloth...

Not for a moment, virile beauty,
who among mountains of coal, billboards, and railroads,
dreamed of becoming a river and sleeping like a river
with that comrade who would place in your breast
the small ache of an ignorant leopard.

Not for a moment, Adam of blood, Macho,
man alone at sea, Walt Whitman, lovely old man,
because on penthouse roofs,
gathered at bars,
emerging in bunches from the sewers,
trembling between the legs of chauffeurs,
or spinning on dance floors wet with absinthe,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, point you out.

He's one, too! That's right! And they land
on your luminous chaste beard,
blonds from the north, blacks from the sands,
crowds of howls and gestures,
like cats or like snakes,
the faggots, Walt Whitman, the faggots,
clouded with tears, flesh for the whip,
the boot, or the teeth of the lion tamers.

He's one, too! That's right! Stained fingers
point to the shore of your dream
when a friend eats your apple
with a slight taste of gasoline
and the sun sings in the navels
of boys who play under bridges.

But you didn't look for scratched eyes,
nor the darkest swamp where someone submerges children,
nor frozen saliva,
nor the curves slit open like a toad's belly
that the faggots wear in cars and on terraces
while the moon lashes them on the street corners of terror.

You looked for a naked body like a river.
Bull and dream who would join wheel with seaweed,
father of your agony, camellia of your death,
who would groan in the blaze of your hidden equator.

Because it's all right if a man doesn't look for his delight
in tomorrow morning's jungle of blood.
The sky has shores where life is avoided
and there are bodies that shouldn't repeat themselves in the dawn.

Agony, agony, dream, ferment, and dream.
This is the world, my friend, agony, agony.
Bodies decompose beneath the city clocks,
war passes by in tears, followed by a million gray rats,
the rich give their mistresses
small illuminated dying things,
and life is neither noble, nor good, nor sacred.

Man is able, if he wishes, to guide his desire
through a vein of coral or a heavenly naked body.
Tomorrow, loves will become stones, and Time
a breeze that drowses in the branches.

That's why I don't raise my voice, old Walt Whitman,
against the little boy who writes
the name of a girl on his pillow,
nor against the boy who dresses as a bride
in the darkness of the wardrobe,
nor against the solitary men in casinos
who drink prostitution's water with revulsion,
nor against the men with that green look in their eyes
who love other men and burn their lips in silence.

But yes against you, urban faggots,
tumescent flesh and unclean thoughts.
Mothers of mud. Harpies. Sleepless enemies
of the love that bestows crowns of joy.

Always against you, who give boys
drops of foul death with bitter poison.
Always against you,
Fairies of North America,
Pájaros of Havana,
Jotos of Mexico,
Sarasas of Cádiz,
Apios of Seville,
Cancos of Madrid,
Floras of Alicante,
Adelaidas of Portugal.

Faggots of the world, murderers of doves!
Slaves of women. Their bedroom bitches.
Opening in public squares like feverish fans
or ambushed in rigid hemlock landscapes.

No quarter given! Death
spills from your eyes
and gathers gray flowers at the mire's edge.
No quarter given! Attention!
Let the confused, the pure,
the classical, the celebrated, the supplicants
close the doors of the bacchanal to you.

And you, lovely Walt Whitman, stay asleep on the Hudson's banks
with your beard toward the pole, openhanded.
Soft clay or snow, your tongue calls for
comrades to keep watch over your unbodied gazelle.

Sleep on, nothing remains.
Dancing walls stir the prairies
and America drowns itself in machinery and lament.
I want the powerful air from the deepest night
to blow away flowers and inscriptions from the arch where you sleep,
and a black child to inform the gold-craving whites
that the kingdom of grain has arrived.

For most New Yorkers today, the name Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848-1907) means the gilded bronze equestrian monument to Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street: Victory, crowned with laurel and clutching a palm frond, strides ahead of the bearded general, with his fierce gaze and windblown cape, erect on his snorting horse. A century ago, Saint-Gaudens would have also been widely known for his Diana—a tall, athletic nude, stepping forward as she releases an arrow from her bow—a landmark sculpture that once dominated the New York skyline from the tower of the original Madison Square Garden. (Removed when the building was razed in 1925, Diana is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.) In 1908, not long after the sculptor's death, the Metropolitan Museum installed a memorial exhibition of 154 of Saint-Gaudens's works in the Great Hall—what was then the Sculpture Court. Now we can broaden our acquaintance with the artist at the far more modest "Augustus Saint-Gaudens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art," a finely tuned exhibition, on view through Nov. 15, that showcases the Met's considerable holdings of the sculptor's works and provides a context for his celebrated monuments. The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bronze cast of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, 1910. That the Sherman Monument largely defines Saint-Gaudens for many of us is entirely appropriate. The sculpture exemplifies his distinctive refined, vigorous style, a synthesis of acutely observed naturalism and classical idealism, informed by the legacy of the Renaissance. The Sherman Monument shares the assured forms and the tense equilibrium between powerful warhorse and powerful rider first announced by those quintessential mounted warriors of the Renaissance, Donatello's Gattamelata, in Padua, and Verrocchio's Colleoni, in Venice. There are even echoes of the iconic Roman bronze that inspired both Donatello and Verrocchio, the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius, once the centerpiece of the Campidoglio, in Rome.


Verrocchio's Colleoni



















Donatello's Gattamelata