Unanswered Question: March 2010 Archives

As Igor Stravinsky's impregnable twentieth century reputation fades with time, both the man and the composer seem ever more elusive. A recent visit to the New York Philharmonic Archives, preparing for the Philharmonic's upcoming Stravinsky festival with Valery Gergiev, reinforced the density of the Stravinsky conundrum.

Stravinsky was born in St. Petersburg. His father was an important opera singer. His teacher Rimsky-Korsakov composed operas, not symphonies. That is: his musical upbringing was rooted in the stage: Russian opera and ballet.

Exiled by the Russian Revolution, Stravinsky lived in Switzerland, France, the US. One 1937 Chicago headline reported, "Stravinsky, in German, Says He's French." In Los Angeles, Stravinsky became an American citizen. He is buried in Venice.

Stravinsky's writings in exile - which in fact were written by others, in French and English - excoriated Russia as backward and "anarchic." "Music," he famously pronounced, "is given to us to establish an order in things; to order the chaotic and the personal into something perfectly controlled, conscious and capable of lasting vitality." In the same breath, he insisted that music was "essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc." Music was unencumbered by the extra-musical. Stravinsky's own music, according to the composer, was impersonal and abstract. It was not to be "interpreted."

Then, in 1962, Stravinsky returned to Russia at the age of 80 and discovered himself incurably Russian after all. His pronouncements about music and about himself - always tendentious or otherwise implausible -- now included:

--"A man has one birthplace, one fatherland, one country - he can have only one country -- and the place of his birth is the most important factor in his life."

And, even more astonishingly:

"I regret that circumstances separated me from my fatherland, and that I did not give birth to my works there and above all, that I was not there to help the new Soviet Union create its new music."

In short, Stravinsky was susceptible to a psychology of exile. Stripped of his homeland, denied his "Russianness," he compensated as best he could (a story I have told in my book Artists in Exile). In retrospect, ambivalence, ambiguity, even (as the music historian Richard Taruskin has stressed) insecurity prove hallmarks of this proud and private man. And his music was not immune to the aftershocks of exile.

In the 1960s, Eric Walter White, in a seminal Stravinsky study, could approvingly quote Lawrence Morton's opinion that Stravinsky's Tchaikovsky pastiche The Fairy's Kiss was an improvement on Tchaikovsky: "Tchaikovsky's faults - his banalities and vulgarities and routine procedures - are composed out of the music, and Stravinsky's virtues are composed into it." (Personally, I find The Fairy's Kiss a beautiful work. I more admire the Pathetique Symphony.) How much more telling, today, seems Aaron Copland regretful observation of 1943: "I don't think [Stravinsky] is in a very good period. He copies himself unashamedly, and therefore one rarely comes upon a really fresh page - for him, I mean."

All this leaped to mind at the New York Philharmonic Archives the other day when I perused the eventful correspondence occasioned by Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, premiered by the Philharmonic in 1946. At least initially, the orchestra specifically intended to commission "a new symphony called 'La Victoire,'" celebrating the impending victory over Germany and Japan. Stravinsky accepted the commission. Once the work was scheduled, the Philharmonic requested a program note from the composer. Stravinsky replied: "It is well known that no program is to be sought in my musical output. . . . Sorry if this is desapointing [sic] but no story to be told, no narration and what I would say would only make yawn the majority of your public which undoubtedly expects exciting descriptions. This, indeed would be so much easier but alas . . . . . "

Eventually, Stravinsky asked the Philharmonic to publish a program note by the composer Ingolf Dahl. Dahl's note, duly printed in the Philharmonic program book, was itself of the species to "make yawn the majority." A specimen: "The thematic germs of this [first] movement are of ultimate condensation. They consist of the interval of the minor third (with its inversion, the major sixth) and an ascending scale fragment which forms the background to the piano solo of the middle part."

But Stravinsky obliged the Philharmonic with a brief "Word" conceding: "During the process of creation in this our arduous time of sharp shifting events, time of despear [sic] and hope, time of continual torments, of tention [sic] and at last cessation, relief, my [sic] be all those repercussions have left traces, stamped the character of this Symphony."

To complete my story: decades later, Stravinsky was asked by Robert Craft, "In what ways is the [Symphony in Three Movements] marked by world events?" Stravinsky answered:

"Certain specific events excited my musical imagination. Each episode is linked in my mind with a concrete impression of the war, almost always cinematographic in origin. For instance, the beginning of the third movement is partly a musical reaction to newsreels I had seen of goose-stepping soldiers. The square march beat, the brass-band instrumentation, the grotesque crescendo in the tuba - all these are related to those repellent pictures. In spite of contrasting musical episodes, such as the canon for bassoons, the march music predominates until the fugue, the beginning of which marks the stasis and the turning point. The immobility here seems to me comic, and so, to me, was the overturned arrogance of the Germans when their machine failed at Stalingrad. The fugal exposition and the end of the Symphony are associated with the rise of the Allies, and the final, albeit too commercial, D-flat chord - instead of the expected C - is a token of my extra exuberance in the triumph. The rumba in the finale, developed from the timpani part in the introduction to the first movement, was also associated in my imagination with the movements of war machines . . . "

And Stravinsky added, inimitably: "Enough of this. In spite of what I have admitted, the symphony is not programmatic. Composers combine notes. That is all."

But it is not all. From the moment I read Stravinsky's "cinematographic details," I heard the Symphony in Three Movements with new (and better) ears. Five years ago, for Pacific Symphony, I collaborated with the video artist Peter Bogdanoff on a "visual presentation" for the six-minute finale of the Symphony in Three Movements, culling newsreel footage faithfully following Stravinsky's scenario. The result, it seems to us, confounds the notion that Stravinsky's concert music is notably unfreighted with extra-musical baggage. Stephen Walsh, in his recent Stravinsky biography, dismisses the relevance of Stravinsky's "supposed" testimony to Craft about the martial imagery informing the outer movements of his WW II symphony. But soldiers and tanks are not irrelevant to the potential affect of this stirring score (surely one of the finest works from Stravinsky's spotty American period). In fact, the "stasis" interrupting the finale had never made obvious musical sense to me. It self-evidently makes programmatic sense.

These Stravinsky questions and thoughts form a backdrop to the New York Philharmonic's May 1 "Stravinsky Odyssey" program, at the Morgan Library - when I'll have occasion to discuss the "meanings" of the Symphony in Three Movements with Valery Gergiev, and to invite him to ponder our "visual presentation." I'll also be showing the visual presentation at Philharmonic pre-concert talks for Gergiev's performances of the Symphony in Three Movements on May 7 and 8.

Stravinsky was a born theater composer, attuned to dance and physical gesture. Like many another composer, he found physical imagery a vital accessory to creativity. It is no wonder that George Balanchine so successfully choreographed the Symphony in Three Movements - in which (as he told his City Ballet dancers) he found images of helicopters, searchlights, and other markers of war.

Leaving aside the problem that William Kentridge's spectacular production of The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera overwhelms Shostakovich's 1928 chamber opera, leaving aside that one departs the house with the questionable sensation of having seen inspired stagecraft inflicted on a weak work, I merely wish to observe a series of paradoxes.

The Nose at the Met, with six performances, is such a hot show you can't buy a ticket. An even greater surprise, alas, is that there were swaths of empty seats at Carnegie Hall earlier this month when Valery Gergiev (who also conducted The Nose) led his Kirov forces in a gripping two-night traversal of Berlioz's underperformed masterpiece The Trojans. Gergiev's transporting rendition of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet at Carnegie in February also failed to fill the house. Neither The Trojans nor Romeo was staged. (Cf. my Trojans blog of March 14.)

Last season the Met gave us Robert LePage's staging of Berlioz's Damnation of Faust - a production festooned with magic tricks and yet innocent of Faust's torments (my review appeared in the Times Literary Supplement.) Around the same time, Gergiev led the Kirov Orchestra and Chorus in Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky at Fisher Hall - a performance so right in timbre, so intense in feeling and projection, so searing in affect as to eclipse all memory of the Eisenstein film.

Next season the Met gives us the first two installments of a Lepage Ring. The most eager expectations of this heralded event are the most disturbing - Lepage's Nibelheim, Lepage's dragon, Lepage's Ride of the Valkyries, Lepage's Magic Fire. It would be a gauche understatement to suggest that the Ring is no more about those than The Damnation of Faust is about its Ride to the Abyss; unlike Berlioz, unlike Shostakovich, Wagner is a psychologist of genius.

Not long ago Gergiev toured a Kirov Ring whose inept staging diminished musical and psychological impact both. Those performances would have been stronger in concert. A friend who admires The Nose listened at the Met with his eyes shut. With his brain.

John Adams, on his blog "Hellmouth," has just posted a stirring piece in praise of Leopold Stokowski. These days Stokowski is by far the more fascinating phenomenon than his onetime rival Toscanini.

John writes: "Anyone following [Stokowski's] career will be driven mad trying to cull the pearls from the swill." Consider his two recordings (live, studio) of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder (of which the gave the US premiere and made the first recording, both in 1932). No one but Stokowski could so fundamentally have misconstrued what the "Klaus-Narr" and Narrator are supposed to do (insane liberties duly noted by the composer, who listened over the radio). But no one but Stokowski deserved to conduct this piece in the first place. I'm thinking of the Interlude in part one - a romantic maelstrom in which the Stokowski lava flow is simply tidal. Nothing we encounter today approaches his impact here.

My single favorite Stokowski recording is of the Andante from Beethoven's Fifth, as experimentally recorded by Bell Labs at the Academy of Music in 1931. You can hear it among the historic recordings posted on my website. Here the lava flow is thinned to a siren song, with many rests erased by elongated phrase-endings not by Beethoven. I enjoy playing this recording at conservatories. "Not a single subito dynamic," a choral conductor accurately observed at the University of Michigan, encapsulating the distance between this music and "Beethoven." "It doesn't sound like Beethoven," echoed a complaint at the Bard Conservatory. And so what?

As John says, Stokowski's glory years, too little remembered (he lived forever), were in Philadelphia. His assistant Nancy Shear told me that in later decades, having been displaced by the inconsequential Eugene Ormandy, Stokowski would draw the shade of his Pullman compartment (he did not fly) when traveling through that city.

A Philadelphia story told by Abram Chasins captures the Stokowski conundrum.
Before a performance, he would secrete himself in his dressing room and do deep-breathing exercises. "If someone said 'Good evening' or merely brushed past him when he was on his way to the stage, he would wheel around and return to his room to restore his former degree of concentration." This could delay a concert by as long as 15 minutes. The gesture was as practical as it was theatrical: Stokowski conducted in a trance.

I write in Classical Music in America: "If at all a charlatan or showman, Stokowski was essentially a principled fantasist. His impatience with the symphonic norm, its rites and repertoire, was irremediable. His belief in music as a 'universal language' was not a belief in Bach and Beethoven merely; he embraced music of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and of the composers - Chavez, Cowell, Harrison, Messiaen, McPhee, Varese, Villa-Lobos -- to whom such universality mattered. He may yet prove prophetic."

Or not.

I'm still attempting to digest Berlioz's The Trojans, as performed by Valery Gergiev and his Kirov soloists, orchestra, and chorus at Carnegie Hall last week. The experience was humbling, overwhelming, enobling.

A sentient listener can only shrink in the presence of Berlioz's masterpiece, an opera in two parts not wholly knowable. Its power, obviously, is archetypal (it sets Virgil). Its originality is pertinent. Defying genre, it surprises at every turn. Its unpredictability is existential.

In all these respects, the experience of The Trojans resembles the experience of Wagner's Ring. But the differences are great. Unlike Wagner and his heroes, Berlioz does not challenge or problematize fate. He evokes "a vast and noble vision of the ancient world," writes the Berlioz scholar David Cairns, "a heroic age in which human beings suffer and are subject of the blind forces of fate but, while they live, live proudly and ungrudgingly in the shadow of their doom."

And Berlioz's originality, unlike Wagner's, wonderfully co-exists with an aesthetic privileging lucidity and coherence. For Wagner, music arises from a morass of deep subjectivity: from dreams. He is consumed by an interior life of feelings and ideas. Berlioz's characters lack this kind of inner reality: they are more like statues come to life. They are iconic because archetypal in situation and response. Wagner's archetypes are of psychology.

Henry Krehbiel, the greatest (and most proactive) of all American music critics, prepared an English-language version of part two of The Trojans "as a dramatic cantata," performed in New York in 1887. And he (of course) reviewed it in the Tribune. Krehbiel's review is long, thoughtful, full of interest. A confirmed Wagnerite, he regards The Trojans as unperformable as composed by Berlioz -- too much like an oratorio; too sporadic in inspiration. But Berlioz, in fin-de-siecle New York, was nonetheless a pillar of the Music of the Future, alongside Wagner and Liszt. Anton Seidl, the high priest of American Wagnerism (and the hero of my Wagner Nights: An American History), gave Berlioz's Damnation of Faust in concert at the Met in 1896.

Here is some of what Krehbiel has to say in his Trojans review:

"Berlioz shows that there was much sincerity in his admiration for the operas of Gluck and Spontini based on classical subjects, and that though the bent of his mind was toward the invention of new devices to increase the effect of his representations, he was not deaf to the terrific dramatic power which lies in the direct and simple methods of Gluck."

"A remodeling of [The Trojans] by an adept in the art of dramatic construction might save [part two: The Trojans at Carthage] for the stage; but the prospect that it will be submitted to such a process in not imminent. One plan to give its music a hearing under circumstances which would insure its appeal to the fancy as well as the sense, seemed feasible, however, and this was put into execution in the present arrangement of the book and music."

(In addition to translating all that was sung, Krehbiel created connecting narratives in English in Virgilian style. He cites two such. They are magnificent.)

"I come to a consideration of the music and have no hesitation in saying at the outset that no estimate of Berlioz's works is complete which does not take this score into account. In The Trojans are to be found musical numbers which dwarf the best features of the compositions on which Berlioz's popularity rests in this country. Three of them I specify at once -- [the finale to part two/act one, in which Aeneas throws off his disguise; the Royal Hunt and Storm; and the chant of the priests at Dido's funeral]. In all the music of Berlioz with which I am acquainted I know of nothing to compare in dignity, dramatic power, and real expressiveness with these pieces."

(But Krehbiel finds the duets of Dido/Anna and Dido/Aeneas to be "sentimental.")

Remember: all this is from a review in a daily newspaper. Absorb: whatever his reservations about The Trojans, Krehbiel undertook, for an American premiere performance, to translate and abridge part two, and to prepare connecting speeches. The prescience and enterprise of this response cannot be sufficiently praised. Afterward - after the fin-de-siecle Wagner moment -- The Trojans disappeared into a fog of obscurity. Has any music of comparable importance been so triumphantly (and yet insufficiently) resurrected in the past half century?

Certainly Gergiev's incendiary performance - divided into two consecutive evenings - silenced Krehbiel's reservations about consistency and construction. But it supported (however unintentionally) the logic of giving this work as a "dramatic cantata." Certainly the Met's staging (premiered in 1973) diminishes The Trojans. And I would say the same of Robert Lepage's recent Met production of The Damnation of Faust (which I had occasion to review for the Times Literary Supplement). It's not just that it's hard to render the Trojan horse, or the Royal Hunt and Storm. Wagner is plainly a German Romantic; his music and dramaturgy foster a specific stage aesthetic which can be supported or dialectically challenged. Berlioz, aesthetically elusive, eludes the eye. He knew what he was doing when he cast The Damnation of Faust and Romeo and Juliet as concert pieces.

I would like to see a semi-staged Trojans, in which Andromache's formidable pantomime is not ignored. But I would be surprised to encounter a full staging as potent as the Kirov Trojans at Carnegie Hall - or the Colin Davis Trojans (in English) that I was privileged to hear at an historic London Proms concert in 1968. The program book (which I have kept) reminds me that we began at 4:30 pm, and that an hour-long interval divided parts one and two. For the Proms, there are no seats on the main floor - we stood for something like four hours. A glorious memory, now rekindled.

As readers of this blog may recall, I have twice (re: Vladimir Horowitz on Feb. 1; re: "Interpreting Liszt" on Feb. 18) written about Mykola Suk - in my experience, the most galvanizing present-day exponent of the piano music of Franz Liszt.

My son Bernie, with whom I joust about such matters, has just apprised me that Suk's epic 2008 performance of the Liszt B minor Sonata at the Mannes International Keyboard Institute and Festival is now available on youtube ("Mykola Suk -- IKIF 2008"). There are two installments, totalling10 minutes of the piece. You can hear the same performance in better sound on Music&Arts (CD 1234), coupled with two Hungarian Rhapsodies and an incendiary re-imagining of the Dante Sonata (2005) even bolder and more remarkable than Suk's B minor Sonata interpretation. (You can also access the 2008 sonata performance, in its entirety, via the Post-Classical Ensemble website.)

As with any great pianist, to watch Suk is to discover his distinctive aural signature made visible. While none of these versions of his Mannes performance capture his volcanic dynamic range, or the full value of the colors he wafts from the stage, the organic application of shoulders, arms, hands, and fingers - of the entire physical mechanism - arrestingly complements the sonic experience, as does his self-evident immersion, body and soul, in the Lisztian cosmos.

I am gratified by the responses I have so far received from listeners new to Suk, and eager to spread the word.

The incontrovertible premise of "Beyond Flamenco: Finding Spain in Music," recently presented at the University of Chicago, was that in the early twentieth century Spain produced formidably important music that is little known or understood. Few remember that Berg's Violin Concerto was premiered in Barcelona. Or that Schoenberg composed most of Moses und Aron there. Or that Albeniz's Iberia (1906-1908), the summit of the Spanish keyboard literature, was considered by Messiaen "the wonder of the piano, the masterpiece of Spanish music which takes its place - and perhaps the highest - among the stars of first magnitude of the king of instruments." Or that Ravel called the slow movement of Falla's Concerto (1926) the century's "greatest chamber music."

There are three reasons for our ignorance. The first is that the brief efflorescence of Spanish modernism - a moment embracing much more than music - was terminated by Franco's dictatorship. Far more than, say, Stalin's Russia, Franco's Spain lost its leading artists and intellectuals, including Falla (who died in Argentina) and
his likely successor Oscar Espla (who left for Belgium), not to mention Pablo Casals.

The second reason for our ignorance is the tenacity of certain postcard stereotypes - "the Spain of Carmen: bullfighters, poverty, flies, and passion," writes the eminent Spanish novelist Antonio Munoz-Molina in the program book for the Chicago festival. "A Spain that remained aloof from European intellectual and political trends: too passionate and too Catholic to be rational and too backward to be anything other than exotic."

The third reason - which I mention hesitantly, not meaning to seem gratuitous - is the Spanish pianist who most disseminated Albeniz and Falla in my lifetime: Alicia de Larrocha. The defining austerities of these composers were irrelevant to her cushioned, dangerously uncontroversial readings. Her fabled fluency better served lesser music, like Granados' Goyescas (no one trilled the maja's nightingale as she did).

A relentless theme of the Chicago festival was that Spanish music must not sound French. For Munoz-Molina - as for the pianist Pedro Carbone and the conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez, who also took part - Bizet, Debussy, and Ravel misrepresent Spain. What complicates this opinion, of course, is that these composers were inspired by "Spain" (a country they did not know) to compose great music, intoxicating for its pungency and fragrance. And there are Gallic Spaniards, like Joaquin Turina, who similarly seduce. Falla once lived in Paris. Albeniz composed Iberia there. But works like the Falla Concerto and Iberia inhabit a darker, more textured Spain than any glimpsed by Debussy or Ravel, by Turina or de Larrocha. Gil-Ordonez made the same point with regard to Palestina's Spanish contemporary Tomas Luis de Victoria -- that Victoria evokes the severity of the Escorial.

I first came to Iberia via the touristic orchestrations of Enrique Arbos - which so trivialize the keyboard originals as to actually seem laughable. Performed by Carbone in Chicago, the Iberias are unforgivably dissonant and dense. As a 90-minute totality, they comprise an epic odyssey. Both Carbone and Munoz-Molina stressed that these are urban landscapes. "Lavapies," with its raucous street noises and hand organs, is even subtitled "Working Class Neighborhood in Madrid."

As for Falla's Concerto for Piano or Harpsichord plus five instruments (each treated soloistically) - this music will always be relatively esoteric, even in Spain. It took three years to compose and lasts 13 minutes. As a timbral exercise, it's a subtle tour de force. As a complex project of cultural reclamation, the Concerto - as Carbone puts it -- "encapsulates the history of Spanish music."

Some years ago, Carbone, Gil-Ordonez, and I recognized the futility of programming the Falla Concerto and attempted to do something about it. We concocted a program around it, including two motets by Victoria, religious poetry by John of the Cross, a Soler sonata, and a popular song. We offer the Concerto twice - before and after citing these eclectic "sources." What this exercise in contextualization (the Chicago performance was our fifth try) clarifies is that the first movement of the Concerto fractures the Renaissance madrigal "De los alamos vengo, madre," that the second is an ascetic l epiphany, and the third pays homage to the keyboard school of Scarlatti.

The Chicago festival also included a performance of Falla's SpainNights in the Gardens of Spain broader (the Falla Concerto, too, must not be rushed) and (in the finale), grittier than any given by de Larrocha, a performance, minimally perfumed, in which the allusions to Moorish Spain seemed profound as well as nostalgic.

Fortunately, certain Albeniz and Falla mysteries will never be solved. Prior to Iberia, Albeniz was a salon composer. Prior to the Concerto, Falla composed Andalusian music infused with flamenco. Doubtless Albeniz's late surge (he died shortly after finishing book four of his masterpiece) was partly powered by valedictory aspirations. Falla's "late style" was partly an electrifying response to the new music (including the Concerto for Piano and Winds of 1924) of his Parisian friend Stravinsky.

Carbone's Chicago performances of the Falla Concerto and Iberia will shortly be aired by WFMT - and accessible via the web. Carbone and Gil-Ordonez perform Nights in the Gardens of Spain with the Orchestra of St. Luke's at the Brooklyn Academy of Music April 17, with Post-Classical Ensemble at DC's Harman Center April 23. Both programs include the American stage premiere of Falla's El Corregidor y la Molinera - a ballet/pantomime misleadingly dismissed as an "early version" of his Diaghilev ballet The Three-Cornered Hat.

Two months ago the Mellon Foundation awarded $1.9 million to three university-based arts presenters: the University Musical Society (University of Michigan/Ann Arbor), Cal Performances (University of California/Berkeley), and the Krannert Center (University of Illinois/Champaign-Urbana).

To my knowledge, Mellon has in recent years been (alas) the only major American foundation to generously fund American orchestras nation-wide. Those orchestras need financial help more than ever. But the new Mellon initiative -- targeting innovative campus-based classical music -- is prescient. Presenters aren't burdened with the fixed costs and contractual obligations that encumber orchestras and opera companies. And presenters that serve university communities arguably enjoy the richest programming opportunity in American classical music today.

In the classical music world, arts presenters can be passive conduits for visiting orchestras and string quartets, pianists and violinists. But in ever growing numbers, they are becoming proactive agents of change. The most auspicious change, it has long seemed to me, lies in the realm of synergies with academia. I have seen that work at Stanford University, at the University of Maryland/College Park, at Georgetown, at Wesleyan -- and, most recently, at the University of California/Davis.

"Copland and the Cold War," as presented by UC-Davis's Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts a few days ago, engaged the services of student singers, an American historian, three music historians, and four instrumentalists associated with the campus community. The students (and also the audience) sang Copland's prize-winning Communist workers' song "Into the Street May First!" The Americanist contributed a 10-minute talk on the Popular Front and the Red Scare. The instrumentalists performed two keyboard works -- The Cat and the Mouse (1920) and the Piano Variations (1930) -- and the late, serial Piano Quartet (1950). Excerpts from The City (1939), a classic, proto-socialist documentary film ingeniously scored by Copland, were screened. Copland's 1953 interrogation by Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn was re-enacted. All of this was choreographed to track Copland's paradigmatic artistic odyssey: how an experimental modernist, schooled in Paris, became a patriotic populist and fellow traveler on the left -- only to find himself in the 1950s estranged from the "new audience" he had so ambitiously courted.

I have produced "Copland and the Cold War" five times. Because it is collaborative, the show is always different. At Wesleyan, Ron Schatz's talk focused on Paul Robeson. At UC-Davis, Kathryn Olmstead stressed McCarthy's chronic mendacity. At Georgetown University, "Copland" linked with six courses; dozens of students wrote reviews. Not the least advantage of university-based programming is inquisitive audiences: discussion becomes integral to the event.

Certainly my own experience of Copland has been transformed by my five "Copland and the Cold War" experiences. "More talented than he realized," Roger Sessions once quipped. What Sessions meant, surely, is that Copland the modernist was a better composer than Copland the populist. I agree. The Piano Variations, more than ever, seem to me a high achievement. But I find Copland a synthetic populist -- a populist by choice, compared to born populists like Gershwin or Revueltas. To Copland's way of thinking, Gershwin and Revueltas were overly "intuitive," insufficiently schooled; they did not fully engage in the compositional act. But compared to the Concerto in F or Caminos, Copland's Piano Concerto and El Salon Mexico seem to me "over-composed"; they disclose artifice.

Copland's decision to seek a broader public, and the fervor with which he urged his colleagues to do the same, are beyond praise. He was unselfishly impelled by an idealistic sense of social responsibility. At the same time, in retrospect one may surmise that, aesthetically, it wasn't altogether in his bones.

"Copland and the Cold War" ends either with the Piano Quartet or the Piano Fantasy (1957). Copland's compatriot on the left Harold Clurman likened the former work to "the quiet preceding or following an atom bomb attack . . . the voice of our inner fear, an echo of the secret trepidations in all our hears as we look out upon the bleak horizon of a world in bondage to its illusions." Heard in the context of the McCarthy interrogation, in which Copland awkwardly perjured himself, the Piano Quartet sounds as chilling as Clurman supposed.

The Piano Fantasy even more poignantly concludes the Copland odyssey. It is his belated return to the unfettered Piano Variations of his youth, reconsidered as an epic valedictory he could not quite carry off. In the hands of a master pianist like Ben Pasternack, the sporadic waywardness of this 30-miute score, juxtaposed with its authentic grandeur, intensifies the act of self-portraiture.

I write these reflections in a hotel room in Chicago, where the University of Chicago Presents this week hosts a three-day Spanish Festival: "Beyond Flamenco: Finding Spain in Music." The participants include three eminent Spanish visitors -- the pianist Pedro Carbone, the conductor Angel Gil-Ordonez, the novelist Antonio Munoz-Molina -- and also the university orchestra and motet choir. The schedule incorporates classroom visits, a master class, and a colloquium. WFMT, Chicago's singular classical music station, will broadcast two of the concerts and produce 15 hours of recorded Spanish music with extensive commentary by the university's guests. All this supports a new world of classical music programming -- and the reasons Mellon's investment is an enlightened twenty-first century move.