Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
William Jewell College, my alma mater, recognizes its alumni each year on Achievement Day, when it presents a group of “exemplary graduates” with the Citation for Achievement Award, the school’s highest honor, which I received in 2000. This being the seventy-fifth anniversary of Achievement Day, Jewell decided to commemorate the occasion last week by inviting all of its past “achievers” to a banquet at which, among other things, two of us would perform. Daniel Belcher, a classical baritone who specializes in new music—his best-known role is that of Prior Walter in Peter Eötvös’ 2004 operatic version of Angels in America—was asked to sing, and I was asked to lecture about what I’d learned from my career as a writer.
The invitation was an honor in and of itself, one that I wanted very much to accept. By the time I heard from Jewell, though, Mrs. T was already listed for transplant in New York and was being evaluated for listing in Philadelphia. I warned the organizers that were we to get the Big Call at any time prior to the banquet, I might be forced at the last minute to deliver my speech via Skype. They replied that they’d rather have me on a TV screen than not at all, and Mrs. T told me firmly that I should say yes, so I did.
William Jewell College is in Liberty, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. I lived in Liberty for four years after graduating, and by the time I finally moved away, I’d become deeply attached to Kansas City and its environs, so much so that I eventually came to think of it as a second home. I still do, but none of my family lives there, meaning that I rarely get a chance to go back and visit. I’ve reviewed a few plays in Kansas City, and I gave a lecture at Jewell six years ago, but for the most part I have no choice but to content myself with my memories of the Midwestern city that was almost as important to my life as Smalltown, U.S.A.
It struck me while driving around town that I felt as though I were playing out the next-to-last scene of Our Town, in which Emily Webb, who has just died in childbirth, is allowed by the Stage Manager to relive a single day of her life, with one caveat: she cannot do anything differently. In my case, I gazed greedily at the still-familiar sights of Liberty and Kansas City, but was unable to step into them. All I could do was see and remember, with Emily’s heartbreaking words tolling in my mind’s ear: I can’t look at everything hard enough.
From time to time, past and present joined hands. That happened at the Nelson-Atkins, where I looked at two paintings that have special meaning for me. One was Fairfield Porter’s “The Mirror,” which I saw for the first time when I returned to Kansas City many years ago to write a magazine piece about the local arts scene, an experience that I described in the speech I gave that night:
I didn’t know anything about Porter, but I liked what I saw, so I went to the bookstore of the Nelson-Atkins and bought a copy of a book he wrote called Art in Its Own Terms. As I flipped through the pages in my hotel room that night, I ran across this sentence: “When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful.” Never in my life have I read a sentence that landed harder than that one: Make everything more beautiful. All at once, I knew what my life was and would be about.
The other was Willem de Kooning’s “Woman IV,” which was left to the Nelson-Atkins by William Inge, a marvelous piece of art-history trivia that had lodged in my memory long, long ago, waiting patiently to be put to use. Two years ago, I was writing a play about Inge and Tennessee Williams called Billy and Me, the second act of which takes place in Inge’s New York apartment. As I tried to envision how the set might look, I remembered that Inge had once owned “Woman IV,” and that it hung in his Sutton Place home for a time before ending up in Kansas City. Rebecca Pancoast, Palm Beach Dramaworks’ scene painter, subsequently made a slightly larger-than-life copy of “Woman IV” that was used as the centerpiece for the second act. Now I was looking at the real “Woman IV” for the first time since writing Billy and Me, marveling as I did so at the fantastic chain of coincidence that had led me from Kansas City to New York to West Palm Beach and back again.
A few hours later, I stood up in front of a ballroom full of loyal alumni and friends of the college to give a speech called, appropriately enough, “The Lesson of Satchmo,” in which I spoke of what I had learned from spending the past decade and a half of my life thinking and writing about Louis Armstrong. I adjusted the microphone, looked out at the crowd, and saw the upturned faces of some of the friends and teachers I had met for the first time half a lifetime ago.
I glanced quickly at the words printed on the page before me: I am what I am because, once upon a time, I came here and did what I did. Then I took a deep breath and began to speak.
* * *
To hear Gina Kaufmann interviewing me on KCUR’s Central Standard, go here. (My segment of the program starts at 28:29.)My Achievement Day speech:
The last two sentences of my speech are inaudible on the video. This is what I said as the music heard on the soundtrack was playing:
I’m done talking, but it wouldn’t be right to wrap this speech up without listening to the voice of the man himself. So if I may, allow me to play a snippet of the song that brings Satchmo at the Waldorf to a close.
* * *
Mary Martin plays the role of Emily in the next-to-last scene from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The scene is introduced by Oscar Hammerstein II, who also plays the role of the Stage Manager. This performance was originally seen on The Ford 50th Anniversary Show, directed by Jerome Robbins and simulcast by CBS and NBC on June 15, 1953:
Nat “King” Cole sings and plays “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” by Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg, and Billy Rose. This performance, which has been colorized, was part of An Evening with Nat King Cole, originally telecast by the BBC on October 13, 1963. It is one of the last known films of Cole playing piano. He is accompanied by Reunald Jones on trumpet, John Collins on guitar, Charles Harris on bass, Leon Petties on drums, and the Ted Heath Orchestra:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Nature has a great simplicity and, therefore, a great beauty.”
Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law
From 2009:
Read the whole thing here.Twelve hours later I was on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the temperature was fifty degrees colder, the sidewalks were covered with sooty snow, and a bagful of mail awaited me. I’d throttled back up to my usual urban ground speed by the time I caught a cab to Broadway that night to see Guys and Dolls, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d just caught a fleeting glimpse of a parallel universe, one in which I could almost imagine myself at home….
“Behind the jokes, I try to talk about life in a serious way. I don’t look at cartooning as just an entertainment. It’s a rare privilege to be able to talk to hundreds of millions of people on a given day, and I don’t want to squander that privilege with mindless chatter. There is an opportunity here to talk about real issues of life with sensitivity, warmth and humor.”
Bill Watterson (quoted in Lee Nordling, Your Career in the Comics)
The obituaries for André Previn, who died last Thursday at the age of eighty-nine, were respectful, even admiring, in a way that they wouldn’t have been had he died a quarter-century ago. It took a very long time for Previn to be fully accepted by the classical-music establishment, which for decades looked askance at a conductor who’d gotten his start in the Hollywood studios, and I confess to being a bit surprised by how lavish a sendoff he received from such official organs of respectability as, say, the New York Times.
Perhaps it’s simply that Previn survived into a world in which the ability to move freely among stylistic genres had long since become not merely acceptable but downright fashionable. What’s more, the Brits went even further in their posthumous praise. Witness, for example, the Guardian’s sendoff: “The conductor, composer and pianist André Previn…was not only among the most charismatic performers of his day, but also enjoyed one of the greatest classical-music lives since Berlioz and Liszt—and one that did not grow less eventful with old age.”
My own view of Previn, if far from jaundiced, is nonetheless somewhat cooler. Admire him though I did, I thought of him as a prodigally gifted artist who did more things well—but nothing better—than anyone else. To compare him to Leonard Bernstein, as many have done in recent days, is to make the point with unintentionally cruel honesty. Like Previn, Bernstein was widely criticized for having spread himself too thin. Yet he still managed to leave behind On the Town, Candide, and West Side Story, as well as a stack of recordings that are, if rarely definitive, almost always remarkable. Not so Previn: I can’t think of even one of his classical recordings that I prefer to all its competitors, nor are any of his compositions especially memorable, in part because he lacked the priceless gift of melody. As a result, only two of his film scores, for Bad Day at Black Rock and Elmer Gantry, are distinguished, and only one of his pop songs, “You’re Gonna Hear From Me,” came remotely close to becoming a standard.
As for Previn’s classical pieces, what I wrote in Time about his 1998 operatic version of A Streetcar Named Desire could be said of any of them:
Previn’s well-bred score barely hints at the dark crosscurrents of obsession and desperation that made Tennessee Williams’ play so naggingly memorable. This slow-moving Streetcar is tonal but tuneless, sometimes violent but never sexy. Even the bluesy bits are oddly polite—an unexpected letdown from a composer-conductor who plays first-rate jazz piano on the side.
Two decades after the fact, I can also admit that I was being just as polite about his jazz piano playing, which was immaculately finished and unfailingly agreeable but almost entirely faceless. I can’t imagine anyone being able to pick Previn out of an auditory lineup, no doubt because he started out as an imitator—he could “do” Art Tatum without flaw—and never fully succeeded in becoming his own stylistic man.
It strikes me in retrospect that Previn’s greatest gift may well have been his formidable ability as a popularizer. He talked about music wonderfully well in his TV appearances, and he was an impeccably competent interpreter of pretty much anything at which he tried his hand. For all these reasons, he was probably at his best during his eight-year tenure as music director of the Pittsburgh Symphony, a good orchestra that he turned into a very good one, simultaneously putting it in the national limelight by hosting Previn and the Pittsburgh on PBS for three deservedly successful years. He was made for that job, and never found another one as well suited to his talents: it says everything about Previn that he seems never to have been seriously considered to run any of the world’s top-tier orchestras, which went elsewhere when looking for new maestros. (The Los Angeles Philharmonic, which he led to famously unhappy effect from 1985 to 1989, did not yet fill that bill.)
I wonder how Previn felt about that, just as I wonder whether he was truly fulfilled by his career, extraordinary in so many ways as it was. You can’t read No Minor Chords: My Days in Hollywood, his witty 1991 memoir, without realizing that he had a first-rate mind, as well as a great deal of personal insight. Rarely has any famous conductor told a story about himself that is as revealing—not to mention self-deprecating—as this tale that Previn told about his conducting teacher, Pierre Monteux:
He liked cloaking his advice with indirection and irony. A few years later he saw me conduct a concert with a provincial orchestra. He came backstage after the performance. He paid me some compliments and then asked, “In the last movement of the Haydn symphony, my dear, did you think the orchestra was playing well?” My mind whipped through the movement; had there been a mishap, had something gone wrong? Finally, and fearing the worst, I said that yes, I thought the orchestra had indeed played very well. Monteux leaned toward me conspiratorially and smiled. “So did I,” he said. “Next time, don’t interfere!”
I think it might have been fun to know such a man, just as it says a great deal about Previn that he was close friends with both Mike Nichols and Tom Stoppard. Alas, I never met him, but I shared an elevator with him at Lincoln Center last year: I was there to review Stoppard’s The Hard Problem, and just before the doors closed, Previn was wheeled into the elevator by an attendant, all but invisible beneath the brutal marks of age, though I had no trouble recognizing him. I was tempted to introduce myself, but thought better of it. What could I possibly have said that would have been of any interest to him? Instead, I looked discreetly away and left him to his reflections.
For what it’s worth, my guess is that Previn was far too smart and self-knowing not to be perfectly aware that for all his great success, he didn’t quite manage to hit the high C as an artist, least of all in the way that Bernstein did. That is a very dark thought, and while I hope he was content to be what he was and do all that he did—as well he should have been—I have my doubts.
* * *
André Previn and Oscar Peterson talk about Art Tatum on the BBC in 1974:
The main-title cue from Previn’s score for Bad Day at Black Rock, performed by Previn and the MGM Studio Orchestra:
Previn and the Philharmonia perform excerpts from William Walton’s “Orb and Sceptre,” Violin Concerto, and Belshazzar’s Feast at London’s Royal Festival Hall in 1982. (The soloist in the concerto is Kyung-Wha Chung.) This concert was given in honor of the eightieth birthday of Walton, who was present in the audience:
A Hallmark Hall of Fame telecast of The Lark, Lillian Hellman’s English-language adaptation of L’Alouette, Jean Anouilh’s 1952 play about Joan of Arc. This abridged version stars Julie Harris and Boris Karloff, who created their roles in the original 1955 Broadway production. The cast also includes Denholm Elliott, Basil Rathbone, Eli Wallach, and Jack Warden. The teleplay is by James Costigan and the production was directed for TV by George Schaefer. The uncredited incidental music (also heard in the Broadway production) is by Leonard Bernstein. This rare kinescope includes commercials from the telecast, which aired on NBC on February 10, 1957:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)