Say this about Aaron Copland’s “Lincoln Portrait”: There is a lot of history to it.
Completed in 1942, as the United States battled fascism and prepared to lead the world in the name of freedom, it was commissioned as a musical sketch of a historical figure. Copland scored “a portrait in which the sitter himself might speak,” as he put it, and gave a narrator the unenviable task of reading from the Gettysburg Address, among other Civil War-era speeches, against orchestral material based on folk tunes from Lincoln’s time.
History has lent its echo chamber to the piece since it was written, too. In 1953, not long before a young lawyer named Roy Cohn culled Copland’s scores from State Department libraries and interrogated him about his leftward leanings in a Senate hearing attended by Joseph McCarthy, “Lincoln Portrait” was cut from one of President Eisenhower’s inaugural concerts. One Republican representative who had protested against Copland’s inclusion said he had “but a passing knowledge of music,” yet favored only “fine, patriotic and thoroughly American composers.”
For his part, Copland believed that “Lincoln Portrait” had a firm enough democratic spirit that it “started a revolution” after he led it in Venezuela in 1957. (The scholar Carol A. Hess has called that story “pure invention.”)
Typically, orchestras invite a politician, actor or cultural personality to serve as the piece’s narrator. Consult an extensive discography, and you can unearth recordings with Maya Angelou, Gregory Peck, James Earl Jones and Adlai Stevenson.
But what if you summoned a historian instead? Would a piece so laden with history take on a different power?
Audiences at Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, will find out on Tuesday, when one of the most prominent historians writing today, Heather Cox Richardson, takes the speaking role with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, led by Na’Zir McFadden.
Over the years, the Boston Symphony’s ensembles have performed “Lincoln Portrait” with at least two senators, a pair of governors, and a solitary historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Chad Smith, the orchestra’s president and chief executive, said the piece has been “a way for us to engage with contemporary culture in an authentic way.”
Although primarily a scholar of the 19th century, Cox Richardson is best known for Letters From an American, an astonishingly popular nightly newsletter in which she dissects the news of the day in a distinctly unruffled voice, sometimes exploring its resonance with the darker moments of our collective past.
Lately, Cox Richardson has been studying various historical takes on Copland’s piece. “I’m stuck on Henry Fonda’s,” she said in a recent interview, “but I’m just trying to listen to as many as I can, to see what seems to work the best.”
Here are edited excerpts from the interview.
“Lincoln Portrait” has so many different layers to its history. What speaks to you personally in the history of it?
What I really am drawn to with the piece is the sense of space in it and the evocation of the prairies — the sense in the late 19th century and mid-20th century that the real power of American politics was in that free labor populism Lincoln certainly represented, but that also people like William Jennings Bryan represented. Weirdly, the Copland piece always reminds me of Vachel Lindsay’s poem about William Jennings Bryan, “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan” — this sense of rolling strength coming from the prairies.
When Copland wrote it, that was something that he was clearly reaching for, and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not able to articulate from that particular position. So there’s that sense of that sweeping, rumbling thunder coming from the prairies that has the power to override systems of oligarchy, like the southern enslavers before the Civil War, like the robber barons in the 1890s and that period, and then the fascists in the early 20th century.
That’s Lincoln’s background in many ways. The fact that Lincoln is, in a funny way, downplayed in the piece — they’re his words, and they’re his famous words, but the score says not to emphasize them, to read them somewhat calmly and quietly — I think adds real power to that. It’s not this great heroic man, it is the American people coming together.
The reception history of the work is interesting, too. It’s very much a piece of its time, but it does endure. Is that tied to Lincoln, or does it speak on some deeper level?
I think it speaks to Lincoln. Of course I think it speaks to the political message that I take from it. I would also suggest that in times of political upheaval, we see innovations in art. That is another piece about it that is exciting to me — the marriage of political speeches to classical music was an experiment. That reach for innovation, I think, speaks to people who are innovating in their own times.
The thing about Lincoln — I use Lincoln all the time in what I do, not just because I think he articulated so well some of the grander struggles of humanity, but also because in the United States, he’s a touchstone. If you wrote a piece right now about William Jennings Bryan, people would be like, “Who on earth are you talking about?” Similarly with Washington. Washington is so deeply problematic for many reasons, but certainly because of his association with human enslavement. Although Lincoln certainly was no saint, he has, at least in his mythology, a somewhat cleaner reputation than some of America’s other great figures.
So Copland chose well.
But it wasn’t just Copland in that period, right? In the late 19th century, there had been a reworking of Lincoln to see him as a folk hero, as a guy who lived in a shack or a log cabin, which itself is an interesting political thing. But if you think about Lincoln himself — the man, not the myth — he did in fact grow up in dramatically straitened circumstances. He rose to power on it in part because of the reputation his strength had given him in his community and so on, but he was not a guy who bought a farm to go cut rails in the future. He was quite happy to be a lawyer and a politician and not to be living the life of a man of the people. But in the period of the 1890s, that gets rewritten, and then it only makes sense in the 1930s and 1940s for people to reach to that, to say, “This is who we used to be, and we can be this again.”
Do you think the piece changes by having a historian as its narrator?
Maybe. I’m going to give you a definitive maybe on that, because one of the things that we’re seeing in this moment, in a different way than we have seen it in the past, is the use of history to change current-day politics and policies. People like me are engaged in pushing back against the concept of what people who study authoritarianism see as the use of history by the far right to advance an authoritarian agenda.
That use of history, that we need to get rid of everything we know about Black history, brown history, women and so on, in order to go back to this perfect past is in service to an authoritarian agenda. People like me are eager to reclaim the real American past, which is extraordinarily noble in many ways and extraordinarily ignoble in other ways. But that’s the point. The point is that democracy itself has always been a work in progress and always will be. And to have a historian talking about history in this moment, in a piece that had its own political message in its moment, maybe brings that layer to it.
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