Musical Thoughts on the Lincoln Bicentennial (Feb. 12, 2009)
Copyright 2009 by Leonard J. Lehrman, Critic-at-Large
“There’s a brand-new wind a-blowin’ down that Lincoln road.” So wrote Langston Hughes, in 1940, words set to music by Elie Siegmeister (1909-1991) and published as the 181st and last song in his collection, A Treasury of American Song. And so sang The Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus last month in Great Neck, Huntington, and Manhattan, at three of the 15 Elie Siegmeister Centennial concerts scheduled this year. As we welcome that “new wind” in Washington today, and commemorate the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth this month, a look back at the music inspired by our 16th president would seem to be in order. This essay is offered as a contribution that will certainly not be comprehensive or complete, but may, I hope, stir others’ memories and imaginations.
Paul Hindemith’s 1946 Requiem for Those We Love after Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed,” which I vividly remember hearing Hindemith himself conduct, with George London and Louise Parker at Philharmonic Hall in 1963, may be the most beautiful and lasting tribute. One should also mention Roger Sessions’s 1971 setting of the same text; and that shorter Lincoln poem by Whitman, “O Captain, My Captain!” and its settings by Walter Damrosch, Arthur Farwell, Kurt Weill, Lee Hoiby, and at least five other composers. The Hoiby and the Weill will be among those “Art Songs Inspired by Lincoln and His Time,” presented at the Lincoln Center Library Feb. 28, 2009. Others include “Lincoln Letters” by Christopher Berg, “A Letter from Annie Davis to Abraham Lincoln” by Jake Heggie, and Celius Doughterty’s “Lincoln the Great Commoner.”
But Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait of 1942 for Narrator and Orchestra is probably the most famous work of musical Lincolniana. It has been performed by William Adams, Fred Child, Van Cliburn, Walter Cronkite, Will Geer, Al Gore, Gore Vidal, Walter Mondale, Carl Sandburg, Marian Anderson, Henry Fonda, Tom Hanks, Melvyn Douglas, Claude Rains, Raymond Massey, David Dinkins, Eleanor Roosevelt, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Adlai Stevenson, Margaret Thatcher, James Taylor, Samuel L. Jackson, Charlton Heston, Edward Kennedy, Norman Schwarzkopf, James Earl Jones, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Eartha Kitt, Katharine Hepburn, William Warfield, Zero Mostel, André Watts, Coretta Scott King, and Copland himself, among many, many others, including, perhaps most importantly of all at the moment, Barack Obama with the Chicago Symphony, Sept. 11, 2005. Its most famous historical moment may, however, have been its rejection by President Eisenhower for inclusion at his 1953 inauguration. Reading Copland’s testimony of May 26, 1953 before Joseph McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Government Operations (which questioned his patriotism) can provide context for that infamous decision. I’ll be glad to email it to any reader who would like to see it, having copied it off the internet when it was available, apparently only for a short time: it does not seem to be accessible at present.
Copland’s teacher, Rubin Goldmark, composed a Requiem Suggested by Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1916; Robert Russell Bennett penned Lincoln: A Likeness in Symphony Form in 1929; and Daniel Gregory Mason called his Third Symphony A Lincoln Symphony, in 1936. Also in 1936, Jacob Weinberg set the Gettysburg Address; and Copland student Earl Robinson set the words of Alfred Hayes (author of the text of Robinson’s most famous song, “Joe Hill“) adapted from Lincoln, which many know by heart to this day:
“This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it.
This country, with its Constitution, belongs to those who live in it.
Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government
They can exercise their constitutional right of amending it
Or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it.”
Sung in summer camps, by the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain, and by a black male quartet in the Shubert Brothers’ Broadway 1938 revue Hellzapoppin’, the song represented, as Earl himself wrote in 1963, a “need not only to look to the future but to seek back in the past, through our own history for helps to face and understand the stormy present. The word ‘revolutionary’ was not a fearsome word–not to the majority.” Robinson would draw further inspiration from Lincoln in his 1942 cantata on a text by Millard Lampell, The Lonesome Train, which will be revived this coming Feb. 12 in a Riverside Church performance conducted by Maurice Peress.
Vachel Lindsay’s 1914 poem “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” inspired choral settings by Elie Siegmeister (1937) - which will be revived by the Providence (RI) Singers Mar. 28 & 29, 2009; Robert Palmer (1948); and Roy Harris (1954), who had been Palmer’s teacher, along with Copland. Their joint interest in this text was what initially brought Siegmeister and Palmer together, in a friendship resulting in at least three students being sent by the one (at Hofstra) to the other (at Cornell) for further study: Jack Gallagher, Leonard Lehrman, and Daniel Dorff.
Other symphonic works inspired by Lincoln included Morton Gould’s Lincoln Legend (1942); Herbert Elwell’s Lincoln: Requiem aeternam (1946); Ulysses Kay’s A Lincoln Letter (1953); Harris’s Tenth Symphony Abraham Lincoln (1965); Ferde Grofé’s Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (1954); Vincent Persichetti’s A Lincoln Address (1973), which engendered almost as much controversy when it was rejected by Nixon for his second inauguration as the Copland had when it was rejected by Eisenhower for his first; and Stephen Paulus’s 2004 settings of words by Carl Sandburg, The Long Shadow of Lincoln.
In the realm of theatre and satire, one should mention Yip Harburg’s 1939 Wizard of Oz verse: “With the thoughts I’d be thinkin’/I could be another Lincoln/If I only had a brain!”; Salvatore Martirano’s L’sGA of 1968; the “Abey Baby” number in the 1966 musical Hair, about to return to Broadway; and the 1961 Victor Ziskin musical Young Abe Lincoln starring baritone Darrell Sandeen, who just passed away this past January 22. The Anne Rutledge-Abe Lincoln duet “Someone You Know” is one of this writer’s favorite love duets, and is to be revived in a concert in Florida Feb. 28.
Lincoln’s (possibly apocryphal) first love, Anne Rutledge, who died in 1835; Nancy Hanks, Lincoln’s mother, who died in 1818; and Lincoln himself were all inspirations for songs by Elie Siegmeister as part of his 1940s American Legends series, written for the American Ballad Singers, and being heard again this coming March 16 at 7pm, at a Lincoln Festival concert of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC. The first had a text by Leo Israel, who wrote under various pen names, including Victor Lear and Leo Paris. It was published as a choral piece with soprano solo, and has been performed and recorded that way and as a solo piece by Helene Williams with (and without) the Metropolitan Philharmonic Chorus on Original Cast and Capstone Records. “Nancy Hanks,” on a text by Rosemary Benet, was recorded by the American Ballad Singers (on 78s), Elizabeth Kirkpatrick (on an Orion LP), and Helene Williams (on CD) as a solo. The Great Neck Choral Society premiered the choral version Dec. 7, 2008. Other settings of that poem have been written by Katherine K. Davis (included in the aforementioned Feb. 28 Lincoln Center program), Herbert Rothgarber, Gail T. Kubik, Edwin London, and Arnold Shaw.
Siegmeister’s song “Abraham Lincoln” began life also as a setting of a children’s poem by the Benets - Rosemary & Stephen Vincent, author of the epic poem John Brown’s Body. The first version of the musical setting (recorded by Lars Woodul on Original Cast) cut a few lines, restored in the second version entitled “Lincoln in Springfield” (premiered Mar. 4 & 6, 2007 concert by New Music New York). The third version, with virtually the same music, was set to an entirely different text, “The Lincoln Penny,” by Alfred Kreymborg, quoted at length in a NY Times article by David Margolick around Lincoln’s Birthday two years ago. It was David who suggested this essay, thinking folks might particularly like to know how I’d felt motivated to write my own 2004 choral setting of some of the most memorable words from Lincoln’s “Second Inaugural,” which has now been heard at an American Guild of Organists mini-convention and services at four different churches, including the Jan.18, 2009 Huntington Ecumenical Martin Luther King Service; and will be heard again, together with music by Siegmeister (including two of his Lincoln songs), Feb. 12, 2009 at the College of Wooster (OH):
With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us strive
to bind up the nation’s wounds,
to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan,
to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace
among ourselves, and with all nations.
With malice toward none, with charity for all, let us strive.
Frankly, I had been quite depressed by the presidential election results of 2000, and especially 2004, realizing after the latter that we were about to experience a second Republican inaugural for the first time since 1984. My thoughts drifted back to the first time there had been a second Republican inaugural, and how different those president’s words had been from those we had been hearing from the White House for four years. I therefore set them, not only as an homage to Lincoln, and what the presidency had been, but also in hopes of what the presidency could again become. Those hopes are of course very high again now. May they only be lived up to.