Dangerous Melodies

“MUSIC IS THE ‘UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE,’ ” the brochure declared. “We DO talk without words.” While its author, Shibley Boyes, pianist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, admitted it was a “hackneyed . . . phrase,” the ninety-six-page publication captured the spirit of a successful trip, which saw the orchestra travel to Western Europe, Yugoslavia, Turkey, Cypress, Israel, Iran, and India, under the direction of Zubin Mehta, its gifted conductor. In reflecting on the 1967 journey, the commemorative tour book offered the uplifting if naive observation that the group had “friends in many countries, and found them all just like ourselves,” a hopeful sentiment unlikely to withstand careful scrutiny. As this evocative volume made clear, the twenty-thousand-mile jaunt was not unlike the orchestral adventures of the previous decade, in which bands of gifted American musicians left the United States on a “journey of Goodwill—with Music as our Medium.”¹

The 1960s and 1970s saw many such trips, as the life of the American orchestra continued to intersect with developments around the world. As before, those of a universalist bent were convinced the tours offered a chance to enhance the prospect for global understanding, while those of a more nationalist inclination believed the skillful use of America’s “diplomatic instruments” could fortify the country’s international position. As these symphonic odysseys suggest, classical music remained entangled in America’s relations with the wider world, underscoring the music’s crucial place in the nation’s political life.

In September 1960, Leonard Bernstein and his ensemble traveled to the divided city of Berlin, which, for many years, had served as the focal point of the US-Soviet competition. There, the New Yorkers would give two concerts at the annual Berlin Festival and offer a lecture-performance for German students, which was taped and shown on American television several weeks later.

The trip was sponsored by the Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford II, the firm’s president, asserted that the tour was an “opportunity to aid the courageous people of West Berlin in ideological battle with Communist East Germany.” Sounding more like a foreign policy pundit than a corporate titan, Ford remarked that the United States should do everything possible to maintain the “ideological gains” already achieved.² In the Philharmonic’s June press release, acting director of the United States Information Agency, Abbott Washburn, said the visit would demonstrate America’s “support” in a vital part of the world.³

Behind the scenes, correspondence among Ford officials, the US government, and the Philharmonic made clear that the trip’s goal was to advance America’s diplomatic objectives. To this end, policy makers hoped the orchestra would allow one of the two concerts they were to give to be taped and broadcast across Germany.⁴ As a USIA official wrote to the orchestra’s managing director, the aim was to keep Europeans cognizant of America’s “high cultural values.”⁵

The New Yorkers’ reception in Berlin was extraordinary, especially when one recalls that the city was home to a superb ensemble of its own, the Berlin Philharmonic, led by Herbert von Karajan. The US orchestra played music by Bartók, Beethoven, Rossini, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky, along with three American works that were intended to showcase the artistic vitality of the United States. Thus, Berliners would hear Copland’s El Salón México, Harris’s Third Symphony, and Bernstein’s overture to Candide. According to an American press account, as the orchestra concluded one of its concerts in the “divided city” with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, two thousand Berliners stood and applauded wildly. “They stamped their feet. They shouted. And they kept it up for ten minutes.” Such ardor, the American reporter noted, was partly an expression of the residents’ appreciation for America’s commitment to support “them against Soviet pressures to take over their city.”⁶

An array of local critics was unsparing in their praise. Describing the orchestra and its music director as “noble American guest[s],” Die Welt claimed the trip represented a heartfelt “sign of friendly ties with Berlin and its inhabitants.” It was unusual, the review observed, to see music used as an “artistic ambassador” on such “a timely cultural-political mission.”⁷ According to Der Telegraf, Leonard Bernstein had become the object of breathless acclaim. Extolled for his many talents—“conductor, composer, pianist, teacher, author, all in one person”—Bernstein possessed the skill of a “magician.” Beyond this, the reviewer found riveting his podium acrobatics: “Rocking, dancing, ready to leap and tense with energy, [he was] permeated with rhythm to his fingertips.”⁸

The most striking assessment of the Philharmonic’s achievement was offered by the Berliner Morgenpost : While politicians would prefer not to hear it, “the best diplomats are often the great musicians. When they step before a foreign public, there is no mistrust, no prejudice, no mudslinging. One finds then a straight road from people to people and a speech which all understand.”⁹

That musicians communicated directly with all peoples was an idea Bernstein had articulated repeatedly before 1960. Once again, the Berlin visit permitted him to deploy music’s extramusical power. If the two evening concerts aimed to accomplish the work of diplomacy by touching the purely musical sensibilities of a receptive audience, the lecture-performance, which permitted Bernstein to speak directly to Germans and Americans, enabled him to “conduct” diplomacy with both music and language. The hour-long event provided another opportunity for the youthful idealist to display his myriad talents, as he played and conducted a Beethoven piano concerto, served as a thought-provoking pedagogue, ruminated upon world affairs, and shared a Hebrew prayer. In one of the world’s most volatile settings, Bernstein and his orchestra offered a musical gift to West Berliners and received, in return, their adulation.

Watching a video of the program today, one is struck by Bernstein’s universalistic agenda, a perspective not entirely harmonious with the one he was meant to offer the beleaguered Berliners. But there was nothing surprising in the message he delivered in Berlin, which was consonant with the way he had approached such opportunities in the past. For unlike government officials, Bernstein did not perceive the visit, as Henry Ford had stated, as a “weapon” in the East-West struggle. Instead, he was committed to international cooperation and shared values, along with an irrepressible desire to use music to transcend the competitive character of the Cold War.

Bernstein rejected the idea that music should be used to enhance the strategic position of the United States in a zero-sum game. Instead, music could unify and inspire, with symphonic performances helping to vanquish the forces that divided humanity. What, then, did the American tell his young German listeners? And as Americans watched the documentary several weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day 1960, how would they have understood his inspirational language?

The CBS-TV documentary, which was widely publicized and enthusiastically discussed in newspapers across the country,¹⁰ began with a sonorous voice declaring that the “maker of the Ford Family of fine cars” was presenting a program featuring Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The opening camera shot moved viewers down a mainly empty boulevard, the Unter den Linden, toward the imposing Brandenburg Gate, passing along the way, of all things, a solitary Volkswagen Beetle. Viewers saw the youthful conductor, smiling and waving as he stepped from a Pan Am plane, after which Bernstein’s voice is heard: “Tempelhof Airport. We have just flown four thousand miles to participate in the Berlin Festival. . . . We’re curious to meet these Berliners, those of the older generation and those of the new. Those who remember the war and those who have only heard about it.” Such language reminded Americans about the centrality of World War II in the lives of Berliners, Germans, and, more broadly, all Europeans, thus linking the epochal events of the twentieth century to the mission undertaken by Bernstein and his musicians.¹¹

Bernstein’s voice is heard as American viewers watch modern-day Berliners, or at least their legs and feet, moving along the street in drab clothes and shoes, images that might have evoked memories of war-weary peoples trudging along the byways of a war-torn continent. Breaking the monotony of this gloomy tableau, a dog is seen walking along briskly. Inevitably, the pup is a dachshund, lending the shot a dash of Teutonic flavor, reminding viewers of the setting in which America’s mission is to unfold.

Here again is Bernstein, conveying the idea that contemporary West Berlin is different from the wartime (Nazi) city, as images of the Reichstag flash across the screen, followed by a view of a modern concert hall. “Today West Berlin is a city of immense gaiety and activity,” the conductor observes, as a brilliantly lighted amusement park appears, its rides twirling, the obligatory Ferris wheel turning gaily. He reminds the American viewer that the orchestra’s visit has been scheduled to coincide with Oktoberfest (a word the cosmopolitan New Yorker pronounces as if he is a native German), which leaves the city “aglow with the carnival spirit” of that annual rite. Viewers even glimpse the Berlin Hilton, where the musicians will stay, the building serving, quite literally, as a concrete symbol of the expansion of America’s commercial and cultural influence, a crucial characteristic of the post-1945 world. A modernist totem of postwar America’s economic and cultural power, the Hilton serves as a sentinel watching over a divided city in a divided world.¹²

The conductor, playing both artist and ambassador, informs his American audience that the task he and his orchestra have before them this day is to “give a special performance for students in the concert hall of the Senders Freies Berlin.” He will speak in English, he says, “since all high school students here are taught English.” Bernstein then offers a clarification, noting, while he will speak to the West Berliners in his “own tongue,” he and his associates have arrived prepared with printed German translations, “just in case, and lucky we did, because somehow a number of students from East Berlin have managed to join us.” In highlighting this difference between West and East Berliners, Bernstein notes, “They are not taught English in East Berlin,” a point American viewers might have taken to mean that young East Berliners were ruled by a backward regime inclined to shortchange its citizens. Such a realization might have suggested to American viewers that those confined to Berlin’s eastern section (and all of Eastern Europe) occupied a place on the margins of civilization.

A line of clean-cut, well-dressed students file into the concert hall in orderly fashion, their faces aglow. If this group is meant to represent the postwar generation in a democratic Germany, or, more pertinently, the youthful cohort comprising America’s democratic ally and bulwark against Communist expansion, the American public should feel reassured at seeing a mix of appealing teenagers and young adults. In the film, they represented just the sort of friends Americans would want to protect from the Soviet Union. Neither Nazis nor Communists, the young Berliners appeared well-mannered and cultured.

Bernstein began by repudiating the notion that musicians’ national backgrounds determined whether they were suited to play particular pieces of music. In his student days, he told the audience, “I used to think, along with so many other people, that all music was somehow quarantined within its own national borders.” Such words, offered to an audience for whom the notion of confinement was real, surely captured the attention of his youthful listeners and those in America, most of whom would have been familiar with the division of Europe. He had learned it was false to claim that only a Frenchman could play Debussy, or that only Germans could perform Beethoven, or that “the true Verdi” could only be sung by an Italian. This was no longer the case, he asserted, for the world had grown smaller, thus allowing musicians everywhere to hear “all styles by great performers of all nationalities.”¹³

Offering his version of musical universalism, in which differences among people were yielding to mutual understanding, Bernstein pointed out that he was in Germany with “one hundred New Yorkers” to play Beethoven, “the chief jewel in the German crown.” Could non-Germans perform the master’s First Piano Concerto in a way that would ring true to this audience of Germans? With a hint of playfulness, though with a purpose, Bernstein examined the now-obsolete notion that only a German could play Beethoven, by playing the opening statement of the Beethoven concerto as a Frenchman might: “light . . . delicate and superficial”; and then as a Russian: “passionate and virtuosic”; and finally, as an American, which led him to transform Beethoven’s opening statement into a jazzy riff, which, he observed, as the audience laughed, “stretched” the idea of nationalistic essentialism to “absurdity.” He articulated his pluralistic point, declaring, “Of course I don’t have to tell you that all this is nonsense.” Musicians today have become “stylistically sophisticated.” Then he drove home the core idea: “We become more international every day.”¹⁴

The musician’s capacity to interpret music could no longer be confined within the walls of the nation, Bernstein contended, for such barriers were increasingly porous. As musicians interacted with one another and encountered musical styles and traditions from across the world, it was foolish to imagine that a Frenchman could not play Beethoven, that a Russian was incapable of performing Brahms, or that an American could not interpret Tchaikovsky. The growing interconnectedness among people and the increasing permeability of national boundaries, as suggested by Bernstein, might have led an American viewer to consider the extent to which a similar idea should apply to the movement of ordinary Europeans; or a young Berliner to ponder whether quarantining people was similarly unenlightened. Addressed to an audience of young Germans, this message undermined the idea of innate national and ethnic differences and was a bold assertion. It brought to mind that fifteen years earlier, when those attending that day’s concert were small children, a version of such thinking had swept Jewish performers and “Jewish music” from the concert halls of the Third Reich and much of Europe.

But Bernstein was not done propounding his distinctive view. He proceeded to argue that Beethoven, the most German of composers, had created music that was “meaningful to all nationalities” because his compositions came closer than any “to the widely held ideal . . . of a universal language.” Beethoven’s music was preeminent among German composers, and had become “the common property of the whole world.”¹⁵ He then turned to the “universal” character of German music, which could not be “quarantined” because it had “transcend[ed] its national borders” to become “a universal communication.” This was so because of one distinctive attribute: “the idea of development,” which was “the fountainhead of everything we call ‘symphonic,’ ” a point Bernstein demonstrated by playing excerpts from the concerto he was about to perform. Musical development was related to the analytical nature of the German mind, he observed—engaging in some essentialism of his own—which gave German music its universal character.¹⁶

To illustrate the point, he offered a highly political—indeed, a geopolitical—metaphor, which no doubt touched his German listeners, while resonating with American viewers. “Let me give you an example of how this analytical development moves toward universality,” he began:

If you tell me that here in your city of West Berlin, certain areas are terribly noisy, you’re telling me a purely local fact. The noise neither bothers nor interests anybody except a Berliner. . . . But the moment we begin to develop this fact by probing, the magic begins to happen. Why is Berlin noisy? Because of the airplanes that are constantly landing and taking off at Tempelhof Airport, which is right in the middle of the city. Well, why does it have to be right in the middle of the city? Because this city is a political island. Now, we have already made a leap from a local fact to one of national and international interest. And the moment we seek further into the causes of this abnormal isolation—into ways and means of overcoming it—of making a peaceful world in which men can live freely and harmoniously, then we have come all the way from a little fact about an airport to a universal search for truth that is of interest to all mankind.

The conductor concluded this extraordinary flight of geographic, political, and musical fancy with the assertion that in music, the process in which he had just engaged, that of “deliberative inquiry,” was central to the entire “German symphonic idea.”¹⁷

The American had powerfully illustrated his musical point, whether one was sitting in a Berlin concert hall or was watching television in one’s living room in the United States on Thanksgiving Day. The conductor seized the opportunity, in making a musical point, to expound on the importance of constructing a more peaceful world, where everyone could “live freely and harmoniously.” Bernstein’s “local fact,” which might have been limited to the location of an airport, generated larger questions, which, upon reflection, revealed “a universal search for truth.” For a Berliner, the reality described was one they experienced daily, while for an American, Berlin’s status was integrally connected to the geopolitical competition in which their country was engaged. Beyond that, Bernstein suggested it was possible that a peaceful international order could be hewn from the cold, hard stone of the Soviet-American relationship.

After speaking in purely musical terms about Beethoven and the concerto he was about to perform, Bernstein turned, near the end of his lecture, to matters which he thought listening to music allowed one to contemplate. Such matters were embedded in great music, he believed, which helped explain why he and his ensemble had come to Berlin. The conductor asserted that everyone now had “at least a glimmer of what makes Beethoven’s music go so deep in human experience,” which explained why performers from every country “feel close to it.” The artist’s task, he insisted, is to “make manifest the basic truths that live in this music.”¹⁸

Bernstein then waxed even more idealistic, expanding upon why his ensemble had crossed the Atlantic. “We hundred New Yorkers” have come to Berlin “to take one more step, through this kind of cultural exchange, along those paths of international understanding that lead to peace.” Bernstein spoke about the emergence of a more cooperative age, the dawn of which music might help bring about. “After all, the heyday of narrow nationalism is, or should be, over by now. And what we must cultivate,” he insisted, “is the real understanding that exists on a level as deep as musical communication—a direct, heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind contact. Only this kind of rapport can bring us peace.” Bernstein then added what was the most arresting part of his presentation. After explaining that he and the orchestra were dedicating their performance of the Beethoven concerto to the goal of achieving peace, he told the audience of young Germans that he and his fellow Americans were offering the concert “with special reverence on this sacred day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when, at this moment, all over our small world, the words of that ancient benediction are being pronounced.” He recited a Hebrew prayer, which he translated for his German audience: “May the Lord lift up His face to you, and give you peace.”¹⁹ After a moment, the young Berliners applauded enthusiastically. And with that, Bernstein sat down to play Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, while conducting from the keyboard.

After the concert, which met with energetic applause, Bernstein rested backstage. A student whom he had met on a group outing the previous night interrupted the musician’s repose to ask if he would write out the Hebrew prayer he had recited earlier. Bernstein smiled and carefully inscribed the prayer in Hebrew. The American musician and the young German shook hands. When the student left, Bernstein lamented some of the rough spots in his playing.²⁰ Despite a few problematic passages, the passion and commitment Bernstein and his orchestra brought to Berlin were more meaningful than any small imperfections in the performance. The New Yorkers’ artistry had exemplified an ideal to which the conductor was profoundly committed. In a fractured world, he believed music had the power to deepen human understanding.

The Berliners’ ardent response to Bernstein’s performance was matched several weeks later across the United States in American press reviews of the New Yorkers’ Thanksgiving Day broadcast. A host of columnists lauded Bernstein for his efforts as artist and communicator, with some pointing to his ambassadorial skill. A piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer spoke of the German students’ “admiration and affection” for Bernstein, which the columnist George Condon found encouraging “in a land which only a few years ago tried to destroy all the Bernsteins of the world.” Moreover, Condon noted, the West Berliners had understood Bernstein “without help,” a result of “their general scholastic routine,” as opposed to the unlucky youngsters from the East.²¹

Even before the exultant reviews of the broadcast appeared, the New York advertising agency Kenyon and Eckhardt had provided a pre-broadcast media blitz, which blanketed the country in an effort to garner the largest possible audience for the Thanksgiving Day program. The ad campaign targeted more than six hundred newspapers in small towns, large cities, and hundreds of places in between.²² Among the campaign’s more notable elements was a promotional letter describing the Berlin trip, which had been sent to the press to supply context for potential stories touting the upcoming broadcast. Included in the November 7 letter was a description of East Berlin, which members of the orchestra had visited while on tour. “It’s a most depressing sight. Few people on the street and those shabbily dressed and dour. Very few cars and those old and decrepit. The stores were almost empty, and what merchandise you saw (you’re not allowed to buy, but who’d want to?) was miserable.” Describing the war-scarred eastern section of the city, the promotional statement spoke of “magnificent churches” that remained “piles of rubble,” and noted that many government buildings from the Nazi era stood untouched, “blasted to pieces.”²³ In learning about Berlin, Americans would hear that the city’s eastern section, where the adversary reigned, was backward, crumbling, and sad.

But the American public also encountered a wealth of attractive ads describing the upcoming program, one of which included a stylized pen and ink drawing of a colossal Bernstein (eyes closed and wielding a baton), towering over a demonic Beethoven, both set against the backdrop of the Brandenburg Gate.²⁴ Spreading the word further, the agency deluged the country with promotional material describing the Thanksgiving broadcast to more than six thousand members of the National Federation of Music Clubs. Bernstein’s theme was “The Universality of Music,” a promotional letter told readers, while emphasizing that the proceeds from the Ford-sponsored trip would help finance summer vacations for children “from the ‘Island City.’ ”²⁵

Of the many acclamatory reviews of Bernstein’s Berlin performance that appeared in the United States, John Crosby’s of the New York Herald Tribune was the most incisive.²⁶ Crosby, who had attended the concert, marveled at the conductor’s brilliance, calling Bernstein “a national asset beyond price.” He was “a living refutation (one of the few we own) of the oft-heard charge that Americans are cultural barbarians. Conductor, composer, teacher, performer—he is all that and more.” The man was “as vivid as a flash of lightning, full of swagger and charm and the courage of his own eccentricities.” The Europeans had “nothing like him, at least no one living.”²⁷

Five years later, one of the world’s most gifted conductors, George Szell, led one of America’s most distinguished ensembles, the Cleveland Orchestra, on a lengthy tour to Europe, including five weeks in the Soviet Union, the longest time an American ensemble had ever spent there.²⁸ The journey, under the auspices of the US State Department, was the second foreign trip undertaken by the Clevelanders; their first had taken them to Western Europe and Poland in 1957.²⁹ Highly successful in every respect, the 1965 tour saw President Lyndon Johnson enthusiastically send the group on its way with a generous letter.³⁰

The Hungarian maestro George Szell, known for his extraordinary musicianship and for his candor, was asked afterward to consider what the orchestra had achieved overseas. Reflecting on the ebullient reception the ensemble was granted in Vienna, he said the response of both press and public had given him “great joy and pride.” Never one to bite his tongue, Szell added, “Even the Vienna Philharmonic—perhaps the most conceited orchestra in the world, whose members attended our concerts in droves—capitulated unconditionally.” As for what the orchestra had accomplished, the conductor sounded like one of the many political figures we have heard pontificating about the aims of the symphonic voyages. It was not just that the group had established itself as one of the world’s leading ensembles. Beyond that, Szell claimed, the orchestra had a significant impact on the people of the countries they visited, by demonstrating that America is not simply “a materialistic, money and power-hungry country, but a society in which cultural organizations of the highest type can flourish.”³¹

This overt expression of musical nationalism was complemented by the more universalistic notion that appeared in the printed program of every concert the orchestra played overseas. Headed “A Message from the Secretary of State” and signed by Dean Rusk, thousands of concertgoers across Europe and in the Soviet Union read that the tour was a manifestation of “the American people’s wish to share with the rest of the world the best of our arts.” According to the statement, America’s overseas cultural program was “born of our conviction that good relations among nations are rooted in mutual understanding.”³²

Whether the Cleveland’s mission rested upon such ideas is debatable. One could reasonably argue that Maestro Szell’s unvarnished message more effectively captured the essence of the ensemble’s mission, but such language, infused with the rhetoric of national self-interest, could hardly have appeared in concert programs placed in the hands of thousands of listeners from London to Moscow.

What is unusual about the 1965 Cleveland tour are the hundreds of welcome-home letters penned to the orchestra upon its return by ordinary people (children included) from Cleveland and across Ohio. What one finds in the mainly handwritten letters is a mixture of themes, including more than a little boosterism on behalf of an esteemed local institution. In that vein, it is difficult to forget the congratulatory letter from the office manager of Associated Transport, described as “The Nation’s Leading Motor Carrier,” who shared his enthusiasm for the orchestra’s achievement, telling the gentlemen of the ensemble, “I have spoken with many prominent local business men in the trucking industry and all were very proud of the way you have represented Cleveland.” He concluded his gracious missive by telling the musicians it is “a pleasure to have you back,” noting, “Efforts such as yours make the phrase, ‘Best Location in the Nation’ more than just a slogan.”³³

Beyond the oft-expressed sentiment that Ohioans felt immense pride in seeing their local ensemble garner international acclaim, one hears quite a bit about music’s potential to help overcome the challenges of world politics. Among the many who spoke of the orchestra as a diplomat, a Cleveland nun told the ensemble that the community was “justly proud of you as American ambassadors of culture, freedom, and peace.” Another local resident said he was pleased for the “city, state, and country to have such an excellent non-political ambassador.” Numerous writers suggested the tour had contributed to building a better world. According to one woman, the world would be “much happier . . . if all contacts could be as successful . . . in making friends for our country.” A Cleveland couple was pleased the orchestra had “succeeded in spreading American brotherhood throughout the world,” and a man from the town of Mt. Vernon claimed the group had “done more to bring understanding between nations than any politician.” Such sentiments were, at times, eloquently expressed, with one woman proclaiming, “Surely the baton is mightier than the sword. . . . There are no language barriers in music—and the perfection of your presenting [that] has had to me a magical significance.”³⁴

Some correspondents expressed views similar to those Maestro Szell had shared, claiming the tour had demonstrated to the world a more refined side of the American people. A Cleveland woman thanked the group for “showing Europeans that Americans aren’t all rock ‘n roll and that sort of music fans but appreciative good music fans.” And from Fort Clinton, a woman who seemed to know a member of the orchestra said the tour allowed “the people of Europe and the U.S.S.R to see what fine musicians we have in Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A.” Indeed, her music-loving cousin living in Vienna had attended a Cleveland concert, and was most “impressed.”³⁵

The US-Soviet relationship attracted the attention of many letter writers, several of whom hoped the trip could lessen the tension between the two foes. Considering the orchestra’s “triumphant tour,” particularly in Communist-controlled Europe and the Soviet Union, a Cleveland man observed, “I now understand what it means to say that music is the greatest diplomat. I am sure that your appearances behind the iron curtain showed more of the American spirit than if an ambassador had talked for weeks.” A woman who had visited Moscow some years before wrote that the “world should be governed by artists and not politicians and generals.” A Bay Village woman claimed the orchestra’s journey had been “one grand thing to be thankful for during these trying times of war and strife.” She concluded hopefully: “Would that we might have government by music with each nation in tune with each other.”³⁶

But the most memorable letters were from young people, who repeatedly suggested that classical music could heal the wounds of the world. These youthful Ohioans highlighted the contribution their orchestra had made to peace and international understanding. Jody, a junior high school student who described herself as a “citizen of your native home,” congratulated the musicians on their “excellent deed,” declaring, “you have helped in the war for world peace.” Expanding on this uplifting if awkwardly phrased idea, she said, “the feeling and emotion put forth by a group of instruments . . . is a better communication to the outside world than any [official] delegation.” From the same junior high, Julia told Maestro Szell, though she had missed the orchestra while they were abroad, it is “a marvelous thing when musicians can bring a world different in culture and belief closer together in beautiful music.” Charles wrote articulately to Szell and his orchestra about their performances in the Soviet Union: “Stunning were your accomplishments over the Russian audiences. It is truly remarkable how you were so warmly accepted by the Russian people, becoming endeared in their hearts.” According to Charles, the orchestra had “strengthened the important cultural bonds between the U.S.S.R. and our country.”³⁷

Finally, a seventh-grader’s message reflected the public enthusiasm for the 1965 tour while capturing the essence of America’s Cold War symphonic project. Norman wrote that the group deserved congratulations for “promoting relationships between millions of people and the United States,” and praised the ensemble for presenting “the image of freedom in oppressed countries abroad.”³⁸

Among the more remarkable symphonic journeys in these years were the visits to the People’s Republic of China, which reflected that country’s heightened importance at this moment in the history of America’s Cold War competition. This crucial political and cultural initiative began with a phone call from President Richard Nixon to Eugene Ormandy in February 1973. The president informed the conductor that Chinese officials had invited the Philadelphians to visit China that year.³⁹ The music director accepted the invitation, and in September the ensemble journeyed to China, the visit sponsored, in part, by the US government. Capturing the universalist spirit, Ormandy observed, “through great music, we will be taking the good will and friendship of this country to the People’s Republic of China.”⁴⁰ Performing in Beijing and Shanghai, the group offered programs of standard European and American works, plus a traditional Chinese piece, The Yellow River Concerto, a composition loathed by the Philadelphia musicians, who dubbed it The Yellow Fever Concerto.⁴¹

Despite their feelings about the Chinese composition, the American musicians savored the opportunity to interact with their counterparts in Beijing’s Central Philharmonic Orchestra, with whom they warmly discussed their respective experiences in music. The musicians engaged in a memorable exchange of gifts, the Americans providing instruments, mouthpieces, reeds, scores, and Western classical recordings, while the Chinese offered traditional Chinese instruments. Enhancing the bonds between the two groups, several American musicians received treatment for longstanding ailments from a local acupuncturist, who won rave reviews from the Philadelphians.⁴² While the trip was not without incident, most of the tensions concerned questions of repertoire. There was an insistent demand to perform Beethoven’s Sixth, which Ormandy disliked but agreed to play, and some distress over Respighi’s Pines of Rome, which was thought “decadent” by Chairman Mao’s wife. But all told, the visit was considered a triumph by both diplomats and musicians.⁴³

Expressing the hopeful sentiments that inevitably accompanied such journeys, an American diplomat in China told the ensemble, by communicating this “universal language with consummate skill and beauty,” they had advanced President Nixon’s goal of achieving “better understanding” between the two peoples. Maestro Ormandy was similarly optimistic: “We had a mission to fill and I hope we succeeded.” Noting that there had been a great deal of talk during the trip about friendship between the two lands, Ormandy said he thought the Chinese had “mean[t] every word of it.”⁴⁴ Widely covered in the American press, the trip was seen as a crucial episode in the evolving relationship between both countries.⁴⁵

Six years later, the Boston Symphony followed the Philadelphians’ path to China, playing four concerts under their Japanese music director Seiji Ozawa, who had been born in China. Privately financed, the trip cost $650,000, a sum underwritten by Coca-Cola, Mobil, Gillette, and Pan American Airways.⁴⁶ Filled with concerts, rehearsals, master classes, banquets, and countless heartwarming interactions between Chinese and American musicians, the stay created enormous interest and enthusiasm in China. Speaking the language of an artist absorbed in the human rather than the political implications of such journeys, Ozawa declared, “On this trip politics was forgotten. Even music was transcended: it was the catalyst that brought people together—heart to heart.” Despite such lofty assertions, Ozawa could not avoid articulating a well-worn idea: “We reconfirmed that music was an international language.”⁴⁷

The final concert, featuring a joint performance by the Bostonians and the Central Peking Philharmonic in Beijing, which included “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as a rousing encore, belied the conductor’s sense that the journey had little to do with politics.⁴⁸ Indeed, when the orchestra returned home from a trip that had garnered extensive national coverage, Ozawa’s contention that the tour was devoid of politics was questioned by a Boston Globe editorial, which claimed the language of Liszt, Berlioz, and Sousa needed little translation. As a result, everyone could understand “the good will engendered by Ambassador Seiji Ozawa and his skilled corps of diplomats.” As such references suggest, more than a little politics was woven into the fabric of the trip.⁴⁹ The point was reinforced by US ambassador to China Leonard Woodcock, who said the visit had “advanced United States-China relations by at least twenty years.” The orchestra’s rapport with the Chinese had “done more good than anything that [could] be established through diplomatic channels.”⁵⁰

Such sentiments notwithstanding, the American orchestral tours during the Cold War did not accomplish what they sought to achieve. While the journeys undoubtedly heightened a sense of connectedness between performers and listeners and deepened the bonds between American and foreign musicians,⁵¹ they produced little in the diplomatic realm. As the turbulent history of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s suggests, the symphonic tours neither enhanced global cooperation nor diminished international tensions.

If the impact of the tours was limited, this had nothing to do with the work of America’s extraordinary orchestras or the superb musicians who populated their ranks. Time after time, those marvelous ensembles and gifted players had done all that was asked of them. But despite memorable performances across the world, the notion that attending orchestral concerts could genuinely alter the political outlook or behavior of people once they left the shared space of the concert hall was a vain hope. As I suggested in the previous chapter, the music clearly aroused powerful emotions in foreign listeners and transported them, for an evening at least, to a different, perhaps better, place. And it is possible that listeners left the concert hall with a greater appreciation for the United States and its capacity to perform and create classical music of the highest quality. Nevertheless—and still more significantly—even the most brilliant performances could not affect the fundamental beliefs or policies of political leaders, nor could such concerts reconfigure the fraught relations among peoples and nations.⁵² Despite what one Ohioan believed, the baton was not mightier than the sword.

Such a realization, however disheartening, does not mean that exploring the intersection between America’s classical-music community and the wider world has little to offer. Quite the contrary. Examining that convergence provides invaluable insights into the history of twentieth-century America. Peering inside the country’s auditoriums (and some overseas), one perceives America’s expanding engagement with the twentieth-century world and recognizes the degree to which a variety of foreign threats, whether real or imagined, created a growing sense of insecurity in the United States. That expanding global engagement, along with the nation’s mounting anxiety—both starkly revealed in the world of classical music—were defining characteristics of the United States in the last century. More than that, those twin developments helped remake the contours of international politics. Without question, the growing assertiveness of the United States on the international stage was crucial to the history of the twentieth-century world, and America’s increasing sense of vulnerability contributed to its determination to expand its global influence.

Let me conclude with some thoughts on the significance of classical music in American life. It is clear that the music and those who performed, conducted, composed, wrote about, and listened to it were drawn into the maelstrom of America’s global challenges in the twentieth century. While it would be unwise to claim that classical music helped the country overcome those challenges, it did offer the American people a powerful way to reflect upon and understand the world. For more than fifty years, countless Americans fixed their ears and eyes on the activities of classical musicians; on the work of composers; and on the performances, broadcasts, and travels of the country’s leading musical organizations. And over many decades, the musicians, the institutions, and the music were of considerable consequence, not just in America’s cultural life, but also in its political life.

While classical music has always offered profound rewards to the music’s devotees, in an era of perpetual crises and endless uncertainty, the music and the work of classical performers helped the nation grapple with matters of grave significance: the meaning of patriotism, loyalty, democracy, freedom, tyranny, and oppression. The world of classical music helped Americans reflect upon questions of war and peace, which were integral to the larger matter of the country’s role on the international stage. With the waning of the Cold War, as overseas threats, especially those emanating from Europe, became less fearsome, classical music became less bound up in world politics. As a result, its role in the nation’s political life would largely disappear. To the extent that the music remained meaningful, it continued to matter to musicians and enthusiasts, as it always had. But for the nation as a whole, classical music was not nearly as consequential. To be sure, the dwindling interest in classical music in the latter part of the twentieth century flowed from a number of sources, not least the ubiquitous appeal of more vernacular genres such as rock and other forms of pop music; a decline in music education curriculums, which no longer offered a broad musical education in elementary through high school; and the pervasive attraction (and distraction) of television and digital culture. At the same time, the end of the convergence between the world of classical music in the United States and international political developments meant the music no longer exercised the powerful hold on the American people that it had from the Great War through the Cold War.

As we think about recent times, an unexpected episode illustrates how the intersection between classical music and the outside world again captured the nation’s attention and raised the music’s profile in a way not seen for many years. In December 2007, the New York Philharmonic announced, as part of an Asian tour, that it would visit North Korea the following February for two days. This twenty-first century confluence of art and politics, a result of the North Korean government’s invitation to the orchestra, placed classical music back in the national spotlight. According to the Philharmonic’s president, the ensemble hoped “to help open the country,” even though he noted, however contradictorily, that they only played “great music” and gave no thought to politics.⁵³

What made this brief adventure striking, aside from the extraordinary notion that an esteemed American ensemble would perform Wagner, Dvořák, Gershwin, and “The Star-Spangled Banner” in distant Pyongyang, was that classical music, if only fleetingly, again occupied a central place in the political conversation. As before, one heard a multiplicity of voices: a conductor, Lorin Maazel, with intriguing things to say about art and politics; symphonic musicians expressing a range of heartfelt emotions; orchestra administrators discussing music’s salutary qualities; government officials pondering the diplomatic possibilities; and journalists and pundits opining on music and the wider world. As was once commonplace, debates ensued about the relationship between music and politics; about confronting the threat posed by a tyrannical regime; and, most significantly, about America’s role in the world. A US diplomat suggested that the trip seemed to signal that North Korea was “beginning to come out of its shell,” and expressed hope that the visit might help bring an isolated nation “back into the world.”⁵⁴ Yet again, America’s diplomatic instruments would be deployed to advance critical overseas objectives.

While the setting was more remote than in the past, there was nothing novel about the journey to North Korea, even if many seemed to think it marked the first time classical music had intersected with foreign concerns. Over several decades, in fact, the music had been every bit as enmeshed in world politics as it was during that brief moment in February 2008, when classical music again occupied an important place in the nation’s consciousness. During those few days when a surge of interest erupted over the New Yorkers’ excursion, a handful of people might have recalled a time when classical music and the wider world converged. They might have remembered when the melodies of Beethoven, Wagner, Strauss, Copland, and Shostakovich, along with the work of the esteemed artists and institutions that performed such extraordinary music, were entwined with developments beyond America. However difficult to imagine, across those eventful decades, countless people embraced the idea that what happened in the concert hall and the opera house was inseparable from the destiny of the United States and the well-being of the American people.