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Commentary
The Year Was 1962
Or, Some Things Change and Some Don't

by Robert Wilder Blue

We’re nuts for research. We love combing through old issues of magazines and newspapers, flipping through microfilm, or clicking away on the Internet. Recently, we had the happy experience of returning to 1962 -- not a year that ordinarily pops out of the perpetual calendar -- to dig up what we could about the premiere of Carlisle Floyd’s The Passion of Jonathan Wade. What follows is a hodgepodge of items, incidental but not directly related to Jonathan – sort of a clippings in prose. Notice: if this kind of thing bores you to pieces, now’s the time to click back to the home page.

The June 23, 1962 edition of The New York Times reported that the Pulitzer Prize for music had been awarded to Robert Ward for his opera The Crucible and for theater to Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows for How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. In the same edition, we learned that Douglas Moore (composer of The Ballad of Baby Doe) had addressed the American Symphony Orchestra League at their annual convention. Moore had retired recently from the faculty of Columbia University to devote more time to composition (Carrie Nation and a revision of Giants in the Earth lay in his future). In his speech, Moore deplored "the stagnation of opera in the U.S. during a decade in which symphony orchestras have enjoyed steadily growing support." One presumes he was speaking about the 1950s when audiences could enjoy such starry orchestra/conductor partnerships as the American Symphony Orchestra/Leopold Stokowski, Boston Symphony/Charles Munch and before him Serge Koussevitzky, Chicago Symphony/Fritz Reiner, the Cleveland Orchestra/George Szell, the New York Philharmonic/Leonard Bernstein, Philadelphia Orchestra/Eugene Ormandy -- perhaps the apex in the development and appreciation of the modern orchestra in this country.

In Europe, Moore noted, "Every town of any size has its own opera house and opera company…. [T]he American public has never understood the true nature of opera. Opera is generally conceived only as a musical experience, with little emphasis on theatrical immediacy." Moore’s solution was to "give operas in English and give them more dramatic appeal. Our salvation lies in having our own opera. We will never be a fully musical nation until we have developed a native opera." He wondered if Americans really knew the American opera repertory and realized how good it was, and offered as evidence recent Pulitzer Prizes awarded to Gian Carlo Menotti for The Consul and The Saint of Bleeker Street, Samuel Barber for Vanessa, and to Moore himself for Giants in the Earth and, just that week, to Ward for The Crucible.

Flipping ahead to Sunday, October 7, the week of Jonathan Wade’s premiere, The New York Times front page informed us that local firemen had rejected the City’s offer of a $7,980 yearly base salary, U.S./Cuba negotiations for the release of 1,113 captives taken during 1961 U.S. invasion of Cuba had broken down, the Marina 2 spacecraft was on its way to Venus, and the N.Y. Yankees had beaten the San Francisco Giants 5-3 in the fifth game of the World Series.

The first page of Section II featured a photograph of Uta Hagen, George Grizzard, Arthur Hill, and Melinda Dillon playing in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, due to open on Broadway the following Saturday. Below it, Mr. Albee let off some steam in "A Playwright Discusses the Excessive Importance Attached to Broadway." Among the many advertisements for offerings on Broadway, Herb Gardner’s A Thousand Clowns (with Jason Robards Jr. and Sandy Dennis, directed by Gene Saks) looked intriguing.

Page three was filled with publicity photos for films opening during the coming week, including Barabbas with Anthony Quinn and Jack Palance, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner with Michael Redgrave and "introducing Tom Courtney," and Long Day’s Journey into Night (the oft-published photograph of the disheveled Katharine Hepburn pulling herself up off the floor, with Dean Stockwell, Sir Ralph Richardson and Jason Robards Jr. reacting in the background).

Music news began on page nine, where a photograph of Theodor Uppman, Phyllis Curtin and Frank Poretta in The Passion of Jonathan Wade advertised the opera’s upcoming world premiere. Carlisle Floyd’s own piece, "Story of Jonathan," answered the questions "Who was Jonathan Wade?" and "How did you come to write an opera set in the Reconstruction era?" The New York City Opera Company’s repertory for the week had a familiar ring: Madama Butterfly, The Marriage of Figaro, Aïda, and The Mikado. Notable musical events for the week included concerts and recitals by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, Rita Streich and Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall, a recital by Gerard Souzay at Hunter College, appearances by Jennie Tourel and Mahalia Jackson, as well as a concert of Bach and Shostokovich with the New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting at Philharmonic Hall (later renamed Avery Fisher Hall). Sam Goody’s full-page advertisement for classical recordings announced the new Fidelio (Beethoven) with Jon Vickers and Christa Ludwig, Otto Klemperer conducting (3 lps for $5.89 mono/$6.97 stereo).

Finally, on October 11, the day of Jonathan Wade’s premiere, we read an obituary for noted philanthropist, Vivian Beaumont Allen.

All of New York’s major daily newspapers (there were eight or so at the time) covered The Passion of Jonathan Wade with thoughtful previews and well-considered reviews. The Associated Press review appeared in major newspapers around the country. The nation’s larger weekly magazines, Time, The New Yorker, et al., also covered the premiere.

The October 27 issue of The Saturday Review devoted a full-page to its review of Jonathan Wade. There were 24 pages of classical music and opera coverage in all. Granted, this included several pages of advertising, but there were also full-page reviews/discussions of The Man Verdi, a new biography by Frank Walker, the new London recording of Händel’s Alcina featuring Joan Sutherland, and the new RCA Victor recording of Wagner’s Die Walküre -- the first uncut Wagner opera recording sponsored by an American recordmaker -- conducted by Erich Leinsdorf with Birgit Nilsson, George London, Gré Browenstijn, Jon Vickers and Rita Gorr. The accompanying photograph was a partial orchestra shot with a caption that read, "‘Ride of the Valkyies’ – an aural shock wave from the thirteen horns" -- although only twelve made the photograph.

Musing on all this, after the writings and the events they describe, and beyond the amusement at the hair styles, fashions and advertisements for "modern" appliances, one is left with another impression: namely, that this was a time when classical music was a part of the intellectual life of the nation. We didn’t count actual column inches, but looking through all these publications there emerged a clear sense that classical music got a lot more press coverage in 1962. One hesitates to assume that publishers were nobler then and more concerned about educating and informing their readers. We suspect instead that there existed a larger reading public for classical music. This is certainly not to report that things looked any less commercial – there were still the full-page ads for large department stores and large electric companies and the like. (We’re not inclined to give them free publicity by mentioning their names.)

Today, mainstream media are loathe to give up space to an art form (entertainment form?) not appreciated by the mainstream and one that therefore doesn’t generate a large advertising revenue. (Imagine a full-page Terminator-esque advertisement for a new opera put on by your local company.) One of Tina Brown’s first acts when she took charge of The New Yorker a few years back was to banish classical music to a once-a-month appearance, allowing more space for fashion photography. (We cancelled our subscription shortly thereafter, already having enough fashion magazines in our rack.) Post-Brown, the magazine still hasn’t reinstated weekly coverage.

All of this, of course, is part of the larger concern: classical music’s place in American culture today. In a recent New York Times piece, Anthony Tommasini wondered whether the New York Philharmonic was relevant at all to the lives of New Yorkers today, a suggestion that generated outrage from industry insiders and hardly a peep from anyone else. This is certainly a change from the 1962 Douglas Moore described. Music education in public schools went down the tubes in the 70s. Classical radio followed in the 80s and 90s. And excepting the obvious and often obnoxious promotions for well-known attention grabbers, don’t let’s even talk about the recording industry.

One could argue of course that the classical music industry did itself in. Fearful of new or popular influences, it barricaded itself behind a wall of 18^th and 19^th century music. On the academic front, turf wars between the serialists and the tonalists did what most wars do – destroy most everything in sight and leave a mess that takes years to clean up. All this left the public few options. Analogies to Detroit aside, if you want to keep selling your product, you had better keep it up-to-date (and relevant). It’s not hard to sympathize with the publisher, writer or reader who is unenthusiastic about yet another production of Carmen. Carmen remains Carmen; is there anything left to say about it?

But we’re not interested in concentrating on the negative here. What about the good news? As symphony orchestras and other classical music institutions struggle to keep payroll accounts funded, opera companies purportedly are enjoying a renaissance. Many theories have been floated for the reasons behind this. One is that the MTV generation has come to opera as an extension of the music video and is perhaps more interested in (and less afraid of) The Ghosts of Versailles (by American composer John Corigliano) than they are in The Abduction from the Seraglio (Mozart). Another is that the inclusion of opera arias on popular film soundtracks and the appearances on television and in sports arenas of opera (and pseudo-opera) superstars have turned people onto opera, albeit Italian opera from previous centuries. Finally, and we’d like to think most importantly, American opera companies are producing new American operas based on American stories and are grabbing the public’s attention by doing so. Dead Man Walking was the talk of the town in San Francisco last fall. Now if we could just do something about the ticket prices!

The growing presence in daily life of the Internet must be viewed as good news. Currently, there are hundreds of Web sites where one can listen to, read and chat about classical music and opera. (In our Links we suggest a few we like.) Given the demise of classical public radio, the recent news that almost a hundred performing organizations around the nation had reached an agreement to broadcast and possibly distribute their performances over the Internet should have excited every music lover in the country!

Thirty-nine years later, Douglas Moore’s challenge remains timely. The artists we have spoken to have said it repeatedly: the way we honor the tradition of opera and ensure its future is by creating works that tell our own stories. There can be no better examples of this than Mark Adamo’s Little Women and Hector Armienta’s Rio de Mujeres/River of Women, both featured in our current issue, and Jake Heggie’s, Dead Man Walking, which we will feature in the next issue. River of Women hasn’t seen its premiere yet but we can report that Little Women and Dead Man Walking are terrific operas. Both will be given numerous productions around the U.S. over the next few years. Little Women will be shown on public television on August 29.

As Meg sings to Jo in Little Women: Things Change! We’d like to hope it’s for the better.

Postcript: Jesse McKinley reported recently in his On Stage and Off column in The New York Times that the 2001-2 Broadway season would bring revivals of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (with Jessica Lange, possibly), The Crucible (with Liam Neeson), A Thousand Clowns (starring Tom Selleck).