DAILY DOSE OF BEETHOVEN (OCTOBER 13, 2020)
Yesterday was Columbus Day. As both historical ignorance and political correctness combine to augment one another's incompetence; and as statues of heroes and scoundrels both, are indiscriminately toppled and defaced, we would like to recall another celebration of another Columbus Day—this one on the 400th Anniversary of Columbus' landing, in 1892.
Rather than seeing Columbus and his voyages as symbols of racism and oppression, the opposite view was then taken. The first "Columbus Day" celebrations in NYC lasted for an entire week. Every nationality and religious group participated. 350 Native American students marched alongside students of private Italian Schools, such as the Dante Alighieri College of Astoria. The parade consisted of 12,000 public school children, 5,500 Catholic school kids, the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, and 29 marching bands, consisting of 30-50 instruments each.
The celebration was not meant to whitewash past atrocities that had taken place against ethnic groups, but to reinforce the commitment to CHANGE, that was embodied in Columbus' mission, as manifested in the parade sponsors' commitment to something new—universal public education. That is why so many school children marched! They were not out to seek reparations for past injustices. No place in the world escapes injustice! They were out to build the future, and our children are that future!
One European observer was especially bowled over. Jeanette Thurber (1850-1946), founder of the National Conservatory of Music in NYC (which was the first American conservatory to invite women, people of all ethnicity, color, and others, to participate in the highest level of musical education), had invited the great Czech composer Antonin Dvorak to come and head the composition department of her new school. She was very careful in arranging for Dvorak to experience all of the things that made America different, and organized it, so that he arrived in time to see this celebration of Columbus. Every nationality, every trade participated. For the newly arrived-to-America Dvorak, this had to be very different from European nationalism. It was not ethnic. It was universal.
RACISTS TRY TO APPROPRIATE COLUMBUS’ MISSION
The next year in 1893, the World's Columbian Exposition began in Chicago, and while it did feature radical elements such as a Parliament of the World's Religions, which presented the views of non-Christians; non-white particpants were restricted to an area called "Midway.'
Was it free of racism? Hardly! The whole exhibit was known as "The White City." Frederick Douglass, as representative of Haiti, circulated tens of thousands of copies of a pamphlet which he had co-written, claiming that the exhibition was designed to "exhibit the negro as a repulsive savage." He and his associates attracted international attention with that.
Doulgas' assistant was a young Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Despite the fact that the Colombian Exposition had excluded non-white people, Dunbar did not fall into the trap. He penned a beautiful poem, as a tribute to Columbus. At the same time, in 1893, Czech Day took place at the exposition, and thousands of Czech-Americans marched into the grounds. Antonin Dvorak proudly conducted Czech music.
Dvorak himself was submitted to racist slurs, because he defended "negro spirituals" as the basis of an American School of Music, as proposed by Mrs. Thurber. It was not, and is not, a matter of accounting for, and redressing every past injustice (although they should be known), but a fight for future justice.
Dvorak intended to make a new setting of "My Country 'tis of Thee." He remarked that he saw much to admire in America, but also much that he would rather not have seen. He never finished the setting, but his personal secretary, Josef Kovaric, told us where to find it.
Listen to the appended audio. The first minute does not sound happy at all. But listen and see if you can sing along with where that patriotic song, "My country 'tis of Thee", emerges, so beautifully, but with a new melody at 0:00:53. Also hear how it emerges as the composer's hopeful solution to a paradox:
https://soundcloud.com/user-216951281/my-country
My country 'tis of thee'
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing (of thee I sing.)
Land where my fathers died
Land of the Pilgrims' pride
From ev'ry mountain-side
Let freedom ring (let freedom ring.)
Dvorak and Jeanette Thurber understood that the future of America lay in how it would address the plight of both African and Native Americans: the citizens most denied their humanity. He had been a freedom fighter in his own country, and immediately identified with the oppressed in America. That is why Mrs. Thurber chose him.
As a bonus, we include what we consider, by far, to be the greatest performance of Dvorak's " New World Symphony", by a personal protege of the composer, Vaclav Talich, from 1952. It would seem that one of his fellow Czechs understood the problems of America better than many American conductors! Can you hear the influence of both African-American spirituals, and Native-American music in it, as transformed by what Dvorak called "Bringing in the full Cavalry of Western Music" ? Can you hear both the problems, and the promise of America in it?
Oh, and how does all of this connect to Beethoven? Dvorak modelled the opening of the Scherzo (3rd) movement, of this, his own Ninth Symphony, on the opening of the Scherzo (this time 2nd) movement of Beethoven's Ninth. See if you can hear it! More to the point, when enthusiasts gave Dvorak a wreath dedicated to "The World's Greatest Composer", he hung it over a bust of Beethoven.