by Alex Ross
On occasion, she extracted a certain dignity from the ugliness of segregation: when the Nassau Inn, in Princeton, New Jersey, refused to give her a room, she spent the night at the home of Albert Einstein. Usually, though, the humiliation was intense. In Birmingham, Alabama, during the Second World War, she had to stand outside a train-station waiting room while her accompanist, the German pianist Franz Rupp, went to fetch a sandwich for her. Sitting inside was a group of German prisoners of war.
By the time Anderson’s career entered its final phase, in the fifties and sixties, such obstacles had begun to disappear. Segregated halls were no longer on her schedule. She broke a momentous barrier in 1955, when she became the first black soloist to appear at the Metropolitan Opera, as Ulrica, in Un ballo in maschera. By then, her voice was past its prime, the pitch unstable and the vibrato distracting. She went on singing for ten more years, less because she couldn’t leave the spotlight than because audiences wouldn’t let her go. They cherished not only what she was but also what she had been. And she might have achieved even more if the world of opera had been open to her earlier. To hear her assume soprano arias such as “Casta diva” or “Pace, pace, mio Dio” (transposed down a step) is to realize that she was capable of singing almost anything. If, as Toscanini said, such a voice arrives once a century, no successor is in sight.
What has changed since Anderson made her lonely ascent, basking in ecstatic applause and then eating alone in second-class hotels? Certainly, she made it easier for the black singers who came after her, especially the women. Leontyne Price enjoyed the operatic triumphs that were denied to Anderson, and after Price came such female stars as Shirley Verrett, Grace Bumbry, Jessye Norman, and Kathleen Battle—although the flameout of Battle’s career might indicate the difficulties that await a black diva who doesn’t go out of her way to avoid making a scene. Opportunities for black males have been markedly more limited, despite the pioneering work of Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, Todd Duncan, and George Shirley, among others. African-American conductors are hard to find; the most prominent is James DePreist, who happens to be Marian Anderson’s nephew. According to statistics compiled by the League of American Orchestras, only 2 percent of orchestral players are black. African-American composers are scattered across college faculties, but they seldom receive high-profile premieres. The black contingent of the classical audience is, in most places, minuscule.
To a great extent, this racial divide stemmed directly from prejudice. Racism hardly disappeared from classical institutions after Anderson reached the apex of her fame. Consider the twisting career of the singer-songwriter Nina Simone, who originally aspired to become a concert pianist. Anderson was a hero to Simone and her family; one of her uncles knew the singer well. But when she failed to win a place at the Curtis Institute of Music, for what she surmised were racial reasons, she turned instead to playing and singing in clubs. In her autobiography, I Put a Spell on You, Simone wrote, “My music was dedicated to a purpose more important than classical music’s pursuit of excellence; it was dedicated to the fight for freedom and the historical destiny of my people.” Miles Davis used harsher language when he explained why he gave up studying trumpet at Juilliard: “No white symphony orchestra was going to hire a little black motherfucker like me.” He went on to mock a teacher who stated that “the reason black people played the blues was because they were poor and had to pick cotton.” Davis, the son of a successful dentist, lost confidence in the school soon afterward.
There is another, less baleful explanation for the absence of African-Americans from classical music: beginning with jazz, black musicians invented their own forms of high art, and the talent that might have dominated instrumental music and contemporary composition migrated elsewhere. Perhaps Simone would have made a fine concert pianist, and Davis surely would have been a sensational first trumpeter in a major orchestra, but it’s difficult to imagine that they would have found as much creative fulfillment along those paths. Instead, they used their classical training to add new dimensions to jazz and pop. Davis, an admirer of Stockhausen, made a point of criticizing the “ghetto mentality” that prevented some black musicians from investigating classical music. Simone, for her part, never forgot the music of her youth. “Bach made me dedicate my life to music,” she wrote in her memoir.
In May 1965, in the tense months that fell between the killing of Malcolm X and the Watts riots in Los Angeles, Simone made a recording of “Strange Fruit,” the anti-lynching ballad immortalized by Billie Holiday in 1939. (As it happens, Holiday’s original recording was set down eleven days after Anderson’s Easter Sunday concert on the Mall.) The ghosts of classical tradition hang over Simone’s radically reworked version: the piano accompaniment becomes a spare lament in the Baroque manner, and there is a strong reminiscence of Schubert’s “Der Doppelgänger”—a song that Anderson sang in memorably ashen style. At the climax—“For the sun to rot, for the leaves to drop”—Simone let her immaculately true-toned voice deliquesce into an agonizing slow glissando, traversing the lamenting interval of the fourth. Schubert’s song is about recurring nightmares, identical tragedies being acted out from life to life; Simone, in a gorgeous fury, tells much the same story.
Sadly, African-American classical musicians today seem almost as lonely as ever. They are accustomed to being viewed as walking paradoxes. William Eddins, the music director of the Edmonton Symphony, has addressed the situation on his blog, Sticks and Drones. In the black community, Eddins writes, classical music is “looked on with intense suspicion,” as “one of the last true bastions of segregation in America.” Eddins sees it differently: “If you sat me down and asked me to describe one truly racist incident that has happened to me in this business, I’d most likely stare at you blankly. I can’t think of a one.” The problem is one of perception; African-Americans think that classical music is for other people, he says, and the almost total absence of music education in public schools prevents a different story from being told. “People tend to support and listen to the music that they hear from a young age,” Eddins writes.
The irony is that classical music has become a far more heterogeneous culture than itwas when Anderson sang on the Mall. The most-talked-about conductor of the moment is Gustavo Dudamel; the superstar pianist is Lang Lang; the most famous of all classical musicians is Yo-Yo Ma. (When people talk about the “whiteness” of this world, they tend to count Asians as white.) No longer a European patrimony, classical music is a polyglot business with a global audience. Why does it still somehow seem inherently unlikely that a black person should compose an opera for the Met, or become the music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra? Unlikelier things have happened, such as the election of a half-Kansan, half-Kenyan as president of the United States. Incidentally, President Obama apparently has a taste for classical music; in 2005, he narrated a performance of Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. The conductor was William Eddins, who noted afterward that his soloist was well prepared. A few carefully staged recitals at the White House could break the stalemate that Eddins describes.
Anderson died in 1993, at the age of ninety-six. The obituaries singled out the Lincoln Memorial concert as the zenith of her career, but her autobiography leaves the impression that other experiences gave her a deeper satisfaction. For Anderson, Easter Sunday 1939 may have been an ambiguous triumph—marking a major advance in civil rights but, on a private level, intruding on her dream of a purely musical life. An artist became a symbol. Her happiest memories, one gathers, were of those international tours in the thirties, when the European critics declared her a singer to watch, and the Finns went wild, and Toscanini blubbered his praise, and she became nothing less—and nothing more—than one of the great voices of her time.
16
THE MUSIC MOUNTAIN
INSIDE THE MARLBORO RETREAT
Mitsuko Uchida, a pianist of piercing intelligence and consoling warmth, could comfortably pass her summers flying from one festival to another, staying in luxury
hotels and private villas. Instead, she stays on the campus of Marlboro College, a small liberal-arts institution in southern Vermont. Since 1951, the college has hosted Marlboro Music, an outwardly low-key summer gathering that functions variously as a chamber-music festival, a sort of finishing school for gifted young performers, and a summit for the musical intelligentsia. Uchida and the pianist Richard Goode serve as Marlboro’s co-directors, alternating the lead role from year to year; in the summer of 2008, when I visited three times, Uchida was in residence from late June until early August. She plays a variety of roles in the Marlboro world—high priest, den mother, provocateur, jester, and arbiter of style.
Marlboro is a singular phenomenon. The great Austrian-born pianist Rudolf Serkin, Marlboro’s co-founder and longtime leader, once declared that he wished to “create a community, almost utopian,” where artists could forget about commerce and escape into a purely musical realm. Marlboro has been compared to a kibbutz, a hippie commune, Shangri-la, a cult (but “a good cult”), Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm, where “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” On certain lazy days, it becomes a highbrow summer camp, where brainy musicians go swimming in the local pond.
At Marlboro, Uchida follows a set routine. Between 9:30 and 10:00 in the morning, she arrives at the campus coffee shop, where breakfast is served to those who have missed the morning buffet in the dining hall. Young musicians slouch on blue and purple couches around the room, and she stops to chat with them. Aside from her Peggy Guggenheim sunglasses—a bright blue model with pointy edges, patterned after a Venetian Carnival mask—she dresses simply, often wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt emblazoned with the name Marlboro. One day, “House of the Rising Sun” was playing on the coffee-shop stereo; this gave way to a Scott Joplin rag. Uchida shimmied to the music as she approached the counter to place her order. Her favorite dish is the Egg McMarlboro, a sandwich made with a fried egg, local tomato, Vermont Cheddar, and bacon. Most patrons are served on paper plates, but Uchida’s dish was carried out on a wooden tray, with a cappuccino in a china cup.
Matan Porat, an Israeli-born composer and pianist with an impressively tangled, Beethoven-like mane, sat down across from Uchida and noticed the cappuccino. “Nice!” he said. “I didn’t know they were doing it.”
“Actually, they are not,” she said. “But they do it for me. I must allow myself a few small luxuries.” She smiled sweetly and took a sip.
The oboist James Austin Smith, who had graduated from the Yale School of Music the previous spring, flopped down on the adjacent couch, propping sandaled feet on the table. Oboists, with their limited chamber repertory, have less reason to be intimidated by the pianist than others who may dream of performing with her; in any case, Smith and Uchida had struck up a playful rapport. Smith announced that he was adding some ornaments, or unwritten musical elaborations, to his part in a Haydn symphony that the musicians were presenting informally that night.
“Cheeky James!” Uchida exclaimed, in mock horror. “No illegal ornaments! I forbid it!”
Uchida speaks a language that can only be described as Uchida. In 1961, when she was twelve, her father, a Japanese diplomat, was appointed ambassador to Austria, and she spent her adolescence in Vienna, becoming fluent in German. In her early twenties, she moved to London, which remains her home, and she acquired a kind of Japanese-Austrian-British accent. (In 2009, Queen Elizabeth II named her Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.) Her many summers at Marlboro have added to her repertory a sizable American vocabulary, which she is always seeking to expand. “What is ‘ditzy’?” she asked at one point. “Not so bright? Talkative but not so bright? OK! Gotcha!”
Her speech falls into a pattern of soaring phrases followed by rat-a-tat bursts. At breakfast, she holds everyone transfixed with a barrage of stories, epigrams, snap judgments, and gossip. On an overhyped instrumentalist: “For the Germans, the greatest thing since Karajan. Karajan, of course, was the greatest thing since Hitler.” On a veteran singer: “She has nothing in her brain, but she is a fantastic coach.” On a celebrated conductor: “Obviously, he has charisma. But I don’t want charisma. I want something other than charisma.” On prodigies: “Do you want yourself to be operated on by a genius twenty-year-old heart surgeon? Do you want to go to the theater and see a teenager play King Lear?” Such comments are often punctuated by a wildly oscillating laugh that sounds like a flock of songbirds ready to be transcribed by Olivier Messiaen. When she is preparing to throw one of her verbal darts, she narrows her eyes and purses her lips. When she has words of praise, she opens her eyes wide, raises one hand to her heart, and draws in her breath sharply.
It was the last week of June. The Marlboro population—thirteen pianists, forty-three string players, sixteen wind and brass players, and nine singers, along with a staff of administrators, coaches, schedulers, librarians, recording engineers, piano technicians, receptionists, interns, cooks, babysitters, and a lifeguard—had been in residence for a week. They had settled into dorm rooms, apartments, and cabins. Some were surprised to find themselves reverting to a collegiate lifestyle, sharing a bathroom and hanging out late at night. But all of them knew that a successful term at Marlboro can practically assure one’s career. More than a hundred alumni hold jobs in eight leading American orchestras, twenty-two in the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra alone. The most venerable of American string quartets, the Guarneri, which retired in 2009, formed at Marlboro in 1964. The Emerson, Juilliard, Orion, and St. Lawrence Quartets also have Marlboro connections, and Murray Perahia, Joshua Bell, and Hilary Hahn received early guidance there. Peter Serkin, Rudolf’s son, made his debut at Marlboro in 1958, at the age of eleven, and went on to have a major career.
Uchida keeps returning because she cherishes the chance to immerse herself in music in a way that no other institution permits. “I was here when I was very young, in 1974,” she told me. “I had a wonderful time, but I didn’t quite understand. When I came back, in 1992”—Serkin had died the previous year, and Uchida became an unofficial adviser, with an official appointment following in 1999—”then I understood. I got hooked. In Marlboro, you get a different way of not only looking at the world but also of looking at life. If you spend weeks together, day in and day out, eating the meals together, chatting and sitting around and drinking the beer together and God knows what, you begin to get a basic outline of what it really means to be a musician, as opposed to flying from one city to the next and rehearsing the ‘Archduke’ Trio for half an hour and then already walking onstage. Ultimately, Marlboro is about the concept of time. We have time to rehearse, time simply to think. But never quite enough time. Time slows down and time accelerates.”
After breakfast, Uchida practices in her apartment for several hours, going through her repertory for the coming season. Those spells of exploration have become vital to her evolution. When she first made her name, in the 1980s, as a Mozart specialist, she was noted chiefly for her fluid phrasing and her lustrous tone. Over the years, her repertory has broadened—at one Carnegie Hall recital, she paired pieces by Bach with the elegantly cryptic works of the contemporary Hungarian composer György Kurtág—and her performances have taken on philosophical depth. In late sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, she conjures up a fractured, even chaotic emotional landscape without committing anything like an excessive gesture. Mozart remains her home ground. On the same night that James Smith inserted his cheeky ornaments into Haydn’s Symphony No. 96, Uchida joined a small Marlboro orchestra to read through Mozart’s Concerto No. 12 in A. The instrumental playing, with a few inexact entries, wasn’t quite perfect, but it had other advantages: the music-making was mellow, naturally flowing, affectionately human. Only a few dozen people heard the performance, and in its intimacy it probably came closer to Mozart’s own concerts than what we normally experience in a modern hall.
For decades, a sign has stood beside the road through the Marlboro cam
pus: CAUTION: MUSICIANS AT PLAY. Performers are liberated from tight schedules; managers, agents, and publicity people do not watch from the wings. Works of Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms melt into a landscape that resembles the pastoral settings from which those composers drew inspiration; when Uchida and a group of players rehearse a Dvoák quintet in a hut on a hillside, it mixes with fugues of birdsong and the ostinato of insects. Wireless Internet aside, participants are effectively isolated in a premodern existence where one walks around all day and eats meals at long tables in a community that includes both toddlers and octogenarians. Above all, as Uchida says, Marlboro causes a stretching out and slowing down of time. One musician after another says the same thing: from September to May, when they sit down to play in an antiseptic postwar performing-arts center after an hour or two of rehearsal, they close their eyes and think of Marlboro.
Rudolf Serkin—or Mr. Serkin, as older Marlboro people still reverently call him—haunts the campus where he spent the last forty summers of his life. Marlboro’s split personality, its refusal to decide between Teutonic solemnity and all-American anarchy, reflects Serkin’s character. A musician of manic dedication, he practiced scales for hours on end and, in ensemble rehearsals, fretted over details until his collaborators were ready to crawl out of their skins. At other times, he behaved like a madcap schoolboy. He was famous for staging pranks; Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, remembers the time a cherry bomb exploded under the hood of his car. Yet woe betide an unproven musician who presumed to treat him as an equal. The story is told of a young player who, while turning pages for Serkin, chimed in about a particular passage: “Rudi, what if you tried it this way … ?” Serkin thanked him with a tight-lipped smile. A little later, a roar of anger was heard behind a closed door.