Dear Mr. Deas,

as Berlin correspondent for www.MusicalAmerica.com I attended – and enjoyed – your concert this afternoon at the Komische Oper, and I have a footnote to Aaron Copland’s arrangement of “I Bought Me a Cat” that I felt a real urge at least to tell you about.  I decided against coming uninvited to the party that undoubtedly took place in the house Casino afterwards; I didn’t want to seem like a party-crasher.

In New York half a century or so ago, circumstances involved me personally in the birthing of that meanwhile famous arrangement Aaron made at that time – but when he himself played the piano part and (more or less) croaked the tune, he always, invariably, incorporated a gimmick I’ve never known any singer to use, but to my way of thinking it adds a final fillip that I find considerably enriches the song’s ending.

Oliver Smith had made a fortune in royalties for having designed that goldmine called “Oklahoma!” and he used that money to set himself up as a producer (of hits including another goldmine called “West Side Story”).  He had a plan to outdo “Oklahoma!” and at the same time bring High Art to Broadway.  With that in mind he bought the rights to Erskine Caldwell’s novel “Tragic Ground”, engaged Lynn Riggs (the born Oklahoman whose play “Green Grow the Lilacs” had provided the raw material for “Oklahoma!”) to adapt the book and write the lyrics, and Agnes de Mille, whose choreography for “Oklahoma!” had introduced ballet to the Broadway musical stage, to do not only the choreography but also stage the entire production.  My friendship with both Riggs and Copland got me involved in Aaron’s spiffy setting of “I Bought Me a Cat.”

Lynn Riggs could not read music but his apartment (at 1 Christopher Street) did have an upright piano, so I got turned into a sort of bilateral amanuensis for both him and Copland.  During early planning discussions, Lynn told Aaron that during his Oklahoma childhood he’d grown up with a local ditty Aaron might find worth incorporating into “Tragic Ground” – and proceeded to sing it for him: “I Bought Me a Cat.”  Aaron took to it immediately, and it apparently set itself, for very soon after that Aaron sat down at Lynn’s upright and both played and sang his arrangement’s official world premiere.

Aaron had had Agnes de Mille’s choreography and dancers in mind, so at the very end of each verse, he’d insert a brief hiatus to clap his hands, twice, before continuing with the final “My cat says fiddle-eye-fee”, doing what he intended to have Agnes’s dancers do.  However – and finally here comes the bug I want to plant in your own ear – at the end of the very last stanza (“I bought me a wife”), he’d clap his hands not the two times the listener expected but, all of a sudden, three times, with an emphatic accent on the third clap, and only then go on to the valedictory tagline.

I’ve always found that little built-in surprise a delightful way to startle an audience, and if you do, too, I offer you this tidbit with my compliments and best wishes.  As far as I know, you’d become the first singer ever to perform that captivating little song the way Aaron himself did.

“Tragic Ground” never did get produced – or, for that matter, even finished.  If you have access to Volume 2 of the memoirs Aaron wrote with Yale’s Vivian Perlis, you might find footnote number. . . .  DAMN!  I can’t at the moment find my own copy, but you can easily locate the passage I have in mind by checking the index for “Alone at Night”, the nearest thing to a conventional pop song Aaron contributed, which he optimistically thought (and for financial reasons hoped) just might have a chance to become a popular hit.

With sincere best wishes,

Paul Moor

Although Karlheinz Stockhausen at 70 has probably become globally the most famous living German composer (his only rival: Hans Werner Henze), comparatively few people actually know his music.  During the early years after World War II he quickly attained rank with France’s Pierre Boulez and Italy’s Luigi Nono in the triumvirate that dominated avant-garde music, and half a century later his music remains almost as thorny and problematical as ever.

Time has made Stockhausen ever more reticent to discuss personal matters, so only in early biographical writings does one find details of a cripplingly traumatic childhood.  With few interruptions, he has spent his entire life in Germany’s Rhineland, where his parents came from farming stock.  By Karlheinz’s birth in 1928, his father had become a grammar-school teacher, but five years later (coincidentally the year Hitler’s Nazis came to power) his mother became incurably psychotic, committed to an institution from which she never emerged: the Nazis’ cynically misnamed “euthanasia” program murdered her eight years later.  At 13 he lost his father to the Wehrmacht – also never to return, officially missing in action, reportedly killed in Hungary.  At 13 Karlheinz entered a boarding school run by an institution in Xanten that trained teachers according to Nazi principles, which they undoubtedly force-fed him.

At six he had started piano lessons; in Xanten he also got instruction in violin and played oboe in the school orchestra.  He attended that school until 1944, when he got assigned to a field hospital at the front where he served as a stretcher-bearer until March 1945.  After World War II ended, he became a farmhand, but by the end of 1945 busied himself rehearsing amateur operetta productions, studying Latin at the same time.  In February 1946 he entered a Classically oriented Gymnasium in Bergisch Gladbach, and in March 1947 completed his Abitur (approximate equivalent of a U.S. junior college diploma).  He supported himself partially as a bar pianist, partially as an operetta rehearsal pianist.  At 19 he gained admission to Cologne’s outstanding Musikhochschule (conservatory), where his teachers included Switzerland’s Frank Martin – an influence one would never guess from the music Stockhausen soon started composing.  Simultaneously he studied philosophy, musicology, and German studies at Cologne University. Ever since, Cologne has remained the place most closely associated with Stockhausen and his activities.

   His earliest works date from 1950, his first marriage (which produced his first four children) from 1952, but his first musical epiphany came when he discovered the music of Olivier Messiaen, a devoutly Roman Catholic Parisian organist-composer early recognized as a post-war avant-garde pioneer.  Already Stockhausen had started composing “pointillistic” music, consisting of myriad individual, seemingly unrelated tones.  In 1952 he went to Paris for rhythmic and aesthetic training with Messiaen, also dabbling in the semi-electronic musique concrète composed by Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer from material tape-recorded from almost infinitely varied sources.  Already in 1952 Vienna’s Universal-Edition, the uniquely adventurous publisher of a modern élite including Bartók, Berg, Schoenberg, Webern, Weill, et al., had signed Stockhausen to a contract any young composer would almost have died for.

In 1953 he joined the trailblazing new Electronic Studio established by Cologne Radio, which he headed from 1963 to 1977. His first major international breakthrough came in 1965, when he electrified the musical avant-garde with a work he called “Song of the Youths in the Fiery Furnace”.  Previously he had horrified Pierre Boulez with his expressed hope to compose an electronic mass for Cologne’s cathedral; after administrators there told him thanks but no thanks, that project became the world’s first generally acknowledged masterpiece of electronic music, the “Song of the Youths”.  Ever the insatiable experimenter, he also investigated the possibilities of new music’s aleatory pioneers, who introduced the element of chance into a work’s performance, theoretically making each and every performance of an aleatory score unique.  Between 1954 and 1956 Stockhausen continued his studies in phonetics and communication research with a pioneering professor at Bonn University.

Two avant-garde musical events in postwar Germany set the international pace: a cosmopolitan summer school sponsored by Darmstadt and a jampacked weekend festival in Donaueschingen, which continued a tradition that had called early attention to composers including Paul Hindemith and Kurt Weill.  By 1953, the Boulez-Nono-Stockhausen troika unassailably dominated Darmstadt, where Stockhausen taught from 1953 to 1974.  Universal-Edition added him to the editorial staff of its pace-setting journal Die Reihe (“The Row”, named after Schoenberg’s trailblazing principle of the twelve-tone “row”), a post he held from 1954 to 1959.

The world premiere of his super-aleatory “Piano Piece XI” in New York created a major esoteric musical sensation in 1957, and a year later he gave thirty-two concert-lectures at U.S. universities – the beginning of a more or less constant series of Stockhausen concerts over which he himself presides.  The University of Pennsylvania brought him to Philadelphia as a guest professor in 1965, the University of California at Davis in 1966-67.  In 1967 he married for the second time, the German avant-garde artist Mary Bauermeister, who bore him two more children, the six names of whom include Julika, Majella, and Suja.  (The more conventional others: Christel, Markus, and Simon; four Stockhausen children sometimes participate in paternal performances, most notably Markus, a brilliant trumpet virtuoso.)

Japan’s 1970 World’s Fair in Osaka brought Stockhausen’s finest hour to date when the Federal German government, then in Bonn, government sent him as its official cultural ambassador, climaxed by the global auditorium built to his own specifications for the performance of his own music.

Since 1977 Stockhausen has concentrated on the seven-part cycle he calls “Light”, subtitled “The Seven Days of the Week” – a heptalogy which when finished will dwarf its most massive predecessor, Richard Wagner’s tetralogy “The Nibelung’s Ring”.  By 2002, the date Stockhausen has set himself to complete “Light”, it will consist of seven full-length operas comprising some twenty-four hours of music.

Although a Biblically-based religion pretty much his own has never ceased playing a dominant role in Stockhausen’s life and music, he today marches to his own drummer.  Years ago he answered my question about him as a Roman Catholic with “I try to be”, but he divorced his two wives and today shares his life with two of his main expert performers: Clarinettist Suzanne Stephens (born in Waterloo, Iowa), who teamed up with him in 1976, and Flutist Kathinka Pasveer (born in Zaandam, Holland), who in 1982 made it a menage à trois.  Stockhausen has composed more than forty works for Stephens, plus a number of Pasveer, not to mention quite a number for both ladies together, one of which (“Ave”, a 23-minute duo for basset horn and alto flute – a scene from the “Monday” instalment of “Light”) formed half the birthday program in Cologne’s Philharmonie Monday night [in 1998].

From the beginning, Stockhausen has burned with a hard gemlike flame, with two adjectives – arrogant and messianic – applied to him with noticeable frequency.  He has a massive, handsome head, and large, burning eyes of an intensity many find intimidating. Two vertical furrows frame the bridge of his nose in an almost uninterrupted semi-frown perhaps indicating perpetual deep thought and total seriousness.  He has never suffered fools gladly – a tendency intensified by age, success, fame, and what long since became international cult status.  Even before Woodstock he had captured the attention and admiration of at least half the Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney), who included his portrait in the montage of their personal heroes on the cover of their “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” LP.  Others on the record as Stockhausen fans include not only deadly serious young composers all over the world but also David Bowie, Allen Ginsberg, The Grateful Dead, and Frank Zappa.

Stockhausen’s acolytes hang upon his every word as the divinely revealed truth, slavishly carrying out his every instruction, no matter how seemingly incomprehensible.  In 1970 he began composing what he calls “cosmic music”, with an almost hour-long “Mantra” for two pianos, percussion, and electronic tape he describes thus: “The unifying construction of Mantra is a musical miniature of the unifying macrostructure of the cosmos, and it is at the same time an enlargement into the acoustic time-field of the unifying microstructure of the harmonic vibrations within the tone itself.”  That typifies Stockhausen in one of his simpler, more lucid descriptions.  Stephen Hawking’s book A Short History of Time enthralled him; so did the Hubble space telescope, which from space has yielded photographs Stockhausen calls “the most beautiful I have ever seen as stars – and for me, tones are stars.”

In 1971 Stockhausen composed a large outdoor work he called Sternklang (Starsound), and in its text referred to inhabitants of other stars, other galaxies, and his wish “to bid them welcome”.  As a gift to the USA for its 1976 bicentennial, the West German government commissioned a work Stockhausen entitled “Sirius”, an electronic opus involving four soloists, and since then Sirius – the brightest star in the heavens at certain times – has figured in writings both by and about Stockhausen.

Berlin Critic Volker Straebel quotes Stockhausen as claiming to have received his musical training on Sirius, cautiously adding that “such utterances soon made him suspect for intellectual discourse”.  Another Berlin critic, Gottfried Krieger, who opened his 70th-birthday laudatio with the question “Is this man crazy?”, lists some of the epithets frequently applied to him: a charlatan, a sect priest, characterized by traits associated with fascism, anthroposophy, and what hip Germans call Esoterik – the equivalent of the USA’s “New Age” movement.  Krieger continues: “Small wonder for someone who gives Sirius as his homeland.” Working on “Light” has led Stockhausen to a sort of overall plan he describes as a “superformula”, and once he has the days of the week polished off, he talks – always with his customary all-out enthusiasm – about going on to compose the individual hour, also the individual minutes, into what Krieger calls “a sort of structure in which the listener can assemble the most varied sonic seconds.  If that is crazy, then Stockhausen is surely crazy.”(Few writers go that far in even hinting at Stockhausen’s genetic maternal heritage.)

In 1969, Stockhausen broke away from Universal-Edition and set up his very own publishing house in the hilltop house he and his family occupy in little suburban Kürten, a forty-minute drive away from Cologne.  Its catalogue manifests awesome marketing techniques of not only printed scores but also compact discs, some in multi-disc sets – even Swiss-made music boxes: Stockhausen, long fascinated by not only legitimate astronomy but also the Zodiac, has composed a little sort of jingle for each sign, and for his 70th birthday Suzanne Stephens arranged a numbered Swiss music-box edition limited to forty of each, bearing the master’s notation of the tune with his signature, available until the end of 1998 for 495 Deutschemarks (c. $275), after that for 560 (c. $310).

[Here, dearly beloved, endeth our Stockhausen text for today.  Shall I continue? - because I can. . . .]

But I do want to turn loose one nifty, primarily because it contrasts so strongly with the oh so serious way Karlheinz almost ostentatiously took himself – and I hasten to make clear that I in no way intend this as chipping away at the monument he took such an important part in erecting to himself as – unquestionably – one of the most influential, if least enjoyed and enjoyable, composers of his time (1924 – 2007).

During his early glory days, his activities focused upon the Rhineland metropolis Cologne, for more than one reason.  He came from that region, as any aurally informed ear noticed as soon as he opened his mouth.  Of all the Federal German regional radio/television centers, the affluent industrial Rhine-Ruhr area’s de facto capital Cologne’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk had the most money, and WDR pampered Karlheinz even during his early years like an especially favorite native son.  If he suddenly one day (so to speak) r’ared back and proclaimed that for some new opus he had in mind he needed unprecedented electronic recording tape with not the customary two tracks but five – which automatically meant manufacturing such tape with an unprecedented width, not to mention the electro-mechanical apparatus necessary to record and play such tape back – Karlheinz got it.  WDR established its pioneering Studio für ektronische Musik primarily for him, and he in turn made it world-famous, starting with his trail-blazing Gesang der Jünglinge im Feuerofen (Song of the Youths in the Fiery Furnace), which interpolated a single, sonically “white” boy soprano’s voice, bereft of overtones, with accompanying sounds otherwise exclusively electronically generated.

Cologne’s thriving avant-garde scene in those days included not only Karlheinz, as its uncrowned king, but also a collage artist named Mary Bauermeister, who from the beginning took an exceptional shine to him personally.  Remember “Never underestimate the power of a woman”?  Well, the first step towards her displacing his first wife Doris and becoming the second lawfully wedded Frau Stockhausen came when she cunningly asked whether she, the collage artiste, could study with him, the composer, actually take lessons from him. 

During her premarital period she occupied a reportedly spacious studio that provided house-room for various sporadic avant-garde happenings (remember happenings?) of significant esoteric importance.  I never attended one, but my favorite will live forever in my memory on the basis of several vivid conversational accounts, some of them first-hand.  The serious artist of the evening in question had said the elaborate nature his happening necessitated an advance rehearsal, and one high point of that rehearsal came when he wound up and hurled an egg at the vast expanse of plane glass providing the studio’s primary daytime illumination, with the egg’s innards dribbling down the pane in fine serious-artistic fashion.

Like perhaps most serious artists, this gentleman had an evil-minded rival in the area, who got himself briefed about that rehearsal and then fiendishly set out to sabotage the main event, with the vicious intention of making a monkey out of the evening’s guest of honor.  He somehow snuck in and snaffled the designated egg away, replacing it with a reasonably accurate facsimile he had carefully pre-boiled to stone-like consistency.  The climactic moment for the scheduled hurling came . . . and Mary Bauermeister’s enormous plate-glass studio window shattered into a thousand shards – at a time when plate glass in Germany cost so much as to classify almost as a luxury item.

I never did manage to obtain any conscientious reporter’s obligatory confirmation that the serious artist reacted to the prevalent risibility greeting this development – mistaking it as part of the serious artist’s own planned happening – by turning upon the uncouth guffawers and denouncing them one and all as “Faschisten!“  I also can’t tell you whether Karlheinz himself attended that uniquely memorable event; I offer it here only as a peripheral descriptive footnote to the Stockhausen period in Cologne at that time.

(Incidentally, my eagle-eyed Knoxville blogfather Perry Nelson has jogged my memory to remind me that during an earlier phase of this playpen I’d reported another serious artistic event – in the air over the German town of Braunschweig – that did indeed personally involve Karlheinz, and in his accustomed stellar role.  Typing his surname into the Search window up at the very top of all this will lead you to those earlier bits of Stockhauseniana.)

My birthplace El Paso, Texas, where I spent the first sixteen years of my life, afforded rather restricted access to “classical” music of any kind, but the indulgent staff of the Tri-State Music Company contributed to my musical development more than any of them could ever know by permitting me to spend hours and hours in one of their two listening rooms, where I subjected their 78-rpm recordings on the Victor Red Seal label – the only label with an El Paso outlet – to the punitive friction of that era’s steel needles. Those life-sustaining treats included a two-disc album containing Serge Koussevitzky’s Boston Symphony recording of El Salón México, a title that immediately found resonance in me since from El Paso you could go to Mexico by simply walking across the bridge over the pusillanimous trickle bearing the grandiose Spanish name for Great River.

Since I knew nothing about that piece’s composer except for a mention I’d read somewhere of one of his earliest piano pieces, “The Cat and the Mouse”, I looked at the two syllables of his surname and for some time after that thought of him as the man with the funny name that combined Cop and Land. After our friendship years later got off the ground, I asked him one day how come people didn’t at least pronounce it the way it looked. He said he had no idea how that had happened, especially in view of its original pronunciation in Russia before the arrival of his immigrant parents. He then told me that story – which I’ve never, anywhere, seen in print, so this little footnote on the most recognized of all American composers of “classical” music might well qualify as a modest world premiere.

Both his parents had come from their native Russia – and heaven alone knows how his father came by his American name Harris Morris Copland, but probably through the same primitive linguistic Americanization that gave birth to that odd surname Copland.

They arrived, conventionally for that day, at Ellis Island, bearing the only documentation they had – naturally in Kyrillic letters, which might as well have confronted the Immigration official who processed them with similar documentation in Arabic or Chinese. He got it across to them that he wanted to know their surname, then wrote down, for all time, what his American ears heard: cop + land. Only some time later did it transpire that by rights he ought to have given them American documents with the correct transliteration Kaplan. One can only speculate as to whether a Jewish boy from Brooklyn named Aaron Kaplan would have had the exalted career Aaron Copland did.

At Stephen F. Austin High School in El Paso, my beloved music teacher Miss Congdon had a small collection of rolls for the upright Duo Art player piano that included one that introduced me to the American pianist George Copeland (1882 – 1971), an early champion of Debussy and the rest of the French school; over and over and over I listened in fascination to the pathetically inadequate Duo Art roll of George Copeland’s playing a piano transcription of Debussy’s orchestrally opulent “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’”. Naturally I eventually asked Aaron Copland whether any kind of family tie connected him with the considerably more famous pianist, and that question yielded me another biographical footnote.

In Aaron Copland’s early thirties, he had become fascinated by Mexico and the other Latin-American countries, and had also acquired considerable fluency in Spanish. When Washington belatedly woke up to the practical strategic importance of its southern neighbors and initiated what it called the Good-Neighbor Policy, with Nelson Rockefeller in charge, the prominent American artists they sent down there understandably included Copland.

He said that in one of the South American countries he visited, he had found himself received with noticeable apprehension, and after a certain amount of discreet prying he found out why. The pianist George Copeland had preceded him there, on a concert tour, and had run afoul of the local fuzz on what those days’ terminology euphemized as a morals charge. Once Aaron Copland convinced them that the two surnames did not coincide even in their spelling, they eventually relaxed and that State Department assignment proved one of quite a number of valuable diplomatic successes.

I cannot conclude this mini-memoir without adding what Germans call a drop of (presumably dry) vermouth. During those hideous years when Senator Joseph McCarthy’s pathological fear of communism held the entire country in thrall, Henry Luce’s second magazine “Life” published a two-page compendium of what it carefully called “Communist Dupes and Fellow Travellers”, punctiliously avoiding calling them flat-out communists, since New York state law made such unsubstantiated labelling punishable unless the accuser could prove actual Party membership. Those pages included tiny mugshots of such dangerous limbs of the red Soviet Satan as Albert Einstein, Leonard Bernstein, and . . . Aaron Copland.

The next time I saw Aaron after that, I asked him what effect he expected that to have for him in practical terms. With a rueful smile he said only that he hardly imagined the State Department would send him on any more of those wonderful junkets – and, as far as I know, it never did.

According to the story I heard from Jerry Robbins – himself at that time (the late 1940s) a fairly new celebrity due to his smashing successes as choreographer of the ballet On the Town (expanded into the full-scale musical Wonderful Town), who in due time compounded his success and fame by taking an idea of his to Leonard Bernstein, who’d composed the music for both those works, who then collaborated with Jerry and a few more such exceptionally bright contemporaries (Betty Comden and Adolph Green plus Arthur Laurents, who wrote the script) in transplanting Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet into one of the tougher neighborhoods of that day’s Manhattan as the worldwide smash hit West Side Story.

As Jerry Robbins told it, Norman Mailer’s introduction to Tallulah Bankhead inspired one of her more memorable off-the-cuff ad libs: “Ah, yes – you’re that funny little man that doesn’t know how to spell fuck.”

The Berlin Philharmonic, billed by Carnegie Hall for four concerts with its conductor Sir Simon Rattle as the main attraction in its lavish November salute to this wonderful city I’ve adopted as my own home town of choice, has no less than three (3) world-class violin virtuosos who all bear the supreme title “Erster Konzertmeister” (First – sic – Concert Master), rotating in coördination with the orchestra’s conductors.  My source this morning tells me that the priceless instrument owned by one of them (I feel 99.44% certain that during our brief encounter he identified it as a Guarnerius, in value right next to the unique Stradivarius instruments, customarily worth well over $1,000,000) attracted the professional attention of the evident ruffian giving him a going-over as part of ascertaining whether he merited admittance to the USA along with the rest of his fellow Berliner Philharmoniker.

That heavy-handed worthy reportedly handled the literally priceless instrument the same way he might have handled a cigar-box, and when the violinist took exception to that, one thing understandably led to another, and his examiners wound up – believe it or not – clapping handcuffs on him and leading him away.

I fully realize that account strains credulity to the limit; I can say only that I’ve known my source long and thoroughly enough to regard that account – especially from someone definitely in a position to know – as totally responsible and reliable.

To my earlier posting here (headed “Why did Abbado really cancel?” – i.e., his scheduled Carnegie Hall appearance as conductor of his own Lucerne Festival Orchestra), some craven reader reacted with an anonymous comment, immediately zapped, that accused me of generalized anti-American “ranting”.  Damned right I’ll rant – and continue to rant – over such inexcusable redneck outrages, especially when everyone else I’ve tried both here and in the USA to enlist in protesting this anti-cultural barbarism immediately turns tail and runs rather than risk ruffling any official Washington feathers that might possibly jeopardize any future stateside engagements or tours, understandably so highly prized by all such foreign ensembles.

On October 8th, a New York Times article under James R. Oestreich’s byline led off with this:

“Opening the Carnegie Hall season, the [Lucerne Festival Orchestra] had come to New York as an exclusive creature of Claudio Abbado, but a seriously ill Mr. Abbado had to stay behind….”

Yeah, sure…. 

Experienced practitioners of journalism instinctively recognize at least two kinds of illness, one of them “diplomatic” – i.e., their promulgators knowingly lie in their teeth, for various reasons, paramount among them legal: cancellations invariably mean emergency additional expenses, so contracts customarily include an escape clause excusing such “acts of God” as serious illness – and my own personal physician (also Abbado’s during his tenure as conductor of Berlin’s mighty Philharmonic), who ordinarily maintains total confidentiality, once confirmed for me the medical feasibility of widely published reports that Abbado’s emergency operation for stomach cancer had left him with literally no stomach whatever, with a stretch of mere intestine skilfully pressed into duty as an emergency substitute, forcing Abbado at least for a period of adjustment to subsist on tiny feedings at accelerated intervals.  Abbado canceled this Carnegie Hall obligation, the press reported, because of illness – which especially under his circumstances hardly surprised anyone.

Earlier this week, empathetically outraged by the treatment accorded the same unboundedly esteemed physician friend, I privately broadcast that outrage to a few personal friends it affected at least peripherally, and one of them who responded I sincerely regret I must leave anonymous here.  I’ll also, for reasons of auxiliary camouflage, edit his personal communication to me, which with European courtesy he wrote me in his rather picturesque acquired English.

Anyone in his right mind has to understand that 9/11 radically changed a long list of things, high among them airport security.  Months ago, bound from Berlin’s Tegel Airport for Helsinki, I had in my leather handbag a tiny keepsake gift less than two inches in overall length: probably the tiniest Swiss Army knife in history, containing one itty-bitty blade, a similar (almost useless) nail-file, and, in lateral slots, itty-bitty tweezers and an incongruously elegant toothpick made of apparently genuine ivory – end of inventory.

However, for the punctilious German official who examined me (and I can recall only one such physical once-over even more thorough than this: at the airport in Tel-Aviv, where the young Israeli soldier going over my person skilfully kept up a line of chatter obviously intended to distract me from such momentary intimacies as his making certain I had absolutely nothing taped between my legs or above my penis) had me open and empty every nook and cranny of that handbag – and he took inexorable exception to my cute little knife.  To his way of thinking – which I totally understand and approve – knife meant knife, and some of those Al-Qaida villains who mass-murdered all those airline passengers on 9/11 had managed to commit that unprecedented crime armed with nothing apparently more sinister than the sort of harmless-looking cutter used on plain ordinary household carpeting.  (In passing, the back of my hand to Finnair’s Tegel Airport staff: not only did they manage to lose that gift knife, not only useful but also cherished for sentimental reasons, but when I pressed them after my return to track it down, an egregiously rude German employee there simply brushed me completely off.)

Getting back to Claudio Abbado’s cancellation of his Carnegie Hall date – and every musician and musical organization naturally accords any Carnegie Hall date pinnacle importance – here you have the explanation provided by a trusted, totally reliable person definitely in a position to know for sure but whom I must, unfortunately, leave anonymous here. 

Apparently in connection with Lucerne’s location in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, Abbado evidently had to go – for the personal interview inflexibly demanded of all such post-9/11 visa applicants – to the Embassy of the United States of America in Bern, the Swiss capital.  The totally reliable and trusted musician friend of mine who’s blown this particular whistle sums up what he reliably (and in my opinion justifiably) regards as Abbado’s real reason for canceling in these few unequivocal words:

“His visit to the U.S. Embassy in Bern.”

He writes from repeated personal experience as a rising musical star already with plenty of experience with major orchestras on several continents when he goes on:

“Everyone who at least once has gone through this procedure knows what it looks like: lines, waiting-list, checking of your files, fingerprints, SPECIAL (!) photos [and I have to admit I have no idea of what he means by "SPECIAL (!)"], another line (inside), discussion with the person behind a glass wall, with you standing and her (him) comfortably sitting, etc., etc.  Why should Maestro Claudio Abbado go through all that hell?”

Let my European friend round off his own contribution with this personal opinion of what he calls the good news:

“Maestro Abbado feels good – and the bad news is: American music fans didn’t get a chance this time to see him conducting his excellent orchestra.  And I am afraid  he’s not the first and not the last European musician who will cancel their U.S. appearances because of  new U.S. visa-regulations.”

Prior to composing this bloggery, I sought opinions from several informed colleagues and friends.  Another response, from the distinguished retired editor of an impressive list of major American musical publications: “As if I weren’t already ashamed enough these days to be an American.”

And from a fellow Berliner-by-choice, with pre-unification experience of Soviet-dominated eastern Europe: “I know of many people who will not even take a plane which stops over in the U.S. nowadays, because non-citizens are treated in such a demeaning manner.  It’s a bit like the procedures behind the old Iron Curtain nowadays, although even before 2001 it was hardly cordial.  How sad.”

For understandable pragmatic reasons, all kinds of people, in various categories and for various reasons, regard this particular potato as far too hot to handle.  Any and every foreign orchestra allots top priority to any American gig, and none of the orchestral officials I approached would talk to me about this.  Thanks entirely to adventitious geography, our Berlin Philharmoniker (who’ll play four Carnegie Hall concerts later this month) at least have it comparatively easy, thanks to the U.S. Embassy’s location here in the capital: their Leipzig colleagues in the great old Gewandhausorchester, for instance, before any such American tour have to make a special trip all the way over to Frankfurt to make nice in person for the people in charge of the Consulate there.

The originally military abbreviation V.I.P. (for “very important person”) has long since become virtual Esperanto, and also a pragmatic aspect of international diplomacy.  Can you imagine any even moderately important official of any foreign equivalent of, for example, The National Association of Manufacturers ever getting subjected to such indignity in order to obtain an American visa? 

I certainly can’t. 

Can anyone seriously wonder why so many Europeans tend to echo the expression a German visitor whipped me with during my years as a San Franciscan?  He summarized his overall opinion after a considerable swing through the country’s most important capitals in the term Kulturlosigkeit – lack of what that catch-all German noun Kultur includes.

Years ago, the wife of a Berlin-based State Department official stoutly proclaimed to me that “An American passport is a privilege!”  She seemed sincerely taken aback when I told her that every other democratic country I know even of regards its passport as automatically an identification document for all its citizens.

During my earlier more or less annual returns to my original homeland, it invariably abashed and shamed me to behold one particular bit of peculiarly American arrogance rise up by way of welcome and slap smack in the face every poor second-class mere foreigner by way of greeting: two parallel waiting lines for arriving travelers, one for the manifestly privileged American nationals, the other – always much longer, always moving much more slowly – for those poor second-class mere foreigners.

Such aspects of my present-day original homeland obviously had a direct bearing on my becoming a naturalized citizen last month of today’s truly democratic Federal Republic of Germany, automatically in proud possession of its Personalausweis (identification card) plus its passport additionally proclaiming me a citizen of the European Union that includes Germany.

As the current season began, the Deutches Symphonie-Orchester plastered Berlin with posters brandishing its new conductor Ingo Metzmacher and this season’s motto, which galvanized me: “Von deutscher Seele” – approximately “Of the German soul.”  The word Deutsch remains, to use a psychoanalytic term, intensely cathected, charged with myriad associations downright neuralgic to pro-democratic Germans.  To me that phrase signifies a major Pfitzner work I knew only about, a huge choral score for soloists, chorus, and orchestra.  Metzmacher would devote the DSO’s first concert in the Philharmonie this season to it – and, meaningfully, on the national holiday called Day of German Unity.

I emailed my own apprehensive reaction to several personal contacts in the DSO’s administration – which remains unanswered.  Clearly Metzmacher anticipated other allergic responses, for before the concert the weekly newspaper Die Zeit devoted exceptional space to an exhaustive interview conducted by Claus Spahn, whose first question cornered Metzmacher: “Why this ‘quest for the German soul?’”  Metzmacher’s response boils down to his personal quest for the essence of German: “Where do I come from?  Where lie my roots as a musician?”  – questions, he said, that have long preoccupied him.

So far, so good …  but why, I myself ask, specifically Pfitzner?  His music does have a few fans, but on exclusively musical grounds they do not include me.  He has left a thoroughly documented reputation as an anti-Semite – but as Manuel Krug’s review for Die Welt points out, that applies also to Chopin and Wagner, to name only two racist bigots whose music gets widely performed.  During a pre-concert discourse between the DSO’s Intendant Ernst Elitz and the prominent Social Democrat leader Egon Bahr, Willy Brandt’s right hand during Brandt’s chancellorship, I learned the most revolting bit yet about Pfitzner to come to my attention.

Politically thinking music-lovers have difficulty with the fact that some of even the most villainous Nazis sincerely loved music.  Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia (whose murder by partisans brought the savage eradication of the village Lidice and its entire population, regardless of age) loved to play the violin, which he reportedly did quite well.  Hans Frank, the butcher of Kraków in occupied Poland, cultivated personal friendships with a number of top-echelon German musicians – among them Hans Pfitzner.

Now brace yourself for the real shocker.  Translated verbatim from Switzerland’s impeccably neutral Neue Zürcher Zeitung: “As [Frank] in October 1946 already sat in his Nuremberg death cell …  he received a telegram: “Dear friend Frank.  Take this hearty greeting as a sign of solidarity [Verbundenheit] also in a difficult time.  Always yours, Dr.  Hans Pfitzner.”

Musically, this concert (involving three vocal soloists and the Rundfunkchor Berlin) went well – as had another a few days earlier, which had combined powerful performances of Richard Strauss’s autobiographical tone poem “Ein Heldenleben” and Edgar Varèse’s still prickly “Amériques.”  The DSO can rejoice in a brilliant successor to Kent Nagano.

Metzmacher’s disingenuous Pfitzner sally promptly brought him an accusation of “provocation” from Germany’s Central Council of Jews.  Naturally he rejected that: “Pfitzner’s anti-Semitic utterances are inexcusable.  At no time did I have the intention to distract from that.”  He called Pfitzner’s 1921 cantata “a document of the time long before National Socialism” and the Day of German Unity an occasion “on which we remember our so varied [wechselvolle] history….  In that context came my decision to play Hans Pfitzner’s music on that day.  Not to whitewash it, not to celebrate it, but to offer it for discussion.”

Okay, done.  But in view of its mediocre quality as predominantly assayed – especially in comparison with so many other far more meritorious works performed far too infrequently – one wonders whether, ex post facto, he would still regard that decision as justifiable.