Page 24 - Phil 25-26 opening night DIGITAL program book

Program Notes

times. Every time, the orchestra responds with Bach-like halos of strings,
brass fanfares, and folk music, including “On Springfield Mountain” and
Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races.” According to Copland, “I hoped to
suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds
Lincoln’s personality. The challenge was to compose something simple,
yet interesting enough to fit Lincoln.” Copland blended quotations from
one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates (1858), Lincoln’s Annual Message to
Congress (1862), and the Gettysburg Address (1863) together with his own
transitional texts. The composer hoped to present Lincoln as belonging
to many places (“he was born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and lived in
Illinois”), as a definer of democracy (“As I would not be a slave, so I would
not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”), and a defender
of the poor, disparaging “the spirit that says ‘You toil and work and earn
bread—and I’ll eat it.’”
The commissioning conductor’s favorite narrator was Carl Sandburg
(1959) and many politicians and actors have enjoyed delivering Lincoln’s
words (including Adlai Stevenson, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and
Senator Edward M. Kennedy). But Marian Anderson and Coretta Scott
King were Copland’s favorite narrators for the work, performing it under
his direction throughout the 1960s-1970s. To celebrate Copland’s 80th
birthday, Leonard Bernstein conducted the work, with Copland himself
as narrator.
On Saturday, April 29, 1865, five days after Lincoln’s funeral train stopped
in the city, the New York Philharmonic opened the last concert of its 23rd
season with the funeral march from Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony
No. 3. The notes for that program described the music as a piece
“expressly composed for the occasion of the death of a great hero”—as
“a fitting tribute to our departed Head.” Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait
thus belongs to a long tradition of music memorializing the fallen
President. It remains both the most famous musical acknowledgement
of Lincoln’s leadership and a patriotic work tinged with the progressive
ideology of its composer.

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Symphony No. 2 in C minor, op. 17, Ukrainian Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
(1840-1893)
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s second symphony was nicknamed the “Little
Russian,” a nineteenth-century term for “Ukrainian,” in the 1896 book

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