by Alex Ross
In the fourth movement, Copland quoted his own Fanfare for the Common Man, that muscular utterance modeled on Henry Wallace’s speech “Century of the Common Man.” By the fall of 1946 Wallace was no longer the nationally respected figure that he had been during the Roosevelt years. President Truman had fired him from the post of commerce secretary on account of a series of seemingly pro-Soviet remarks. This was the context for Berger’s comment: to be associated with an unrepentant New Dealer such as Wallace had become a political risk. As Elizabeth Crist points out, Virgil Thomson made the subtext explicit in a review of the symphony the following year, in which he mocked its resemblance to “the speeches of Henry Wallace, striking in phraseology but all too reminiscent of Moscow.” Thomson’s enthusiasm for all-American symphonies was on the wane. In the same year he wrote a review headlined “Atonality in France,” singling out Boulez for his virtuosity and noting the emergence of a “new international style.”
Thomson’s attack on the Third Symphony was a brilliantly manipulative feat of musical politics, and yet Copland himself was playing naive ideological games. His occasional commentaries on the international situation showed lamentably little awareness of what life inside the Soviet Union was really like. In April 1948, for example, he delivered the following analysis of Zhdanov’s persecution of Shostakovich and Prokofiev: “[The composers] were rebuked for failing to realize that their musical audience had expanded enormously in the last several years…and that composers can no longer continue to write only for a few initiates.” Such remarks brushed dangerously close to the Party line, and Copland was about to discover the consequences of clinging too long to the old spirit of American-Soviet solidarity.
In March 1949, Copland made the mistake of attending the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York. This was one of the first great propaganda battles in the cultural Cold War, and more than a few artistic reputations fell victim to the clash of ideologies. The martyr in chief was Dmitri Shostakovich, who had gone to America at Stalin’s behest. Weird scenes surrounded Shostakovich from the moment he arrived on American soil. The Broadwood Hotel in Philadelphia canceled his dinner reservation on account of threats of violence. Demonstrators carried placards exhorting him to speak out or to defect:
SHOSTAKOVICH, WE UNDERSTAND
SHOSTAKOVICH! JUMP THRU THE WINDOW!
—the second slogan referring to the athletic defection of the schoolteacher Oksana Kasenkina the previous year. It was not in Shostakovich’s nature to jump through the window. He read the speeches that were placed in front of him; he answered questions in accordance with instructions that were whispered in his ear. On the final night of the conference, he played a piano arrangement of the Scherzo of his Fifth Symphony at Madison Square Garden before an audience of eighteen thousand while two thousand picketers protested outside. All the while, Shostakovich maintained an indecipherable facade of nervous preoccupation. When Morton Gould sidled up to him in the hope of hearing some candid confession, Shostakovich muttered, “It’s hot in here.”
Left-leaning American artists of all disciplines and persuasions gathered at the Waldorf to greet their Soviet counterparts. Some attendees came in a spirit of political sympathy, others out of artistic fellow feeling or curiosity. Henry Wallace was there, and drew cheers as he entered. Time observed snidely that the event could have been mistaken for a Wallace rally. Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller also attended. Thomas Mann sent a message of support. Copland’s role was especially prominent: he greeted Shostakovich at the airport and sat at the head table with Hellman and Wallace. Most of the attendees did not know to what extent the event had been engineered by Soviet propagandists, who were under the aegis of the Cominform organization.
Assembled on the other side of the political barricades was a coalition of disenchanted leftists who called themselves Americans for Intellectual Freedom. They holed up in the bridal suite at the Waldorf, trying to stem the tide of Communist and fellow-traveler propaganda. In the thick of the group was Nicolas Nabokov, the former Ballets Russes composer and OMGUS operative, whose career was taking a colorful new turn. After his stint in Berlin, Nabokov had applied for a position in the nascent Central Intelligence Agency, for which his sponsor was none other than George Kennan, one of the chief architects of American Cold War policy. Failing to receive security clearance—apparently J. Edgar Hoover nixed him—Nabokov decided to devote himself again to composition.
By various twists and turns, Nabokov ended up on the CIA’s payroll all the same. Americans for Intellectual Freedom was receiving clandestine support from the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination, which had taken an interest in combating Soviet influence through the promotion of anti-Communist or pro-democratic cultural activities. Nabokov’s subsequent protests that he had no knowledge of the CIA connection are difficult to credit. Surely, at about the time that the president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union handed him a wad of cash to pay the hotel bill, it must have crossed his mind that all was not as it seemed.
The members of Americans for Intellectual Freedom fanned out to various speeches and panel discussions at the conference. Nabokov zeroed in on a Sunday-morning fine arts panel, where Shostakovich and Copland were scheduled to appear.
Shostakovich’s contribution was a five-thousand-word speech that ranged from music to international politics and on to Soviet domestic policy. It would be too much to say that the composer “delivered” it; he sat in silence while his interpreter read it aloud. The speech attacked Stravinsky for betraying his native Russia and joining the ranks of the reactionary modernists: “His beginnings were promising, but…his moral barrenness reveals itself in his openly nihilistic writings, proclaiming the meaninglessness and absence of content in his creations. Stravinsky has no fear of that gaping abyss which separates him from the spiritual life of the people.” The speech went on to denounce “new aspirants for world domination, now engaged in resurrecting the theory and practice of fascism.” This “small clique of hatemongers”—presumably the cold warriors of the Truman administration—was engaged in developing weapons of mass destruction that stood in the way of world peace. The speech even criticized Hanson Baldwin, the military-affairs editor of the New York Times, for denigrating the economic status of Soviet Asian republics such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The conceit that Shostakovich was an avid reader of military-affairs coverage in the Times added a slight comic note to the proceedings.
Copland responded with temperate, thoughtful remarks in which he declared himself independent of any political agenda. “I am going to start by saying that I wrote this paper myself,” he said. “Nobody told me what to say, and if anybody had tried to tell me what to say, I wouldn’t be here.” At the heart of his speech was an affecting elegy for the lost idealism of the New Deal:
Lately I’ve been thinking that the cold war is almost worse for art than the real thing—for it permeates the atmosphere with fear and anxiety. An artist can function at his best only in a vital and healthy environment for the simple reason that the very act of creation is an affirmative gesture. An artist fighting in a war for a cause he holds just has something affirmative he can believe in. The artist, if he can stay alive, can create art. But throw him into a mood of suspicion, ill-will and dread that typifies the Cold War attitude and he’ll create nothing.
Unfortunately, the only part of Copland’s speech that drew notice in the papers—the Times’s front-page article carried the headline “Shostakovich Bids All Artists Lead War on New ‘Fascists’”—was this: “The present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war.”
Nabokov kept his gaze fixed on Shostakovich. The “culture generalissimo,” as Stravinsky called him, had for many years been nursing a hatred of his Soviet counterpart. Like Bartók, he heard the Leningrad as musical kitsch, foisted by cynical maestros and impresarios on a “naively stupid, apathetic, and profoundly uncu
ltivated American public” (as he put it in a letter to Stravinsky). In a 1943 article for Harper’s magazine Nabokov declared that the fad for Shostakovich signaled a general decline in cultural values, a slide toward “absolute and immediate comprehensibility to large masses of people.”
Despite his built-in hostility, Nabokov professed to feel a certain sympathy for the pathetic figure who stood before him in 1949. “Throughout the tumultuous conference,” Nabokov recalled, “I watched [Shostakovich’s] hands twist the cardboard tips of his cigarettes, his face twitch and his whole posture express intense unease. While his Soviet colleagues on the right and left looked calm and as self-contented as mantelpiece Buddhas, his sensitive face looked disturbed, hurt, and terribly shy…He seemed like a trapped man, whose only wish was to be left alone, to the peace of his own art and to the tragic destiny to which he, like most of his countrymen, had been forced to resign himself.”
The knowledge that Shostakovich lacked freedom of speech did not prevent Nabokov from forcing him to speak. The émigré rose from his seat to ask whether Shostakovich really endorsed Zhdanov’s condemnation of composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Hindemith. Shostakovich had no choice but to say, “I fully agree with the statements made in Pravda.” Decades later, Arthur Miller was haunted by the memory of Shostakovich’s moment of humiliation: “God knows what he was thinking in that room, what splits ran across his spirit…”
If Shostakovich made any protest against the charade that he was required to conduct, it assumed a subtle, silent form. The night after the conference, he attended a Juilliard String Quartet concert of Bartók’s First, Fourth, and Sixth quartets, works that fell into the formalist category. He congratulated the performers, and then, according to the Times, “slipped quietly out into the night.” Bearing no apparent ill will for (or knowledge of ) Bartók’s parody of the Leningrad, he would incorporate Bartókian ideas into his own sublime late sequence of string quartets.
Several days later Life magazine opened fire on the entire world of Henry Wallace, the New Deal, the Popular Front, and the U.S. Communist Party. A sardonic photo essay on the Waldorf conference highlighted Wallace as the “standout fellow traveler,” and a two-page photo gallery identified fifty “dupes and fellow travelers” who were said to be aiding the Communist cause. Copland, spelled “Copeland,” appeared alongside Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein, Langston Hughes, Charles Chaplin, and all the above-mentioned attendees of the conference.
Among other things, Luce’s attack indicated that the media’s lionization of refugee intellectuals was at an end. A “strange rogue’s gallery,” Mann called the Life spread. The author of Doctor Faustus feared that America was falling victim to the same totalitarian madness that had consumed his German homeland, and he began to think about emigrating once again. Three years later he moved to Switzerland, his final homeland. Mann had come to America looking for freedom from demonic politics, and he did not find it.
When the Waldorf debacle was over, Copland took a trip to Paris. Bearing no obvious scars from what he had endured, he busied himself with tracking down the latest musical trends in the city where, more than two decades before, he had got to know the work of Stravinsky and Les Six. In a letter to the composer Irving Fine and his wife, Verna, he reported that he was “ferreting out the dodecaphonistes.”
In particular, he ferreted out Pierre Boulez. The two composers were apparently brought together by John Cage, who had met Boulez a few weeks earlier. Copland ascended the stairs to Boulez’s apartment, which occupied two rooms on the top floor of a building in the Marais, and heard the young master play parts of his Second Sonata. “But must we start a revolution all over again?” Copland asked, when it was over. “Mais oui,” Boulez replied, “sans pitié.” The two composers met again a few days later, at a gathering of American expatriates that included the pianist Shirley Gabis and the gifted young composer Ned Rorem. Boulez once more banged out the Second Sonata, to the consternation of the neoclassical Americans. According to Rorem, Copland “stuck it out with a grin.” Afterward, he went to the piano to play his own hard-driving Piano Variations, from 1930; he wanted to show that “he was just as hairy as Boulez,” or so Rorem guessed.
That fall, the question of Copland’s politics arose once more in the American media, and in a most bizarre way. Arnold Schoenberg, who usually limited his political utterances to Zionist issues, declared in a radio address: “You cannot change the natural evolution of the arts by a command; you may make a New Year’s resolution to write only what everybody likes; but you cannot force real artists to descend to the lowest possible standards to give up morals, character, and sincerity, to avoid presentation of new ideas. Even Stalin cannot succeed and Aaron Copland even less.”
Virgil Thomson reprinted Schoenberg’s bellicose remarks in the Herald Tribune and then allowed Copland to respond. Copland said: “Mr. Schoenberg must have seen my picture in the papers in company with Shostakovich on the occasion of his brief visit here last spring. In America it is still possible (I hope) to share a forum platform with a man whose musical and political ideas are not one’s own without being judged guilty by association.”
At the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, D.C., someone went to the trouble to open a file on the composer (“Alias: Aaron Copeland,” it said on one page). When Copland returned from a six-month tour of Europe and Israel in 1951, J. Edgar Hoover wrote a note to his counterpart at the CIA: “Copland has been abroad for some time and on June 25, 1951, he arrived in New York from Bombay, India, on TWA flight 6022-C. It would be appreciated if you would furnish this Bureau any information you have received concerning Copland’s activities while abroad.”
In 1951 and 1952 Copland delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard, where he sketched an exceptionally clear and canny picture of the emergent ideological divide in postwar music. On the one hand, he said, you have the twelve-tone composer who “is no longer writing music to satisfy himself” but instead “is writing it against a vocal and militant opposition” of socialist realist composers. In other words, twelve-tone music had been politicized. On the other hand, you have the “composer of communist persuasion,” who runs the risk of abandoning artistic quality for popular appeal.
Reading between the lines of Copland’s flat-toned prose, you can sense his anxiety that he was falling too conspicuously into the second category. He had already been labeled a fellow traveler in the pages of Life. He had watched as old colleagues had been subjected to interrogation or driven out of the country. As a gay man, he had extra reason to worry: the FBI was conducting separate purges of homosexuals on the theory that they made easy targets for Soviet blackmail. One of them was John Evarts, the former music officer of OMGUS Bavaria, who lost his post as cultural attaché in 1951.
On January 20, 1953, Dwight D. Eisenhower was inaugurated as president of the United States. Copland’s Lincoln Portrait had been scheduled for a preliminary Inaugural Concert by the National Symphony, but two weeks before the event Congressman Fred Busbey denounced Copland’s work as Communist propaganda and demanded that it be removed from the program. Making the case for Copland as a “fellow traveler,” Busbey read a long list of Copland’s affiliations into the Congressional Record, including his appearance at the Waldorf-Astoria conference; his support of Hanns Eisler, who had been interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 and then deported; and his relationships with such organizations as the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, the Artists’ Front to Win the War, the Citizens Committee for Harry Bridges, the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners, the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, and the American Music Alliance of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Busbey warned: “As the number of such activities or affiliations increase [sic], any presumption of the innocence of such a person must necessarily decrease.”
Copland released a statement couched in the defensive jargon of the day: “I say unequiv
ocally that I am not now and never have been a communist or member of the communist party or of any organization that advocates or teaches in any way the overthrow of the United States Government.” Nonetheless, Lincoln Portrait was not played for President-elect Eisenhower at Constitution Hall.
Finally, on May 22, 1953, came the dreaded telegram: “YOU ARE HEREBY DIRECTED TO APPEAR BEFORE THIS COMMITTEE ON MONDAY MAY TWENTYFIFTH AT TWO THIRTY P M ROOM 357 SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC—JOE MCCARTHY CHAIRMAN SENATE PERMANENT SUBCOMMITTEE ON INVESTIGATIONS.”
Fortunately, McCarthy did not treat Copland as brutally as he did other fellow travelers, perhaps because the senator was interested less in the composer’s career than in his educational activities on behalf of the United States Department of State, which was supposedly riddled with Communists. “My impression,” Copland wrote in a private memorandum, “is that McCarthy had no idea who I was or what I did.” The composer claimed ignorance of the Communist affiliations of the organizations to which he had been linked. Sometimes, he said, his name had been used without his knowledge. In other cases the associations were tenuous; Copland’s role in the Citizens Committee for Harry Bridges had amounted to a one-dollar check. Less sincere was Copland’s claim that he had never knowingly consorted with a Party member. Fortunately, Roy Cohn’s investigators did not learn of his 1934 speech to a rally of Communist farmers in Minnesota.
Having submitted his written response to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Copland waited to be called back for a public hearing. But none materialized. Apparently, he benefited from the unlikely support of the anti-Communist newspaperman George Sokolsky, who privately urged McCarthy to lay off “one of America’s greatest living composers.” Still, there were repercussions. For years Copland experienced hassles whenever he tried to travel abroad; the Passport Agency declined to renew his passport and repeatedly requested that he demonstrate affiliations with anti-Communist organizations. And in 1953, several of Copland’s engagements were rescinded on political grounds.
