ON BRAHMS, JOHN KENNEDY, AND MUSIC by Nils Peterson

Saturday, November 21, 2009, 9:52 AM...I wrote this last year, but it's all on my mind again...

I’ve thought about writing this piece for many years, but this seems to be the right year.

I went to graduate school at Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers had a fine University Chorus that sang one concert a year with a New York Orchestra at Carnegie Hall and one concert a year with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Though my scholarly friends scoffed at such a waste of time, I had the chance to sing with some of the great conductors, Eric Leinsdorff, for instance, and, of course, Eugene Ormandy.

My last semester in New Jersey, we sang the Brahms German Requiem with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It was a transcendent thrill. I had loved the piece as a listener, but now I had the chance to go so deeply inside it as a singer (and spend a long weekend in Philadelphia to boot). Not long after our last performance, I got married and set out across country for California and my first full-time teaching job at San Jose State, not yet a university. The year was 1963.

I arrived in San Jose dead broke. My wife and I had money for one night in a hotel (all night long, the same noisy cars circled round and round) and then we had to find a place to rent the next day or we would have had to use part of our month-in- advance rent money. Incredibly, we found a cottage on a rich man’s estate overlooking Alum Rock Park. We were allowed to use the swimming pool in the yard. The one in his living room was for his family alone. We had also gotten our first credit card, a Bank America one with a $200 limit. (Well, my pay was $6600 a year.) We maxed it out on a $195 hi-fi set.

I found that I enjoyed teaching even though I had three sections of composition. My fourth class was a survey of English Literature. Originally, I was scheduled to have 4 composition classes, but the new head of the department took pity on me and split one of the senior professor’s class. In gratitude, I think I tried to squeeze a graduate seminar into each class, but the students seemed to like it and me.

One November morning, bright and shiny like the November morning I’m typing this in, I walked out of my English Lit class to the news that President Kennedy had been shot. It wasn’t clear yet whether it was fatal. There were desperate hopes that it wasn’t, but, alas..., and the lamentations of a nation began, the weeping of a nation who could not believe or comprehend the fate it had been asked to live through.

Of course my wife and I had no television set so we could visually share the grief of the nation. We’d blown the bucks on the radio. But our landlord invited us down to look at the news with him and his family, and for hours over the period of several days, we sprawled in chairs in his bedroom where the big set was, watching with tear-filled eyes a country trying to cope.

On the second or third day of grieving, I heard familiar music, and looked up at the set. There was Ormandy, the orchestra, and my old choir. They were singing the Requiem. They had been gathered together quickly for a memorial service. I sat there weeping as I watched the faces of my old friends, also tear-stained, singing the music I knew so well and which had meant so much to me. I desperately wished to be with them and part of them, but I sang along as well as I could and my weepy baritone comforted me in as far as it was possible to be comforted. The music asked “Tod, wo ist dein Stachel?” “Death, where is thy sting?” I knew well enough the answer to that, but it also sang, “Und Du hast alle Dinge ershaffen,” “And You have made all things,” and the sounds made me think that way, feel that way, rather, and move towards some sense of resolution and mystery. Eliot said something like “in the presence of a great religious poem, you know what it is like to believe in that religion.” It is even more true of music.

As it turned out, we needed the comfort of great music more than once over the next years, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, all those who died in Vietnam, and yes. forty years later, Iraq and Afghanistan. As I type this, I find myself wondering if the music of the spheres is a requiem not a joyful song of praise. But maybe they are the same, maybe they are the same.

And truthfully, today, above dark chords, I hear a bright song of possibility and praise.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuZlcEz4WkI

THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA WITH THE RUTGERS UNIVERSITY CHOIR CA.1963

Eugene Ormandy at a performance ca. 1963. The Philadelphia Orchestra, the Rutgers University Choir and two soloists. Possibly Brahms' Requiem. (John Vila)  http://www.art-robb.co.uk/soup.html

"Barbara S. wrote in [an] email: [The] photo is etched in my memory. The [Rutgers University] choir had begun its tour singing Brahms' Requiem (in German) just before JFK was assassinated on Friday November 22. We had already performed in Philadelphia and Baltimore as I recall, and may have already had a performance in New Brunswick although as I recall we canceled the Nov. 22 performance there.

Maestro Ormandy contacted Soup as well as NBC, and took the choir to Philadelphia on Saturday to tape the entire Requiem in honor of our fallen president. The performance was seen on Saturday night on NBC. (I have always wondered if that tape was saved or not -- perhaps it's in the NBC archives somewhere.) The soloists were Phyllis Curtin and Donald Gramm, but for the taped performance, Gramm was replaced by McKinley Boatright so this photo was taken at one of the other, regular performances.


On the following Monday, the choir performed at Carnegie Hall, again presenting the Requiem in honor of President Kennedy."