The 40s: The Story of a Decade (95 page)

· · ·

The doctrine that underlies Giedion’s book is one that Frank Lloyd Wright has been preaching and practicing his entire life, and never more vocally, never more visibly, than during the last decade. But Wright’s pronouncements on architecture had never been brought together and many of them have long been inaccessible, so we owe a special debt to Frederick Gutheim for collecting and collating them in an admirable book,
Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture: Selected Writings, 1894–1940
.

The book begins with a speech by Wright on architecture and the machine given in 1894 and ends with a dinner talk at Hull House. The very first words are characteristic and could not be improved: “The more true culture a man has, the more significant his environment becomes to him.” The color of Wright’s personality, the wide range of his mind, his healthy aplomb, his deeply moral feeling about life and art are all visible in these pages. These pronouncements and challenges, these reports and jottings and memoranda are an indispensable part of America’s cultural history. One learns, for example, that Wright’s houses were first called “dress reform houses”—a precious sidelight which indicates that the removal of the bustle and the corset and the manifold petticoat went logically along with his opening up of window space, the breaking down of partitions, and the removal of the triple layer of curtaining that once screened the American home from light.

When he is talking about nature, when he is finding a new beauty in the rocks or the vegetation of some little-known region, interpreting its values for architectural form, Wright is at his supreme best. To read Wright on Arizona and South Dakota is to find a fresh reason for being an American. Enough if I say that this book is of the same order as Whitman’s
Democratic Vistas
, the fruition of a brilliant individual life and the seed of a better life to come.

· · ·

After remaining on the high level of Giedion’s historical criticism and Wright’s contemporary challenges, you may like to climb down to earth again by reading
Architecture in Old Chicago
, by the late Thomas E. Tallmadge. Even so, you will not be very far away from Wright or Giedion, for the Chicago Tallmadge tells about was the capital city of the New American architecture, and though Tallmadge was not an acute critic, he was familiar with the personalities and the material remains of the great days of Chicago architecture. By now even a New Yorker should know that all the fundamental experiments in both the aesthetics and the technics of the skyscraper were worked out in Chicago between 1883 and 1893. If he doesn’t, it is high time that he learned. When the history of American architecture comes finally to be written, the material in Tallmadge’s little book—left unfinished, alas, at his death—will be important.

A NOTE BY ALEX ROSS

F
or decades, classical-music criticism in
The New Yorker
, like much other writing in the magazine, struck an urbane, irreverent, studiously off-the-cuff tone. The first custodian of the Musical Events column, Robert A. Simon, zigzagged between classical and popular music, dabbling in Broadway work in his spare time. (He wrote lyrics for “Ups-a-Daisy,” “The Gang’s All Here,” “Hold Your Horses,” and “Champagne, Sec.”) One of Simon’s early reviews, from 1926, begins thus: “Enter into the conductorial arena Otto Klemperer, the seven foot dynamo from Wiesbaden, the terror of second trombonists, the cave man who yanks ’em by the collar and shakes sweet music from their quivering instruments, the wild bull of the symphony, Brann the Iconoclast, and all the rest of it.” The
New Yorker
fact-checking department was not quite the colossus it eventually became: Klemperer was, in fact, six feet four.

Such was the tenor of the musical conversation in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Classical music had not yet been fenced off in the public mind as an elite, effete pursuit; it held a prominent position in mainstream culture, inspiring Hollywood biopics and occupying prime slots on the radio schedule. Up to ten million people tuned in for Arturo Toscanini’s broadcasts with the NBC Symphony. Classical performers and even a few composers appeared on the cover of
Time.
In the chic 1944 thriller
Laura
, the hard-boiled detective played by Dana Andrews catches Vincent Price in a philharmonic fib: “Why did you say they played Brahms’s First and Beethoven’s Ninth at the concert Friday night? They changed the program at the last minute and played nothing but
Sibelius.” A red-blooded American male didn’t throw his masculinity into question if he showed a taste for opera.

The embattled heroism of the symphonic literature matched the mood of a nation reeling from the Depression and war. The
New Yorker
writer Philip Hamburger, visiting wounded soldiers at the Halloran General Hospital, on Staten Island, in 1943, reported that the young men were listening as avidly to Wagner and Shostakovich as they were to popular fare. Leonard Bernstein became a sleek matinee idol, his 1943 debut at the New York Philharmonic covered in the same cheeky tones as the discovery of a starlet at Schwab’s Pharmacy. The civil-rights movement came alive with the tremendous spectacle of Marian Anderson performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in 1939. Aaron Copland created the sound of the American heartland, notwithstanding his leftist politics. There was, in fact, no contradiction between the leftist slant of Roosevelt’s America and the bent toward classical sounds: Clifford Odets, among others, saw Beethoven as the herald of an egalitarian future, one in which contentious individual voices would unite in a major-key consensus.

The populist streak in classical culture coincided with a significant, though short-lived, effort on the part of the federal government to give employment to musicians and other Depression-battered artists. In 1935, the Federal Music Project was launched, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration; across the country, orchestras and opera companies offered high-quality events on the cheap. The arts projects were largely shut down in 1939, as a result of anti–New Deal agitation, but W.P.A. orchestras lingered on in a few places, notably in New York. “You can’t lose at the New York City W.P.A. Symphony concerts,” Simon writes in 1942. With the purchase of War Savings Stamps—ranging in price from fifty cents to five dollars—attendees got to see Nathan Milstein and Gregor Piatigorsky in the Brahms Double Concerto. How were they? “Immense.”

Simon remained on the beat until 1948, when he ceded his position to Hamburger, who, despite the fact that he had not studied music, turned out to be a keen, deft observer. (“Just listen and write,” Harold Ross sensibly told him.) After a year, Hamburger moved on to the brave new world of television, and Douglas Watt, best remembered for his theatre reviews, wrote the column for a few years. Winthrop Sargeant also contributed a few notices, and, in 1953, he took over for a two-decade stint at
Musical Events. A professional violinist who had played under Toscanini in the New York Philharmonic, Sargeant knew the core repertory, but he showed little sympathy for contemporary music. Only with the arrival of the formidable London critic Andrew Porter, in 1972, did
The New Yorker
acquire a classical commentator comparable in influence to the likes of Edmund Wilson, Pauline Kael, and Whitney Balliett. Still, it’s permissible to feel a bit of nostalgia for the days when almost any generally cultured person on the staff seemed prepared to write the music page. It was a sign of the times.

ROBERT A. SIMON

OCTOBER 24, 1942

T
his
Rodeo
that the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo brought to the Metropolitan Opera House last week turned out to be a bright little offering that will please plenty of customers. The scenario, in the language of the program, “deals with the problem that has confronted every American woman, from earliest pioneer times, and which has never ceased to occupy them throughout the history of the building of our country: how to get a suitable man.” This is not presented abstractly, there being no spirit of woman struggling to reach the ideal man, or anything like that. There’s a cowgirl on a ranch competing with visitors from Kansas City for the attentions of the gents. You follow her adventures from a rodeo to a Saturday-night dance at the ranch house—and that’s the story. The rodeo, as a terpsichorean job, is pretty good, a square-dance interlude (without music) is better, and the Saturday-night dance is something of a triumph. The audience doted on the production, and even after the doting tendencies of ballet visitors are discounted,
Rodeo
goes into the books as a hit.