And so, as I promised in my last column, to America. First to the Hudson Valley, that second Eden north of New York City, still garlanded with autumnal leaves. I hadn’t come to sing, but to give lectures at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, surrounded by places with names like Rhinebeck and Wurtemburg, which betray the area’s Germano-Dutch heritage. From my window, I could see across the river to the fabled Catskill Mountains, where one of my favourite childhood stories plays out—what would old Rip Van Winkle make of things now if he awoke after a decades-long sleep ?
Leon Botstein has been president of Bard for an extraordinary half-century and he has created a college that is committed to the saving grace of the humanities in an age when the humanities seem constantly under attack. He resists the iron bureaucratic HR recruitment cage by drawing distinguished faculty members from outside academia. He raises funds for iconic buildings including the Fisher Center, a theatre/concert complex designed by Frank Gehry. He started a music conservatory that insists that all its students pursue a second, academic, non-musical degree.
Bard is closely plugged into the George Soros-funded Open Society Universities network with campuses and programmes in Berlin, Kyrgyzstan and East Jerusalem. A partnership with St Petersburg State University’s Smolny College ran from 1994 to 2021. There’s also the Bard Prison Initiative, which offers arts schooling to the incarcerated (watch the Ken Burns documentary College Behind Bars). This is by no means an ivory tower; at the same time, there are no compromises on the centrality of the humanities to a proper education. There’s still a great books programme at Bard, without embarrassment.
I’d come to give lectures founded in memory of the great American poet Anthony Hecht—a poet, I would say, little known in the UK. The lectures were about Britten’s War Requiem and I discovered a nice little cluster of circumstances to tie together the poet and the composer. Both were friends of WH Auden. And, when living on Ischia, Hecht was asked to write the words for a song cycle to be composed by another denizen of the island, Hans Werner Henze, for his friends Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears. Sadly, it never came to fruition.
Most significantly, both Hecht and Britten found themselves in what remained of the German camps at the end of the Second World War: Britten as a pacifist, playing for prisoners at Bergen-Belsen in the summer of 1945; Hecht as a GI, liberating Flossenbürg in the spring of the same year. Both men wrote under the shadow of that experience. Hecht’s most famous poem, “More Light! More Light!”, memorably binds together a botched execution from the 16th-century English Reformation with a scene of horror from 1940s Europe:
We move now to outside a German wood. / Three men are there commanded to dig a hole / In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down / And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.
The poem is dedicated to Hannah Arendt and her husband, both buried at Bard. The title quotes Goethe’s last words. Mehr Licht.
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From the Hudson Valley to St Louis, Missouri. A tornado had blown through the city six months before. Damage to the massive mansions built opposite Forest Park at the time of the 1904 World’s Fair (the climax of that Christmas movie favourite, Meet Me in St Louis) was mostly repaired; in the poorer parts of town, where the storm had been at its fiercest, the debris was still apparent. I was there to sing my 98th and 99th War Requiems with the city’s symphony orchestra, back home in a refurbished and revitalised Powell Hall.
I’d been told that the St Louis Art Museum had a great collection, especially of German art—Beckmann, Richter, Beuys. The great surprise was to find a spectacular new Anselm Kiefer show, Becoming the Sea. Inspired by Kiefer’s 1991 visit to St Louis and a trip up the Mississippi, the most haunting paintings blend together the experience of the New World and memories of the old, more specifically of the Rhine and its ominous place in the German imagination. In the museum’s sculpture hall, five vast canvases, nearly 10m by 10m, include one referring back to that iconic figure of 19th-century German art, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. The title? Anselm was here.
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I’m back in Europe and realising that my editor asked me for something festive for this winter issue. Since I’m in Florence for rather unseasonal stagings of the St Matthew Passion—more of an Easter piece, surely—I was a little stumped. I’ve been surrounded by images of the crucifixion and a little bit underwhelmed by a very crowded exhibition of Fra Angelico at the Palazzo Strozzi. But then we visited one of the true wonders of Florence, the Chapel of the Magi in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, frescoed in rich colours and luxuriant detail by Benozzo Gozzoli from 1459. Christmassy enough, I think.
