Ask anyone for a list of favorite American composers, and it’s almost a reflex to name three or four immediately. Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin and Morton Gould are all shoo-ins. All were inextricably tied to New York, and all were composers who pierced the mainstream by embracing the music around them (jazz) or the music thousands of miles away from them (hoe-downs, cowboy songs, Latin influences and the like).
One New Yorker, on the other hand, embraced neither. Instead, William Schuman pressed onward his own way, feeding his own indefatigable, optimistic manner directly into his music for nearly 60 years. He would’ve turned 100 Aug. 4.
Schuman was esteemed enough as a composer of all-consuming intensity and the first Pulitzer Prize winner for music. But perhaps even more impressively, so much of the New York arts scene would cease to exist without him as the president of both Juilliard and Lincoln Center.
Schuman, who died in 1992, was no follower. He led urgently and assertively, always looking toward greater things as a composer and administrator alike.
He was impeccably genial in social settings, armed with a rapier wit, always ready for a deep baseball discussion and so persuasive he could sell sand in the desert. In as few words as possible, his charisma shines in a 1962 appearance on What’s My Line?
But besides his dear wife, Frankie, music and music education formed his true love, and he treated them with utmost reverence. Bill McGlaughlin, the former conductor of the Kansas City Symphony and current radio host of Exploring Music, remembers Schuman as a forceful, articulate speaker and direct in his approach.
“I think Robert Shaw spoke at this same conference, and Shaw, by contrast – they knew each other, of course – was an enchanter when he spoke. And Bill Schuman wasn’t interested in enchanting,” said McGlaughlin in an interview with Suite101, who is devoting an entire week to celebrating Schuman’s centennial on his nationwide program. “He wouldn’t have taken that route to engage us. It would’ve been a tremendous waste of time. One of his really close friends said, ‘I don’t think Bill went around smelling the roses much, to tell you the truth!’”
Essential Schuman: Third Symphony and Violin Concerto
To be sure, Schuman kept such an outlandishly busy schedule at Juilliard and especially with his Lincoln Center duties that it’s amazing he had time for composition. His lifetime of scores is illuminative for its incremental progression in complexity while still holding fast to his singular voice.
Schuman’s choral and chamber works, especially his series of string quartets, occupy valuable shelf space. But his orchestral catalog shows the composer in peak form time and again. Two in particular deserve all their years worth of praise.
His extraordinary Symphony No. 3 (1941) is as perfect an American symphony as has ever been written, still packing a wallop with each listen. Leonard Slatkin, like Leonard Bernstein before him, is one of the symphony’s most ardent promoters.
Although Schuman wrote a piano concerto and a cello concerto of sorts (A Song of Orpheus), his crowning achievement for soloist and orchestra is his devastating Violin Concerto, published in its final form in 1959. The blistering violin part, with an intricate cadenza among many demands, matches wits with a fiery orchestral accompaniment.
“He took great pride in the fact that he never changed a note of the cadenza,” Joseph W. Polisi, Juilliard president and Schuman biographer, told Suite101. “It’s a great violin concerto, and I’m hoping it’ll be played more and more as time goes on.”
These two significant works have more in common than being the large-scale, sprawling pieces that Schuman often favored. Both are over a half-hour’s length in two parts, but both contained extra music at one time, to the curiosity of Schuman devotees.
“He fiddled around with large structures a lot, and I think liked to be unconventional. So he got rid of what I consider an amazingly beautiful second movement,” Polisi says of the Violin Concerto. “I have a recording of it, and it’s only six minutes. It was in the first version that was done in 1950, and it’s quite beautiful.”
Slatkin made a similar discovery with the Third Symphony while with the National Symphony Orchestra.
“I went to the Library of Congress right away when I started in Washington. And I wanted to see the manuscript of the score of that piece. All of a sudden, I saw all this music that I didn’t know about in the symphony,” Slatkin said to Suite101. “I can see why he made most of the cuts, but there are two passages, quite substantial, that I think are really valuable and important for the structure for the piece.”
Slatkin, the current conductor of the Detroit Symphony, performed both pieces with the Juilliard Orchestra in honor of Schuman’s centenary on April 1, 2010, exactly 18 years to the day of his memorial service. This time, Slatkin reinstated the second movement of the concerto.
On Schuman’s Ground: His Musical Future
Some of Schuman’s later works from the 1970s through the 1980s suffered from a combination of fading energy levels, bouts of poor health and a dearth of ideas, which Polisi acknowledges. Critics who grew to know his music gave increasingly disapproving assessments of commissions he took on in later life.
But thankfully since his death, new recordings have generated a Schuman reawakening. Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony finished his symphony cycle, numbered 3 through 10, this year. Meanwhile, Ian Hobson and Sinfonia da Camera have more Schuman on tap soon that hasn’t been recorded commercially (the Pulitzer winner A Free Song and On Freedom’s Ground).
And as for the next great interpreters of his music, McGlaughlin fascinatingly guesses they haven’t been born. Hesitant to play favorites within this grand composer’s output, he says, “What is Schuman’s best stuff? I think it’s yet to be discovered. And whether he develops an audience over the next 50 years will tell the tale.”
Alex Hoffman - Alex Hoffman is a graduate of the University of Kansas' journalism school whose credits include Midwest Commercial Journal, Lawrence ...
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