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Interview by Livia Kam, PYOMI Student Intern
Dr. Allen C. Guelzo is a historian, author, and Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida, best known for his acclaimed works on Abraham Lincoln and the American Civil War, including Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, which became a New York Times bestseller. Dr. Guelzo will be narrating The Testament of Freedom, in addition to introducing each piece at the 86th Annual Festival Concert for the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra.
Philadelphia Youth Orchestra
Sunday, May 31 at 7 p.m.
Marian Anderson Hall
Stravinsky: The Star Spangled Banner
W. Schuman: New England Triptych
Thompson: The Testament of Freedom
Copland: Symphony No. 3
Historian Dr. Allen C. Guelzo Brings America’s Story to the Stage
Tell me about your background as a historian and your passion for music.
I’ve been back and forth between history and music for a long time. I was first interested in historical subjects when I was quite literally small — the summer between first grade and second grade. But I was also interested in music. My grandmother put me in violin lessons very early on. And oh, how I wish I’d stuck with them! I’m afraid I didn’t. But suddenly, after a few years, the bug bit again, this time, singing in a chorus. I signed up to sing in my ninth-grade boys’ glee club, and I just got drawn into every musical event and every musical organization that was on offer, and even music theory classes! I think there was a moment in which I seriously entertained the idea that I should do something important with music. I have to say that, in truth, I probably came back too late. Again, if only I’d stuck with those violin lessons in fourth grade!
You can be very interested and very inclined musically without necessarily needing to be directly committed to it. That’s pretty much where I’m at.
I have done lots and lots of history. What I have not probably been nearly so forward about is writing about music history. But I have been able to find ways of making my history interests meet my music interests. I think I do that in large measure, because I don’t like to put things in little boxes. I don’t want there to be a little box for history and another little box for music — because no one lives their lives that way. So, why should we write our history in that way?
What is your background in speaking?
I never had what you’d call formal training in speaking. Happily, it seems to have come out reasonably well. If I had a formula for it, I’d bottle it and sell it, but I don’t. People sometimes ask the same question about writing. All I can say, by way of explaining, is that I just saw what I thought was good writing, and wanted to imitate it. In a way, that’s also like writing good music. I remember Ralph Vaughan Williams, in one of his essays, saying that if you wanted to start out as a composer, you should find someone whose music you really like and imitate them. It’s by imitating them that you will learn to develop your own voice in composing. The same thing is true in writing and speaking.
I’ve loved doing narration with the Youth Orchestra and other orchestras over the years because that’s the closest I know that I’ll ever get to solo performance. For narrating, I’ve most obviously done Copland’s Lincoln Portrait many times That’s the one piece with orchestra and narrator that is most often called for and programmed. I remember doing Lincoln Portrait for the first time with my high school orchestra back in 1971. Which, by the way, was also the same spring that I was first part of a concert by the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra, as a singer in our high school chorus. We performed a joint concert with the PYO, and I still have the poster!
What went into programming the repertoire for the finale concert?
When Maestro Scaglione and I were talking about the program for this 250th concert, I suggested to him some things that, as a historian, I thought might be useful. One thing I said was, ‘You really have to do Randall Thompson’s The Testament of Freedom,’ because that sits right at the heart of the 250th, with its settings of quotes from Thomas Jefferson. I also suggested to him very tentatively that we might do it as a narrator arrangement, in which I would read the Jefferson quotes at the head of each one of the four movements. Much to my pleasant surprise, he was very agreeable to the idea. In addition, the performance will include another piece written around Revolutionary-era themes, William Schuman’s New England Triptych, and finish with Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony.
One surprise is the opener of the concert: Igor Stravinsky’s arrangement of the National Anthem. So maybe the big question of the program is, ‘Why in this program are we going to do that unusual Stravinsky setting of the national anthem?’ There’s a whole story about that, and it’s a hoot! Stravinsky’s arrangement was written in 1941, and it sounds to us more like a chorale than a patriotic song. Especially in the last five or six measures, Stravinsky gives you the traditional tune but over top of a diminished seventh, which he then resolves to the tonic – but which doesn’t sound like the usual version. People found that very strange. In January, 1944, when Stravinsky conducted his arrangement with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the police commissioner wrote to Stravinsky to warn him that, according to Massachusetts state law, you were only allowed to play one arrangement of the anthem (known as the “Service Version”).
That meant that Stravinsky, in 1944, was actually breaking the law in Massachusetts. So, he had to withdraw that, and the BSO had to take the parts off the stands!
For William Schuman’s New England Triptych, Schuman wrote a very lengthy explanatory preface in which he stipulated that the preface should be printed (or read) at every performance. The preface is printed in the published score. But when I borrowed a copy of the score from the University of Florida’s music library, the preface was definitely there, but someone had pasted a date-due sticker right over it. So, I actually had to locate that text from another source.
Finally, I’ll do a short introduction explaining the Copland Third Symphony, and especially how Copland worked the Fanfare for the Common Man into the last movement, which surprises people, because you often think of Fanfare as a freestanding piece. Copland spoke of how he was in the process of writing the Third Symphony in 1942 when it occurred to him that the fanfare part might work as a free-standing piece. Then, by the time he finished the Third Symphony in 1946, he had put it all back in. You might say, being a little snarky, that it’s Copland plagiarizing Copland.
Tell me about The Testament of Freedom, the piece you are narrating point-by-point.
I love Randall Thompson as a choral composer. He’s written some of the most famous American choral works in the 20th century. I don’t think there’s a chorus in this country that, at some point, has not sung Thompson’s Alleluia. His arrangements for chorus of Robert Frost poems — the Frostiana series — are so beautiful. He also wrote three symphonies and two string quartets. But the things he’s best known for are the big choral pieces like The Testament of Freedom.
Testament is so much fun. It’s got so much drama in it. Even at the very beginning, you get Jefferson’s name – Tho-mas JEF-FER-SON – punched out by the orchestra. Thompson wrote Testament in 1943, when he was on the faculty at the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia’s Glee Club and Orchestra did the premiere, and it caught on almost at once. When Franklin Roosevelt died in 1945, that was one of the pieces that was played as a memorial to him. It’s great writing, and it’s wonderful stuff to sing.
I’m half tempted in the dress rehearsal to shimmy over to the Mendelssohn Club Chorus and make a surreptitous vocal debut!
Being able to do this with the Philadelphia Youth Orchestra is such a treat, especially for a Philadelphia boy like myself. Back in 2022, when I did Lincoln Portrait with all of you, it was so much fun. All of you are so talented, so warm, so devoted to this music. You can hear my enthusiasm, bubbling up for participating in this. I just think it’s wonderful!
The Testament of Freedom draws words from Thomas Jefferson, whose legacy remains deeply complex and contradictory. How do you navigate those tensions while still honoring the piece?
You have to be honest and wonder: how can someone talk in such an eloquent fashion as Jefferson does in the Declaration of Independence about equality, natural rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, while at the same time exploiting slaves? Jefferson actually posed that same question to himself, and his best answer was to admit, pretty lamely, that human nature is a very contradictory thing. On one hand, he said, we extol liberty. On the other hand, we do things that take liberty away from people. And he’s not the only one in the 18th century who was saying that. How did they reconcile these stories? Well, the answer is, of course, they didn’t. And finding a way out of that dilemma was not easy in those times.
So what should we look at when we look at Jefferson? I try to look at Jefferson the same way that Abraham Lincoln did. Lincoln was fully aware of these contradictions in Jefferson. Lincoln read about Jefferson’s exploitation of Sally Hemings, and it made Lincoln despise Jefferson’s moral character. But at the same time, Lincoln drew a line of distinction between the private Jefferson’s licentiousness and the public Jefferson’s eloquence. He wrote, in a letter in April of 1859, that Jefferson’s words are the ‘axioms of liberty.’ And so Lincoln can say ‘all honor to Jefferson,’ who, in what otherwise might just have been a dull legal document — a Declaration of Independence — puts into it words of such power about liberty that, in all future generations, tyrants, dictators, and authoritarians, will break their teeth on them. So, I’m trying to look at Jefferson through the same lens that Lincoln did — a man of great flaws and great failures, with also a great achievement.
I think that this allows us to take his words but also say we will do him one better. I think that’s the spirit in which we want to perform The Testament of Freedom. There are such marvelous moments in Testament, from both Thompson and Jefferson, that we shouldn’t let them go. One of these moments is in the third movement. The words of Jefferson read “We have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors and all danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before.” That is such a tremendous moment. It’s almost as though Thompson reaches over 200 years to connect with the spirit of Jefferson and the Revolution.
When you encounter Jefferson, you want to be uplifted by what the man said, and Thompson helps us to do that, because Thompson catches so much of the drama.
We are a country dedicated to a great ideal and a great creed — to which we have not always lived up. Let that be an exhortation for us to continue working to live up to it. Let us not assume that, somehow, 200 years ago, we arrived and don’t need any improvement. No — we always need improvement. I like to say that, although what we’re doing is a celebration of the 250th Anniversary of Independence, that independence really only happened just yesterday, and not in some far-off unconnected past. The words of Jefferson, too, happened yesterday. They are for us to work with now because, in a real sense, the American Revolution is not over; maybe, in fact, it’s only just begun.
We can help these ideals flourish by writing about them. We can help them to flourish by thinking about them. We can help them flourish by making music about them.
