Heather Cox Richardson Enters the History of ‘Lincoln Portrait'
Completed in 1942, as the United States battled fascism and prepared to lead the world in the name of freedom, it was commissioned as a musical sketch of a historical figure. Copland scored 'a portrait in which the sitter himself might speak,' as he put it, and gave a narrator the unenviable task of reading from the Gettysburg Address, among other Civil War-era speeches, against orchestral material based on folk tunes from Lincoln's time.
History has lent its echo chamber to the piece since it was written, too. In 1953, not long before a young lawyer named Roy Cohn culled Copland's scores from State Department libraries and interrogated him about his leftward leanings in a Senate hearing attended by Joseph McCarthy, 'Lincoln Portrait' was cut from one of President Eisenhower's inaugural concerts. One Republican representative who had protested against Copland's inclusion said he had 'but a passing knowledge of music,' yet favored only 'fine, patriotic and thoroughly American composers.'
For his part, Copland believed that 'Lincoln Portrait' had a firm enough democratic spirit that it 'started a revolution' after he led it in Venezuela in 1957. (The scholar Carol A. Hess has called that story 'pure invention.')
Typically, orchestras invite a politician, actor or cultural personality to serve as the piece's narrator. Consult an extensive discography, and you can unearth recordings with Maya Angelou, Gregory Peck, James Earl Jones and Adlai Stevenson.
But what if you summoned a historian instead? Would a piece so laden with history take on a different power?
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