Deferred Gratification: Horowitz, Lincoln, and JFK
The great 20th Century pianist Vladimir Horowitz
was a renowned neurotic. The litany of his personal quirks could fill a small
book and, several times during his more than fifty-year career, his stage fright
overcame him and he simply stopped performing in public.
On May 19th, 1965, after a hibernation of twelve
years, Horowitz returned to Carnegie Hall.
For the classical set, this was the equivalent of the Beatles landing,
and, for hours before, the crowd lined up around the building in anticipation. Wanda,
Horowitz’s wife (and the daughter of Arturo Toscanini) sent out cups of
coffee. By every account, Horowitz was a
wreck. Schuyler Chapin, later head of
the Metropolitan Opera, was at that time acting as a sort of major domo to Horowitz,
and later said he literally spun his charge around 180 degrees and shoved him
out on the stage.
Horowitz took his bows, sat down in front of his personal
Steinway (he only played on his own piano, placed just-so on the stage) and
opened with a Bach-Busoni transcription.
His giant hands crashed down on the keys. And, before he even got started, he hit a
clunker more at home at a sixth grade recital.
A collective, stifled gasp from the crowd. If there were a New Yorker drawing of the
scene, it would have had to have included a caption of “oh no, he’s lost it.”
This is a week where we both celebrate and mourn perfection
and imperfection. Tuesday, November 19,
is the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Friday, November 22, is the 50th
anniversary of JFK’s assassination.
History can be a harsh mirror. If there is one enduring impression you get
from watching Larry Sabato discuss JFK in his excellent on-line course, it is that how very great and how very small Kennedy could be. There is something about JFK that loves the camera;
look at old photos and newsreels and you will find his image creates the odd
effect of being colorized when others are in black and white. Stack him up against the politicians of the
day, against Nixon, or Khrushchev, and you see an expression of an America as
it would like to be, youthful, virile, and self-confident. He is as far away from the party apparatchik
or the 50’s era man in the gray flannel suit as is possible. You can go to the moon with JFK. You can go anywhere. But there was a darker side to the trip.
JFK’s death was so public and so tragic, the mourning so
exquisitely staged, that his greatest legacy was his image. Lyndon Johnson was both bedeviled and enabled
by it. The most powerful Senator of his
time, perhaps of any time, he found himself needing to make a ritual bow with
each accomplishment. Who could resist
even the most far-reaching when it was packaged in black crepe?
Listen to Sabato, who idolized JFK as a boy, and memorized
his Inaugural Address, and you hear the undertones of irony and sadness. The
irony, of course, is that JFK would likely never have gone as far as Johnson
did, either on civil rights, or the Great Frontier. JFK was an unconventional and bold
politician, but a conservative and gradualist lawmaker. And the sadness is that the public image of
Kennedy hid a less flattering side; his willingness to play bare-knuckle
politics, his early-term inexperience, his uncontrolled sexual behavior. Sabato’s conclusion: that as those with
memories of JFK pass inexorably from the stage, his image will become less
important than his actual accomplishments. He will no longer be thought of as in the
first rank of Presidents.
Lincoln was as ugly and ungainly as Kennedy graceful. “Friend and foe alike” openly mocked him. But he and Kennedy shared one trait; they
were both men capable of inspiring eloquence, of defining a future filled with
aspirations.
At Gettysburg, Lincoln spoke for barely two minutes—not even
enough time for the photographer to set his lens. What Lincoln accomplished in a few hundred
words has been recounted thousands of times over. Whole books have been written about it. It is a magnificent work; classical in
structure, both mournful and optimistic, rescuing the Declaration of
Independence from the blood and ashes in which it was immersed. The genius of Lincoln’s prose is in its
simplicity and its modesty. Politicians
and orators are not heroes, their words do not elevate the sacrifices of those
who risked all for a principle. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled
here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world
will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget
what they did here.”
Lincoln lived this.
He grounded the intellectual aspects of his leadership around core
principles; Union and Freedom. For those
ends, he was willing to employ every tool at his disposal. But as to the emotional, he was taxed to his
limits. The political historian Richard
Hofstadter once wrote “Lincoln was
shaken by the Presidency. Back in
Springfield, politics had been sort of a exhilarating game; but in the White
House, politics was power, and power was responsibility…To be confronted with
the fruits of his victory only to find that it meant choosing between life and
death for others was immensely sobering.”
Somewhere in dark and depressive parts of his mind he found
his core. Lincoln is great not because
of his words but because of his dogged humanity and essential humility. He fought without joy, but with purpose. He probably wielded more power than any
President in United States History, and there are many who still curse his
memory, but there is no generational clock on his star.
It might seem odd to find Vladimir Horowitz, Abraham
Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy in the same post, but somehow it seemed
appropriate. All three men had a peculiar genius. Kennedy’s trumpet perhaps sounded the
brightest, but may well fade with time.
Lincoln’s beat seems that of the human heart, timeless. And, as for Horowitz, he stumbled and almost
seemed to teeter during that first piece at Carnegie Hall. And then he centered himself. His hands regained their magic, he
soared. I was fortunate enough, years
apart and in separate cities, to have spoken to two people who met on line that
day, waiting to get in to see the master.
Both described their horror after the first few notes. Then they went on, their memories as fresh as
if it had been just last weekend. They
both concluded with exactly the same words “of course, he finished beautifully.”
Sometimes, you just have to wait.
November 18, 2013
Michael Liss (MM)
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