Aural Icons and Social Outcasts

Abstract

As conductor of the New York Symphony Orchestra in the early decades of the twentieth century, Walter Damrosch gave a series of radio broadcast children’s concerts in which he used an analogy between Lincoln and Beethoven as a pedagogical device for interpreting the symphony for an audience of young schoolchildren. The story of Beethoven’s dedicating the Eroica Symphony to Napoleon, then changing his mind, and the famous “fate” theme of the Fifth Symphony appear throughout the literature on the music curriculum. Weaving the themes of moral suffering, creation, freedom, and sacrifice around visual images of Beethoven and Lincoln¹ marshaled the kind of attention that made classical a patriotic exercise.² Lincoln’s oratory and Beethoven’s deafness connected miraculous speech to hearing and both to grand sacrifice. Speech and music were linked their portraits to imaginaries of a united nation and cultivated public. In the post-Civil War era, oratory interlaced familiar notions of citizenly worthiness and whiteness that would command the airwaves of home and school a few decades later.³

The snowstorm—students were very late on account of the buses and traffic that slowed to a crawl. Mr. Hoffman said he was tempted to reschedule the concert, but changed his mind when he spotted Carleton on his bicycle in the snowstorm, cello strapped to his back, making an end run around the right lane to get there on time.

—R. Gustafson, “Report on Minority Student Achievement”

The fifth symphony is a drama … in which Beethoven gives us the entire struggle, tragedy and ultimate triumph of a human soul. If you will explain this work to an audience of older children … you will be amazed at how much they can understand. Tell them to imagine Abraham Lincoln at the White House during the War of Secession, during the darkest age when it seemed impossible … to preserve the Union … You should tell them something of what a symphony is.

—Walter Damrosch, “A Lesson in Appreciation”