To honor the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), our 16th president, the Spokane Symphony under Music Director Eckart Preu commissioned Michael Daugherty to write a Lincoln-themed work for baritone and orchestra. The piece, which was recorded live by E1 Entertainment (formerly Koch) a year ago, was conceived as a vehicle for Thomas Hampson, a Spokane native who, according to the liner notes, “began his career with the Spokane Symphony.”
Daugherty, who studied the president’s writings and made trips to the Lincoln Memorial and Gettysburg battlefields, created a 27-minute, seven-section work whose text is drawn from Lincoln’s writings. The work begins with a musical evocation of Lincoln’s funeral train, jumps to a descriptive section from his autobiography, and ends with the Gettysburg Address. Along the way are two poems: “Abraham Lincoln Is My Name,” written when Lincoln was a teenager, and “The Mystic Chords of Memory,” composed soon after he had turned 52. Most moving, besides the extraordinary Gettysburg Address, are the famed “Letter to Mrs. Bixby,” written to a woman who lost five sons on Civil War battlefields, and a prescient, two-line telegram to Mrs. Lincoln sent two years before his assassination.
Listen to the Music
Letter to Mrs. Bixby
If only Daugherty’s music were as moving as Lincoln’s words. Alas, the music of Letters From Lincoln comes across as little more than a series of clichés. There are big dramatic explosions, lots of cymbals, the folksy jig, snare drum rolls, death-knells, the trudging of troops, and on and on.
In Daugherty’s liner note, he mentions that Lincoln fell in love with Anne Rutledge early on. It is believed that he never recovered from her untimely death, from typhoid, in 1835 at the age of 22. “In 1842, Lincoln reluctantly married the high strung and temperamental Mary Todd, a decision that haunted him the rest of his life,” he writes. I can’t help but wonder if Daugherty knew so much about Lincoln’s gloom and darkness that he found himself resorting to musical platitudes rather than writing music that would illumine the emotional subtext of Lincoln’s words. Wozzeck this is not.
Hampson brings to the project all the vaunted sincerity and grandness of gesture we expect from him. At age 54, the voice is grittier and more stentorian than of yore, yet retains a fair amount of its fabled beauty.
The CD closes with Anton Webern’s Langsamer Satz and In Sommerwind. Both works reside in “the outstanding collection of manuscripts from the Moldenhauer Archives established in Spokane with strong ties to the Spokane Symphony.” The performance is only intermittently successful.