Aaron Copland was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 14, 1900, and died in North Tarrytown, New York, on December 2, 1990. The first performance of Lincoln Portrait took place in Cincinnati, Ohio, on May 14, 1942, with William Adams, narrator, and Andre Kostelanetz conducting the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Lincoln Portrait is scored for narrator, two piccolos, two flutes, two oboes, English horn (optional), two clarinets, bass clarinet (optional), two bassoons, contrabassoon (optional), four horns, three trumpets (third trumpet optional), three trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, xylophone cymbals, sleighbells, snare drum, tam-tam, bass drum, harp, celesta, and strings. Approximate performance time is fourteen minutes.
Following the December 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Aaron Copland received a letter from his friend, the conductor Andre Kostelanetz. Kostelanetz planned to conduct a series of concerts during the summer of 1942. The programs would feature new works by American composers, designed to “represent a portrait gallery of great Americans…In addition to approaching you on this matter I am writing to Virgil Thomson and Jerome Kern.”
Once Copland decided upon Abraham Lincoln as the subject of his work, the composer began to grapple with various challenges:
I was skeptical about expressing patriotism in music—it is difficult to achieve without becoming maudlin or bombastic, or both. I was hoping to avoid these pitfalls by using Lincoln’s own words. After reading through his speeches and writings, I was able to choose a few excerpts that were particularly apposite to America’s situation in 1942. I avoided the temptation to quote only well-known passages, permitting myself the luxury of only one from a world-famous speech (i.e., The Gettysburg Address). The order and arrangement of selections are my own.
Copland provided the following program notes:
Lincoln Portrait is a thirteen-minute work for speaker and full orchestra, divided roughly into three sections. In the opening, I hoped to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality, and near the end of the first section, something of his gentleness and simplicity of spirit…The first section opens with a somber sound of violins and violas playing a dotted figure that turns into a melodic phrase by the eighth bar; the second subject is a transformed version of (the 19th-century ballad) “Springfield Mountain.” The section ends with a trumpet solo, leading without pause into an unexpected allegro for full orchestra. The second section is an attempt to sketch in the background of the colorful times in which Lincoln lived. Sleigh bells suggest a horse and carriage of nineteenth-century New England, and the lively tune that sounds like a folk song is derived in part from (Stephen Foster’s) “Camptown Races.” In the conclusion, my purpose was to draw a simple but impressive frame around the words of Lincoln himself…The background music in the final section, while thematically related to the orchestral introduction, is more modest and unobtrusive, so as not to intrude on the narration. But after Lincoln’s final “…shall not perish from this earth,” the orchestra blazes out in a triple forte with a strong and positive C-major statement of the first theme.
—Aaron Copland
program notes by Ken Meltzer
