Listening to Walt Whitman

Avery Fisher Hall is not the most intimate surrounding, certainly not for what Walt Whitman says in his poem “The Wound-Dresser.” But the large, somewhat impersonal space is nonetheless where the New York Philharmonic plays its concerts. It’s been home for this marvelous orchestra since Bernstein led the first concert there back in the early sixties. I watched that opening concert in 1962 on television. Bernstein conducted a crazy program with everything from syrupy Vaughan Williams (“Serenade to Music”) to hectic Mahler (First movement of the Eighth Symphony) to a piss ‘n vinegar-sour twelve-tone premiere by Copland (the “Connotations for Orchestra”). The hall has been acoustically improved since then, but it’s still not a really friendly place to hear a concert. It’s an irony, because, as I am reminded by listening to the rehearsals this week, the New York Philharmonic is a truly wonderful orchestra. Like the Yankees, it’s talent runs very deep. Is there a greater trumpet player anywhere in the world than Phil Smith? And likewise, all through the solo chairs and the backup players as well.

After some years of congenial coasting with very familiar repertory under Maazel, Alan Gilbert is now working them very hard, and it’s plain to see that the players like to match his demands. Under Alan’s leadership they are playing better than I can ever remember. His rehearsal technique is serious and intense, but not without occasional injections of humor. At one point, concerned that The Wound-Dresser (my setting of the text for baritone and orchestra) is in danger of getting a little too elegiac, I whisper to him, “It’s Whitman…there’s gotta be a little sex in here, not all suffering and dying.” And he repeats exactly what I just said to the full orchestra, and a wry chuckle sort of spreads through the orchestra, New York style.

Thomas Hampson, who specializes in American texts, is an excellent choice to sing the piece, and I’m moved by his performance. He doesn’t try to extract any unnecessary stage emotions from it. The text itself is plainspoken, amazingly graphic for a poem written in the 19th century, a disturbing description of infected wounds and dazed, horribly suffering young men on the brink of death, lying in long rows of cots in the terrible, disease-ridden hospital tents that had been hastily erected on the Washington DC mall.

Read “This Republic of Suffering,” Drew Faust’s grave, lyrical account of how woefully unprepared the American population was for the incomprehensible scale of death that the Civil War wreaked on the country.

Whitman’s mixture of eros and thanatos is nowhere more potently handled than in this poem. The war destroyed him physically and nearly did the same for his emotional state. He befriended, and in more than a few cases fell in love with, these horribly maimed young men. They were barely more than boys, a lot of whom couldn’t even read or write. They came from tiny rural farm communities all over the Northeast and Midwest. And they were thrown into the slaughter willy-nilly by generals who often treated them as little more than flesh and blood targets. Those that didn’t die outright on the battlefield lingered in horrific conditions, in filthy tents that were frigid in winter or unbearably stifling in summer. Most died slow, grievous deaths, feverish, hallucinating, without pain-killing drugs. I can’t even begin to contemplate the sadness and loneliness of dying away from family and loved ones.

Seeing the big, slow-moving bearded figure of Whitman walking quietly down the long rows of cots to say hello, perhaps have a chat or change a bandage, must have been like an apparition of heaven-sent kindness.

Whitman admits (in an earlier stanza of the poem I didn’t set) that he too had joined in with the public war-fever, thinking perhaps that going to war for a good cause would be an exciting, even thrilling thing. But then, the first-hand reality of what war is overwhelmed him:

“Arous’d and angry, I’d thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war,
But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d and I resign’d myself,
To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead”

I am fortunate to be able to hear my piece performed with such care and feeling by these sensitive performers.