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Monday, Feb. 04, 2008

His stage presence

Plays and music keep Lincoln in the spotlight

If you have never heard Aaron Copland's Lincoln Portrait, you probably will during the next two years.

The work for orchestra and narrator is one of the signature compositions about our nation's 16th president. But it is hardly the only artistic comment on Honest Abe.

In the near century-and-a-half since Abraham Lincoln's death, in 1865, he has been portrayed on stage and in music by many artists from many angles.

That's appropriate, says Illinois State Historian Tom Schwartz.

"Growing up on the frontier, he was not in a cultural mecca," Schwartz says. "But he quickly gravitated toward books, and he was steeped in the classics," including the Bible, Aesop's Fables and Pilgrim's Progress.

Later in life, Schwartz says, Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, enjoyed attending the theater and opera and would invite traveling theatrical troupes to perform in the White House. Mary would have her children act out portions of Sir Walter Scott novels, and son Robert went on to perform in Harvard's Hasty Pudding Club, the nation's oldest theatrical troupe.

The arts returned the love, and in doing so, gave us a way to look at how society's attitudes toward Lincoln have changed over the years.

"Today, they try to make him more of a human being," says Phil Funkenbusch, director of the shows division at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield, Ill. Closer to his life and assassination, "it wasn't necessarily a caricature, but it was veering toward it."

Composer and musical historian Dan Kneupper says, "The newer music is much more realistic. It's a more realistic assessment of his strengths and weaknesses. Less whitewashed."

And there is quite a bit of new material out and forthcoming on Lincoln, with the approaching bicentennial of his birth, the celebration of which starts Feb. 12.

Kneupper points to works such as a recent opera by Eric Sawyer and John Shoptaw called Our American Cousin, not coincidentally the name of the play Lincoln was watching when he was assassinated. The opera -- which has been performed in a concert version in Amherst, Mass., and will be fully staged in Northhampton, Mass., in June -- is the story of Lincoln's assassination from the point of view of the actors presenting the play.

Lincoln was also portrayed in opera last fall in San Francisco in Philip Glass's Appomattox and will be onstage next year, when University of Kentucky Opera presents the world premiere of Joseph Baber's River of Time, a work about Lincoln's early years in the Bluegrass State.

The anniversary isn't just a time for new work, though. Kneupper says he's been getting calls about performing his two Lincoln works, "and if I'm getting calls, you know other people are doing things."

Classical portrayals

And there are other things to choose from.

Among the serious classical compositions, Kneupper says Portrait stands alone in terms of popularity, if not necessarily critical acclaim.

Lincoln is also associated with Gaetano Donizetti, the composer of such operas as Lucia di Lammermoor. Donizetti died 17 years before Lincoln, but his funeral march was played during the fallen president's funeral.

Lincoln played a key role in Paul Hindemith's requiem for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That work, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, was based on Walt Whitman's poem of the same name about Lincoln. Other composers who have paid tribute to Lincoln include Roy Harris, a Lincoln devotee who dedicated his fourth and sixth symphonies to Lincoln. Alan Menken, best known for writing the music for modern Disney features such as The Little Mermaid, wrote a celebrated score for a 1992 TV documentary, Lincoln.

On the theatrical side of things, Lincoln has been on Broadway several times.

Funkenbusch says Abraham Lincoln by British writer John Drinkwater is probably the best-known biographical work on Lincoln for the stage. Playwright Robert E. Sherwood won a Pulitzer Prize for Abe Lincoln in Illinois, which was made into a 1940 movie starring Raymond Massey and most recently was revived on Broadway with Sam Waterston in the title role.

In Suzan Lori-Parks' Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog, now playing at Actors Theatre of Louisville, the two tragic brothers are named Lincoln and Booth (as in assassin John Wilkes Booth). The play's Lincoln works by dressing up as the 16th president and sitting in a booth where people can pretend to shoot him.

Funkenbusch notes that Lincoln also has been referenced in shows such as Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, a musical about presidential assassins, and Leonard Bernstein's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

In the late 1800s, a lot of Lincoln plays were produced, but "most of those just don't hold up," Funkenbusch says,

"We do need a great new Lincoln play," he says, suggesting maybe Edward Albee or Horton Foote would have intriguing takes on the president.

Kneupper notes that during Lincoln's presidency, more than 200 songs were published addressing the man.

"It was the birth of the American composer and the birth of the American publishing industry," Kneupper says. "And there was a huge surge of compositions around the time of his death."

A consistent theme

While Lincoln today is almost universally revered, Kneupper says, songs of the president's era remind people that he was a controversial figure. In the mid-1800s, a popular melody might have a half-dozen lyrics to it. Kneupper says there were melodies that would have pro- and anti-Lincoln sentiments.

While the view of Lincoln has changed, a consistent theme running through most works, Schwartz says, is Lincoln as a man who came from humble beginnings to become president.

"Even when historians and elected officials were not talking about Lincoln," he says, "popular culture has kept him in front of the public."