Letter from America, 1946-2004 by Alistair Cooke

Author:Alistair Cooke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T07:00:00+00:00

The Presidential Ear

8 December 1978

The newspapers and the television commentators have just paid their annual respects – or regrets – to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, a day, President Roosevelt said when he went before Congress, ‘that will live in infamy’.

However, two days before that was 5 December 1978, a night which will surely live in American history. For there occurred an event that has never before taken place in the history of the Republic: an incumbent President of the United States took his seat at the opera. The doors of New York’s Metropolitan Opera House – either the old or the new – have never been darkened, or lit up, by the presence of a President.

Nothing ought to be made of the fact that the opera was Aida , an opera on an Egyptian subject commissioned by Ismail Pasha and first performed in Cairo, though it’s possible something may be made of it by ill-meaning journalists in and out of Israel. In which case, the President could make amends by commissioning a performance of Handel’s Israel in Egypt.

The fact is that President Carter is something of a freak among the long line of American Presidents. He is a music lover. I don’t mean that he has his favourite tunes (as haven’t we all). President Eisenhower, I believe, let it be known that he had an album of favourites, which he liked to have piped in so that he could hum to them, as George V on a memorable occasion – his fifth visit to his favourite opera, Rose Marie – sat in the royal box and, having conquered his favourite song in the whole of music, accompanied the chorus singing ‘Totem tom tom, Totem tom tom.’

I mean that President Carter is the phenomenon of a very hard-working President who yet makes time every morning–every dawning, I ought to say – to listen to a half-hour or so of Mozart or Beethoven. It is hard to think of a better prescription for rinsing out the mind before the growing cacophonies of the day. It is fascinating, though perhaps not very instructive, to wonder why politicians, who regularly acquire some strange bedmates, should so rarely relax with the muse of music, with classical music, that is. Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy would have paid any price to avoid a symphony concert. Disciples of the late Harry Truman will be bound to protest that he actually played the piano, chopped his way through bits of Chopin, and at all times was ready to give a soulful performance of ‘The Missouri Waltz’.

But, having heard him and followed his tastes, I must say that his range was that of the excerpts we staggered through on the piano when I was a boy: a series of what was called ‘The Three Star Folio’, which incorporated the more swinging bits from the Poet and Peasant overture, ‘Zampa’, Handel’s ‘Largo’ and the ‘Four Indian Love Lyrics’ of the immortal Amy Woodforde-Finden. They were conveniently known as middle-brow classics.

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