Philip Glass at Teatro degli Arcimboldi in Milan, Italy on September 20, 2008 (MITO SettembreMusica/Wikimedia Commons)
President Donald Trump's influence on Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (which the president has added his name to) has now spread to legendary composer Philip Glass. Earlier this week, Glass announced that his "Symphony Number 15: Lincoln" will not debut at the venue. One legal scholar is arguing that Glass' symphony is actually about Trump.
"Lincoln' was inspired by President Abraham Lincoln, who served as the United States' first Republican president before he was assassinated on April 15, 1865 near the end of the American Civil War. And in a biting op-ed published by The New Republic on January 29, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman argues that "Lincoln" can serve as a "warning" about Trump.
"Donald Trump responded to Philip Glass' withdrawal of his 'Lincoln' symphony from the Kennedy Center the way he usually does when confronted by someone of real stature: with a sour-grapes, self-aggrandizing rant," Litman observes. "The tirade was petty, frivolous, and quickly forgotten. But the episode itself deserves attention because Trump’s insult, unsurprisingly, missed the broader point of Glass' gesture. Glass, 89, a towering figure in modern composition whose place in the history of music is secure, did not merely pull a much-anticipated work that is likely his last symphony. He pointedly sounded the symphony’s theme as a direct protest to the dangerous authoritarian rule under Trump."
Litman notes that Glass' "Lincoln" is "centrally" drawn from Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum Address of 1838.
"Lincoln delivered the address to a group of young professionals in Springfield, Illinois, when he was just 28 — an age when Trump was still shining his father's shoes," Litman explains. "Trump, who one suspects has never read the Lyceum speech or listened to a Glass symphony, viewed the gesture, as he invariably does, as a personal affront. In fact, it was far more. It incorporated Lincoln's prescient warning about democratic collapse, a warning that lands with unsettling accuracy on the dangers of Trumpian rule. In the Lyceum, Lincoln was already grappling with the question of how republics fail."
Litman continues, "He begins by asking where the danger to American self-government will come from. Not from abroad, he insists. No foreign army, no invading conqueror, no modern Bonaparte. If destruction comes, Lincoln says, 'it must spring up amongst us.'” If the republic falls, 'we must ourselves be its author and finisher'…. Lincoln warned that contempt for law is the republic’s gravest danger. Trump, without intending to, has demonstrated exactly why."
Harry Litman's full article for The New Republic is available at this link.