Lincoln Portrait

Lento – Subito allegro – “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history”

Abraham Lincoln was not a common man, humble though his origins were. Born 200 years ago into a family of uneducated farmers and brought up in a one-room log cabin in Kentucky, he became the most revered President of the United States. He saw his country through the Civil War, preserved the Uniion and abolished slavery. So when – in 1942, in the same war-time patriotic spirit that moved Eugene Goossens to commission Fanfare for the Common Man – André Kostelanetz approached three composers to provide a “gallery of musical portraits” of great Americans, the 16th President was an obvious candidate. Although Copland’s first choice was Walt Whitman, whom he described as “the patron poet of all American composers,” he eventually settled on Abraham Lincoln – in spite of the advice from a distinguished colleague that “no composer could possibly hope to match in musical terms the stature of so eminent a figure.”

“Of course he was quite right,” Copand later recalled. “But secretly I was hoping to avoid the difficulty by doing a portrait in which the sitter himself might speak. With the voice of Lincoln to help me I was ready to risk the impossible.” The idea was to take five short extracts from Lincoln’s letters and speeches and, ending with famous words from the Gettysburg Address, have them spoken by an actor over a suitably solemn orchestral background.

The work begins with two purely instrumental sections. The first is intended, according to the composer, “to suggest something of the mysterious sense of fatality that surrounds Lincoln’s personality.” A slow-moving, gradual accumulation of orchestral grandeur, it gives way near the end to an allusion to the folksong Springfield Mountain in tribute to Lincoln’s “gentleness and simplicity of spirit.” It leads directly into a contrastingly cheerful and, at its climax, riotous section based on the Camptown Races, “sketching in the background of the times he lived in.” Memories of Springfield Mountain restore presidential dignity and assemble the proud orchestral material which, after a mightly clash of the tam-tam, will accompany the voice of political destiny.

Lincoln Portrait was first performed by the Cincinatti Symphony Orchestra under the direction of André Kostelanitz in 14 May 1942.