September 17 & 19, 2009
It’s no slight understatement to observe that the whole of Illinois left no stone—or stovepipe hat—unturned to celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of the 16th President of the United States. Naturally, a great many Illinoisan academics and leaders came together under the interdisciplinary Illinois Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, including Ravinia’s team. Then president and CEO of the festival, Welz Kauffman brought a clear vision: “Lincoln is a figure of change. To celebrate Lincoln in a year that brought America its first Black president is more than serendipity; it’s reinforcement of the belief that our celebration should look toward the future. That means new work.”
At the outset, Ravinia hosted its first-ever competition for composers and received over 100 entries of chamber works inspired by the words of Lincoln (or Walt Whitman’s elegiac poem); in the spring, one winning piece was toured around the state by the Lincoln Trio, and another was featured by Steans Music Institute alumni on a national concert tour. The summer season at Ravinia of course included the Chicago Symphony playing Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait—a moving performance with the once-in-a-lifetime voice of Jessye Norman for the narration, juxtaposed with Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Beethoven’s ode to unity of spirit, his Ninth Symphony. Signature new works were at the season’s bookends.
June 12 saw Ramsey Lewis wade further into large-scale com- position with his symphonic poem Proclamation of Hope: nine movements representing Lincoln’s life or legacy. He’d begun writing the work a year earlier, originally intending the finale to be a collage evoking elements of popular music and culture that had evolved from Black communities and descendents of once-enslaved people. But then, “History gave me a gift,” he said. “Seeing President Obama sworn in, that started the wheels turning. I realized, no, you can’t end this as if it’s simply a musical number. This runs far deeper.” And Lewis arrived at titling and styling the final movement “Hope.”
The grand finale of Ravinia’s 2009 season—and the series of Lincoln-celebratory events collectively dubbed Mystic Chords of Memory, a musical allusion to his first inaugural address— was the September 17 and 19 realization of an extraordinary full-evening dance-theater work by Tony- and MacArthur “Genius Grant”-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones: Fondly Do We Hope... Fervently Do We Pray. (The entire creative process became the subject of the 2011 feature-length PBS American Masters documentary by Kartemquin Films, A Good Man.) As in his monumental Last Supper, Jones wove music and movement into metaphor, to not simply present history but experience its facts and feelings, across cultural perceptions, toggling between past, present, and future. What great questions still need answering, and who will do the work? What are the issues that shaped Lincoln’s thinking and forge our own? Jones came to admire Lincoln all the more for his ability to grow and change—to become a great man—according the finale with “cautious hopefulness” about Lincoln’s legacy, and our ability, to be led by the “better angels of our nature.”