Lincoln's Bicentennial Soundtrack

Our nation was striving in the 19th century to establish suitable venues for the performance of European music and also to prove that American composers could write music just as good as the imported kind. After all, in 1840 the director of the Paris Opéra dismissed an offer by the American composer William Henry Fry to pay all the costs of mounting his opera "Leonora" there, declaring: "In Europe, we look to America as an industrial country – excellent for railroads but not for art."

Dismissive.

America had no railroads in 1809, when Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Indeed, his birth occurred just a few weeks before Thomas Jefferson, a keen amateur violinist and music collector, handed over the presidency to his friend James Madison, whose redoubtable first lady, Dolley, presided over the first inaugural ball in the federal capital's history, and brought a taste for French music and elegance to the Executive Mansion.

And so a tradition started.

The Lincoln family left Kentucky for Indiana in 1816, shortly before a remarkable musical figure, Anthony Philip Heinrich, arrived there from Philadelphia. Heinrich installed himself in a log cabin in Bardstown, Ky., taught himself composition, and in 1820 produced a collection of songs and pieces for violin and piano loftily entitled "The Dawning of Music in Kentucky," Opus 1. A second volume followed, prompting a critic to call Heinrich "the Beethoven of America" because of the relative complexity of his music. Heinrich went on to even greater complexity, composing large-scale orchestral works with titles like "The Washingtoniad, or the Deeds of a Hero" and a "Grand National Heroic Fantasia: Scintillations of 'Yankee Doodle.'"

HWPL, of course, has: the score to his Opus 1; a CD of The ornithological combat of kings, and a couple of other CDs which include music of his (one of those, The wind demon, has a piece by William Henry Fry, who helped found the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society).

Lincoln was 17 when the U.S. celebrated the 50th jubilee of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. On that day, Jefferson and John Adams both died. And on that same day, in Pittsburgh, was born the first American song composer still widely remembered, Stephen Foster.

Quite a coincidence.

Lincoln apparently enjoyed Gottschalk's music, and when the 9-year-old Venezuelan piano prodigy Teresa Carreño played at the White House in 1863, she performed several Gottschalk compositions to please him. Afterward, at the president's request, she improvised a set of variations on one of Lincoln's favorite ballads, Septimus Winner's "Listen to the Mocking Bird."

Lincoln was also an opera lover. En route to Washington in 1861, he took in a performance of Verdi's "A Masked Ball" at New York's Academy of Music, and throughout the war years he attended operatic performances in Washington whenever he could.