by Lorenza Civitareale
On November 22, 1968, a single comes out that is destined to speak to the heart of the United States: If I Can Dream, by Elvis Presley. Eleven days later, on December 3, America hears him sing it to close the NBC television special that brings him back to the stage after years of films. The comparison may seem daring, but that song did for its country something like what Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony did in 1824 for its audience: it took the feelings and ideals of an era and turned them into music for everyone.
How do we arrive at such a pairing? Art music, what we commonly call classical music, is recognizable by the complexity with which it handles its parameters: melody, harmony, timbre, dynamics. And often by its bond with the history unfolding around it. In Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth we find the ideals of an entire age. Something similar happened with If I Can Dream.
1968 is one of the most violent years in American history. On April 4, in Memphis, Martin Luther King is killed. On June 5, in Los Angeles, it is Robert Kennedy’s turn, a presidential candidate, five years after the assassination of his brother John. It is in this climate that If I Can Dream is born: the lyrics are by Walter Earl Brown, written with Elvis in mind and his grief over King’s death, while the music and orchestration bear the hand of the composer Billy Goldenberg. The song has to say one thing only: all this violence must end.
It was a different kind of piece from what Elvis had sung until then. The band was not enough: in the studio, in Hollywood, in June 1968, an orchestra and a choir were added to the base recorded by Los Angeles’s most sought-after session players. The reason was clear from the start: it took the power of an orchestra for that music to reach everyone. It is the same road classical music had travelled centuries earlier, when it moved from the rooms of palaces, for a few listeners, into the great concert halls, with ever larger ensembles, to reach more ears and strike deeper.
But there is one parameter in If I Can Dream worth pausing on: dynamics. Anyone who has the song in their ears remembers the opening: a single trumpet playing a timid melody, almost subdued, as if to draw attention without disturbing. It is a gesture that recalls the beginning of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, where the trumpets rise above a deep rumble and the orchestra, bar after bar, swells until it explodes in a triumphant chord. Elvis’s song too starts from that trumpet, then the rhythm section comes in, then the voice, and with the voice the orchestra and choir. The trumpet never becomes the protagonist, but it is doubled, and the intensity climbs to the final explosion. Only here, as the lyrics and the history tell us, the explosion is not a triumph: it is a desperate plea for help.
Art music hides in these shades of popular music, and ends up influencing even what is not art music. There are gems of art music in our everyday lives that we do not know how to catch; but if we listen closely we will find hundreds. Classical music is not dead, and is not condemned to stay shut inside a concert hall: it has passed through the years and through people, and has sat down among us.
Come to think of it, the great composers who made music history, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, are not so different from rock stars. Allow me, then, to say it: Beethoven is rock, and Elvis, in his own way, a classicist.