On Demand
Mad About Music
Sunday, July 04, 2004
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The Washingtonians
It's July 4th at "Mad About Music" and we're celebrating Independence Day by revisiting some of our most popular shows that focused on our nation's Capitol and the occupants of the White House and Supreme Court. As we explore the remarkable connection between music and three consummate Washington insiders: President Jimmy Carter, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
Giacomo Puccini La Rondine . "Doretta's Dream". Mirella Freni. EMI Records 65163.
Sergei Rachmaninoff Polka V.R. Vladimir Horowitz, Piano. RCA Victor 7754.
Glenn Miller "Moonlight Serenade". RCA Victor 52290.
Sigmund Romberg The Student Prince . "Drinking Song". Philharmonia Orchestra. John Owen Edwards. Jay Master Works Edition CDJAY2 1252.
Cole Porter "Tale of the Oyster". Samuel Ramey. Warren Jones, Piano. Live from the United States Supreme Court, May 26, 1994 , and aired on NPR "Performance Today".
Giacomo Puccini Tosca . "Vissi d'arte". Maria Callas. Orchestra e Coro del Teatro Alla Scala. Victor de Sabata, Conductor. Musical Heritage Society 524973H.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K.466 [Final Movement]. Artur Rubinstein, Piano. RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra. Alfred Wallenstein, Conductor. RCA Victor Gold Seal 7967-2-RG.
Johannes Brahms Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn for Two Pianos, Op. 56b [Excerpt]. Sir Georg Solti and Murray Perahia, Pianos. CBS Records Masterworks MK 42625.
Rogers and Hammerstein The King and I . "Getting to Know You". [Excerpt] Deborah Kerr. Angel Records 64693.
Kaplan It's July 4 th at "Mad About Music" and we're celebrating Independence Day by revisiting some of our most popular shows that focused on our nation's Capitol and the occupants of the White House and Supreme Court. As we explore the remarkable connection between music and three consummate Washington insiders: President Jimmy Carter, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
[Theme Music]
Kaplan Classical music has always played some role in Washington under all our presidents, typically an after dinner recital for a visiting head of State, but I think it is fair to say that no President has more embraced classical music, made it such a prominent feature of White House life as Jimmy Carter. And it all started shortly after he moved in the building when he decided to do, shall we say, a little redecorating, to make certain music was always at his fingertips.
Carter There was a very large collection of 33 RPM recordings when I got to the White House and I had the sound engineers come into the White House and arrange for this music to be played by my secretary whose small office was just adjacent to the Oval Office and then I have a private office behind that and I would guess for ten hours a day she would play musical selections that she or I chose and when she played some more esoteric selections with which I was not familiar, she would put a stack of 3x5 cards on my desk so that I could turn from one to another and know what was being played. Sometimes when I was on the telephone, I would forget to turn the sound down low enough and sometimes members of Congress would complain later to my staff that they had a difficult time understanding what I was telling them because the music in the background was overwhelming.
Kaplan Well, those recordings, I guess about 2,000, were actually the legacy of your predecessor Richard Nixon and 50 of them were classical, I understand. President Nixon's favorite recording apparently was Richard Rogers' "Victory at Sea". Do you have a favorite recording?
Carter Well, I have a tremendous collection now of CDs and a very good high fidelity system in my office at home and also in my office here at The Carter Center. I would say that my favorite recording of all is about 17 or 18 arias on a CD called Aria: A Passion for Opera . And I listen to it over and over again. Some of the recordings to me are not very superb. Maria Callas has a recording on the same CD that I think - I think she's off key. But, the best one I think is Mirella Freni signing La Rondine from Puccini. If anybody's interested, it's No. 16 on the CD. But that is to me overwhelming. No matter what I'm doing with music in the background, when that particular recording comes on I just have to stop and do nothing but listen.
[Music]
Kaplan "Doretta's Dream" from Puccini's La Rondine , sung by Mirella Freni, President Jimmy Carter's favorite piece of music. This is Gilbert Kaplan welcoming you to this special July 4th edition of "Mad About Music" where we are revisiting earlier appearances of guests from our nation's Capitol. Now, beyond listening to music in his office non-stop, President Carter also initiated an ambitious program to bring stars to perform at the White House. Perhaps his greatest coup was to persuade the legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz to come. He had played there as early as 1931 -- for President Hoover; and every president since had tried to lure him back. Jimmy Carter was the one to succeed but only to discover that Horowitz presented him with an unexpected challenge.
Carter When Mr. Horowitz came to the White House on Saturday afternoon to get ready, we had the East Room prepared with a platform there, he brought his own Steinway piano, but he thought the room was too harsh sounding. So I went upstairs myself, with my blue jeans on, as President of the United States, and brought down a oriental carpet and Horowitz and I placed that carpet at different places against the platform until he was satisfied that the resonance in the room suited him. But this is one of the high points of my life to sit there and hear Rachmaninoff's music played by Mr. Horowitz, who had in the past always refused to come to the White House.
[Music]
Kaplan A Rachmaninoff polka performed by Vladimir Horowitz at the Carter White House. Through this recital, the President of the United States and one of the world's greatest musicians came to know each other in a special way. Of course, music entered the president's life long before he entered the White House. But given his vast knowledge of music, I was surprised to learn that he had never studied an instrument.
Carter The only instrument I ever played was the ukulele when I was stationed in Hawaii on a submarine and my wife was the best hula dancer among all the Navy wives on the entire island. But that's my only experience in playing a musical instrument. But when I was a child I grew up on a farm in Georgia. We didn't have electricity, we didn't have running water. But we had a radio operated by battery, and my father would let us listen to a few programs every day. Our family usually went to bed as soon as it got dark, but he gave me special permission to stay up until Glenn Miller would come on every night at 8 o'clock for 15 minutes. So I would lie in front of the fireplace and go to sleep sometimes, try to wake up at 8:00, turn on the radio, and listen to 15 minutes of Glenn Miller's music, "Moonlight Serenade" and so forth, and then I would go to bed with the rest of the family.
[Music]
Kaplan "Moonlight Serenade" by Glenn Miller, one of the earliest musical memories of President Jimmy Carter. This is Gilbert Kaplan and during this July 4 th special edition of "Mad about Music", we are revisiting some of our shows focusing on guests from the White House and the Supreme Court. I always encourage our guests to select music that played some special role in their life. And it would be hard to imagine a more powerful connection than the one between Sigmund Romberg's operetta The Student Prince and President Jimmy Carter.
Carter Well, when Rosalynn and I were in the Navy in my earliest days of married life, we made a total of $300 a month and we spent over $150 on food and lodging which only left us a little bit. But I was assigned to go to Philadelphia to learn about pending new radar equipment and one night we decided to splurge and went out to an actual restaurant and afterwards we went to Sigmund Romberg's performance of The Student Prince . It was so overwhelming to us to hear this music in live that I guess became a little more romantic than usual and that night we decided to have our first child, so our oldest son Jack was conceived that night after we heard The Student Prince .
[Music]
Kaplan The "Drinking Song" from Sigmund Romberg's The Student Prince performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra selected by my guest, President Jimmy Carter, as testimony to the romantic power of music. When we return, we'll move to the Supreme Court and to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
[Station Break]
Kaplan This is Gilbert Kaplan on our special summer edition of "Mad About Music" where we are revisiting earlier appearances of guests from our nation's Capitol. Jimmy Carter may have been an exception at the White House for his passionate love of music, but at the Supreme Court it was rumored that practically all the Justices loved classical music. I asked my guest Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whether this was true.
Ginsburg I think you're right – we have a clear majority.
Kaplan And who would be the ones that come to mind who are as passionate as perhaps you are?
Ginsburg Justice Scalia who I must confess is the only one of us who can carry a tune and he was my companion at the Washington Opera when we both appeared as supers, as extras, in a performance of Ariadne auf Naxos .
Kaplan That's interesting because I would think as a "couple" you might be an odd couple – I don't see the two of you dancing to the same tune so much on the Court. But what about music? Do you have similar tastes in music?
Ginsburg We certainly do. We are given to beautiful music; we don't shy away from admitting that we cry at Puccini and I think our musical tastes are very much alike. The Chief is also a music lover, but he prefers choral music.
Kaplan In much the same way as President Carter became an impresario of classical music at the White House, Justice Ginsburg has played a similar role at the Supreme Court with an eclectic array of presentations.
Ginsburg Oh, the range is enormous – so we could go from Bach all the way to Burl Ives, Cole Porter.
Kaplan Cole Porter?
Ginsburg Yes, and a sample that I have brought with me, a Cole Porter number, is Samuel Ramey – the rich resonant bass baritone that I am accustomed to hearing in a devilish role like Mephistopheles . Here he sings in just a delightful way Cole Porter's witty "Tale of the Oyster".
[Music]
Kaplan The "Tale of the Oyster" by Cole Porter sung by Samuel Ramey with pianist Warren Jones, a selection of my guest Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and recorded during a live performance at the Supreme Court. Now deep down I discovered that of all music, Justice Ginsburg's true passion is opera. And her favorite singer? Maria Callas, who, in an unexpected way, inspired Ginsburg to win an argument before the Supreme Court when she was still a lawyer in private practice.
Ginsburg To my great sadness I never saw Callas perform although I did meet that great diva. I met her in an elevator at the Hay Adams Hotel. She was in town for a concert. I was in town to make an argument at the Court. I stepped into the elevator and there was Callas in white mink with her poodle with the same color as her coat. She looked every inch the diva that she was and I mumbled something about how much joy she had given me through her recordings and then I felt as if I had been touched by magic -- that there was no way that I was going to lose that argument -- and as things turned out a couple of months later, the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court was unanimously in favor of my client.
Kaplan That's a wonderful story and of course it's a pity that you could never have experienced hearing or seeing Callas sing. I suppose you would have liked to done that. Where would have been the moment? What would have been the work?
Ginsburg The opening night of Tosca at La Scala. Tosca was one of Callas's best roles and I believe that at the opening she sang Tosca with di Stefano. At any rate, she sang Tosca many times with di Stefano. She recorded it with him from La Scala with de Sabata as the conductor and her recording of Tosca has been described as perhaps the best recording of opera anyplace.
[Music]
Kaplan "Vissi d'arte" from Puccini's Tosca sung by Maria Callas with the Orchestra of La Scala. Victor de Sabata on the podium, a selection of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she appeared earlier on "Mad About Music." This is Gilbert Kaplan on our special July 4 th edition of "Mad About Music" where we are revisiting some of the most popular shows that focused on our nation's Capitol. Earlier we learned that Jimmy Carter's passion for music enabled him to lure the foremost artist to perform in the East Room, but I think it's fair to say that perhaps the most accomplished musician ever to work in the White House is National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rica who could well have made a career as a concert pianist. From her earliest years, music has dominated her life.
Rice Music played a very important role in my childhood. My mother played, my grandmother and my great grandmother all played piano. A couple of them were church musicians, but my grandmother was also a piano teacher and I stayed at my grandmother's house during the day while my parents worked and I would go to the piano and bang at the piano when she taught her students trying to emulate what she was doing with her students. So she said to my mother, let's teach her to play. I was only about three. My mother thought I might be a little young, but my grandmother wanted to try it and as a result I learned to play very, very young. I could read music before I could read. I went through then the kind of normal childhood but with music very much at the center of it, always piano lessons, always the time to practice, and when I was ten, I went to the Birmingham Southern Conservatory of Music – I think I was the first black student to go to that newly-integrated conservatory in Birmingham – and I began to compete in piano at that point. It was then several years later, a couple of years later we moved to Denver and I won a competition there, a young artists' competition regionally young artists' competition playing the Mozart D Minor Piano Concerto , a piece that I still love to this very day.
[Music]
Kaplan The final movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor played by Artur Rubinstein with the RCA Victor Orchestra led by Alfred Wallenstein, a work also performed by Condoleezza Rice, winning a piano competition at age 15. When we return, we'll explore what Condoleezza Rice's musical selections tell us about her as a person.
[Station Break]
Kaplan This is Gilbert Kaplan on our July 4 th special edition of "Mad About Music" where we are revisiting appearances of guests from our nation's Capitol. Now given Condoleezza Rice's prodigious musical talent, I asked her if she ever regretted abandoning what might have been a real career in music.
Rice I planned a career as a concert pianist but I realized in my sophomore year, at the end of my sophomore year in college that I was pretty good but not great. I went to one of those Aspen Music Festival summer programs and I met 11-year olds who could play from sight what had taken me all year to learn and I thought I'm maybe going to end up playing piano bar or playing at Nordstrom, but I'm not going to end up playing Carnegie Hall and so I started looking for something else. But the great thing about music is that you can love it all of your life, you can pick it up at different phases. I remember when I was about ten I really wanted to quit playing the piano. I had been a child prodigy, now I was ten, there were lots of kids who could play the piano at ten, and my mother said you're not old enough or good enough to make that decision and she was right, I wasn't old enough or good enough, but fortunately, when I made the decision to leave, I was good enough that I could now bring it back into my life and play chamber music and it's a real joy.
Kaplan So the piano continues to occupy a prominent place in the life of Condoleezza Rice. But what can we learn from her musical selections about Condoleezza Rice herself? I always find it fascinating to explore the connection between our guest's musical selections and their own personalities. And in explaining her attraction to Brahms' music, Condoleezza Rice perhaps revealed something about herself as well.
Rice I've always been much more attracted to Brahms, to Schumann, to a certain extent to Schubert. I don't particularly like programmatic music and Liszt, of course, the sort of father of that School, has never been particularly interesting to me. Brahms someone once described to me as passionate without being sentimental and that's how I think of Brahms and I just love – Brahms is probably my favorite composer at this stage in my life.
Kaplan Passionate without being sentimental. Could that be a description of you?
Rice Oh, now that's a good question. I suppose I'd like to think of myself as passionate about life. I'm certainly passionate about music and I'm passionate about my work, passionate about family and about my faith. I can be sentimental as well, but I prefer my composers pretty straight.
Kaplan You know, I wonder if you have two personalities, the music personality and your regular personality, if I can call it that. I read somewhere that Secretary of State Colin Powell once said you were raised first and foremost to be a lady and media accounts always mention that you're impeccably dressed, which I can testify to today, tidy, and disciplined. My question is, what happens when you sit down at the keyboard? Is there a different Condi Rice lurking beneath the surface?
Rice When I sit down at the keyboard, I think it's the same Condi Rice, but it's a Condi Rice that has to be really disciplined.
Kaplan Well what about just playing with abandon and disregarding all that tidiness, organization, discipline and just going for it?
Rice Well, one reason that I love Brahms and Mozart is one can't play with abandon. You have to be pretty disciplined. I'm one of those people now if you put it in front of me, I can read it. But if you ask me to play it by ear or with improvisation, I have a much harder time, so I guess I'm tidy and disciplined even when I'm playing the piano.
Kaplan I suppose it's your predilection towards discipline that prompts you then to prefer the rarely heard two piano version of Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn over the one we know best, the one performed by a full orchestra?
Rice The reason that I love the two piano version of the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn is that I think that the matched timbre of the two pianos, the kind of open sound that you get from that, really works very much better in several of the Variations that Brahms wrote. I would be the first to admit that there are a couple of Variations that are better for the orchestra. But on balance you can hear this tremendous ability of Brahms to use very small intervals, like seconds, when two pianos are playing, because you don't have the effect of the strings, with all due respect to the string players, kind of mushing over the sound. It's much clearer and crisper and I love the two piano version.
[Music]
Kaplan An excerpt from Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn , performed in the original version for two pianos by Sir Georg Solti and Murray Perahia, a work that has also been played by our guest National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. With music such an essential part of Condoleezza Rice's life, I asked her if she ever talked to President Bush about classical music.
Rice The President and I don't have the same musical tastes, I'm afraid. He loves, he does love music. I like country western too, which is what he likes very very much. But he knows that its very important to me and even he asks me once in a while, well, are you playing the piano, because he knows it's a centering experience for me.
Kaplan You know, President Carter used to have music on constantly at the White House. I gather that doesn't go on any more?
Rice No, we don't have music constantly on at the White House and it's a good thing. I actually have never been one of those people who could work with music in the background. I get very caught up in what's going on with the music, so only when I'm exercising can I have music as background music. When I get on the treadmill I have to do something to get my mind off the fact that I'm droning on a treadmill for 30 minutes and I usually play on the CD pieces that I know, usually pieces that I've played, because I can kind of time my workout to the start of a Scherzo , to know that I ought to run to the end of the Scherzo , or something like that. And so, yes, I use music very much on the treadmill. But my physical trainer, my strength coach at Stanford, came once to a concert that I played and he said, you know, that's every bit as physical playing that piece as anything that I watch with the Stanford football team, so pianists don't often get enough credit for the physical side of playing something like Brahms, which can be quite physically demanding.
Kaplan As I knew that a few days after her appearance on "Mad About Music", Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to accompany President Bush on what would be his first visit with Russian President Putin, I decided to ask her, as a farewell question, could she imagine what music might serve as an ideal soundtrack for such a meeting. She didn't skip a beat in her reply.
Rice "Getting to Know You" would come to mind as a soundtrack for that meeting. I think this is going to be great fun for the two Presidents because I suspect that they'll get along very well. But anything that, in the musical world, would suggest two people getting to know each other, getting to take the temperature a little bit and showing a vision for a peaceful world with a US-Russian relationship that is healthy at its center.
[Music]
Kaplan An excerpt from "Getting to Know You" from The King and I , National Security Advisor Condoleezza's choice for a soundtrack for the first meeting between President Bush and Russian President Putin. This concludes "Mad About Music's" 4 th of July special edition about the power of music in the lives of our leaders in the nation's Capitol. I hope you enjoyed our revisiting President Jimmy Carter, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. You might want to mark your calendar now for Sunday, August 1 st , at 9:00 PM when we will present our second summer special on "Mad About Music" – this is one on Hollywood, revisiting our earlier shows with Mike Nichols, Alec Baldwin, William Friedkin and Alan Alda. Until then, have a good summer. This is Gilbert Kaplan for "Mad About Music."
[Credits]
Sergei Rachmaninoff Polka V.R. Vladimir Horowitz, Piano. RCA Victor 7754.
Glenn Miller "Moonlight Serenade". RCA Victor 52290.
Sigmund Romberg The Student Prince . "Drinking Song". Philharmonia Orchestra. John Owen Edwards. Jay Master Works Edition CDJAY2 1252.
Cole Porter "Tale of the Oyster". Samuel Ramey. Warren Jones, Piano. Live from the United States Supreme Court, May 26, 1994 , and aired on NPR "Performance Today".
Giacomo Puccini Tosca . "Vissi d'arte". Maria Callas. Orchestra e Coro del Teatro Alla Scala. Victor de Sabata, Conductor. Musical Heritage Society 524973H.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K.466 [Final Movement]. Artur Rubinstein, Piano. RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra. Alfred Wallenstein, Conductor. RCA Victor Gold Seal 7967-2-RG.
Johannes Brahms Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn for Two Pianos, Op. 56b [Excerpt]. Sir Georg Solti and Murray Perahia, Pianos. CBS Records Masterworks MK 42625.
Rogers and Hammerstein The King and I . "Getting to Know You". [Excerpt] Deborah Kerr. Angel Records 64693.
Kaplan It's July 4 th at "Mad About Music" and we're celebrating Independence Day by revisiting some of our most popular shows that focused on our nation's Capitol and the occupants of the White House and Supreme Court. As we explore the remarkable connection between music and three consummate Washington insiders: President Jimmy Carter, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
[Theme Music]
Kaplan Classical music has always played some role in Washington under all our presidents, typically an after dinner recital for a visiting head of State, but I think it is fair to say that no President has more embraced classical music, made it such a prominent feature of White House life as Jimmy Carter. And it all started shortly after he moved in the building when he decided to do, shall we say, a little redecorating, to make certain music was always at his fingertips.
Carter There was a very large collection of 33 RPM recordings when I got to the White House and I had the sound engineers come into the White House and arrange for this music to be played by my secretary whose small office was just adjacent to the Oval Office and then I have a private office behind that and I would guess for ten hours a day she would play musical selections that she or I chose and when she played some more esoteric selections with which I was not familiar, she would put a stack of 3x5 cards on my desk so that I could turn from one to another and know what was being played. Sometimes when I was on the telephone, I would forget to turn the sound down low enough and sometimes members of Congress would complain later to my staff that they had a difficult time understanding what I was telling them because the music in the background was overwhelming.
Kaplan Well, those recordings, I guess about 2,000, were actually the legacy of your predecessor Richard Nixon and 50 of them were classical, I understand. President Nixon's favorite recording apparently was Richard Rogers' "Victory at Sea". Do you have a favorite recording?
Carter Well, I have a tremendous collection now of CDs and a very good high fidelity system in my office at home and also in my office here at The Carter Center. I would say that my favorite recording of all is about 17 or 18 arias on a CD called Aria: A Passion for Opera . And I listen to it over and over again. Some of the recordings to me are not very superb. Maria Callas has a recording on the same CD that I think - I think she's off key. But, the best one I think is Mirella Freni signing La Rondine from Puccini. If anybody's interested, it's No. 16 on the CD. But that is to me overwhelming. No matter what I'm doing with music in the background, when that particular recording comes on I just have to stop and do nothing but listen.
[Music]
Kaplan "Doretta's Dream" from Puccini's La Rondine , sung by Mirella Freni, President Jimmy Carter's favorite piece of music. This is Gilbert Kaplan welcoming you to this special July 4th edition of "Mad About Music" where we are revisiting earlier appearances of guests from our nation's Capitol. Now, beyond listening to music in his office non-stop, President Carter also initiated an ambitious program to bring stars to perform at the White House. Perhaps his greatest coup was to persuade the legendary pianist Vladimir Horowitz to come. He had played there as early as 1931 -- for President Hoover; and every president since had tried to lure him back. Jimmy Carter was the one to succeed but only to discover that Horowitz presented him with an unexpected challenge.
Carter When Mr. Horowitz came to the White House on Saturday afternoon to get ready, we had the East Room prepared with a platform there, he brought his own Steinway piano, but he thought the room was too harsh sounding. So I went upstairs myself, with my blue jeans on, as President of the United States, and brought down a oriental carpet and Horowitz and I placed that carpet at different places against the platform until he was satisfied that the resonance in the room suited him. But this is one of the high points of my life to sit there and hear Rachmaninoff's music played by Mr. Horowitz, who had in the past always refused to come to the White House.
[Music]
Kaplan A Rachmaninoff polka performed by Vladimir Horowitz at the Carter White House. Through this recital, the President of the United States and one of the world's greatest musicians came to know each other in a special way. Of course, music entered the president's life long before he entered the White House. But given his vast knowledge of music, I was surprised to learn that he had never studied an instrument.
Carter The only instrument I ever played was the ukulele when I was stationed in Hawaii on a submarine and my wife was the best hula dancer among all the Navy wives on the entire island. But that's my only experience in playing a musical instrument. But when I was a child I grew up on a farm in Georgia. We didn't have electricity, we didn't have running water. But we had a radio operated by battery, and my father would let us listen to a few programs every day. Our family usually went to bed as soon as it got dark, but he gave me special permission to stay up until Glenn Miller would come on every night at 8 o'clock for 15 minutes. So I would lie in front of the fireplace and go to sleep sometimes, try to wake up at 8:00, turn on the radio, and listen to 15 minutes of Glenn Miller's music, "Moonlight Serenade" and so forth, and then I would go to bed with the rest of the family.
[Music]
Kaplan "Moonlight Serenade" by Glenn Miller, one of the earliest musical memories of President Jimmy Carter. This is Gilbert Kaplan and during this July 4 th special edition of "Mad about Music", we are revisiting some of our shows focusing on guests from the White House and the Supreme Court. I always encourage our guests to select music that played some special role in their life. And it would be hard to imagine a more powerful connection than the one between Sigmund Romberg's operetta The Student Prince and President Jimmy Carter.
Carter Well, when Rosalynn and I were in the Navy in my earliest days of married life, we made a total of $300 a month and we spent over $150 on food and lodging which only left us a little bit. But I was assigned to go to Philadelphia to learn about pending new radar equipment and one night we decided to splurge and went out to an actual restaurant and afterwards we went to Sigmund Romberg's performance of The Student Prince . It was so overwhelming to us to hear this music in live that I guess became a little more romantic than usual and that night we decided to have our first child, so our oldest son Jack was conceived that night after we heard The Student Prince .
[Music]
Kaplan The "Drinking Song" from Sigmund Romberg's The Student Prince performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra selected by my guest, President Jimmy Carter, as testimony to the romantic power of music. When we return, we'll move to the Supreme Court and to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
[Station Break]
Kaplan This is Gilbert Kaplan on our special summer edition of "Mad About Music" where we are revisiting earlier appearances of guests from our nation's Capitol. Jimmy Carter may have been an exception at the White House for his passionate love of music, but at the Supreme Court it was rumored that practically all the Justices loved classical music. I asked my guest Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg whether this was true.
Ginsburg I think you're right – we have a clear majority.
Kaplan And who would be the ones that come to mind who are as passionate as perhaps you are?
Ginsburg Justice Scalia who I must confess is the only one of us who can carry a tune and he was my companion at the Washington Opera when we both appeared as supers, as extras, in a performance of Ariadne auf Naxos .
Kaplan That's interesting because I would think as a "couple" you might be an odd couple – I don't see the two of you dancing to the same tune so much on the Court. But what about music? Do you have similar tastes in music?
Ginsburg We certainly do. We are given to beautiful music; we don't shy away from admitting that we cry at Puccini and I think our musical tastes are very much alike. The Chief is also a music lover, but he prefers choral music.
Kaplan In much the same way as President Carter became an impresario of classical music at the White House, Justice Ginsburg has played a similar role at the Supreme Court with an eclectic array of presentations.
Ginsburg Oh, the range is enormous – so we could go from Bach all the way to Burl Ives, Cole Porter.
Kaplan Cole Porter?
Ginsburg Yes, and a sample that I have brought with me, a Cole Porter number, is Samuel Ramey – the rich resonant bass baritone that I am accustomed to hearing in a devilish role like Mephistopheles . Here he sings in just a delightful way Cole Porter's witty "Tale of the Oyster".
[Music]
Kaplan The "Tale of the Oyster" by Cole Porter sung by Samuel Ramey with pianist Warren Jones, a selection of my guest Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and recorded during a live performance at the Supreme Court. Now deep down I discovered that of all music, Justice Ginsburg's true passion is opera. And her favorite singer? Maria Callas, who, in an unexpected way, inspired Ginsburg to win an argument before the Supreme Court when she was still a lawyer in private practice.
Ginsburg To my great sadness I never saw Callas perform although I did meet that great diva. I met her in an elevator at the Hay Adams Hotel. She was in town for a concert. I was in town to make an argument at the Court. I stepped into the elevator and there was Callas in white mink with her poodle with the same color as her coat. She looked every inch the diva that she was and I mumbled something about how much joy she had given me through her recordings and then I felt as if I had been touched by magic -- that there was no way that I was going to lose that argument -- and as things turned out a couple of months later, the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court was unanimously in favor of my client.
Kaplan That's a wonderful story and of course it's a pity that you could never have experienced hearing or seeing Callas sing. I suppose you would have liked to done that. Where would have been the moment? What would have been the work?
Ginsburg The opening night of Tosca at La Scala. Tosca was one of Callas's best roles and I believe that at the opening she sang Tosca with di Stefano. At any rate, she sang Tosca many times with di Stefano. She recorded it with him from La Scala with de Sabata as the conductor and her recording of Tosca has been described as perhaps the best recording of opera anyplace.
[Music]
Kaplan "Vissi d'arte" from Puccini's Tosca sung by Maria Callas with the Orchestra of La Scala. Victor de Sabata on the podium, a selection of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg when she appeared earlier on "Mad About Music." This is Gilbert Kaplan on our special July 4 th edition of "Mad About Music" where we are revisiting some of the most popular shows that focused on our nation's Capitol. Earlier we learned that Jimmy Carter's passion for music enabled him to lure the foremost artist to perform in the East Room, but I think it's fair to say that perhaps the most accomplished musician ever to work in the White House is National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rica who could well have made a career as a concert pianist. From her earliest years, music has dominated her life.
Rice Music played a very important role in my childhood. My mother played, my grandmother and my great grandmother all played piano. A couple of them were church musicians, but my grandmother was also a piano teacher and I stayed at my grandmother's house during the day while my parents worked and I would go to the piano and bang at the piano when she taught her students trying to emulate what she was doing with her students. So she said to my mother, let's teach her to play. I was only about three. My mother thought I might be a little young, but my grandmother wanted to try it and as a result I learned to play very, very young. I could read music before I could read. I went through then the kind of normal childhood but with music very much at the center of it, always piano lessons, always the time to practice, and when I was ten, I went to the Birmingham Southern Conservatory of Music – I think I was the first black student to go to that newly-integrated conservatory in Birmingham – and I began to compete in piano at that point. It was then several years later, a couple of years later we moved to Denver and I won a competition there, a young artists' competition regionally young artists' competition playing the Mozart D Minor Piano Concerto , a piece that I still love to this very day.
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Kaplan The final movement of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor played by Artur Rubinstein with the RCA Victor Orchestra led by Alfred Wallenstein, a work also performed by Condoleezza Rice, winning a piano competition at age 15. When we return, we'll explore what Condoleezza Rice's musical selections tell us about her as a person.
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Kaplan This is Gilbert Kaplan on our July 4 th special edition of "Mad About Music" where we are revisiting appearances of guests from our nation's Capitol. Now given Condoleezza Rice's prodigious musical talent, I asked her if she ever regretted abandoning what might have been a real career in music.
Rice I planned a career as a concert pianist but I realized in my sophomore year, at the end of my sophomore year in college that I was pretty good but not great. I went to one of those Aspen Music Festival summer programs and I met 11-year olds who could play from sight what had taken me all year to learn and I thought I'm maybe going to end up playing piano bar or playing at Nordstrom, but I'm not going to end up playing Carnegie Hall and so I started looking for something else. But the great thing about music is that you can love it all of your life, you can pick it up at different phases. I remember when I was about ten I really wanted to quit playing the piano. I had been a child prodigy, now I was ten, there were lots of kids who could play the piano at ten, and my mother said you're not old enough or good enough to make that decision and she was right, I wasn't old enough or good enough, but fortunately, when I made the decision to leave, I was good enough that I could now bring it back into my life and play chamber music and it's a real joy.
Kaplan So the piano continues to occupy a prominent place in the life of Condoleezza Rice. But what can we learn from her musical selections about Condoleezza Rice herself? I always find it fascinating to explore the connection between our guest's musical selections and their own personalities. And in explaining her attraction to Brahms' music, Condoleezza Rice perhaps revealed something about herself as well.
Rice I've always been much more attracted to Brahms, to Schumann, to a certain extent to Schubert. I don't particularly like programmatic music and Liszt, of course, the sort of father of that School, has never been particularly interesting to me. Brahms someone once described to me as passionate without being sentimental and that's how I think of Brahms and I just love – Brahms is probably my favorite composer at this stage in my life.
Kaplan Passionate without being sentimental. Could that be a description of you?
Rice Oh, now that's a good question. I suppose I'd like to think of myself as passionate about life. I'm certainly passionate about music and I'm passionate about my work, passionate about family and about my faith. I can be sentimental as well, but I prefer my composers pretty straight.
Kaplan You know, I wonder if you have two personalities, the music personality and your regular personality, if I can call it that. I read somewhere that Secretary of State Colin Powell once said you were raised first and foremost to be a lady and media accounts always mention that you're impeccably dressed, which I can testify to today, tidy, and disciplined. My question is, what happens when you sit down at the keyboard? Is there a different Condi Rice lurking beneath the surface?
Rice When I sit down at the keyboard, I think it's the same Condi Rice, but it's a Condi Rice that has to be really disciplined.
Kaplan Well what about just playing with abandon and disregarding all that tidiness, organization, discipline and just going for it?
Rice Well, one reason that I love Brahms and Mozart is one can't play with abandon. You have to be pretty disciplined. I'm one of those people now if you put it in front of me, I can read it. But if you ask me to play it by ear or with improvisation, I have a much harder time, so I guess I'm tidy and disciplined even when I'm playing the piano.
Kaplan I suppose it's your predilection towards discipline that prompts you then to prefer the rarely heard two piano version of Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn over the one we know best, the one performed by a full orchestra?
Rice The reason that I love the two piano version of the Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn is that I think that the matched timbre of the two pianos, the kind of open sound that you get from that, really works very much better in several of the Variations that Brahms wrote. I would be the first to admit that there are a couple of Variations that are better for the orchestra. But on balance you can hear this tremendous ability of Brahms to use very small intervals, like seconds, when two pianos are playing, because you don't have the effect of the strings, with all due respect to the string players, kind of mushing over the sound. It's much clearer and crisper and I love the two piano version.
[Music]
Kaplan An excerpt from Brahms Variations on a Theme by Haydn , performed in the original version for two pianos by Sir Georg Solti and Murray Perahia, a work that has also been played by our guest National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. With music such an essential part of Condoleezza Rice's life, I asked her if she ever talked to President Bush about classical music.
Rice The President and I don't have the same musical tastes, I'm afraid. He loves, he does love music. I like country western too, which is what he likes very very much. But he knows that its very important to me and even he asks me once in a while, well, are you playing the piano, because he knows it's a centering experience for me.
Kaplan You know, President Carter used to have music on constantly at the White House. I gather that doesn't go on any more?
Rice No, we don't have music constantly on at the White House and it's a good thing. I actually have never been one of those people who could work with music in the background. I get very caught up in what's going on with the music, so only when I'm exercising can I have music as background music. When I get on the treadmill I have to do something to get my mind off the fact that I'm droning on a treadmill for 30 minutes and I usually play on the CD pieces that I know, usually pieces that I've played, because I can kind of time my workout to the start of a Scherzo , to know that I ought to run to the end of the Scherzo , or something like that. And so, yes, I use music very much on the treadmill. But my physical trainer, my strength coach at Stanford, came once to a concert that I played and he said, you know, that's every bit as physical playing that piece as anything that I watch with the Stanford football team, so pianists don't often get enough credit for the physical side of playing something like Brahms, which can be quite physically demanding.
Kaplan As I knew that a few days after her appearance on "Mad About Music", Condoleezza Rice was scheduled to accompany President Bush on what would be his first visit with Russian President Putin, I decided to ask her, as a farewell question, could she imagine what music might serve as an ideal soundtrack for such a meeting. She didn't skip a beat in her reply.
Rice "Getting to Know You" would come to mind as a soundtrack for that meeting. I think this is going to be great fun for the two Presidents because I suspect that they'll get along very well. But anything that, in the musical world, would suggest two people getting to know each other, getting to take the temperature a little bit and showing a vision for a peaceful world with a US-Russian relationship that is healthy at its center.
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Kaplan An excerpt from "Getting to Know You" from The King and I , National Security Advisor Condoleezza's choice for a soundtrack for the first meeting between President Bush and Russian President Putin. This concludes "Mad About Music's" 4 th of July special edition about the power of music in the lives of our leaders in the nation's Capitol. I hope you enjoyed our revisiting President Jimmy Carter, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. You might want to mark your calendar now for Sunday, August 1 st , at 9:00 PM when we will present our second summer special on "Mad About Music" – this is one on Hollywood, revisiting our earlier shows with Mike Nichols, Alec Baldwin, William Friedkin and Alan Alda. Until then, have a good summer. This is Gilbert Kaplan for "Mad About Music."
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