Bristow: A Progress Update

A Work in Progress | Editing Room

I first stumbled onto George F. Bristow the way you trip over a loose floorboard in an old house—unexpectedly, and then you can’t stop poking at it. His life cuts right through the turbulent heart of 19th-century America: the first stirrings of a homegrown literature, the growing pains of a young culture, the rupture of the Civil War, and the swaggering debut as an imperial power in the Spanish-American War. Born in 1825, as the Revolution slipped into textbooks, he died in late 1898, months after the Treaty of Paris handed us Cuba and the Philippines. The nation shed its skin again and again while he was still very much alive.

Bristow: A Progress Update: It started with a single symphony I found online: No. 4 in E minor, The Arcadian. It’s soaked in pine needles and mythic American promise, the kind of music that makes you smell the air even when you’re stuck in a subway car. That was all I had at first—just that one piece—but it was enough to pull me in.

Then I dug up Symphony No. 2, the one Louis Jullien paid real money for back when “American composer” still sounded like an oxymoron. Jullien—top hat, waxed mustache, the P. T. Barnum of baton-wavers—turns out to be the guy who commissioned the work and put Bristow on the map.

Suddenly, the story had a sparkly French villain-hero, and I was hooked.

Rip Van Winkle sealed the deal. Washington Irving’s sleepy Catskills shaped Bristow’s first opera the same way The Tales of the Alhambra shaped my childhood bedtime stories—different books, same author, two hundred years and six thousand miles apart. I finished the Rip sequence with a grin I couldn’t wipe off for days.

A Harvest of Death, Timothy H. O'Sullivan

And then the Civil War barged in, rude as a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. You can’t tell Bristow’s story without it: 750,000 Americans dead in four years—how many of them might have someday sat in a concert hall to hear one of his symphonies, or become the next generation of musicians carrying his work forward? I hit pause on everything else and started patching together that chapter—still pinning photos to the wall like a detective. The clip I’m sharing has Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln staring down destiny, O’Sullivan’s grim harvest of bodies at Gettysburg, and the yellowed program from Bristow’s own Patriotic Concert, courtesy of the Philharmonic’s back room.

There are more late nights ahead, more rabbit holes, more “wait, he knew who?” moments. I’m not complaining. This is the part I live for.