The Sound of the Lost Republic

Last night, Joseph Horowitz sent me an article about the German conductor Frieder Weissmann and his years at the helm of the Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana. Horowitz never sleeps, at least not while everyone else does. I read it immediately, and it also kept me awake till dawn. The article made me wonder whether I had overlooked an entire dimension of the republic I am trying to reconstruct.

We tend to think of pre-revolutionary Cuba through its popular music. Son, rumba, mambo, bolero, jazz: these have become inseparable from our historical imagination of the city. But another Cuba sounded at the same time, and its musical geography was remarkably international.

Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Consider some of the names conducting Havana before the Revolution: Serge Koussevitzky, Leopold Stokowski, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux, Bruno Walter, Erich Kleiber, Igor Stravinsky, Herbert von Karajan, Ernest Ansermet, George Enescu, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Carlos Chávez.

Herbert von Karajan conducting the Philharmonia

These were central figures in twentieth-century musical life. Many moved regularly between Europe's great orchestras and those of the United States. Judging from the traffic of conductors and repertoire, Havana’s symphonic culture seems to have developed as part of the same international circulation that connected cities such as New York, Boston, Milan, and Buenos Aires.

That proposition needs testing. But if the archival record confirms it, the implications are considerable.

It would mean that to understand The Lost Republic we must place it on a cultural map much larger than Cuba.

Frieder Weissmann’s Havana

Weissmann is an especially useful witness because he was not simply passing through.

Born in Germany in 1893, he had already established an important European career before Nazism forced him into exile. He eventually made his way to Havana in the 1950s.

His recollections, decades later, were not merely about the prestige of having conducted there but about its sound. That detail interests me.

Historical memory is often organized around events: elections, coups, revolutions, assassinations. A musician remembers something different. He remembers how an orchestra sounded.

And suddenly a period in Cuban history that so many accounts have reduced to corruption, American influence, and the inevitability of 1959 becomes acoustically more complicated.

An orchestra was there; there was a peculiar sound. A Symphonic ecosystem? And some of the world's most relevant musicians wanted to conduct it.

The More Difficult Question

Then comes the part of the story I do not yet understand. What happened to this inheritance after 1959?

I want to be careful with the question because it would be tempting—and probably historically wrong—to conclude simply that the Cuban Revolution had little interest in symphonic music. The Soviet cultural model suggests precisely the opposite. The USSR invested heavily in orchestras, conservatories, opera and ballet. Classical music could provide education, institutional discipline and enormous international prestige.

Cuba itself famously demonstrated how effectively such prestige could be cultivated through ballet. So the question becomes more specific.

What happened to the memory of the symphonic Havana that preceded the Revolution?

Why does the extraordinary international lineage of the Havana Philharmonic seem so absent from the cultural image of twentieth-century Cuba?

The revolutionary state proved remarkably capable of appropriating cultural traditions and incorporating them into a new national narrative. Popular musicians, writers, poets and other creators from before 1959 could be recovered, reinterpreted and presented as antecedents of revolutionary culture. Then, why not make the same claim upon this extraordinary symphonic inheritance?

Walter, Stravinsky, Villa-Lobos, Karajan and others could easily have been presented as evidence that Cuba had possessed a sophisticated international musical culture long before 1959—and that the Revolution was its legitimate heir.

Yet something appears to be broken.

Perhaps what disappeared was not symphonic music itself but institutional memory. Perhaps the Philharmonic was too closely associated with the social structures of republican Havana. Perhaps the musicians' departure made continuity impossible. Perhaps the Revolution created new institutions and, in doing so, had little use for the genealogy of those they replaced. Perhaps Cold War alignments redirected Cuban classical music toward an entirely different international network.

Or perhaps my premise is simply wrong. The question is wrong. Cuba is unpredictable, and the answer could be as simple as “Fidel hated Beethoven”. Yes, welcome to the Caribbean.

Listening for cues in The Lost Republic

This is where Weissmann’s recollections become potentially cinematic.

Imagine beginning not with Batista, Castro, casinos or revolutionaries, but with an orchestra tuning in Havana.

Programs appear. Newspaper advertisements. Photographs. Audiences entering a concert hall. Then the names begin to accumulate: Koussevitzky, Stokowski, Walter, Stravinsky, Villa-Lobos, Karajan.

Gradually the geography changes.

Havana is no longer an island at the edge of the musical world. It becomes one of the places through which that world circulated.

Then, in Weissmann’s account, conditions begin deteriorating during the early 1950s. Musicians go unpaid. Some leave Cuba; others quit the craft. Weissmann himself flees, hoping circumstances will improve sufficiently for him to return.

He never does.

We know what comes afterward, which makes it tempting to read everything that preceded 1959 as a prelude to the Revolution. That is one of the distortions The Lost Republic is intended to resist. People living in Havana in 1951 did not know that they were characters in a story whose irremediable conclusion was January 1959.

And perhaps that is where this chapter of The Lost Republic belongs.