On today's historic United States Supreme Court decision on marriage, we invite you to listen to Leonard Bernstein's Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for Six Singers (1977), which includes poems by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes and Gertrude Stein.
According to Bernstein archivist Jack Gottlieb, the subject matter of Songfest's poems is the American artist's experience as it relates to his or her crea¬tivity, loves, marriages, or minority problems (blacks, women, homosexual s, expatriates) within a fundamentally Puritan society.
“To What You Said,” a poem by Walt Whitman, references war, America, and love between two men. At the time that Bernstein composed, this poem about the poet's homosexual secret, had been recently discovered and never published in Whitman's lifetime.
"To what you said, passionately clasping my hand, this is my answer:
Though you have strayed hither, for my sake, you can never belong to me,
nor I to you,
Behold the customary loves and friendships – the cold guards
I am that rough and simple person
I am he who kisses his comrade lightly on the lips at parting,
and I am one who is kissed in return.
I introduce that new American salute
Behold love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious
Behold the received models of the parlors – What are they to me?
What to these young men that travel with me?"
Though you have strayed hither, for my sake, you can never belong to me,
nor I to you,
Behold the customary loves and friendships – the cold guards
I am that rough and simple person
I am he who kisses his comrade lightly on the lips at parting,
and I am one who is kissed in return.
I introduce that new American salute
Behold love choked, correct, polite, always suspicious
Behold the received models of the parlors – What are they to me?
What to these young men that travel with me?"
Here is a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the National Symphony Orchestra with bass soloist Donald Gramm in a performance of "To What You Said".
A cartoon by Michael Maslin. Find more cartoons here:http://nyr.kr/1fJMnkQ
"Social acceptance, the decriminalization of gay sex, the legalization of homosexual social and sexual institutions, the removal of barriers to same-sex marriage, to military service, to the priesthood and psychoanalysis, along with other previously off-limits professions, should not be confused with the end of sexual normativity, let alone the collapse of heterosexual dominance."
