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- [00:01]
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Terry Gross
This is FRESH air. I'm Terry Gross. Divisions in our country are often traced back to the Civil War, but the divisions go all the way back to the Revolutionary War. It wasn't just a war against the British.
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It was it was a bloody civil.
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War in the colonies between the revolutionaries who call themselves the Patriots and the loyalists who wanted to remain under British rule. The Revolutionary War is the subject of a new documentary series made by America's best known documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, along with Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. Burns describes the Revolutionary War as the most consequential revolution in history. The series tells the story not only from the perspectives of the Founding Fathers, the generals and the fighters. It includes the stories of people left out of the Declaration's statement, all men are created equal. That's women, Native Americans, enslaved people and free black people. Making this film, Burns says, led him to new perspectives on the fundamental questions about the Founding. This 12 part series premieres on most public TV stations Sunday, November 16th, with two hour long episodes on six consecutive nights. The subjects of Byrne's other documentaries shown on public TV include the Civil War, the war in Vietnam, baseball, jazz, country music and our national parks. We recorded our interview on stage at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey, near next to the river depicted in the famous painting Washington, the Delaware.
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I have to tell you, Ken, that this series was like a revelation for me. I never studied the Revolutionary War in depth. I knew bits and pieces and it was really a revelation. So my first question to you is what really surprised you? Like, tell us one thing that really surprised you in doing the research because you uncovered so much and had so much source material.
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Ken Burns
Well, I have to acknowledge my co directors, Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt. We've worked for nearly 10 years with our writer Jeff Ward, and an extraordinarily good team of people figuring out maps and figuring out archives and figuring out how to shoot reenactments without it feeling like reenactments. I don't think there was a day, Terry, when we weren't stunned by something we'd learned new that this was not just a revolution that takes place of ideas in Philadelphia, but a real revolution, a bloody one, a late 18th century war in which people die by muskets and bayonets, and that it's a Civil War. Americans are killing other Americans, and then that it's a world war. And that was the stunning thing that Britain had not just 13 colonies, but 26. The other 13 were in the Caribbean, and they're by far the most profitable, a great engine of wealth for this far flung British Empire because it's based on. Almost entirely on slave labor. And that the prize of North America has been contested by the Dutch, by the Spanish, by the French, by the English for centuries. And that our revolution, which is our little fight with the mother country, is in fact the fourth global war over the prize of North America.
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Terry Gross
One of the things that really surprised me, we always talk, especially now, about how divided our nation is. In my mind, that goes back to the Civil War. But now I think, oh, that goes back to the Founding. That goes back to the Revolution.
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Ken Burns
We've always been divided. I don't know if you can take comfort from it, given the current state of affairs, but I do believe that the historian's perspective is one that permits you to understand. As Ecclesiastes says, there's nothing new under the sun. The colonists, they are human beings like us. And I think because there are no photographs to prove that, just paintings, and they have buckles on their feet and stockings and waistcoats and powdered wigs, that we think somehow they're just utterly different from us. And they're not. So I think we can understand. The historian Maya Jasanoff says that we're born in violence. The United States comes out of violence, she says, and that's an important thing that we have to understand. There's certainly big ideas over there. And those big ideas, I have to say, are not diminished by telling the truth about how complicated and how violent the struggle is and how diverse the group of people participating in it are.
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Terry Gross
Yeah.
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So let's talk about the diversity, divisive.
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Nature of the Revolutionary war in the colonies.
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Tell us briefly some of the arguments for being a loyalist, being loyal to Britain, and for being a revolutionary, and fighting for independence from Britain and the king.
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Ken Burns
Well, loyalists, they think that their prosperity, the fact that they own land, their health, their literacy, all of it has come from the British constitutional monarchy. Why rock the boat for some strange, crazy, cockamamie ideas? The patriots are a kind of an amalgam of concerns. The most, the central one, we're not taught this in school. It's taxes and representation, which is super important. But it's Indian land. It's Indian land in an intimate, personal way for an ordinary person who wants to get 150 acres of land and wants to spill over the Appalachians, where the British won't let us go because they can't afford having one. The previous war, the previous World war, the Seven Years War, which we call the French and Indian War. They can't afford to defend us. And so please don't go over. And it's enraging people like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington who are speculators in tens of thousands of acres of land in the Ohio Valley where people want to go. So it's about Indian land, and then it's about a funny thing that takes over this kind of gravitation from an argument between British people over English law, property and things like that into natural laws. And so these ideas of freedom and liberty and independence come and it begins to grow steadily. So that by the time the Declaration is signed in the summer of 1776 and it's disseminated, there's a palpable sense that people have agency. There's a new thing going on. Suddenly new identity had come. A lot of that has to do with the 3,000 miles that separate them. And so all of a sudden, new events like the Boston Massacre or the Tea Party are invested with new understandings. If you can have the patience to see out all the complexity and hold in contradiction lots of stuff that the simple, easy story of our revolution never wants to tell.
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Terry Gross
Yeah. And I was amazed that America was so divided during the Revolutionary War that Ben Franklin's son was a loyalist. He was siding with the British. And Abigail Adams, John Adams wife, the first vice president's wife, she initially thought, like you are really underestimating the amount of anarchy and violence this is going to lead to. This is not going to be an easy thing. And she was so right. But by the time the revolution was over, she was fully behind independence and revolution.
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Ken Burns
And it's not even that one person is a loyalist and another person's a patriot, and their positions are held. They're people who change. Benjamin Franklin's son William was the royal governor of New Jersey. He was deposed, spent time in a prison in Connecticut. It was presumed when he was released, he would go back to his beloved England. And he stays and forms a terrorist organization that are hunting down patriots. And there are lots of patriot organizations hunting down loyalists. That's one family of a founding father.
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Terry Gross
So in terms of the brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, we're talking about like freelance fighting. I mean, we're talking about militias too, but in addition to the militias, in addition to the actual armies, you Also have just individuals attacking each other, burning each other's houses, seeking revenge. I didn't know that.
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Ken Burns
Nor did we. I don't think we understood when the British are dominant, the Loyalists are taking revenge on their patriot names. And when the reverse happens, the Patriots are doing the same. And this is a very down and dirty war and also a war at that huge macro level of geopolitics that is taking place in the courts of Europe.
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Terry Gross
One of the things I love about your series is it talks about the revolution, not just from like the founding fathers, you get to the women, you get to the enslaved and the free black people, you get to the Native Americans. So let's start with the enslaved and the free black people. They were fighting in the army on both sides, right? So what were they promised on each side?
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Ken Burns
So the war is big and global, as I said, but it's also intimate, down to a family or an individual's decision. There are about 20% of the population of 2 and a half to 3 million people included in the colonies, excluding native peoples, are enslaved and free black people. And they've got decisions to make. Many, we think 20,000 fought 15,000 for the British who had cynically promised freedom for those slaves of rebelling people, not of slaves of Loyalists. They had to remain slaves. The man who issued this proclamation, Dunmore himself, owned other human beings and did, didn't think that that was inconsistent. And many black Americans flooded there and had a taste of freedom for the first time and fought alongside British regiments. The remaining 5,000 were Patriots who fought.
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Terry Gross
So the British promised that enslaved people, if they fought with the Brits, would be freed. Did the Americans make the same promise?
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Ken Burns
No, except in Rhode island and a few other northern states, particularly Rhode island, in which those black regiments that were made up of both free and enslaved were promised their freedom. But it was also indicated that Rhode island would compensate the owners for the loss of their property.
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Terry Gross
And Washington, when he saw black people in the militia, he didn't want them there.
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Ken Burns
He arrives a Virginian and a very wealthy man and an owner like Jefferson, of hundreds of human beings over the course of his lifetime. And he arrives in Boston and discovers that the army that he is assembling, this new Continental army that's created in the spring of 1776, has black soldiers who have fought in Lexington and Concord and have served bravely at Bunker's Hill. And he doesn't want to recruit anymore. And he sort of is insists on that. And then finally, and this distinguishes George Washington from many other people of his time, he suddenly realizes this has been a mistake. And he's. What's, what's so incredible about Washington, I think, and why he's so endlessly interesting despite these flaws, despite his military mistakes, is how he is singularly the one person responsible for the United States. And a lot of it is his fluidity and his ability to say, oh, okay, you make good soldiers, that's okay. So he changes his mind and he grows in a way that is impressive. And I think by the end he's freeing his slaves. And he understands. By the end of his life, he understands, as Jefferson knows too, that slavery is wrong. It's a complicated thing that defies the. The sort of binary.
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Terry Gross
So I want to quote something that Washington says because I found this a fascinating quote. And he's talking about how upsetting it is to see one brother killing another. And he says the once happy and peaceful plains of America are either to be drenched with blood or inhabited by slaves. Sad alternative, but can a virtuous man hesitate in his choice? So he's not talking about enslaved people, he's talking about himself.
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Ken Burns
That's right.
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Terry Gross
That he is being treated like a slave by the British. Like that's the choice that the colonists have, to be treated as a slave by the British or to fight. And I'm thinking, hey, you're an enslaver. You are not a slave.
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Ken Burns
So this is the whole conundrum of the Revolution. Many people began to describe their situation within British America as being dependent or slaves to them. The irony is not lost on everybody. It's not lost on the British. It's not lost on even some of the people. And so what happens is, is that the second that incredibly hypocritical comment comes from Washington and many, many others, slavery is kind of over. I mean, it's over by the time Thomas Jefferson writes the Declaration. It's going to take a long time, four score and nine years. But when he says all men are created equal, and he means all white men of property, it's over. Women are going to get the vote. Takes 144 years, but it's going to happen. All the other expansions of liberty are going to happen because of the vagueness of these new arguments that the Americans are using. Born of the Enlightenment about how you're going to be free. And the hypocrisy is evident. But that hypocrisy is the place in which we are, strangely enough, able to grow. The scholar, the late scholar Bernard Bailyn said nobody really talked about the Evils of slavery. Before the American Revolution, there were some people who spoke to it. He said, and it's evils, but nobody really talked about it. But the second the Revolution began, that's all people talked about. Basically, by the time the revolution had started, our Civil War was going to happen.
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Terry Gross
Was there anybody speaking up during the Revolution about ensuring rights for women or Native Americans or enslaved people everywhere?
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Ken Burns
All the time it's going on. Abigail Adams, during the Revolution, Abigail Adams is saying, you know, we have this phrase that comes down to us, and we leave it. Remember the ladies? It sounds dainty, and we leave it alone. But she says, all husbands would be tyrants if they want to, and then goes on to say that if we don't get some sort of representation, we're likely to foment a rebellion. And so there are people who are already patently anti slavery speaking about this at the time. And by the time the Constitutional Convention is over and our government is starting, Benjamin Franklin himself, who had owned human beings in his own household, a handful of people is submitting to Congress a bill that goes, of course, nowhere to end slavery in the United States. But there are people arguing for the rights of Native Americans. There are people arguing for women's rights. There are people arguing for the rights of enslaved people. It is an incredibly fluid and fascinating dynamic.
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Terry Gross
Let's talk about Native Americans and the Revolution. So as you mentioned, the British had fought the French and Indian War. The Native Americans were siding with the French at that time.
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Ken Burns
Some of them. Some of them were with the British, some were with the French. And remember, the colonies are superimposed over many tribal lands. And so there's coexistence and even assimilation of Native peoples among the colonists. And then you have all of these separate nations at the west who are fearing the encroachment of the settlers. And early on figure that maybe they should go with the British who beat the French. And because the British seem to be trying to restrain their own people, their own upstarts. And a lot of Native tribes are waiting and seeing. And a lot are also fighting on the American side. Rebecca Tanner, a Mohegan woman, therefore I presume to be from Connecticut, lost five sons fighting for the Patriots. It's just an extraordinary loss. I can't imagine being a mother losing five sons. And the Haudenosaunee, the group that we open our film with, the Iroquois Confederacy that Franklin decides could be the model for the United states, a union 20 years before the Revolution that gets destroyed by our American Revolution because the eastern branches of the tribes, mostly the Oneida side, with the Americans and the Westerns, the Senecas and Mohawks, are siding with the British and the entire beautiful democracy that had existed for centuries. That Franklin was trying to model this idea for the colonies. The Haudenosaunee falls apart as a result.
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Terry Gross
Of the American Revolution, and Washington owned tens of thousands of acres of Native American land. How did it get them so you.
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Ken Burns
Survey it, you speculate. And while many of the recent immigrants and colonists are hoping to flow over the Appalachians and take over Indian land, you know, 125 acres to own land for the first time, maybe in your life, because you've been in Wales or Scotland or Ireland, and your family has worked as dependents on somebody else's land for a thousand years, you've got new land. So there's tension at the sort of lower levels of society and then at the higher levels, both in the north and the south, you have the planters and you have successful businessmen like Benjamin Franklin who are speculating in tens of thousands of lands which they've just identified that they want, and they're hoping to get the blessings of the king or the governor to grant them that land. But these are Native lands, and they are presuming that Native people do not have the same relationship to property as they do, which is true, but that therefore they then have some right, which we'll call in the next century Manifest Destiny, to o' erspread the whole thing.
- [18:29]
Terry Gross
So let's talk about women. And an image that you have in your film really sticks in my mind of, like women in a stream washing blood out of clothes. And you talk in the movie about how women's jobs. Part of it was washing the blood out of clothes so that the clothes of the dead soldiers could be given to fighters who were wearing tatters, you know, tattered clothes. Tell us more about the role that women played during the Revolutionary War.
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Ken Burns
The role of women is essential. They are responsible for sustaining the resistance period in the 10 or so years leading up to the actual warfare, beginning in April of 1775. Our idea of battles as solely masculine affairs are completely wrong. There are women and children accompanying every army. Washington, every general resents the kind of dependence, but they are performing functions of. Of cleaning and nursing and burying the dead and washing the blood and preparing a uniform of a dead soldier to be handed down to someone else. They are very active in all aspects of this. Some women, of course, disguise themselves very famously at Fort Washington in Manhattan, across from Fort Lee in New Jersey, almost where the George Washington Bridge is. Now there's a big fight and Margaret Corbyn's husband is killed, and she directs such a furious fire down on the Hessians who are coming up the hill that they direct all their fire at home her and she's wounded in the breast and in the jaw and ends up being the first woman offered a pension after the Revolutionary War, though, of course, at half the rate of the men.
- [20:17]
Terry Gross
We're listening to the onstage interview I recorded with Ken Burns about his new PBS series, the American Revolution. It premieres on Most PBS stations November 16th. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
- [20:32]
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- [21:58]
Ken Burns
Hi, this is Molly Sievi Nesper, digital producer at Fresh Air.
- [22:01]
Terry Gross
And this is Terry Gross, host of the show.
- [22:04]
Ken Burns
One of the things I do is.
- [22:05]
Terry Gross
Write the weekly newsletter, and I'm a newsletter fan. I read it every Saturday after breakfast. The newsletter includes all the week shows, staff recommendations and Molly picks, timely highlights from the archive. It's a fun read.
- [22:17]
Ken Burns
It's also the only place where we tell you what's coming up next week an exclusive.
- [22:21]
Terry Gross
So subscribe@whyy.org and look for an email.
- [22:26]
From Molly every Saturday morning. Well, hearing Abigail Adams prediction about how horrible a revolutionary war would be and learning More through your film about how horrible it was and all the blood and anarchy and brother and brother fighting against each other. I'm so war averse, which isn't to say I'm a pacifist, but I grew up watching World War II movies because it wasn't long after World War II, and then there was Vietnam and. And seeing just all of that horror made me very feeling lucky that I've never had to live through a war in my own country. And so it made me wonder, watching your documentary, which side would I be on? I'm not sure that I would be a revolutionary because I wouldn't want to have war in my neighborhood. I wouldn't want to lose all the men in my life to war. If I was a mother, I wouldn't want to lose my son. I'm a sister. I wouldn't want to lose my brother. Have you thought about that? Which side would you have been on?
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Ken Burns
I think that's the fundamental question. And I really don't know what side I'd be on. I don't know whether I could take up arms for a cause, whether I would be willing to die for a cause, whether I would be willing to kill for a cause. I remember when we made the Civil War series afterwards. I said, we're not doing any more wars. And for a variety of reasons, we got sucked into doing a history of the Second World War, which we called the war before the ink was dry on that I'd committed to Vietnam. And before the ink was dry on Vietnam, I said, we're doing the revolution. I'm drawn into the fact that it obviously represents the worst, but often the best of us. And there's so much that happens in the. In the levels of it. And yet the elemental question that you ask is one that I think all of us who've worked on it sound every day in some way. I'm not sure I have the answers. Of course, I might be a loyalist, but maybe I wouldn't be. But could I fight? Jefferson didn't fire a gun in anger. Patrick Henry didn't fire a gun in anger. Benjamin Franklin didn't fire a gun in anger, but George Washington did, and Alexander Hamilton did, and James Monroe did. And, you know, many other people fought in this war and made decisions of that kind. And as this, the last line of the Declaration says, we mutually pledged to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. George Washington may have been the richest man in America, and he certainly risked his life, certainly risked his fortune constantly. And let's remember that in addition, between his flaws and between the bad military decisions that he made, often he also rides out on the battlefield risking everything. At Kips Bay in mid Manhattan, living.
- [25:29]
Terry Gross
With his men in the freezing cold or the winter in the freezing cold.
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Ken Burns
Hold and being able to inspire them. This is like the richest guy in America or one of the richest guys in America. And at Valley Forge he loses something like 500 major officers who've gotten letters from home saying, hey, we're making a lot of money off this war selling provisions and doing this. And they desert and he stays.
- [25:52]
Terry Gross
That's the thing. A lot of the wealthy landowners who start off fighting for independence, they end up going home. And then it's the relatively poor people, the people who don't own land and teenagers and felons, you say, who become the army. And it's kind of remarkable that they succeeded. They had no training.
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Ken Burns
There's zero chance that they're going to succeed. At Lexington Green on April 19, 1775. And this is a war that has been proposed and sort of undertaken by property owners, from militiamen who are farmers to businessmen and merchants and big planters and rich people. But in order to actually succeed, it has to be, as you say, those teenagers and those felons and those ne' er do wells and those second and third sons without a chance of inheritance and recent immigrants who have nothing. And so by the end of the war, the war is being fought in large measure by people who have little or no property. That it started out as a war to protect the rights of property owners. And so the interesting thing is our textbooks say, you know, the American Revolution was about bringing democracy. Democracy is not an object of the American Revolution, it's a consequence of it. Because those people, as Washington himself said so movingly, it is a standing miracle that that army stayed together and did it. And that's what impresses the French, and that's what impresses the world, is that. And in Johann Evold, who we follow, and it says, who would have thought a century ago that out of this multitude of rabble he's dismissive of them could come a people who could defy kings. And what you have to do is reward those people. And the first rewarding happens in Pennsylvania when the Pennsylvania State Convention, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, extends to all men 21 years or age the right to vote. They don't have to own property. They can be in debt. And that's where the door gets opened. And we can say we're taking the tentative steps of democracy.
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Terry Gross
Are you saying that like all men are created equal, that beautiful phrases like that are because of gratitude to the people who fought, no promise that they made to get them to stay in the army.
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Ken Burns
That's early in the war. And I don't think they've fully come to the idea. When he said all men are created equal, he meant all white men of property free of debt. And we don't mean that anymore. And a lot of that anymore happens over the course of the revolution as it changes. And what happens is when you have a clash between British people that suddenly becomes about natural rights, this is the enlightenment. You're suddenly talking about big ideas that the people who are serving the meals hear and understand, the native people at the borders understand, the women in the household understand that if you are going to take your argument with Britain and turn it into this big, huge human affairs, really, as Thomas Paine says, not since the time of Noah do we have a chance to change things. And by the way, that's the story of America. It's a process word. Democracy is not a thing. It's kind of an active verb. You're in pursuit of happiness. You're after a more perfect union. And a lot of it has to do with both the poetry and the vagueness of the words that permit everyone else to find meaning and hope in it. And so, as the legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk says in our film, the Declaration of Independence is deeply significant to people at the margins, not because they think for a second that they're immediately going to be granted those rights, but it says that those rights are theirs. And as James Forten said, where does it that God says that white people are better than black people? And I can tell you, God never says that.
- [29:47]
Terry Gross
We're listening to the interview I recorded on stage with Ken Burns. His new documentary series, the American Revolution, premieres on most PBS stations Sunday, November 16th. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
- [30:01]
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- [31:03]
Terry Gross
When I was preparing the interview, I found myself focusing a lot on, like, Washington's flaws, like his hypocrisy about slavery and what happened to the Native Americans and the enslaved and free black people who fought in the war and the women. And because those stories haven't been told in the same way that the founding fathers and the poetic language of the founding documents. That's part of what really interested me in your series. So I don't mean to just, like, focus on the negatives, but these are like the untold or lesser told parts of the story. I was wondering if you were showing this in a Smithsonian museum or instead of outside on a night in New Jersey, in Camden, if you were showing it in a national park, would you be canceled because it's so dei, if I may say, because you're focusing on the people whose stories haven't sufficiently been told.
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Ken Burns
I've always thought another way of saying DEI is e pluribus unum, part of the dilemma, the trap. The mistake of argument is that we become so dialectically preoccupied, one side or the other. We see things in simple binaries that don't exist. And so Richard Powers, the novelist, said, the best arguments in the world won't change a single person's point of view. The only thing that can do that is a good story. A good story. Is a good story, is a good story. I think the story of the American Revolution is a really good story. Conservatives are supposed to love the series Yellowstone, and that is a film about a. A rancher.
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Terry Gross
I'm going to stop you. I want to stop you to say that you did a series on national parks. Look at what's happening in the national parks. History has literally been escorted out of the parks, taken down, erased. And that's the climate that we're living in now. So in reality, you might have been canceled if it was at the Smithsonian, if. Or it was in a national park. Are there bits of history that you, for instance, treasure in the national parks that you became very familiar with when you were doing your series that are gone now? Because everybody loves a good story, but we know we're living in a time when history is being race and diversity is being punished.
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Ken Burns
They did just scrub the word Enola Gay, which is the mother of the pilot who dropped the first Atomic bomb. And that was the name of his plane, the Enola Gay, because it had the word gay in it. And I'm disappointed that we, at this present moment, and it's not everyone, feel compelled to take the simplified version of things and try to make it all morning again. In America, we don't operate that way. I don't think a good story operates that way. And my argument about Yellowstone is that it's telling about all the stories. They're black and gay and female and white and poor and Native American. And greed is one of the main objects of it. And the main character is a murderer in addition to this big patriot. And it's just beloved good stories about human beings. Whether it's William Shakespeare or Kevin Costner or God forbid. A documentary about the revolution can have complexity and nuance and people get it. And I'll tell you that I couldn't have made any of the films we made outside of public broadcasting.
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Terry Gross
Well, that's another thing. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been shut down. And I know all of public radio and public television has lost money. You've lost some of your funding.
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Ken Burns
I've lost a great deal, millions of dollars as a result of the decision, which as you know, clawed back two years of money that had been authorized and appropriate and promised. And it's gone away. And it's an incredibly shortsighted thing. This is a network, in the case of pbs, that had William F. Buckley, a noted conservatives show, on for 32 years. And that show's still on, still moderated by a conservative. But because some people did not like certain aspects of it, the idea that it had to be defunded, it will mostly hurt. Why will survive. I will too. So we'll figure out ways to overcome that. More people will join and become members in Philadelphia, and that will be a good thing. But the losers will be the rural stations, the poor rural areas that will now be news deserts. No one will be covering the school board or the city council. There will not only be the good children's and primetime, but there won't be classroom of the air and continuing education and emergency signals and homeland security things. This is, you know, this is a big deal. And places will lose what is a. What I think is the. In PBS that I know and NPR by extension, the Declaration of Independence applied to communications.
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Terry Gross
I'm proud to be an American has new meaning to me because I realized, like during the Revolutionary War, when somebody said, I'm proud to be an American, what they kind of meant was, I no longer consider myself British.
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Ken Burns
That's right.
- [36:48]
Terry Gross
I'm a patriot. I'm not a loyalist, and I'm proud to be a patriot, fighting for freedom and revolution. I'm proud to be an American. It just had totally different meaning to me. I wonder, like, if you felt that way.
- [37:03]
Ken Burns
I have been, Terry, engaged with trying to tell the stories about the this complex American project for 50 years and whether it's about the Brooklyn Bridge or the national parks or the Shakers, but strangely, perhaps perversely, in the study of war, no more do I feel, even in things that are so drenched in contradiction and hypocrisy and blood, does that authentic patriotism that I think you're talking about come out and raise the kind of questions within themselves and between themselves that you've asked in that regard, very sincere, basic, sometimes gut wrenching questions. What would I have been? Could I have done this? Could I have killed somebody else? Would I be willing to die for a cause, to give up all of my good fortune for, for a cause? And then you're beginning to approach, but not necessarily make the decisions that were made in every family, in every community, in every colony to become a state, to become a union, to become the United States of America.
- [38:18]
Terry Gross
Ken Burns, it's time for us to end. I thank you so much for being here. Thank you for this series. Like I said, it was a revelation. And congratulations to you and your team and your co directors and co producers.
- [38:33]
Ken Burns
Thank you, Terry. Thank you. Thank you.
- [38:42]
Terry Gross
My interview with Ken Burns was recorded Oct. 9 on stage at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey. Thanks to WHYY's Nancy Stuske, Jana Tripoti Bizet, Yvette Murray, Ali Lesperance, Julian Herzfeld and Adam Stanischewski. After we take a short break, classical music critic Lord Schwartz will play recordings by a singer he recently discovered and really loves. This is FRESH air.
- [39:10]
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- [39:30]
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- [40:18]
Terry Gross
This is Fresh Air. Sometimes we can overlook something that's right under our noses. Classical music critic Lord Schwartz tells us.
- [40:30]
A story about a singer he discovered.
- [40:32]
Only a few months ago without realizing he already had one of her recordings.
- [40:52]
Lloyd Schwartz
Last spring, on a rare visit to Los Angeles, I was especially eager to hear the celebrated acoustics of Walt Disney Hall. I toured the building the year it opened, but I had never heard any music there during this recent visit. Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic were away on tour, but something called the Handel Project was filling in. It was a series of concerts by the French early music ensemble Le Concert d', Astre, led by the renowned French conductor and harpsichordist Emmanuel Haim, whom I had never heard in person by chance. The one program I was free to get to was a performance of Handel's very first oratorio, the Triumph of Time and Disillusionment, an allegorical story about wisdom eventually winning out over pleasure. I had never heard it in a live performance, so for the very first time I would not only get to hear the legendary Disney hall acoustics, but a major work by a composer I love, performed by a celebrated ensemble. Haim is a conductor of impulsive and propulsive energy who is also sensitive to molding beautiful and expressive phrases. The playing was marvelous, and so were the four vocal soloists, but one of them really stood out, the Russian coloratura soprano Yulia Lezhnyeva, now in her mid-30s, who sang the most famous, really the only famous aria in this oratorio. It's an aria that became famous because Handel, as he often did, reused the music and some of the words in a later work, in this case his opera Rinaldo, which was one of his biggest hits. Lascia Cheopiange. Let Me Weep is the heroine's gorgeous lament in Rinaldo, but in the earlier oratorio, it's the figure of pleasure who advises the heroine beauty to pick the rose but leave the thorn. Lasha la spina. I was pretty excited by the performance, which was a perfect fit for the breathtakingly live acoustics of Disney Hall. But it was Lezhnyeva's brilliant coloratura in her fast arias and glowing sensitivity in her slight arias, including the famous one that really moved me. Here's an excerpt of that great slow aria Lascha La Spina from Handel's very first oratorio.
- [44:08]
Terry Gross
Sa.
- [44:34]
Ken Burns
Sam.
- [45:18]
Lloyd Schwartz
A few months after I got home from LA, I was looking through some review copies of CDs that I had put aside over the years. And in one of those stacks, released a decade ago, was an album of early Handel's soprano arias by a singer I didn't know at the time. The surprise was that the soprano on the CD, 10 years younger, was Yulia Lezhnyeva. I could hardly wait to hear the recording. I think her voice has blossomed over the past decade and that although the conductor on the recording is excellent, the musical accompaniment wasn't quite as riveting as Emmanuel Haim's was at Disney Hall. Still, Lezneva's singing of the role of pleasure even 10 years ago was already exceptional and vividly conveys the demands of Handel's remarkable early oratorio. Now let's close with soprano Yulia Lezhnieva singing what may be the even more beautiful and emotional repeat section of that same unforgettable aria.
- [47:11]
Ken Burns
Sam.
- [47:51]
Terry Gross
Lloyd Schwartz is our classical music critic and also the poet laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts. He reviewed a recording of early Handel arias by Russian soprano Yulia Lezhnieva. Tomorrow on FRESH air, Malala Yousafzai, who became the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner at age 17, discusses her new memoir, finding My Way. It's about her life as a young woman navigating friendship, first love and self discovery while living in the global spotlight. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram. P R FRESH air Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Meyers, Anne Marie Boldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yukundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Sivi Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Our co host is Tanya Moseley. I'm Terry Gross.
- [49:19]
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