On a Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer, in an open-sided wooden concert shed in the hills of western Massachusetts, a baritone stood up in front of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and began speaking the words of a young Illinois lawyer who had stood up in a lecture hall in 1838 and warned his neighbours that the greatest danger to their country would not come from abroad.
The music under him was by Philip Glass, who was eighty-nine years old and sitting in the audience. The piece was his Symphony No. 15, subtitled Lincoln, eight movements and about thirty-five minutes long, scored for orchestra and a single male voice that sometimes sings and sometimes just talks.
It was a world premiere, which is always a bit of an occasion. What made this one unusual is that the symphony had not been written for that shed, or for that orchestra, or for that summer. It had been written on a commission from the National Symphony Orchestra, and it was supposed to have been unveiled the previous month in Washington, in the concert hall at the Kennedy Center, in the year the United States marked its 250th anniversary.
Glass took it away.
That is the rare part. Composers miss deadlines. Orchestras postpone premieres, lose funding, swap programmes around at the last minute. What almost never happens in public is a composer looking at a commission that has been agreed, scheduled, announced and written, and saying that the piece will not be played in the building it was written for.
Glass made the announcement in a short written statement in the winter, and he picked the day deliberately. It was the 188th anniversary of the speech at the heart of the symphony, the address Abraham Lincoln gave to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, as a man in his late twenties. The statement was one sentence long in its essentials. Symphony No. 15 is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, he wrote, and the values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony.
He did not elaborate, then or later. He declined interviews around the premiere.
The background to it is a matter of record and can be stated plainly. In early 2025 the leadership of the Kennedy Center changed, with the sitting US president taking the chairmanship of the board. Late that year the board voted to add his name to the building, and the name went up on the facade. Glass withdrew the symphony weeks after that. The Kennedy Center and the National Symphony did not issue public responses to the withdrawal, and the piece was taken off the June dates.
What happens next in a situation like that is genuinely complicated, and it is worth understanding, because a commission is not a favour. It is a contract. An orchestra pays a composer a fee, often with other orchestras or a consortium sharing the cost, and in exchange it gets the score and, crucially, it gets the premiere: the first performance, the announcement, the reviews, the association of the institution’s name with a new piece of music forever afterwards. Commissioning bodies buy the right to be first. That right is the product.
So a withdrawal is not simply a gesture. It removes the one thing the commissioner was actually buying, and it leaves an open question about the fee, the score and who may perform the work when. None of the parties here have described publicly how those questions were settled, and it would be wrong to guess. What is visible from the outside is the result. The commissioner’s name stayed attached to the symphony as the body that commissioned it, and the premiere went somewhere else.
Somewhere else turned out to be Tanglewood, the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer home in the Berkshires, roughly 300 miles north of Washington. The orchestra announced in the early spring that it would give the world premiere in July, as part of a four-day run of concerts built around the anniversary year. Glass offered a short, warm line about Tanglewood and the orchestra having a long history with new music and with civic life, which is true and which also, pointedly, said nothing about the row.
Moving a premiere from a concert hall to Tanglewood changes the piece’s first breath in ways that are easy to underrate.
The Kennedy Center’s concert hall is an indoor room that seats a couple of thousand people and holds sound the way a box holds sound. Everyone is sitting still, in the dark, in the same air. Tanglewood’s main venue, the Shed, is a vast open-sided wooden structure on a lawn, seating more than five thousand under its roof, with thousands more outside on the grass with picnic blankets and folding chairs. Birds come through. Weather comes through. Children run about at the back.
For a symphony whose whole design depends on a single voice speaking unaccompanied at its most serious moments, that is not a neutral swap. Quiet is harder to buy outdoors. A long, low, sustained ending is more exposed when there is no ceiling to hold it.
There is another difference, and it is the more interesting one. The Washington audience for a June subscription concert in the anniversary year would have been, to a large extent, a Washington audience: a capital crowd, in a national building, hearing a national subject. The Tanglewood audience on a July weekend is a holiday crowd, families and summer visitors and people who drove up for the day, many of whom bought a lawn ticket for a programme rather than a premiere.
Glass’s symphony was not the only Lincoln on the bill. The orchestra surrounded it with two other pieces about the same man, which is either a generous piece of programming or a slightly risky one, depending on how you look at it. There was a suite from John Williams’ score for the 2012 Spielberg film, and there was Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait, the 1942 piece for orchestra and narrator that ends with the Gettysburg Address read out over brass. The Boston Symphony has performed the Copland seventy-four times in its history. The narrator that afternoon was the actor Alec Baldwin.
Being the new piece at the front of a programme that also contains one of the best-loved patriotic works in the American repertoire is a hard place to stand. The Copland is designed to make an audience sit up straight. It has a big tune, a famous text and a finish.
Glass wrote almost the opposite.
Symphony No. 15 takes its words entirely from Lincoln himself, and it does not take the famous ones. The spine of it is the Lyceum Address of 1838, which is not a speech most people can quote: a young man’s warning about mob violence and about the ways a free country can lose itself from the inside. Around that, Glass set an autobiographical sketch Lincoln wrote in the 1860s, when he was asked for biographical material and produced something almost comically plain about a poor childhood and a scanty education. There is a movement drawing on the Emancipation Proclamation. There is the short farewell he gave to his neighbours in Springfield when he left for Washington in 1861, never to come back alive. And there is his last public address, delivered days before he was killed.
The movement titles are as unglamorous as the texts. Lyceum Address in two parts. Autobiography in two parts. Slavery. The End of War. Farewell Address.
Some of it is sung. Some of it is spoken over the orchestra. Some of the heaviest lines, by the account of Zachary James, the baritone who gave the first performance, are delivered with the orchestra silent, the voice alone in the room. Karen Kamensek conducted, and both she and James were making their debuts with the orchestra and at Tanglewood, which is a lot of newness to put on one stage for a world premiere.
The reviews that came out afterwards agreed on the facts and disagreed, usefully, about the piece.
Boston Classical Review’s verdict was that it is not really a symphony at all, but closer to a secular oratorio: eight fairly self-contained panels rather than an argument that builds. That is a criticism and also a description. The same review praised James for finding an actual human being in the texts, gravity and dry humour both, with a reedy tone that suited a man rather than a monument, and credited Kamensek with holding the shape of something episodic together as the rhythmic layers stacked up.
NPR noted what the ending does, which is the detail that tells you most about Glass’s intentions. There is no triumph. The symphony closes on long, quiet, sustained chords, with Lincoln’s hopeful words spoken as he leaves Illinois, and it leaves the hope unresolved. The listener is not told whether the man’s confidence was justified. Given that the audience knows exactly what happened to him, that is a decision with a lot of weight in it.
The Berkshire Eagle’s critic came out warmest, calling the premiere radiant, and using the word historic with a small apology for reaching for it.
You can read those three verdicts as a disagreement about whether the piece works. You can also read them as three people describing the same thing from different distances. A set of panels, a voice that stays human, an ending that refuses to resolve. That is a portrait rather than a monument, which is what Glass said he had written before any of the argument started.
Lincoln is not a new subject for him. Glass has spent fifty years writing large works about people who changed things and paid for it, from Gandhi in Satyagraha to Akhenaten, and he put Lincoln on an opera stage nearly twenty years ago in Appomattox, which premiered in San Francisco in 2007 and which he substantially rewrote for a new production in Washington in 2015. That production was staged by Washington National Opera, which performs at the Kennedy Center. The man who withdrew a symphony from that building had one of his operas revived there within the last decade.
That is not a contradiction. It is the ordinary shape of a long career in an art form that depends almost entirely on institutions, and it is part of why the withdrawal mattered to other composers. The people who write this music do not have many levers. They do not own halls. They do not sell tickets on their own names, mostly. What they control is the score and the timing of its first performance, and Glass used the only lever he had.
There is a cost to the orchestra that catches a piece in that situation too, and it is not only money. An institution that picks up a withdrawn commission is making a visible choice, and a summer festival that depends on a broad ticket-buying public is not usually eager to be visible in that way. The Boston Symphony said very little about the politics and a great deal about the music, programmed it inside an anniversary weekend, and let the concert be the statement.
What the orchestra got, in return, was the premiere. That belongs to Tanglewood now, permanently, in every future programme note and every recording booklet. Whatever else is arguable here, that transfer is real and it is not reversible.
The clock on all of this is Glass’s age, and it is the quiet thing sitting under the whole story. He was eighty-nine at the premiere. He turns ninety at the end of January, and the birthday has become a global season of concerts across dozens of cities.
The symphony has a place in it. On his ninetieth birthday itself, at Carnegie Hall, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s is scheduled to perform Symphony No. 15 under Dennis Russell Davies, a conductor who has been playing Glass’s music since long before it was respectable to do so. A further run is scheduled with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra the following summer. As of now there is no announced performance by the orchestra that commissioned it, though nothing has been said to rule one out, and a piece that outlives a row usually ends up being played by everyone eventually.
That is the thing worth holding on to. Withdrawals tend to end badly for the work. A piece pulled from its premiere often just disappears, because the machinery that would have carried it, the marketing, the reviews, the recording, the second and third orchestras looking at what worked somewhere else, all of that machinery was attached to the date that got cancelled.
This one did not disappear. It was written, it was withdrawn, it was picked up, it was played in front of thousands of people on a summer afternoon, it was reviewed by critics who argued about it, and it is now booked into other cities with other conductors. A new piece of orchestral music surviving its own first year is not a small achievement even without a controversy attached.
The last sound Glass wrote for it is a long, quiet chord under a man saying he hopes it will be all right, in a building with no walls, with the summer going on outside. He did not decide, in the music, whether the hope was warranted. He left that to whoever is listening, which is where the audience for a portrait of Lincoln has always been left.