50 years after the Philadelphia Orchestra’s historic tour of China, can music help our nations?

Jan 27, 2024

Fifty years ago, the relationship between the United States and China was bad but improving.

Today, the relationship is bad — and getting dangerously worse.

I have been thinking a lot about this perilous shift on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Philadelphia Orchestra’s historic tour of China as the first American orchestra invited to perform in the People’s Republic.

When maestro Eugene Ormandy took off from Philadelphia International Airport on Sept. 10, 1973, the “Fabulous Philadelphians” crossed a Cold War-era Bamboo Curtain that had separated our countries for 24 years.

By 1973, the Cultural Revolution — a destructive and violent political campaign launched by Chairman Mao Zedong eight years earlier — was easing, and leaders around Mao were maneuvering to end China’s isolation from the United States. President Richard Nixon made his move in this geopolitical chess match by meeting Mao and followed up by asking his favorite conductor to take his musicians to China.

It was a charm offensive to soften perceptions of Americans — and it worked.

The People’s Daily ran a front-page article with a photograph of all 130 members of the Philadelphia entourage. American diplomats in China fired off cables to colleagues in Washington, D.C., declaring the tour a huge geopolitical success.

“We felt like diplomats,” percussionist Anthony Orlando told me recently.

My cousin, Julia Tsien, was in the audience for one of the Shanghai performances, and the concert left an indelible mark. At the time, she was 24 and assigned by the government to work as an accompanist for the Shanghai Lyric Opera. Like all performing arts organizations, her opera company could only present hard-line revolutionary productions with titles like The Red Detachment of Women. Since the start of the Cultural Revolution, Western classical music had been banned in favor of new revolutionary music. That meant no Beethoven, no Mozart, no Chopin.

But in this thaw that began with Nixon, classical music returned — if only for a moment. Julia recounted recently that every seat in the auditorium was taken. Afterward, she and her musician friends marveled at the orchestra’s superior musicianship. On hearing Ormandy conducting Beethoven, she told me, “I never heard such a heavenly sound in my entire life.”

Two other musicians, Zhenmei Wang and her husband Kwang Yu of Roxborough, attended one of the concerts in Beijing. When the Cultural Revolution began, both had been students at the Central Conservatory in the capital. They grew up listening to the orchestra’s vast catalog of albums. “If you studied music,” Yu said, “you knew the Philadelphia Orchestra.”

Yu had been given a ticket to the concert, but Wang had to sneak in. “I wasn’t the only one,” she told me recently. Without a seat, she had to wedge herself between her seated friends. What Wang recalled of the first piece — Pines of Rome by Respighi — was the sound of the timpani. “Wow,” she said, summoning up a memory of the instrument’s rumble. After the piece, an usher realized she didn’t have a seat and threw her out of the concert hall.

Since that first trip in 1973, the Philadelphia Orchestra has toured China more than any American orchestra. I covered three of those tours as part of History Making Production’s documentary crew for our film, Beethoven in Beijing. At the time of the orchestra’s last tour in 2019, tension between the two nations was running high, mostly over trade issues.

Then came the pandemic. And rising military threats over Taiwan. And more revelations about the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. And the crackdown on protests in Hong Kong. And the spy balloon. And on and on and on.

What will happen to cultural interactions like orchestra tours?

Because of China’s previous zero-COVID policy, the orchestra decided last December to cancel its planned May tour to commemorate the 50th anniversary. As tensions between our two nations escalate, I can’t help but wonder: What will happen to cultural interactions like orchestra tours?

It’s not just a question facing Philadelphia. Every major orchestra in the world now includes Beijing and Shanghai on their touring schedules because of China’s growing audience for classical music. But the dilemma works both ways: Would the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra travel to Philadelphia to perform side by side with the orchestra, as it did in 2019 for a special Lunar New Year concert at the Kimmel Center?

It’s easy to come up with a scenario where all types of exchanges are disrupted, not just cultural but also educational and scientific. If that’s the case, I worry about what will be lost at a personal level. The impact of such exchanges should not be underestimated.

One of my favorite stories about 1973 was relayed to me by Robert “Bobby” De Pasquale, a 95-year-old violinist. He said the orchestra had just arrived in Shanghai and he wanted to stretch his legs. He went for a stroll with Harold C. Schonberg, the music critic for the New York Times, and Kati Marton, a reporter for WCAU (now NBC10). They were walking under the sycamore trees in the old French Concession when they heard the sound of a violin coming from a balcony. De Pasquale looked up and saw a young boy. He waved for him to come down.

De Pasquale didn’t speak Chinese; the boy spoke no English. But they both spoke music. The musician took the tiny violin from the boy and showed him how to better practice his scales, and demonstrated legato playing of two notes. Ever the showman, he told me how he then “ripped into some Sibelius and the first movement of Bach’s G minor Sonata.”

A considerable crowd began to form, startled by the sight of an American performing an impromptu concert of banned music on the sidewalk. “There were looks of absolute wonder on people’s faces,” Marton told me. “This was a sound like nothing they had ever heard, coming from the hands of a master violinist.”

“That was the highlight of my trip,” De Pasquale said. “You could tell through the boy’s eyes how much he appreciated what was going on.”

He added that he wished world leaders had been there to see it — to see how easy it is for music to bring people together, to put aside all our differences. “This,” he said, “is what it’s all about.”

Jennifer Lin was China correspondent for The Inquirer in the 1990s. She codirected “Beethoven in Beijing” and wrote a companion oral history (Temple University Press, 2022). To commemorate the 50th anniversary, History Making Productions is hosting a free community screening of “Beethoven in Beijing” at 7 p.m. on Sept. 7 at the Michael A. Nutter Theatre of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. To register, visit bit.ly/BeethovenTicket.