From Critic to Creator

“I’ve always loved festivals,” says John Rockwell, contemplating with satisfaction the fact that after a career spent with his reporter’s eye fixed on cultural events, he now has one of his own to run.

Rockwell, director of the Lincoln Center Festival (which gets underway Monday and runs through Aug. 11), may be an impresario now, but he is an observer by trade. As a music critic at the Los Angeles Times and then for more than 20 years at the New York Times, he covered a beat that extended from the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to the great summer festivals of Salzburg, Aix-en-Provence and Edinburgh, and ranged as far as Tokyo, Morocco and a celebration of Arctic culture in the upper reaches of Norway.

In print, he was an agitator and an advocate, putting his eloquence at the service of artists whose work he found challenging, vibrant and new: composer Virgil Thomson, for instance, whose opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” he praised for its “insouciant avant-gardism” and “nose-thumbing vivacity,” and director Robert Wilson, whose collaboration with Philip Glass on the opera “Einstein on the Beach” he calls “one of the great experiences of my life.”

Then, two years ago, he was given the opportunity that almost every critic both craves and fears: the chance to put other people’s money where his mouth was. Rockwell had spent the previous two years as the New York Times’ roving cultural correspondent based in Paris. When he returned to the United States, Lincoln Center President Nathan Leventhal gave him a call. Would he be interested in creating a festival in his own image from scratch? He was.

“How many people in their mid-50s get a chance not only to change careers completely but also to enter a field in a position of such prominence? To be given Lincoln Center with all its resources--it was extraordinary. I would have been calling myself a wimp for the rest of my life if I’d said no.”

So he said yes, and the result is Lincoln Center Festival 96, a three-week blowout of music, theater, dance, film, technology and the unclassifiable Vietnamese water puppets. One of the major offerings is Wilson’s staging of “Four Saints in Three Acts.”

To a degree that seems almost improbable at an institution with the corporate profile of Lincoln Center, this festival is the product of Rockwell’s taste. The rationale for programming Maguy Marin’s choreography of Delibes’ “Coppelia” was that “I saw it and I liked it and I thought it would be a great thing to have.” If Leventhal turned to a critic, rather than a proven arts administrator, it was “because of his creativity, the breadth of his knowledge and his taste,” and having done so, he granted him the freedom to indulge it.

“You can’t hire somebody like that and then second-guess his programmatic choices,” Leventhal says. “Of course, the flip side of having that flexibility is that he can’t point to anybody else if it goes wrong.”

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Rockwell loves festivals in part because he thinks of them as more than a collection of performances: “I buy into the idea of a festival being a secular continuation of a religious ritual. Festivals become places of pilgrimage, events that lift people out of the ordinary and into a realm of art.”

As Rockwell squints out his office window at the sun-washed roofs of Lincoln Center, a concrete landscape of right angles and gray-white planes, he is actually talking about Bayreuth. Every summer, in the Bavarian town where the descendants of Richard Wagner still manage the theater the composer designed for his own works, Wagner’s latter-day acolytes come to bask in the great man’s spirit and go to a different opera every night.

But of course, Rockwell’s festival is not Bayreuth--or Salzburg or Aix or even Edinburgh--and it is not taking place in some mountain-ringed village of quiet, cobbled streets where, for a two-week period, cosmopolitan culture blends with picturesqueness. No matter how big the Lincoln Center Festival is, it will not take over the town. Whether its presence can even persuade people to brave the fetid air and melting sidewalks of Manhattan in midsummer is an open question.

With a few exceptions (notably Lincoln Center’s own 30-year-old Mostly Mozart Festival), what cultural life New York City does have in summertime, when those who can afford it generally head for the hills or the beach, has thus far tended to be outdoors and free. So Rockwell is banking on tourists.

“There’s no question that in the dead of summer, some New Yorkers leave town,” he acknowledges, “but for the same reason that they’re leaving for Paris and Florence, Parisians and Florentines are coming here.”

And if New Yorkers do like their city’s institutions quiet in summer--well, they shouldn’t: “It would be sad to think that the cultural interests of New Yorkers die in June and only flicker back to life in October.”

Even allowing that New York’s penchant for summertime philistinism might be a problem, Rockwell’s solution is not to fill his festival with the cultural equivalent of wine coolers, such as outdoor Vivaldi concerts and an evening of flamenco, but to take the opportunity to fill a cultural void. One thing this country needed, Rockwell says, is an annual summit meeting of luminaries drawn from different arts and many parts of the world--”a big, major festival on the Edinburgh or Salzburg model is something America hasn’t had.”

Now it has one, and even though it is Rockwell who picked its 64 events out of the whole world’s offerings of entertainment, and it is he who got to decide exactly how to spend the festival’s $8.5-million budget, he acknowledges that he is not quite sure what to expect.

“You are looking at someone who has never put on a show,” he says, “and I won’t be able to say different until July 23.”

But Rockwell, 55, is not a man to be fazed by inexperience. Ever the cultural analyst, he seems to be studying himself closely in his new role and, so far, giving himself high marks for his handling of the transition from newsroom cubicle to leather-upholstered executive’s chair. Before becoming festival director, he had never administered anything more intricate than his computer’s hard drive, yet he obviously thrives on the schedule, budgetary and organizational problems, enjoys being on the other end of an interview, gets pleasure out of writing memos and faxes and is intrigued by the differences between his former and his current careers.

“In both cases,” he explains, “you start with an idea. But if you’re a critic, even if you’re sensitive to the realities of the world, you still have an ideal and you measure reality against it. If you’re an administrator, your ideal goes through a refining process, and the question is: Does it come out the other side all tarnished and scuffed, or is it more richly colored?

“One thing I find intellectually interesting is the notion of constant adaptation to reality. Maybe you have to re-conceive the ideal and maybe you wind up with something better in the end.”

Rockwell has spent a lifetime doing the research for this job: In high school he sought advice from San Francisco Chronicle music and art critic Alfred Frankenstein on how best to make his opinions matter. At Harvard, he went from his teenage years of record collecting straight into a major in music but eventually decided to take a broader view, switching to the interdisciplinary field of history and literature. (“Literature” he interpreted to mean “music,” and his senior honors thesis was on Richard Strauss’ opera “Arabella.”)

Then it was on to a doctoral program in cultural history at UC Berkeley. His dissertation focused not on an artist or writer but on Leo Kestenberg, the music educator and administrator who formulated Prussian cultural policy during the Weimar Republic until the advent of Nazism forced him to Israel, where he ran the Palestine Orchestra.

“I’ve always had an interest in the people who make it happen,” Rockwell says.

His dissertation was also part of a lifelong fascination with things German, engendered perhaps when he was a small child living in the blistered city of Berlin just after World War II. (His father, an attorney, helped design a West German judicial system to the Allies’ specifications.) From his stark memories of those two years-- streetcars snaking their way through mounds of rubble, the house next door so full of unexploded mines and bullets that when a fire started, the whole building began to pop and burst--Rockwell fashioned a Germanophilia that, though it makes scant appearance this year, he expects will make itself felt in Lincoln Center Festival 97.

If it does, then next year’s festival will be freighted with issues Rockwell has been thinking about for years: “Germany truly was the most cultured country in the world, and yet it created the greatest barbarism in the world. That brings up questions like ‘What’s the relationship between art and morality, between art and civilized behavior?’ ”

Despite all the abstract cerebration he brings to the office every day, there is another, less rarefied strain in the development of Rockwell’s taste. It is what led him to cover a comic book festival in southern France for the New York Times, to write a book about Frank Sinatra and to begin, however tentatively, to bring pop music into the Lincoln Center Festival fold.

Rockwell’s first exposure to live music was San Francisco pops concerts conducted by Arthur Fiedler, which the boy could get into for 25 cents.

“This was way pre-rock,” he says. “When I was young, there was still the ‘Hit Parade,’ which was full of dopey little novelty tunes. Of course, I liked a lot of those dopey little novelty tunes.”

Then, when Rockwell was in his teens, came the revolution.

“I remember sitting in a movie theater watching ‘Blackboard Jungle,’ ” Rockwell reminisces about the 1955 film that featured Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” “I remember the feeling of everybody around me: They had never heard music like this.”

When Rockwell went to the New York Times in the early 1970s, he found a paper without a pop music department--at a time when the first wave of serious rock critics had already broken. Soon, he became the paper’s chief pop music critic before he had even graduated from stringer to full-time staff writer.

“It was a great time to be writing about rock,” he says. “There was the New York underground scene, there was English punk, there was the emergence of Bruce Springsteen.”

Rockwell straddled the paper’s rock and classical departments, and that double duty too had an intellectual purpose: “I got into pop music wanting to make a point about the totality of music--I wanted to write about music, not just little corners of music.”

But large organizations like the New York Times do not think in terms of artistic holism but in terms of division of labor, and by 1980 Rockwell had to choose. He chose classical music. Even as the string-puller at Lincoln Center, he has found himself stymied by the fact that different musical genres inhabit separate economic realities: Pop music is expected to make money; classical music routinely loses it.

“One of the intellectually interesting things is to try to figure out how a big, grand, not-for-profit institution like Lincoln Center should involve itself in commercial music--it’s an ongoing project in my brain,” he says.

So although the festival does include an “International Gospel and Soul Celebration,” plans for a three-concert tribute to James Brown at the Metropolitan Opera had to be scrapped. For future years, though, Rockwell is mulling a cross-genre exploration of musical high technology that would draw musicians, composers and engineers from IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and link them with their counterparts in the worlds of hip-hop and ambient music.

That kind of linkage makes the Lincoln Center Festival a sort of map of Rockwell’s mind, a web of intellectual references and associations. He thinks, therefore the festival is.

“Thought is making connections,” he says. “Connectedness is what brings coherence to anarchy.”

Some of the connections between this year’s events are straightforward enough--the New York Philharmonic’s concert performance of Beethoven’s only opera, “Fidelio,” juxtaposed against a period-instrument performance of the same opera’s earlier version, “Leonore,” by John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, for instance.

But some links are more obscure, others unplanned. There are mini-festivals devoted to playwright Samuel Beckett (the Gate Theatre of Dublin will perform his complete stage works) and composer Morton Feldman, whose work shares the same lonely and austere existentialism. Beckett also wrote the libretto for Feldman’s only opera, “Neither,” and Feldman’s last work (to be performed at the festival) was titled “For Samuel Beckett.”

The chain goes on: Feldman’s mentor was John Cage, whose last collaborative work with Merce Cunningham is also on the festival program. And Cage connects to featured composer Virgil Thomson--they wrote about each other--and Rockwell wrote the introduction to a collection of Thomson’s writings. Cage was also influential in turning the heads of Western composers eastward, and the scheduled performance by the Japanese traditional music ensemble Reigakusha of a work by Lois Vierk is a tacit tribute to the enigmatic composer-philosopher.

“Part of it is serendipitous,” Rockwell says, “part of it is deliberate, part of it is recognizing serendipity when it hits you in the face.”

Rockwell can only hope that audiences will follow his train of thought to the box office and that the habitues of New York’s myriad specialized venues will rub shoulders at Lincoln Center. He believes that audiences for the arts are not as compartmentalized as entertainment corporations would have us think--and he has commissioned an audience study to prove it--but how many people will have the combination of time, cash and intellectual curiosity to sample his smorgasbord of comparisons?

“Will people want to go to both Berlioz’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ [performed in concert by the Kirov Opera Orchestra and Chorus] and the New York Philharmonic’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ program [with musical settings by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev and Bernstein]? I don’t know.”

Rockwell would love nothing better than for his festival to broaden a few minds, but he knows that the economic future of the festival may depend on those who order their culture a la carte, picking up just one or two events.

“We hope to offer them a wonderful experience,” he says with a marketer’s genial flexibility. “And we’ll happily take their money.”

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Lincoln Center Festival 96 runs Monday through Aug. 11 at nine venues in New York. Information: (212) 875-5030; tickets: (212) 721-6500.