The New York Philharmonic behind the Iron Curtain: goodwill tour or Cold War propaganda?

© 2012 Jessica Catherine BlackIn 1959, the New York Philharmonic embarked on its longest and most ambitious venture to date: a ten-week tour of the Soviet Union and Europe. At the height of Cold War hostilities, Leonard Bernstein led the orchestra abroad under the sponsorship of President Eisenhower’s Special International Program for Cultural Presentations. US-Soviet cultural exchanges had been occurring since the early 1950s to bring about mutual understanding and benefit amid the tensions of the Cold War. The Philharmonic’s 1959 tour provides a specific insight into the cultural exchange process and illuminates the musical and political ramifications of cultural tours of this period. The promotion of American music was a significant aspect of the 1959 tour, and the Philharmonic’s programs reflected the influence of Bernstein’s personal and professional relationships with American composers of the period. By examining the American press coverage of the tour, it is possible to see how Bernstein and the Philharmonic were utilised to promote the United States’s cultural achievements at a time of intense political and scientific rivalry with the Soviet Union. Bernstein shed his image of the early 1950s of a radical leftist implicated in McCarthyism to become the model of the new breed of American-born and -trained musicians and a representative of American values. Through him and the Philharmonic, the United States sought to show that it was a cultural leader as well as a world power. The Philharmonic’s tour demonstrated how notions of goodwill were overshadowed by unavoidable Cold War competition and that the tour’s success contributed to the shaping of American national identity