Robert De Niro walked onto Carnegie Hall’s stage Tuesday night, unannounced and to loud applause. He didn’t make any speeches, at least none of his own. After a career defined by playing gangsters, an avenging taxi driver and a paranoid prize fighter, the Oscar-winning actor recited a call for civility, as first spoken by Abraham Lincoln.
“Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense,” De Niro said in an even voice, halting at first, but becoming firmer as he became caught up in words Lincoln delivered in 1838, early in his public life. “Let those materials be molded into general intelligence, sound morality, and in particular, a reverence for the constitution and laws.”
De Niro was a featured performer at the 39th annual benefit concert for the nonprofit cultural and educational organization Tibet House US, where others appearing ranged from Laurie Anderson and Elvis Costello to Maya Hawke and Allison Russell. He didn’t dwell on current events, or on President Donald Trump, whom he has denounced often fiercely over the past decade. But his reason for giving that particular speech had everything to do with the country today.
De Niro was reading excerpts from Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address,” a warning against mob violence that Lincoln delivered to a young man’s debating society in Springfield, Illinois. Philip Glass, a co-director of Tuesday night’s benefit, used the address as inspiration for his Symphony No. 15, “Lincoln.” He was supposed to premiere his symphony at the Kennedy Center in June, but announced earlier this year that he was calling off the performance, citing Trump’s ouster of the center’s leadership. The president has made the venue a flashpoint for his battle against so-called “woke” culture.
“The values of the Kennedy Center today are in direct conflict with the message of the Symphony,” Glass said in a statement at the time.
Last month, Trump announced that the center would shut down in July for construction he expects to last two years. Numerous artists in addition to Glass had withdrawn from planned appearances, including Renée Fleming, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Bela Fleck.
Trump’s name was rarely spoken by anyone during the nearly three-hour show Tuesday night. But the president was clearly on the minds of numerous performers who denounced the war against Iran, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and what they saw as a general spirit of violence and indifference. Costello, who had the crowd clapping along to “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding,” hardly needed to point out the relevance of a song written by Nick Lowe more than 50 years ago.
Costello appeared toward the end of the night, and spoke of listening backstage and marveling at the “millions” of meanings of what he had been hearing. Tuesday night was a tribute to experimentation and to the universality of music, a world’s tour of sounds and rhythms. It began with an invocation by the Drepung Gomang Monks, continued through the avant-garde compositions of Glass and Anderson, and stopped along the way for folk, gospel, protest songs, Beat poetry, Broadway and such pillars of modern Western music as the Rolling Stones’ “Wild Horses,” performed as a duet by Russell and Toro y Moi, and Paul McCartney’s “Maybe I’m Amazed,” sung by Toro y Moi, the stage name for Chaz Bear.
Tuesday night also featured an unfinished song by Christian Lee Hutson, who promised he would work on it some more, and a duet between Hutson and Hawke, daughter of Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman. Her grandfather, the Buddhist scholar and Tibet House co-founder Robert Thurman, began the night with praise for the artists and a sermon on the right of everyone to be happy. He did not seem to doubt the current joy of his granddaughter; she married Hutson last month, on Valentine’s Day.
