Historian Richard Tedlow joins me to ask what made Bach charismatic in his own time and ours. He also argues that no matter the political situation, “Bach’s music is going to exist as long as the human race exists and can’t be taken away.” Along the way we consider the charisma of Bernstein, Gould, Clinton, Hitler, and Trump.

Here’s Richard’s Substack.

Playlists of works referenced in this episode, including those by Shostakovich, Bach, Brahms, and Strauss. Apple Music and Spotify below.

Transcript:

Evan Goldfine: Hello, and welcome to the fifth episode of A Year of Bach. I’m Evan Goldfine. Today my guest is Richard Tedlow, one of our leading historians of business. He was a longtime professor at Harvard Business School and later an instructor at Apple where he taught executives in their internal Apple University. Richard studies how leaders persuade, connect and make decisions how they deceive themselves and others.

And he’s put a special focus on the elusive force of charisma in leaders. Today we’ll speculate a bit on Bach’s charisma and what it might have been, and we can see how charismatic conductors act in the world today. We’ll also touch on our president’s charisma and Richard’s deep connection to Bach’s music.

Richard, welcome.

Richard Tedlow: Thank you very much. Pleasure to be here.

Evan Goldfine: Before charisma, let’s talk about Bach and your connection to the music itself.

Richard Tedlow: I didn’t start music with Bach. One of the characteristics of Bach is that one finds [00:01:00] oneself listening to his music without realizing that he composed it.

The Air on the G-string the Jesu, Joy of Man’s desiring, this is part of normal sort of living in this world, and you hear it without necessarily connecting it to the name Bach. I’ve been listening to music seriously since I was a kid. My parents introduced me to it.

The first opera I went to was Carmen with Risë Stevens at the Miami Opera Company in Miami, Florida. And so I’ve been interested in this kind of music my whole life. I went to Bayreuth three times to hear Wagner’s music there. And Bach I began to seriously listen to when I was in college.

I graduated from Yale in 1969. And there I first heard the Cantata 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, and other music by Bach, and you realized that this was an [00:02:00] extraordinary creative human being.

So here’s a question. How much do you have to know? How much do you have to sort of work, if you will to how much does music have the right, if you will, to ask you to invest in it, in order to get the most out of it? Versus to what extent does music hear itself? So you’re not involved at all, basically.

So move, moving from noise. To really find complex music, how much do you need yourself to invest? And I think the older the music is, and Bach was from 1685 to 1750 the more you have to invest for the most part with the exception of some pieces. The Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor would be a classic example.

Everybody’s heard that and they don’t necessarily [00:03:00] associate it with Bach. On the other hand, at least to me, the Goldberg Variations. You have to concentrate, at least I have to concentrate. And the difference between Glenn Gould’s first recording of that set of pieces and the last one is really dramatic.

And I saw when I was at Apple, I saw a remarkable presentation about this, and that presentation greatly increased my own ability to enjoy and appreciate it. So that’s a question. How much do you have to know, or how much do you have to invest in order to get the most out of the music as opposed to the music just hearing itself?

Evan Goldfine: What a beautiful question. I think that you can be a passive listener and enjoy it. You can be an active listener and enjoy, and you can be a player and enjoy. And then you can be a scholar to learn about the historical importance and where each of these composers, Bach included, fit on the great timeline of the composers of Western music.

I think you get back what you invest. [00:04:00] And even then some. And just like with anything else, you could glance at a book of poetry. You can read Shakespeare Sonnets on the first glance, and there’s some nice stuff and you might not get it, but if you really take your time with it, you’re going to unearth more and more things.

And, what’s great about Bach in particular is that often in some of the pieces, not all of them, but it’s a pleasant first listen. And as you listen again, something happens inside as you are processing the multiple moving lines. Often you’re hearing different musicians emphasize different parts of the music.

So there’s the performance side that you’re enjoying, and also the core of the music itself. So if you’re playing it yourself on a piano or on a guitar, you see the architecture of how things are moving in order to create this thing that just sounds pleasant or moving even. There’s really no way to explain why Cantata 140 might move you to [00:05:00] tears.

That’s not explicable, and that’s the beauty of why we’re talking about this today, 300 years after Bach’s time. Something about that music has really moved us for centuries and many millions of people. And I’ve described this as a backwards explanation for something divine.

I’ve heard one of my favorite musicians, a bassist named Victor Wooten says that music needs us as much as we need the music. Music can be abstract, but if it’s not resonating through a person doesn’t exist. It’s one of the great mysteries and pleasures of life and Bach is one of the greatest exemplars of how to create it with deep meaning and with deep emotion. Because without the emotional connection, it’s just a curiosity.

Richard Tedlow: I think that’s very well put. I think that there has to be this emotional connection and going through life as you and [00:06:00] I are doing, and just encountering curiosities to use your word as opposed to deep emotional connections is not a very fulfilling way to go through life.

So that’s one thing that draws one to Bach. What is it about Bach that is magnetic and charismatic, if you will? What is it about it that’s so utterly appealing? And I think that once again, to use your phrase, if the first listen is not an invitation, you are not likely to have a second listen or to go to Wagner.

If all you hear is the noise, and there is a lot of it in Wagner. You’re not gonna go to the next, listen. So there’s gotta be something that resonates with you, some, something that is harmonic with you in this music and Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, is just that’s that piece. It works. So why? If Bach could’ve said it another way, he would’ve said it another way and he would’ve been a novelist or a poet or you name it, he said it through his music and by almost by [00:07:00] definition tho, those aren’t words, even though he is setting words to music.

I think that with the words of music, there is a matching of sound and sense that is very powerful with Bach. Can I play a little one snippet of music

Richard Tedlow: From the B minor mass. Okay. It’s the Gratias Agimus Tibi. In other words, we give thanks for your great glory.

Thinking about the B minor mass, the most accessible part of it is the Gloria. You can’t miss it, and I only got to this later, but you listen to it and you listen to it and you realize this is really this, this is glorious, if you will.

In addition to the fact that the music is simply beautiful to listen to there is an authenticity about Bach music, which is very hard to capture in words. You have to capture it in music, you have to listen to it. But there’s an authenticity, a sense that you are touching the ground truth of a human being and that human being’s relationship to [00:09:00] the everlasting the divine.

Bach to state the obvious was a profoundly religious Lutheran. And that comes through. I mean the genuine, I mean, in a world where there’s so much that’s phony, frankly, that to touch something genuine is a large part of the inspiration of Bach and a large part of, if you will, the charisma of him.

So I think that it’s the first listen has got to work. Authenticity. The more you discover, the more you listen to it. And with Bach especially, the more you discover as you age and you listen to it, I started listening to this music, to Bach music when I was about 18. I’m gonna be 78 years old tomorrow.

That’s a long time. And it’s, it sounds different and it moves you in a different way now that I’m elderly than it did when I was a kid.

Evan Goldfine: Could you dig into that a little bit more?

Richard Tedlow: I think [00:10:00] that without sounding cliche ridden, which is not something that I want to sound, but Bach touches something fundamental in the human experience.

And the more human experience that one has, the more one can go back to that. And be enriched by his own, if you will. Insights. It’s a cheap word. This is music we’re talking about, not words. The more you can be touched, which is the real thing. Bach himself as a religious person was profoundly in search of communion.

For him, it was communion with God through Jesus Christ. That’s in all his music. And for us, it’s communion with him. It’s true contact, genuine human contact, which I think we all crave in order to be fully alive. I think there are a couple of other things that I’ll just mention, which are quite remarkable to me anyway, about Bach.

One is that this guy, this man, this [00:11:00] genius lived basically his whole life. In a 90 mile by 70 mile area of Thuringia and Saxony. There was no Germany at the time of his life. But, he could have gone to Paris, he could have gone to London, like Handel did, or Milan or Venice or, there are a lot of other places that he didn’t go.

The man was a provincial. And for someone for this genius to emerge from that soil is very intriguing. And there’s something else, which is that the 30 years war took place from 1618 to 1648. And in certain parts of what is now Germany 50% of the people living there lost their lives.

There was massive depopulation. He was born in 1685. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the 30 years war, was in 1648. It’s not that long. So I think that perhaps [00:12:00] growing up with that heritage and certainly his parents, his family, this must have been a very vivid reality in their lives.

The slaughter of the 30 years war, looking for the divine in the context of inhumanity might have some been something else that propelled him, I don’t know, but that’s just speculation.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah. And it’s beautiful how you sense and I sense this great human truth, wordlessly,

In the Goldbergs in the solo cello suites in the violin sonatas, and it doesn’t need the words, but it’s still touching on something profoundly real. And that’s the genius and hard to get to.

Richard Tedlow: Yes.

Evan Goldfine: I’d like to pivot towards talking about what we can speculate about Bach’s charisma, and I’ll talk about maybe my lay person’s understanding of the idea of charisma.

I’ve met only a handful of charismatic people in my life. And what I think of that is, is someone who attracts other people through their aura, [00:13:00] something more than beauty or grace or brains. There’s a unique personality force, people who might light up a room to be the person that other people want to be near, a gravitational pull.

And I’m just going to share a couple people who I’ve shared a room with before, who I felt that with. Probably first was Bill Clinton. I saw him coming out of a restaurant once and he was like, this demi-god walking out. He’s this huge guy and people were losing their minds. This was in the early two thousands, but he had an incredible aura about him.

I met Cindy Crawford once. Paul McCartney I had the great fortune of meeting for a few minutes. Christopher Hitchens, the writer. I had a couple former classmates, a former coworker, a VC guy or two, but it’s exceedingly rare. So what is charisma? Why is it so rare in the real world, or maybe I’m conceiving of charisma slightly differently than you do when you speak about it from a scholarly way.

Richard Tedlow: No, I think that without going into the definitions in the history of the word, which comes from religion, by the way, in the 19th century, a man named [00:14:00] Rudolph Sohm, which was picked up by. Max Weber, who really is the person, the sociologist who moved it into common parlance. By the way, I met Bill Clinton, a grand total of one time.

I shook his hand one time. It was in December of 1992 in Little Rock, and it was astonishing. Mean just the circle of people around him. The magnetism of the man. Yes. The sense when you were around him that the normal bounds of your life didn’t necessarily have to contain you. The idea that trees can grow in the sky.

And so as far as the meaning of charisma is concerned, Potter Stewart famously said about pornography. I know it when I see it. And he certainly had it in 1992. Steve Jobs is a classic example in the business world. Of somebody who had it. Why is that? He didn’t seem to be constrained by the normal bounds that I am contained by.

One of his famous models was think different [00:15:00] and even that term think different. It’s not “think differently,” which is the normal way. It’s “think different”. And when I started there, which was in 2010, you got a plexiglass little set of nine people. There are nine people here Jim Henson of the Muppets, Wynton Marsalis Maria Callas Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso and Amelia Earhart, Bob Dylan, and so on. And these people are all people who thought different. They’re all people who got out of themselves the Dalai Lama and Graham, the great modern dancer. And this didn’t come with instructions. The idea was you should, you should be like the misfits because fitting in is not the goal. The goal is to to use Robert Noyce, who was the Intel employee, number one don’t be encumbered by history.

Go out and do something wonderful. That was the idea at Apple and it was very [00:16:00] inspiring. And the results are there for all to see. So that was charismatic, if you will. But I think it’s a question of someone who inspires you to think beyond reason about what you can achieve in this world.

And if you find that person you cleave to him or her, because that’s a wonderful way to live.

Evan Goldfine: Charisma is used best when it is doing that inspiration to other people. But charisma implies a certain amount of power, if they’re inspiring you to think different because you could be thinking different in a way that is not necessarily healthy for yourself or society. Why don’t we talk about some of the downsides of charisma? And often some of these charismatic people that you’ve featured and charismatic political figures have used that charisma to nefarious ends.

Richard Tedlow: Leadership is dangerous because you can lead toward a laudable goal and you [00:17:00] can mislead.

So Robert J. Lifton, who’s this famous psychologist who passed away just recently at the age of 99, used a phrase called ‘thought terminating cliches’. And that’s something that leaders can come up with and it’s dangerous. So one has to be careful about the person. Or people in whom one chooses to place one’s faith.

Evan Goldfine: Mm-hmm.

Richard Tedlow: That word faith, that’s not reason. And when you take leave of your reason and live on the basis of faith, if your leader is not morally centered, you’ve got a problem and the world has a problem. And that’s difficult. Now with a man like Bach as you pointed out you don’t start off being him and attract the kind of attention that he was able to attract without social media, if you will.

Unless there’s something very special. And if you read [00:18:00] about the first encounter that people of his musical ability, Dietrich Buxtehude type people, you name it they came to understand. That here was an individual who had something special to contribute not only to the human race, but to the development of their art, which music, depending on how far you go, is as complicated as anything in this world.

Music theory is, you know, higher mathematics, which by the way is one of the problems with music. I’ve heard people say that the Grosse Fuge Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge is beloved of mathematicians, which I’m not. On the other hand, with Beethoven you really, you don’t have to study a lot to appreciate the Emperor Concerto or the ninth Symphony, or the fifth Sym, or the sixth Symphony.

[00:19:00] His music is quite accessible for the most part, I would say from a percentage standpoint. More accessible, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it bridged the classical and the romantic period. Beethoven states were 1770 to 1827. So we went basically from being in the world of Mozart, to the world of Chopin.

And Chopin, by the way, was deeply influenced by Bach, as was Debussy, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect anyway. I think that you could listen to Beethoven’s complete oeuvre and never have a moment when you’re asking yourself, why am I listening to this exactly. Whereas with Bach I don’t know what your experience is.

I’d be interested in knowing. But, for example, the English Suites, which I have seen performed when I was living in Silicon Valley, they didn’t speak to me.

Evan Goldfine: Oh goodness. You’ve been listening to the wrong recordings.

Richard Tedlow: It was a live performance. And it’s possible that the [00:20:00] performer wasn’t able to communicate the beauty of that to me.

Also, it was the first time I heard them.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Richard Tedlow: And I think that’s a dilemma because you don’t know in a sense how to listen. But for example, the Toccata and Fugue and D Minor, the interesting thing about that piece of music, so, on YouTube there is a Latvian woman whose name now I can’t remember.

But you can go and search Latvian woman playing Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor. And she’s wonderful. She’s playing on this gigantic organ in Riga. And that you don’t have to study that. But what is interesting about that piece of music, which I first heard what in 1967 or something like that, was that the more you listen to it, the more you hear.

And that’s extremely intriguing to me because the first thing that you hear is okay the original, the introduction to it, this is extraordinarily accessible. But now I realize that the last few bars are absolutely [00:21:00] wonderful.

But I it, it was important for me to see her playing that as well as to listen to it.

I will send you a link for this recording so you can see what I have in mind. Terrific. I think with the English Suites, it wasn’t that accessible to me, and I had never heard it before, so I don’t know. But

Evan Goldfine: I have some thoughts about all of this, so thank you.

I feel as though Bach really lays a performer bare. There’s no place to hide in Bach. It’s spare. It’s demanding a lot from you. There’s not a lot of markings in the score to say, this should be at this tempo or at this volume. It should crescendo like this. It’s very open for interpretation, which is why you get a very wide range of it. At the same time, if you don’t have something really meaningful to say about this music, it will fall flat.

It will just sound a little bit robotic. It could sound stiff. You can be very bored, and it really depends on the recording. We have been blessed with many [00:22:00] extraordinary performers in the recorded age. For the English Suites, I’m gonna link again to everybody Martha Argerich’s Bach album that starts with the second English suite in A Minor, which is just the top of the mountain for me. You cannot get better than that. The first movement’s probably four of the best recorded minutes of music in the 20th century. I love it. So you’ll connect with that soon.

I feel as though you really do have to find the right match of the performer in the piece and yourself in that moment. I feel like you should find something to hang onto in the moment that makes you wanna listen again. I think in Bach there’s always something to hang onto.

It just is a matter of the right performance and your own right temperament. What kind of mood that you’re in are you open to hearing a certain thing? And also, I’ll say that I’ve heard many extraordinary performers live in concert play Bach’s music and do very poorly with it because they’re better suited to different sorts of music.

It’s [00:23:00] extremely hard to do well, which is why every great recording is a blessing. And even when, I don’t care for Glenn Gould’s second Goldberg Variations. I think it’s way too slow. I don’t connect at all. The first one is a tour de force for me. I prefer it more blazing.

But then there are other interpretations that I’ve listened to over this past year that are so different, so unusual, very deeply personal to all these people. And they’re not blazing. There’s contemplative ones, there’s mysterious ones. There’s interpretations on harpsichord and on clavichord and for String Quartet, so super interesting stuff can be done. And that’s gonna provide the connection to the music. I’ll also, I’ve been thinking about something you said a few moments ago about how there has to be something deeply accessible at first.

I think that’s true, but I think it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s harmonic or tonal. For example, when I listen to the tenor saxophone of John Coltrane, when he’s playing at his [00:24:00] at his peak in the early sixties, ‘61 might be my favorite time of his, ‘62. There’s a clarion call, a piercing-ness and like a deep grounding to the truth of what it means to be alive is coming through that horn, through that man and whatever he went through to get to that point, which was also a quasi-religious experience for him in that he, gave up hard drugs and put himself on a mission to become the most extraordinary musician he could up until his death. And he came up with, from 1957 to 1967, 1 of the most concentrated 10 year decades of greatness that we’ve seen in only a handful of other people in human history.

Van Gogh only painted for 10 years. He was a failed priest and he picked up his art and just went nuts for 10 years and died. You’ve got 10 years of Schubert. You’ve got 10 to 12 years of Chopin’s great writing. If you can connect to the greatness of any of these people, it doesn’t [00:25:00] necessarily have to be to your ear at first.

You’ll get it eventually that the cream rises to the top with this sort of stuff. And if you keep going at it, even the more obscure things, even the out jazz, I think if you’re open to it, you’ll be able to hear the greatness inside of it, even if it’s not super easy at first.

Richard Tedlow: I do think it is intriguing.

It’s been said of Schubert that if he did not live at the same time that Beethoven lived, people would be remembering him as the equal of Beethoven. I do think some of Schubert’s music, for example, is to me extremely accessible. Yes. The Unfinished symphony is simply great music.

I do think that the lieder, especially the lieder cycles, this is very performer dependent to me. Really depends on who it is. Who’s communicating that music to you because the wrong performers kill it. There are probably some kinds of music that are performer proof when you’re young, the ride of the Valkyrie, [00:26:00] the introduction to Die Valkyrie.

And that by the way, brings up something that you mentioned about tempi with regard to the first and second Gould recordings of the Goldberg Variations. My impression of Glenn Gould was that he was something of a fanatic with regard to that issue.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Richard Tedlow: For example, this is probably on the web too, by the way.

There is a famous example of his performing Brahms first piano concerto with Leonard Bernstein.

And Bernstein comes out in front of the audience and says, I have an announcement to make our words to that effect. And every and the first thing he says is ‘Relax, he’s here.’ In other words, Gould being Gould you want to be sure he showed up. But then he said you know this is going to be performed in a way you’ve never heard it before. And that’s because this is what the pianist Glenn Gould wanted. And [00:27:00] he says words, I haven’t looked at this for a while, but he says, words to the effect of the integrity of Gould’s desire is what has carried the day here.

And that’s why we’re doing it this way. And Bernstein was a man of a gigantic ego. So for him to submerge that because of Gould’s vision, which was about, and among other things, tempi Gould my recollection is, was very disturbed, and I think not without reason, about the fact that people, great conductors, for example, conducting, choose a piece of music, Beethoven Seventh Symphony, he would play one conductor, then he’d play another and ask you, the listener, can you tell the difference?

And oftentimes you couldn’t. And he said, that’s a problem. If they’re all doing it the same way, they are not to use Steve Jobs’s formulation thinking different.

Evan Goldfine: Yeah.

Richard Tedlow: They’re not, go ahead.

Evan Goldfine: Richard, in that recording, I don’t have the exact words, but Bernstein steps in and says, I don’t agree with this.

Richard Tedlow: Yes, [00:28:00] I know.

Evan Goldfine: He, so he let his ego in there to say, if you don’t like it, don’t blame me. Blame Glenn, which is definitely part of his charisma and ego. You’re got these two giant brains and egos on stage together, and it’s a weird recording, it’s worth listening to. Bernstein, for me, one of my favorite symphonies is Tchaikovsky’s, last symphony, the sixth. And Bernstein’s recording is terrible. It’s like well over an hour, and it should be about 48, 49 minutes. He stretches it way out and it’s completely wrong. Don’t listen to it. But there’s dozens of others that have a kind of excitement, pathos, everything that you want from it. And so that’s another one of these moments where the artist and the piece itself might be in friction with one another.

Of course, de gustibus, right? If some people might love Tchaikovsky’s sixth at Bernstein’s, like over, an hour long, God bless ’em. Let ’em have fun with it. And as I’ve gotten older, one of my maturing things was that it doesn’t make me mad about what other people like anymore.

It [00:29:00] used to really get under my skin. Like, how could you possibly like that? This is my twenties, even some of my thirties now. It’s if you’re into whatever you’re into, great. Like, enjoy your life. We have this multiplicity of options and people might think that my tastes are awful as well.

I’ve tried to be as broad and open as possible in my project here on, on the blog, which is one of the reasons why I like talking to people who have different kinds of flavors than I do.

Richard Tedlow: Just very briefly, I think of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. The last movement is in my opinion, the best thing Bernstein ever did.

I found Bernstein very difficult to see live because I found him a distraction on the podium, the wild gesticulation. And it was, if it wasn’t about the music, it was about him, but on a recording, you don’t have that problem.

Evan Goldfine: But he’s the charismatic man, right?

Isn’t he like the Ur-, charismatic, classical musician America in the 20th century?

Richard Tedlow: A lot of people feel that way. And the thing about charisma is if it doesn’t speak to you, [00:30:00] you have the opposite reaction to it, which is, ah, what’s going on this podium? And when you, when one is lucky enough to have seen really great conductors, sometimes conductor composers.

Who are not about themselves, but about the music. And then you see somebody who strikes you as different about himself in case of Bernstein and not about the music. For me, it’s distracting. But once again, if you just listen to it and you’re not in the presence of the man then it’s possible to still enjoy his artistry, which is Bernstein’s artistry .

The first concert I ever heard at Lincoln Center I remember my mother took me there was Brahms first symphony and the conductor was Joseph Krips. An interesting fellow my recollection, which could be wrong, is that he was a Roman Catholic, but his father was born Jewish.

So when the Anschluss took place in 1938, he had to get out of Austria. In [00:31:00] other words when the Third Reich incorporated Austria into the Reich, and he was very important in the rebirth of music in Vienna after 1945. So it was exciting to see him and at least in my experience, he was about the music, not about himself.

And my preferred recording of Don Giovanni is with Joseph Krips conducting and Cesare Siepi as Don Giovanni. But once again, this is something about which everybody can disagree. The wonderful thing about music and the wonderful thing about what you just said about the English Suites is that what basically you’ve told me is, Richard, you’ve got a treat in store.

And that’s fine. It gives me something to look forward to. And that, by the way, is part of the miracle of Bach. The more you listen, the more you hear, the more you listen, the more you’re touched. But as you said at the very beginning of this conversation. [00:32:00] There’s gotta be something about it that strikes a responsive chord, no pun intended, on the first hearing.

Otherwise, you’re not gonna have a second hearing. So for me, for example, atonal music doesn’t do that. I used to really enjoy opera a lot. I ha I actually haven’t been to the opera since Covid and that may change this season. I used to go all the time when I was around New York City especially, or when I was lucky enough to be in Europe.

And modern opera doesn’t do it for me. It just doesn’t. For me, opera basically ended in 1925 when Puccini died. But the early operas of Richard Strauss and Wagner, what have you, and

Evan Goldfine: Can you get into Janacek?

Richard Tedlow: Yes.

Evan Goldfine: Yes. He’s probably the last one, right?

Richard Tedlow: Yeah, absolutely.

Evan Goldfine: What about Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle?

Richard Tedlow: I saw that in Budapest. In 2004 or two.

Evan Goldfine: I thought that’s a cool piece.

Richard Tedlow: It’s a remarkable piece. But it’s not something [00:33:00] that I would gravitate to. And that, by the way, is an opera you have to see in my opinion, because it’s, yeah, it’s well staged. And to see it in Budapest and here he was, Hungarian I was writing a biography of Andy Grove.

Andy Grove was born in Budapest, so that’s why I went and Andy was very interested in opera. So Andy Grove was one of the great figures of Intel when Intel was a great company. If you can remember back that far Intel employee number one was Robert Noyce. Number two was Gordon Moore.

Number three was Andy Grove. And Andy, as I mentioned, was born in Budapest. His parents were Jewish, so he spent the first 10 years of his life trying to escape the Nazis and the second 10 years of his life trying to escape the Communists. And when there was the Hungarian Revolt in 1956, he escaped from Budapest, made it to Vienna.

And my recollection is before he actually came to the United States, thanks to the IRC, the International Rescue Committee, he managed to get a ticket and see Cesare [00:34:00] Siepi and Don Giovanni in Vienna. So he was, I remember I saw Magic Flute with him in Northern California, and it was very interesting to see great music with him because he had insight into it and you could learn a lot.

Evan Goldfine: Strangely enough, I live in Westchester County, north of New York City. About three miles from my house is a cemetery where Bartok is buried, and right next to Thelonious Monk, the great pianist, which is bizarre.

I do wanna spend some time talking about your Substack Yes. Writing about what you consider to be the dark charisma of our current president, and the dangers that poses to the fabric of our country right now.

I like covering my bases. I’m a grandchild of Holocaust survivors. I just recently got my Polish passport for myself and my kids.

Richard Tedlow: Wow.

Evan Goldfine: ‘Cause I qualified for it and it’s great to have options. It’s a cheap call option. Or maybe it’s a put option depending on how you look at it. Tell me, tell us about [00:35:00] your great concerns about what’s going on right now. What might people be missing? This is not a political podcast, but you’re my guest and you’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about this.

Richard Tedlow: I have. I’m, as I mentioned I’m a historian of American Business Enterprise. I’m not a political historian, but I have a fairly good education in the history of America generally. And what struck me last summer was that, the question facing the United States is, can it happen here?

And so I began this set on Substack, this set of chapters, if you will, and it is entitled Dystopias and Demagogues. And I post each week. And it’s been very useful for me and less expensive than psychotherapy to explore what is happening in this country.

And the question that this all began with was, can it, whatever you define it as being happen here. [00:36:00] And chapter one was about a book that’s actually a classic called the Nazi Seizure Power. And it’s about one particular German town, Nordheim in Germany from 1930 to 1935.

Hitler became chancellor on January 30th, 1933. So it’s an exploration of what happened there, a town in which antisemitism played next to no role. A town which was basically social democratic, so slightly left-leaning and the Nazi seizure of power, how is it that they went over to the dark side, if you will?

And I first read that book in 1967 when I was an undergraduate at Yale. So I reread it and was deeply impressed, especially also by this famous statement by Pastor Martin Niemoller, who was, this guy was a pastor of the German confessing church, and it’s known as first they came. So first they [00:37:00] came for the communists and I was not a communist, so I did not speak up. Then they came for the socialist. I was not a socialist. They came for the trade unionist. I was not a trade unionist, I did not speak. It came for the Jews. I was not a Jew. So I did not speak up. Then they came for me and there was no one left to come from to speak up for me.

So I reengaged with that and I started writing about the various angles through which you could see what’s happening here. And then when the election took place I wasn’t shocked that Trump won, but I was particularly disturbed about a couple of aspects of it.

The most disturbing for me. So let’s take a look back at 2016. Okay. That was when he was first elected. I could understand people were sick of politics as usual. They were sick of having things shoved down their [00:38:00] throats. They were sick of just a white noise of political Babel.

Evan Goldfine: And the Democrats ran a uniquely disliked candidate in 2016.

Richard Tedlow: It was highly problematic. The fact about that election was that it, it’s a great flaw in our constitution that put Trump in the White House, and that flaw is the electoral college. She actually got over 2.8 million more votes than he did. So people sometimes will say to me, who read my Substack that the United States simply is not prepared to elect a woman. And my response is they actually did. We actually did. She just didn’t win because of a terrible problem with the Constitution, which was a great mistake. And you can look in the history of why the electoral college was created to see that the people who created the Constitution, threw that in there because they didn’t know what they were doing at the end of a long, hot summer in [00:39:00] 1787? In Philadelphia. Anyway, I was surprised that Trump got a plurality of votes in 2024. And I was a little startled. More than a little. I went to bed early in the night of election night in 2024. ’cause I figured he was gonna win.

But I didn’t think he was gonna get a plurality of the votes. By the way, the voter participation was actually lower in 2024 than it was in 2020.

Evan Goldfine: Yes.

Richard Tedlow: Nevertheless, he got, my recollection is 77.3 million votes. So 77.3 million Americans thought that it would just be dandy to have Donald Trump back in a White House.

So the difference for me between 2016 and 2024 is by 2024. There was simply no reason why you could not know who Donald Trump is and was [00:40:00] and has been. The risk of stating the blindingly obvious 2024 took place after January 6th, 2021, the first attempt violently to overthrow the American government.

Even the Civil War. If you look at the election of 1864, which Lincoln thought he was going to lose in the summer of 1864, that election took place. Anyway, the Confederacy, some people have said, I don’t buy this, but a guy who won two Pulitzer Prizes wrote this, said it died of democracy. Now democracy is on the chopping block.

We don’t know what’s gonna happen. And so navigating this period where you have a man who has openly spoken about being a dictator, a man who has made it clear that he does not accept any election that he lost, January 6th, 2021 was a dreadful moment in American history and a warning.

And people say to me often, ’cause now that you publish this stuff, people get in touch with you. Just wait for the [00:41:00] midterms. There’s no guarantee at all. I’ve been saying this since August 1st of last year. There’s no guarantee at all that we’re gonna have free and fair elections next year or in 2028.

There’s no guarantee at all that Trump isn’t going to run for a third term. Amy Coney Barrett, Justice Barrett was asked, could he? And her response was words to the effect of the 22nd Amendment says it can’t. Instead of, you would’ve expected that somebody would’ve answered that question with one word: no.

Round it off to the nearest, no, that’s not what she said. Is this significant? We’re in uncharted territory right now. In 2024, the Supreme Court gave him an opportunity to get back into the White House. If you look at article three of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, that article says that if once you have sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution, and then you incite a rebellion against it, you cannot hold public office [00:42:00] again.

Black letter law, the Supreme Court said, what’s the constitution between friends?

These are major concerns for me, and I’m involved in various ways to hopefully see to it that the elections in next year are free and fair, and of course in 2028. One last comment and then I’ll be quiet. JB Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, is showing up pretty well right now.

But I mentioned this in one of the recent substack that I wrote. He said, basically what goes around comes around and the pendulum is going to swing back. I don’t think there’s a pendulum and it’s not just gonna swing back. I believe it was Martin Luther King Jr. who said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” It doesn’t bend by itself. People have to make an effort to make it bend toward justice. And whether this country has within it, what is necessary to make that happen, that’s an issue that agitates me. In my [00:43:00] old age,

Evan Goldfine: I am no fan of the current president.

When it comes to seizing the power, like with a dictatorship at this point, I think that he’s too weak. He’s too unliked by too many people, and I think he doesn’t have that kind of bloodlust to actually go through with anything.

I have two big fears about the next little stretch. The first is like a big tail risk, which is like a ‘night of the long knives’ style purge, which was one of Hitler’s early moves to just eliminate people in his own party, and people in the other party and consolidate around a group of loyalists for himself and when he also siezed control of the army, there was no place to go at that point.

So that’s a kind of tail risk, game-over US. Slightly before that, you’re a historian of business. I think about business all the time in my real life outside of this hobby. But I think that in terms of the courts, if [00:44:00] people can’t feel that their contracts will be enforced because they’re a friend of the party, then people will stop entering into business contracts with one another.

And that thing that keeps us all going is that, that we have some sort of check on our individual private agreements that we make with one another that’ll be enforced by a neutral party and a fair and government supported party. If that goes away, I think that’s an early sort of game over.

So I don’t wanna see that kind of clannish rule in Washington for any party because it will corrupt the courts, which are keeping business honest, which is keeping all of our prosperity going. I’m not saying it’s a perfect country, but that is the baseline of how we’ve succeeded over time.

Richard Tedlow: Yeah, and I think the sanctity of contracts is also in doubt now.

The federal government had a lot of contracts with Harvard University researchers, and by the way, some of those [00:45:00] grants I apparently are going to be re-instituted unless the Supreme Court says that they shouldn’t be.

But Harvard won one round in the courts.

We’ll see what happens. I don’t know what Trump is capable of. I don’t, if you think of ICE as his own personal police force, or if you think of the, the people who desecrated the capitol on January 6th, and he then pardoned as his own personal police force. His SA or his ss I don’t know.

And it’s astonishing at this stage of the game to be questioning.

Evan Goldfine: Yes, for sure. Are you familiar with the book, Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, a World War II book?

Richard Tedlow: I’m not, no.

Evan Goldfine: This is my favorite Holocaust book. I can’t believe I’m ending my Bach podcast on a Holocaust book.

But this is a book about a regular Polish police force, like your neighborhood cops. Were enlisted by the local Nazi leaders to murder with guns, little Jewish villages that they would go [00:46:00] from place to place. And you see the diaries of these people, and it’s about how ordinary men, just regular policemen who were not necessarily virulently antisemitic, were following orders to do these things.

There’s also some of the officers who declined to do it, but they were not exiled from the police force. They weren’t murdered themselves. Fascinating book about what happens when you’re put in these sorts of situations. Brilliant book of history. Christopher Browning. I think I won a bunch of prizes in the early nineties, but I will put a link to that. Richard, do you wanna end with something a little brighter?

What are some absolutely favorite recordings of Bach or anything else that you wanna,

Richard Tedlow: I, it’s interesting. My favorite recording of the B minor mass is John Elliot Gardner. Okay. I’m deeply impressed by him. For me, any recording that has Elizabeth Schwarzkopf singing is a big plus. And by the way, if you want great recordings that are not Bach it is Elizabeth Schwarzkopf and George Szell, [00:47:00] the four last songs of Richard Strauss, which it’s interesting because Strauss, early in his career was a great composer. And then by the twenties and thirties, after the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was his librettist, you could live without the stuff.

And then toward the very end of his life, he comes up with these four last songs with orchestra. And by the way, that recording of the four last songs is played in a movie called The Year of Living Dangerously, which is very effectively used in that movie, but that music is literally heavenly.

I think a lot of Bach music is literally heavenly, and that’s why you can listen to it time and again, hear new things, time and again, and. As you age , the music grows with you. It is there when you’re 30, the music is there waiting [00:48:00] for you to be 40. When you’re 40, it’s there waiting for you to be 50. And this is a man who, what did he have? 22 children and like 15 of them died or whatever before the age of two. And the fact, by the way, that his scores survived it all, it was CPE Bach who was very important. And then the fact that he was rediscovered through Abraham Mendelssohn and then Felix Mendelssohn and 1829 was St. Matthew’s Passion in Berlin. This is all miraculous.

But one of the great things about his music is that no matter how dark, it’s wonderful that we have this music. No matter what the political situation is.

Evan Goldfine: It’s a balm.

Richard Tedlow: Absolutely. And it’s a link with something that’s authentic, with something that’s beautiful and something that’s going to exist as long as the human race exists and can’t be taken away.

And so that’s this unbelievable [00:49:00] gift that Johan, Sebastian Bach has given you and has given me and has given the whole world because his music is appreciated or enjoyed, or the communion that it makes possible is available all over the world. There are plenty of people in East Asia who wake up and go to sleep to Bach.

It’s not just the Western tradition. There’s a universality of the experience through music. As a matter of fact, Ingmar Bergman made a movie about the Magic Flute and the message of the movie is quite simple. Music is the universal language. So I don’t know how many languages there are in the world. 5,000, 6,000. Noam Chomsky, the famous linguist, said I happened to be dining recently with a woman who has a PhD in linguistics from MIT and she said that Chomsky’s definition of a language was a dialect with an army. [00:50:00] Just an extremely intriguing definition of language. And do you understand what I’m saying?

One of the wonderful things about a universal language is you don’t have to learn how to speak a foreign language to appreciate the beauty of music. And Bach not only gave us his music, but he is probably the foundational figure more than Handel more than anybody else for the Western music that the world enjoys. So he not only gave us his music he gave us Haydn’s music, Mozart’s music, Beethoven’s music, as we mentioned before, Chopin’s music, Debussy’s music. What an unbelievable gift of sanctity, of pleasure that one man made possible for the rest of the world. To use another religious word, it’s [00:51:00] awesome. It inspires awe. And that’s part of his charisma. Part of his charisma took place after he passed away in 1750. So that’s, I think, a high note, if you will, to conclude.

Evan Goldfine: Wonderful, Richard. Thank you again.

Richard Tedlow: Oh, you’re very welcome.

Evan Goldfine: And go check out Richard’s Substack. I’ll link to that in the show notes.

Thanks again.

Richard Tedlow: Very kind of you. Thank you.

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