As Americans prepare to celebrate the nation’s birth, it’s safe to say that the most familiar figure connected with that birth is George Washington. Although he didn’t actually sign the Declaration of Independence—he had been in New York since March, commanding the Continental troops there—his image is more completely bound up with the revolution and its success than any of America’s other patriarchs.
Whether known as the “Father of his Country,” the “Atlas of America,” the “Sage of Mount Vernon” or just the “Old Fox,” Washington has always been a figure of mythic proportions, and during his lifetime he was venerated practically as a living saint by many citizens of the new republic.
One of the president’s most endearing and least familiar weakness was for music, theater and dancing.
True, at 6-foot-2 he really did stand taller than most men of his time, and his repeated escapes from death in battle contributed to his somewhat divine aura. But despite the sentimental hagiography of Parson Weems, whose best-seller “The Life of Washington” (1800) fairly reduced his subject’s career to a series of Aesop-like fables, Washington was a very human being, however formally he conducted himself in public. As his biographer Joseph Ellis notes, Washington cultivated his exceptional self-control to compensate for his weaknesses, among them a fiery temper and a passionate love for Sally Fairfax, the wife of a friend.
Perhaps Washington’s most endearing and least familiar weakness, however, was for music, theater and dancing. Unlike his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, a talented amateur violinist, Washington wasn’t a musician himself. But he took great pleasure in musical and theatrical events—both of which were closely intertwined in 18th-century America—and from early adulthood eagerly attended performances at theaters in Fredericksburg and Williamsburg, Va.
Throughout his life, Washington attended concerts wherever he traveled. During the American Revolution, while spending a night in Bethlehem, Pa., he enjoyed a concert of chamber music, and on a subsequent visit there in 1782, we read of his being serenaded, to his great pleasure, by a Moravian trombone choir.
Meanwhile, Washington was always eager to pay ready money for good music. In 1757, Philadelphia enjoyed its first two public concerts. For the second of these, then-Lt. Col. Washington purchased a block of tickets costing 52 shillings and six pence, or £2 12s 6d, a considerable outlay at a time when a teacher might earn an annual salary of £60. On another occasion, in 1787, now-Gen. Washington gave a dinner in Philadelphia for which he engaged a nine-piece orchestra to perform, this time paying £7 10s for the pleasure—no mean sum either.
Among his friends was the Philadelphia lawyer Francis Hopkinson, a talented amateur poet and musician who also designed several issues of Continental currency and did sign the Declaration of Independence. Acknowledged as the first native-born American composer, Hopkinson dedicated a set of “Seven Songs for the Harpischord or Forte Piano” to Washington in 1788.
Not surprisingly, musical performances in the newborn nation were often connected with major current events. Thus shortly after America’s victory, in 1781, we find Washington in the audience at the “hotel of the Minister of France” (i.e., the French Embassy) in Philadelphia to enjoy the celebratory premiere of “The Temple of Minerva, America Independent, an oratorical entertainment,” another Hopkinson opus. Similarly, in May 1787, four days after the opening of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Washington notes in his diary that he “accompanied Mrs. Morris to the benefit concert of a Mr. Juhan.” The program, divided into three “acts,” included overtures by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, William Shield and Padre Giovanni Battista Martini (who had given lessons to the young Mozart in Bologna). There was also a “Sonato Piano Forte” [sic] by the English-born Alexander Reinagle, one of America’s leading musicians of the day.
Reinagle, who had been a close friend of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Europe, had settled in Philadelphia while it was the nation’s capital and was engaged by President Washington as music master to his step-granddaughter, Nelly Custis, providing a noteworthy, if indirect, connection between the Father of his Country and the son of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Apart from attending public performances, Washington also relished listening to music- making at home, and not only Nelly but Washington’s stepchildren and step-grandchildren were offered a musical education befitting the landed gentry. A small household collection of music books is still preserved at Washington’s beloved Mount Vernon, along with Nelly’s harpsichord, which Washington bought for her.
In addition, various eyewitness accounts of Washington on the dance floor reveal a side far removed from the starchy image on currency and canvas. Most notable is the account by his step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis of a ball held a few weeks after the conclusion of the American Revolution: “The minuet was much in vogue at that period,” writes Custis, “and was peculiarly calculated for the display of the splendid figure of the chief, and his natural grace and elegance of air and manners. . . . As the evening advanced, the commander-in-chief, yielding to the general gaiety of the scene, went down some dozen couples in the contre-dance with great spirit and satisfaction.”
Throughout his life, Washington enjoyed the balls and “assemblies” that were a popular entertainment in 18th-century America. One of his final letters in 1799 is a poignant response to an invitation to the managers of the Alexandria Assembly in Virginia: “Mrs. Washington and myself have been honored with your polite invitation to the assemblies of Alexandria this winter, and thank you for this mark of your attention. But, alas! our dancing days are no more.”
Though at age 67 Washington was still relatively vigorous, he caught a cold while riding five hours through a snowstorm on Dec. 12 of that year. Two days later the “American Cincinnatus” died, and to the raft of musical compositions already written saluting his military and presidential accomplishments was added another repertoire of dirges, elegies, odes and marches lamenting his passing. The first, Benjamin Carr’s dignified “Dead March and Monody for General Washington” was ready for performance in Philadelphia a mere 12 days later, with musical offerings continuing to appear up and down the Eastern seaboard throughout the winter of 1800.
The music-loving “Sword of the Revolution” probably would have enjoyed listening to them.
Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.
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