Drive, the maestro said

Tanglewood's success has been linked to the automobile from the beginning, and now the BSO is stepping on the gas

(Illustration by Roland Sarkany)

LENOX - It took $4-a-gallon gas to make an honest couple out of Tanglewood and the automobile.

This summer, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in tandem with the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and Gulf gas stations along the Pike, announced that vouchers for free lawn passes to the BSO's summer home would be given out with a purchase of $50 in gas from participating stations; according to the BSO, over 5,000 vouchers were given out in the initial month. Then the BSO announced a second deal, giving away $50 Gulf gas cards with the online purchase of $200 in tickets. (Both promotions come with the slogan "Fuel for your car and your soul.")

They're the first such promotions in the history of Tanglewood and the BSO, which goes back to the summer of 1936, when music director Serge Koussevitzky brought the orchestra to a tent on the Tanglewood grounds for what was then called the Berkshire Symphonic Festival. And they're an acknowledgement that, for all the images of rolling lawns and towering pines, Tanglewood's relationship to the car is long-standing and deep.

Koussevitzky's betrothal of the BSO to the Berkshire Festival had a certain anti-matrimonial basis. According to BSO Managing Director Mark Volpe, in addition to fostering Koussevitzky's dream of a summer music academy, the move was also an effort to keep his roster stable. "His musicians, they were primarily European, and primarily men," Volpe tells it. "They would return to Europe for the summer, and maybe meet a woman, and then not come back."

The maestro wished to ensure that any romance took root locally, but his real motivations were entrepreneurial. "The real genius of Koussevitzky is that he realized that there were 40 million people within three hours of Tanglewood by train," Volpe says. "It was a critical mass," a happy intersection of population and transportation.

But cars were crucial to Tanglewood from the beginning - a report puts 4,500 vehicles in the parking lot at one of the earliest concerts. After World War II, extensive lobbying by the auto and oil industries resulted in a decisive shift away from rail and toward the interstate highway system, the crown jewel of Eisenhower-era public works. Tanglewood, according to Volpe, came to be completely dependent on the car. (The closest remaining rail stop to Tanglewood is in Pittsfield, some 9 miles away; the one-time Lenox depot, shuttered in the 1950s, is now part of the Berkshire Scenic Railway Museum.)

The scenery along the rails and roads leading to Tanglewood has changed over time. The natural beauty of the Berkshires used to be more forbidding; a 1694 traveler called the area "a hideous, howling wilderness," and the early-19th-century author Catharine Sedgwick lamented the "six miles of steep and rough driving" required to reach Lenox. Tanglewood itself was originally the summer estate of William Aspinwall Tappan (son of the abolitionist-merchant Lewis Tappan, founder of what is today Dun & Bradstreet); the name was borrowed from Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose 1853 "Tanglewood Tales" was written during a stay on the property. Tappan's home on the estate was an early and somewhat sober example of the increasingly elaborate cottages that would be built in the area by Boston and New York millionaires, who set about civilizing nature into painterly expanses of trimmed lawn and picturesque views.

Advertising their lack of need, they began a purely cosmetic reshaping of the landscape, fashioning a re-creation of the stately English garden inspired by the Roman poet Virgil. Tanglewood would eventually erect its own version of those gardens' classical structures: the Music Shed, named with stereotypical New England rectitude, but characterized by BSO historian Mark DeWolfe Howe as "none the less a temple - and a temple of music." (Hawthorne's "Tanglewood Tales," after all, had used the Berkshires as a backdrop for a child-friendly retelling of Greek and Roman mythology.)

For concertgoers, Tanglewood's lawn-ticket rent - a short lease on a tiny plot - has outsourced not the land's productivity, but its lack of productivity, its capacity for recreation. The illusion has come to depend on a temporary denial of the car's presence. Parking lots originally within the Tanglewood estate itself now reside outside the natural space, beyond gates and walls, behind trees and hedges. Automobiles are sequestered, so as not to interrupt the manicured landscape, yet their immediate proximity reminds and reassures: easy attainment for those eager to claim a sense of Gilded Age leisure, a quick escape for anyone uneasy with the anti-democratic overtones of such privilege.

The escape may be quick in theory, but the slow crawl of cars out of Tanglewood and up West Street (Route 183) is a familiar sight on July and August nights. The town of Lenox hires an additional 10 part-time police officers each summer to direct traffic; according to the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission, traffic volume in southern Berkshire County increased 28 percent between 1990 and 2004, with summer-home owners and tourists especially pertinent factors. Secluded from the road, Tanglewood becomes a haven from congestion of its own making.The logistics of driving make up much of the activity of running Tanglewood. Volpe contrasts it with the urban environment of Symphony Hall: "Here, we have to provide the infrastructure," he says, taking an active role in transporting urban amenities to the country. "We have relationships with the towns, relationships with the Turnpike, relationships with the State Police." In 2002, the BSO promised locals to cap ticket sales at 18,000 after a James Taylor concert caused a traffic snarl of historic proportions. And Volpe estimates that Tanglewood now employs, in some fashion, over 1,200 people during the summer, many of them solely for traffic control and parking.

Volpe came to the BSO from the Detroit Symphony, where he had a chance to observe the auto industry at close range, its successes and failures, its benefits and evils; for him, Tanglewood's existence is bound up with that old cliche, the American love affair with the car. He's happy with the modest success of the Tanglewood Express Coach, the BSO-chartered bus service between Boston and Lenox (tickets for the Friday/Saturday routes are running ahead of last summer) but doesn't anticipate a sea-change in Tanglewood transit.

"You're running on the buses' schedule, not your own schedule," he points out. "You can't get here three hours early and picnic, you can't choose to get here eight minutes before the concert starts." That need for temporal freedom echoes the British music publisher Ralph Hawkes, who, after visiting Tanglewood, wrote in 1944: "Here, a car is a necessity, but then, in America generally it is accepted as such."

Volpe doesn't expect a drastic effect on attendance from high gas prices; "Weather is still a bigger factor at this juncture," he says. He regards the gas promotion as just that, a promotion, piggybacking Tanglewood's brand on what, for now, remains the biggest news story in the country, eliminating a barrier to first-time visitors while reminding them of the place itself. Volpe cheerfully admits that it's a short-term giveaway with, hopefully, long-term benefits. "Once they see this magical place, they're more likely to come back."

Tanglewood's magic, for all its conscious artifice, past and present, is not dishonest; it is our own particular fantasy of back-to-nature escape that the place expertly caters to. Henry David Thoreau extolled the sound of "a bugle in a summer night" as a pleasant reminder of "the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests." But on a trip through the backwoods of Maine, Thoreau had seen another side of nature. "There was there felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man," he wrote. "It was a place for heathenism and superstitious rites, to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to wild animals than we." Tanglewood keeps such forces at a safe distance, and the paved, motorized path back to civilization close at hand. There's also music.