9 Artists Honor the Man Who Put Brooklyn on the Map

When he announced his retirement as the president and executive producer of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1998, I argued in The Times that Harvey Lichtenstein had been the most innovative, influential performing arts administrator in New York history. With all due respect to Joseph Papp, I stand by that contention.

Both men took great risks and built great institutions. But Harvey, who died on Feb. 11 at 87 — everyone called him Harvey, as if he were some outer-borough Prince or Madonna — affected the arts in the city, the nation and the world. He brought mainstream attention to the New York avant-garde of the 1970s, played a central role in the revitalization of Brooklyn, and fostered a global artistic exchange, now sadly threatened by nationalism and populism here and abroad.

I knew him first from afar, as the impresario behind performances I reviewed in the ’70s. Many of them were great, but the academy, which had become provincial and poorly attended before he arrived in 1967, was still finding its footing. That only really happened in the early ’80s, with the transformation of “the Brooklyn Academy of Music” into “BAM” and the advent of the Next Wave Festival. Harvey was not the first to discover Philip Glass, Merce Cunningham, Robert Wilson, Bill T. Jones, Laurie Anderson and Mark Morris, let alone Peter Brook, Pina Bausch, Robert Lepage and William Christie. But his instincts told him they were great, and he provided key support for their careers. And those artists, in turn, created the latter-day image of BAM as a mecca for trendy, black-clad hipsters.

During my tenure as director of the Lincoln Center Festival, from 1994 to 1998, I got to know Harvey better. He felt threatened at first by what he feared would be big Manhattan money outbidding him. But we remained respectful and friendly. It would be unfair to me and Nigel Redden at the festival, or to Jane Moss and her Great Performers and Mostly Mozart and White Light programs, to say we slavishly copied Harvey. But it would be silly to deny BAM’s influence on us and on performing arts series nationwide. Here, some of the artists who worked with him pay tribute to his achievement and legacy.

Philip Glass

Composer

One time, after a superb new dance-theater performance, Harvey shared his reflections with me. It had been an especially beautiful work — either by Pina Bausch, Trisha Brown or the Nederlands Dans Theater, I don’t recall which. But the audience was far too small for the ambition of the work and the great expanse of the opera house. He seemed more curious than troubled when he asked me: “Tell me something, Philip. Do you think an audience from Manhattan will ever willingly come to the Brooklyn Academy of Music?” Well, an answer in the affirmative came far sooner and stayed longer than anyone expected.

Bill T. Jones

Choreographer

Next to my bed is a framed postcard of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, circa 1912, given to me by Harvey on the eve of his retirement. It’s a document of the man’s commitment and vision, a reminder of how a once-grand cultural landmark can fall into disrepair and neglect and be resurrected by the right combination of personality, chutzpah and, yes, simple love.

And most important to me is that amid the cultural confusion, as seen from my point of view as a young black artist, here was a white man, a Jew, who could pat my cheek, call me bubbe at just the right moment, and with just the right touch. Harvey could be fatherly and yet never paternalistic.

Robert Wilson

Director and designer

I had written a seven-hour silent work, “Deafman Glance,” and in January of 1969, I got an appointment to meet Harvey Lichtenstein. Harvey was unfamiliar with my work and was confused as to what exactly I had in mind. I explained to him that I wanted to show all seven hours, and he said that due to the production costs he did not think it was possible. So he allowed me to show the first part at BAM, which was two and a half hours long.

Afterwards, Harvey was ecstatic. As a former dancer, he related to it. Although the press was not good and attendance sparse, he wanted to show the other acts of the work. So in 1970, he supported performances of the remaining segments. Later Harvey made the decision to present another silent opera at BAM, “The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin,” which went from seven in the evening to seven in the morning. I will always be grateful to him for planting the seed, against all odds.

Laurie Anderson

Composer and performer

By the time we met in the late ’70s, Harvey’s days as a dancer were over, but he was always dancing around his office at BAM. Tap, ballet, a little soft-shoe. He had body energy, a lot of grace and a very loud laugh. Then in the middle of a conversation, something would catch his attention. He would turn his head to the side like he was listening to some long-vanished birdcalls. He would sit there motionless, looking at me. One-hundred percent present. His eyes full of curiosity and kindness.

He helped me produce “United States,” an eight-hour show, at BAM in the first year of their Next Wave Festival. For him, after the all-night-marathon Bob Wilson pieces he had presented, this was short. For a few years we didn’t see each other, then in the last few years we became friends again. I visited him and we talked with dread and hope about how the new political reality would affect art and artists. We shared a dark vision which we managed somehow to combine with lighthearted optimism. He was very good with extreme contradictions.

William Christie

Founder of the early music ensemble Les Arts Florissants

We first met in the late ’80s, when he’d come to a performance of Lully’s “Atys.” He said, “I like what I saw and I like what I heard, and I’ve never seen or heard anything like it, and I want it to come to New York.” It was very spontaneous, and, as everything he did, it had this extraordinary enthusiasm.

I remember we were sitting in a park in Paris. And I said, “You know, Harvey, this has been sort of an eye-opener for the French, this sort of music. Can this go down in New York?” And he said: “Yes, of course. You don’t know my audience.” And of course he was right. Our music was however many years old, but we played it as if it was something contemporary, which means it had something to say to a late-20th-century audience. We were doing something radically new. And if you hadn’t heard it before or seen it before or experienced it before, Harvey wanted it.

The memory of him right now comes at a time when one needs the memory of people, especially Americans, who could actually find themselves in other cultures. He had a sense of world culture.

Steve Reich

Composer

In 1971 I was barely known, but Harvey heard good things about “Drumming” and decided to present the full hourlong piece at BAM in the days when going to BAM was still something of an adventure. During the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s it was relatively easy for me and many others to perform in Europe because of all the tax money showered on the performing arts there. It was far more difficult for New Yorkers to see what was going on in Germany, Paris or Brussels until Harvey made it a point to gather international support to get Pina Bausch, Peter Brook, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker and many others to perform at BAM. Harvey presented the best new work he believed in wherever he found it, and if one piece wasn’t the artist’s best, Harvey made sure to present their next. If he believed in you, that was that.

Peter Brook

Director

The conventional theaters everywhere were putting the young, enthusiastic audience far away from the actors, and closest to the players, in the most comfortable seats, were sitting rich and often somnolent bodies.

We agreed that at BAM we could reverse this situation, by having seats on the stage, for a few dollars. This shared understanding opened up all our future collaboration, from our weeks of workshops, to a new huge and risky project: to transform an abandoned old movie house, close to BAM, called the Majestic, which is rightly called now the Harvey, to present the nine hours of “The Mahabharata.” It took all of his strength, talent and will power to make this happen. And then the relation never stopped, with him and his marvelous collaborators.

Mark Morris

Choreographer

I went to BAM when it was dangerous and scary to go there — which people don’t even believe, because you look at it now and it looks like Shanghai, with the buildings. I was a very early member of the Next Wave Festival. Harvey had scouted me and found me and offered me shows at the Lepercq Space, which was a fabulous theater that’s now the cafe. All the lighting instruments in the building were already being used — I’m exaggerating — because Bob Wilson was downstairs. Every lighting instrument in town, Bob was working with, and I was doing my first show upstairs.

Peter Sellars

Director

Now everybody knows that the action is in Brooklyn. Thirty years ago they didn’t know that! Harvey is really the guy who just said, “You have to get on that subway and come over to Brooklyn.” That was the power of the BAM pilgrimage. The thrill of not only meeting new work, but also meeting your friends at this location in Brooklyn where all the coolest people knew to be there. It was incredibly exciting — the sheer vibe of the place and the aliveness of those lobbies. You just couldn’t miss it.

And he truly realized that the only way you can program new work is festivals. It’s a collective statement that it’s not just individually brilliant people, but a movement, the same way Diaghilev gathered a range of artists of different disciplines, and it became a moment in the history of art.

The first day he heard the score of “Nixon in China,” you just saw his eyes light up. When he came to Brussels for the premiere of “Death of Klinghoffer,” he just lit up, and then when we brought that to the Brooklyn Academy, you can imagine that controversy. Harvey stood his ground and fought it all the way through, against all kinds of barrages and attacks in the press. Harvey believed in it, he cared about it, and he defended it to the last word.