HAIL TO THE CHIEF.(Abraham Lincoln's love for music, and opera in particular)(Brief Article)

All 4,600 seats of New York's Academy of Music were filled the night Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera appeared in its U.S. premiere run on February 20, 1861. But the aura of suspense and excitement that night came not so much from the production, conducted by Verdi's former pupil, Emanuele Muzio, as from the presence of Abraham Lincoln in the hall. Verdi's compelling drama about the assassination of an important leader was president-elect Lincoln's first opera. It was also a chilling prophecy. Four years later, in a theater in the nation's capital, Lincoln himself was assassinated.

Abraham Lincoln was one of America's most unmusical presidents: he could neither play an instrument nor carry a tune. Yet he had a passionate love of music. During his tenure in the White House, Lincoln attended the opera more than thirty times, seeing nearly every production in Washington -- elaborate stagings, mostly from New York, of Norma, La Dame Blanche, Martha, Der Freischutz, Die Zauberflote, Fidelio, Tannhauser, La Figlia del Reggimento and others. Gounod's Faust, with its rousing soldiers' chorus, was his favorite. He saw it at least four times. When he was criticized for attending the opera so often while the real-life dramas of Bull Run and Harpers Ferry were raging, he replied simply, "I must have a change, or I will die." But he also claimed that "Listening to melody, every man becomes his own poet and measures the depths of his own nature."

From his earliest boyhood days, Lincoln came to love the sentimental songs his mother, Nancy Hanks, sang to him. Friends recalled that when he was a young man, certain "homely" ballads -- "Annie Laurie," "Barbara Allen," "Twenty Years Ago," "Home, Sweet Home" -- would "mist his eyes with tears and throw him into a fit of deep melancholy."

But the music closest to Lincoln's heart were the melodies that revealed the soul of a people who knew the powers of both tragedy and joy, defeat and victory. On the White House lawn Lincoln heard men bellow out George F. Root's immortal "Battle Cry of Freedom." On July 4, 1864, thousands of black people gathered to sing spirituals, and early the next year 500 members of the Christian Commission sang the soldiers' chorus for him on the lawn.