The other day, I went to the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, as the institution was originally known, to say goodbye to the place where I first felt music’s full power. There, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, I witnessed Antal Doráti unleashing the National Symphony and the University of Maryland Chorus in Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony; Erich Leinsdorf marshalling the New York Philharmonic in whiplash Richard Strauss; the august Bach authority Karl Richter presiding over the Mass in B Minor; and, not least, Angela Lansbury generating comic terror in “Sweeney Todd.” My parents were chamber-music people, but a friend of my father’s gave me tickets to the big-league items. Although I can’t claim to recall the performances in detail—I was between ten and twelve—their echoes have never left my mind.

On March 16th, the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center capitulated to President Donald Trump’s plan to close the complex this summer for a supposedly essential two-year-long renovation. “I’m not ripping it down,” Trump has said. “I’ll be using the steel. So we’re using the structure. We’re using some of the marble, and some of the marble comes down.” The vagueness is ominous. Trump made similar assurances before ordering the demolition of the East Wing of the White House. No one should be surprised if Edward Durell Stone’s streamlined modernist shoebox changes beyond recognition. When the Kennedy Center opened, in 1971, the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, finding the design a little too redolent of Albert Speer’s fascist monumentalism, described it as “gemütlich Speer.” We may now get echt Speer.

In the hierarchy of horrors that Trump has inflicted on the nation and the world, the violation of the Kennedy Center ranks fairly low, yet it deserves attention all the same. He has extruded his name onto a memorial to a slain President: the main façade bears the legend “The Donald J. Trump and John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” It’s not only stomach-churning but also head-scratching. Memorials are reserved for the dead, while Trump is, as of this writing, still alive. Inside, though, you see few traces of the chairman’s presence. Quotations from Kennedy’s speeches are still etched into the walls. It struck me that the real reason for the so-called renovation might be to curtail Kennedy’s representation and to augment Trump’s. Which of the current President’s utterances will be suitable for engraving? “i could stand in the middle of fifth avenue and shoot somebody”? “they’re poisoning the blood of our country”? “i was not a fan of rob reiner at all, in any way, shape, or form”?

Preceding the physical evisceration of the Kennedy Center has been an evacuation of its cultural substance. Trump’s narcissistic obsession with the place, together with the miasmic hatefulness of his words and actions, has caused artists to flee en masse. Renée Fleming, Philip Glass, Béla Fleck, the San Francisco Ballet, the Martha Graham Dance Company, and the “Hamilton” company, among others, have cancelled dates. Washington National Opera, previously one of the center’s resident organizations, has migrated to George Washington University. The groups that remain, notably the National Symphony, have experienced plummeting attendance. Richard Grenell, whom Trump put in charge of the center last year, managed it with belligerent ineptitude, alienating even MAGA apparatchiks. If the plan had been to run the Kennedy Center into the ground so completely that shutting it down was the only option, Grenell aced the assignment. His place has since been taken by a young man named Matt Floca, whom Trump has praised as a “pro at construction.”

Tempting as it is to blame Trump for the Kennedy Center’s fate, he does not bear sole responsibility. The idea of a national arts center was always more of a noble dream than a reality. Kennedy’s own reputation as an arts patron rang a little hollow; most of the work was done by his impeccably cultured wife, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Few Presidents, in fact, have had much time for the performing arts. Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter are the most recent ones to take a serious interest in classical music. (I met Carter in 1977, when his daughter, Amy, gave a Suzuki violin recital at a church near our house, in Northwest D.C. I was nine, and received a misleading impression of what people in power are like.) The Kennedy Center Honors, which once recognized the likes of Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, and Leontyne Price, became a site of celebrity worship long before Trump handed a medal to Sylvester Stallone. Hopes that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama would seriously boost the traditional arts largely came to naught. Cultural capital resides almost entirely in the pop realm, and politicians bow before it.

As a New Yorker cartoon by Jonathan Rosen noted, the death rattle of the Kennedy Center happened to coincide with a flap over comments made by the non-Oscar-winning actor Timothée Chalamet, who, in conversation with Matthew McConaughey, said, “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s, like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive, even though it’s like no one cares about this any more.’ ” Nathan Lane dryly observed that Chalamet said all this while promoting a movie about Ping-Pong—another pursuit of no interest to huge numbers of people. What’s striking is Chalamet’s use of the phrase “no one.” Millions attend ballet and opera performances every year, but the number is too small to satisfy Chalamet’s idea of success, and so he rounds it down to zero. This contempt for the minority is antithetical to democratic thinking. Like it or not, Chalamet finds himself on the same page as Trump.

On my most recent visit to Kennedy Center, I attended a concert by the PostClassical Ensemble, which, since 2003, has been presenting thematic programs that emphasize broader artistic and political contexts. This was PostClassical’s farewell to the center before it, too, moves on to other venues, and the event was sold out. To be sure, it took place in the Terrace Theatre, which has four hundred and ninety seats—an unimpressive number if you are seeking global domination but more than respectable if you are examining connections between music and the visual arts in Berlin in the nineteen-twenties.

Ángel Gil-Ordóñez, who conducts the PostClassical Ensemble, and Drew Lichtenberg, a guest curator for the evening, avoided any direct political comments, but the selections spoke clearly enough on their own. We heard Kurt Weill’s “Oil Music,” a satire of the oil industry, and Hanns Eisler and Bertolt Brecht’s “The Ballad of §218,” an attack on German anti-abortion legislation. The audience seemed in tune with the implicit message. One young guy was wearing a “resist” T-shirt. A distinguished-looking white-haired gentleman sported a bright-blue cap with the legend “make lying wrong again.” But no one was expecting to start an uprising. What mattered was the freshness of the programming and the spark of the performances—above all, the sly, idiomatic singing of the soprano Melissa Wimbish.

A few days earlier, I went to Lisner Auditorium, at George Washington University, to see Washington National Opera’s production of Scott Joplin’s “Treemonisha,” which the great ragtime composer wrote in his later years, in the hope of gaining admission to the classical arena. Here, too, the audience was in a punchy mood. When Timothy O’Leary, the company’s general director, came out onstage, he received perhaps the most raucous ovation I have ever heard bestowed on an arts administrator. It was testimony not only to the logistical difficulty of what O’Leary and Francesca Zambello, W.N.O.’s artistic director, have achieved—moving an opera company on short notice is no easy matter—but also to the spirit of independence in which it was done. When O’Leary began to say something about “creative freedom,” cheers drowned him out. This wasn’t just empty rhetoric. Staging a pioneering opera by a Black composer is the sort of enterprise that Grenell liked to dismiss as “D.E.I. bullshit.”

I’d never seen “Treemonisha” live, and, despite the awkwardness of the libretto (Joplin wrote it himself), I found myself falling for its fairy-tale vision of a bright young woman who defeats forces of superstition and assumes leadership of her community. Joplin withholds true rag stylings until the very end, when he unveils the casually majestic “A Real Slow Drag.” Its refrain, “Marching onward, marching onward,” is a reminder, perhaps, that progress can be gruellingly slow. The mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves directed the show with an eye toward brilliance of color and vigor of movement; Viviana Goodwin and Justin Austin led a spirited cast, with Kedrick Armstrong conducting and Damien Sneed handling the arrangements. Opening this weekend at W.N.O. is Robert Ward’s “The Crucible,” an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s ever-renewable allegory of the Salem witch trials.

If W.N.O. had a difficult time extracting itself from the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony faces even tougher obstacles. W.N.O. had been financially affiliated with the complex only since 2011; the National Symphony has had such a relationship for decades. Adding to its crisis is the fact that Jean Davidson, the orchestra’s executive director, is leaving for Los Angeles. Nonetheless, the orchestra has a formidable artistic leader in the conductor Gianandrea Noseda, who has introduced new purpose and polish to the ensemble. While some patrons have fled, others are working to save the institution; a “musical salon” was held at the Watergate Hotel in February, with National Symphony musicians participating. One major challenge will be finding a suitable venue for future performances.

The most determined opposition to Trump’s defilement of the Kennedy Center has come from Representative Joyce Beatty, an Ohio Democrat who is an ex-officio board member of the complex. In a typically Trumpian ploy, the board changed its rules last year so that ex-officio members could not vote; it also tried to prevent Beatty from attending its recent meeting about the renovation. Beatty successfully sued for the right to show up and speak. Although she still wasn’t allowed to vote, Beatty took the opportunity to deliver a warning to the trustees. She reported telling them: “Think about if you were building your office, building your home, and you had not received any information, and the day before deciding the budget, the money, the needs, the ramifications, you signed off on it.” According to Beatty, dead silence followed. Then the board rubber-stamped the entire scheme. Earlier, Trump had discussed his ideas for the center, which include, apparently, marble armrests. ♦