The cast of On the Town (1949)
Book Details
Nigel Simeone, editor
THE LEONARD BERNSTEIN LETTERS
606pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $38).
978 0 300 17909 5
A protean personality as displayed in his gossipy, intelligent correspondence
MORRIS DICKSTEIN
"Dear Pupil", wrote Aaron Copland to his twenty-two-year-old protégé Leonard Bernstein in 1940:
What terrifying letters you write: fit for the flames is what they are. Just imagine how much you would have to pay to retrieve such a letter forty years from now when you are conductor of the Philharmonic. Well it all comes from the recklessness of youth, that's what it is. Of course I don't mean that you mustn't write such letters (to me, that is), but I mustn't forget to burn them.
Bernstein was just beginning his conducting studies with Serge Koussevitzky, the long-time maestro of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but those who knew him had already singled him out as the great hope of American music. "The Big Boys here", Bernstein had written a year earlier, "have it all decided that I am to become America's Great Conductor. They need an Apostle for their music." It took him only seventeen years, not forty, to become music director of the Philharmonic, frequently performing the work of American composers. Confirming Copland's warning, one unbalanced young musician did indeed try to blackmail him with his letters, though to no avail.
Far from burning Bernstein's gossipy, indiscreet letters, Copland crossed out a few names and saved these lively effusions – for some future archive and for this volume, a rich selection of letters to and from Bernstein, meticulously edited by Nigel Simeone. The book is a mine of research and helpful information. Every detail that needs explaining is tracked and annotated and every correspondent receives a capsule biography, enabling us to follow the life in vivid bits and pieces, especially in tandem with Humphrey Burton's excellent biography of 1994, where some of these letters first appeared.
Copland assumed, quite sensibly, that his reckless young friend was destined for greatness. Bernstein's gifts were already on display when they met at a party in 1937. It was Copland's thirty-seventh birthday and the Harvard undergraduate, a gifted and showy pianist, sat down at the keyboard and played Copland's difficult Piano Variations from memory. By 1939, when he graduated, Bernstein had also begun writing music and he wondered whether the Big Boys, by fastening on him as a conductor, wanted to "to keep a rival composer out of the field". Soon he was studying conducting with the formidable Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, the best student Reiner ever had.
Copland became a mentor and lifelong friend – their correspondence is central to the first half of this collection – and Bernstein in turn would become the master interpreter of Copland's music, especially as it took a popular turn with ballet scores such as Billy the Kid, Rodeo and Appalachian Spring. Bernstein's first published work was his piano transcription of the infectious Latin rhythms of Copland's El Sálon México. But Bernstein's own story – his open grid of possibility, his ambition and lusty appetite for life, his largely gay sexual adventures, even his self-absorption – fascinated Copland as much as the young man's plentiful gifts. "What a letter!" he writes from Hollywood in 1943. "I had a wonderful time with it – better than any novel. But now I want to read the next chapter." Ever determined to plumb his own depths, Bernstein was seeing a psychotherapist, as he would through most of his life; his musings about his unconscious motives made the more placid Copland wonder whether he too had "an inner psyche doing funny things without my knowing it".
The wunderkind was just on the cusp of being discovered by the world at large. In late August 1943, he was appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic and just two months later, when Bruno Walter was suddenly taken ill, Bernstein, without benefit of rehearsal, made headlines with a sensational performance broadcast on national radio. The press had been alerted, his devoted Boston Jewish family was in town, and the adulation he enjoyed became a drug he would always crave. A pattern was established: though composing was his deepest aspiration, and he took frequent sabbaticals to pursue it, he could never give up the podium for any length of time. He'd long since pinpointed one symptom of his problem: "my love of people. I need them all the time – every moment . . . . I cannot spend one day alone without becoming utterly depressed". Yet all his relationships seemed like one-night stands, transient, superficial. "I still hate being alone, and yet don't want anyone in particular", he wrote to Copland in 1942. "You're the only one that persists and persists, come hell or high water."
By the time of his debut with the Philharmonic, Bernstein had already written a symphony, Jeremiah, and a fine sonata for clarinet and piano, yet he felt restless and unfulfilled. In 1944, his work took an unexpected turn; he collaborated on a heady, rambunctious new ballet, Fancy Free, with the young Jerome Robbins. Its success soon led to a musical, On the Town, with choreography by Robbins, book and lyrics by two of Bernstein's closest friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green – four effervescent, try-anything newcomers in their twenties reined in by one veteran director, George Abbott. The wartime setting, as in Fancy Free, was urban and contemporary – three sailors on shore leave in New York, looking for girls. The dancing was winningly fresh, the lyrics witty, and the vibrant jazz- inflected score ranged from the bluesy to the frenetic. The most memorable number, "New York, New York", buoyant with irrepressible energy, would serve as an enduring anthem for Bernstein's adopted city. The show ran for 463 performances.
Writing for the theatre, for a popular audience, brought out the best in Bernstein even as it kept solitude and depression at bay. He relished collaborating with people as talented as Abbott or Robbins, sponging up what they knew with an astonishing facility. This cross-pollination became one key to his success. Like George Gershwin, he worked with sophisticated lyricists who steered clear of the clichés of the musical theatre, particularly those soggy boy-meets-girl love songs. Thanks to the triumph of Oklahoma!, the Broadway musical was shifting direction when Bernstein arrived. The slapdash shows of the 1920s and 30s, composed loosely of song, dance and spectacle, were giving way to the book musical, with song and dance embedded in character and integrated into the story. With Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hart had been replaced by Rodgers and Hammerstein, just as Bernstein and his collaborators were paving the way for Hammerstein's protégé, Stephen Sondheim, who kicked off his illustrious career by writing the lyrics for Bernstein's strongest musical, West Side Story.
Sondheim, like Bernstein, would be blamed for not writing hits, hummable tunes that could be extracted from their context and take off on their own – in recordings and jukeboxes, in sheet music and on the radio, where so much money lay. In The Joy of Music (1959), Bernstein had responded defensively with an imaginary dialogue, "Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?" Gershwin, he says, "really had the magic touch. Gershwin made hits, I don't know how. Some people do it all the time, like breathing". His imagined accuser persists: "Your songs are simply too arty. . . . A special little dissonant effect in the bass may make you happy, and maybe some of your highbrow friends, but it doesn't help to make a hit". (Hollywood had in fact been leery of Gershwin for being too artful; this made him swear, tongue in cheek, that his only goal was to write hits.) The charge points to Bernstein's strength as a theatrical composer. What he lacks in sheer melodic invention he makes up for in harmonic subtlety and complexity. For Paul Bowles, a composer before he became a writer, On the Town had "an epoch-making score" and "its instrumentation was phenomenal in its cleverness". To Bernstein, a Gershwin showpiece like Rhapsody in Blue remained a collection of moveable parts, lacking the structure and organic development that was the glory of the symphonic tradition. "Composing is a very different thing from writing tunes." Yet Bowles saw Bernstein as Gershwin's heir: "No other composer combines the same kind of nervous energy and the same incredible degree of facility".
As music drama, West Side Story is Bernstein's Porgy and Bess, the crossover work, hard to classify, in which the writer transcended himself. Gershwin came to this territory from Tin Pan Alley, having gradually mastered orchestral writing along the way. Bernstein arrived from classical composition, passing through musical comedy and operetta. It's no accident that dance looms large in Bernstein's best shows. He provided the musical base for Robbins's choreography in Fancy Free, On the Town and West Side Story, orchestral writing with strong, syncopated rhythms, almost palpable drama, and a strikingly vernacular sound. The fierce urban tension in the music for West Side Story also infuses his memorable score for Elia Kazan's film On the Waterfront. He adapted both into symphonic suites. His most frequently performed concert work actually originated on Broadway, the four-minute overture to Candide in 1956.
Both the ingenious yet flawed Candide, musically rich (too rich, some said), and the succès fou of West Side Story came at the end of the freelance years that followed Bernstein's sensational debut at Carnegie Hall. After On the Town, Koussevitzky read him the riot act, insisting that he stick to conducting and the concert hall, and Bernstein, ever deferential to his first patron, stayed away from the theatre as long as Koussevitzky was alive. (He died in 1951.) Instead, he became everyone's favourite guest conductor, building his repertoire, preserving some of his freedom to compose, sometimes leading as many as a dozen orchestras in a single year. For him conducting was a form of lovemaking, an overflow of passion, and he took pleasure in seducing yet another set of players as well as a new audience.
Two urgent commitments influenced Bernstein's conducting life during these years. As the first American-born conductor to gain wide acceptance in many European cities (or American cities, for that matter) he proselytized for American composers whose work was still only rarely given a hearing. Sometimes he overstepped the mark, as when he programmed one of his own pieces for a Boston Symphony concert, after which Koussevitzky, who preferred Bernstein's conducting to his composing, turned on him:
May I ask you: do you think that your composition is worthy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston organization? Can it be placed on the same level as Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Stravinsky, Prokofieff, Bartók or Copland?
As usual with Koussevitzky, Bernstein sent a humble, breast-beating reply:
Why do these misunderstandings happen? Is there an evil element in my nature that makes me do and say immoral things? . . . Whenever I conduct in Boston I am conducting for you, deep inside, and whatever I may do well is a tribute to you. My main concern is to make you proud of me, and justified in all your efforts for me.
Yet Koussevitzky himself was a vigorous supporter of contemporary composers, and within a few years he commissioned and premiered Bernstein's second symphony, loosely based on W. H. Auden's Age of Anxiety. Bernstein had eaten humble pie out of deep respect, even reverence, but also from a canny self-interest, for the older man had taken him under his wing and done more than anyone to advance his career.
The other highlight of Bernstein's conducting Wanderjahre was his excited discovery of Israel; it seems to have triggered a renewal of his Jewish identity. He had grown up in a family in which religion mattered – his father was a Talmud student who came from a long line of rabbis – but cultural identification mattered even more. He had already set Hebrew texts from Lamentations in Jeremiah and would deploy biblical and liturgical texts in major compositions such as his Kaddish and Chichester Psalms. He was drawn to Israel and its musicians, many of them refugees from Nazi Europe, even before the state was declared. As early as 1947 he wrote to Koussevitzky:
If you ever wanted to be involved in a historical moment, this is it. The people are remarkable; life goes on in spite of police, bombs, everything. There is a strength and devotion in these people that is formidable. They will never let their land be taken from them; they will die first. And the country is beautiful beyond description.
He returned in 1948, during the Arab–Israeli war, to conduct forty concerts in sixty days, sometimes with artillery fire booming in the background. He wrote home of the beauty of Jerusalem, the heroism and privation of the people, and was tempted to sign on as principal conductor of the newly renamed Israel Philharmonic. He always maintained a link with the orchestra, a kind of family connection that meant the world to him, yet he would also perform with former Nazis in Vienna, one of the adopted cities of his later years. For him, it was the music that mattered most, the music and the tumultuous acclaim he invariably received.
In these years, questions of family and identity loomed large for him. Writing from Israel in 1950 to his sister, Shirley, he describes them as "years of compulsive living, of driving headlong down alleys of blind patterns, dictated by God knows what vibrations". In 1946, he met a striking woman, Felicia Montealegre Cohn, a Chilean piano student and aspiring actress, half-Jewish, but educated by nuns and raised as a Catholic, and they got engaged, much to his parents' distress. Always close to his family – and especially to his sister and brother, with whom he spoke an affectionate private language – the footloose Bernstein felt the the pull of home and family. But Bernstein was bisexual, ambivalent, and the engagement foundered within a year. Still, he reckoned that his career, if he were ever to head a major orchestra, demanded a spouse, whatever his sexual inclinations. Three years later, though she was now with another man, he found himself thinking of Felicia again, testing himself. As he told his sister, who kept in touch with her:
I have been engaged in an imaginary life with Felicia, having her by my side on the beach as a shockingly beautiful Yemenite boy passes – inquiring into that automatic little demon who always springs into action at such moments.
Within a year Felicia's lover had died, and she and Bernstein were engaged again and soon married. He wondered "what security she will manage to find in a marriage contracted in insecurity". How much she knew about his past life is not clear, but after some difficult months she laid out the grounds of their relationship:
You are a homosexual and may never change. . . . I am willing to accept you as you are, without being a martyr or sacrificing myself on the L.B. altar. (I happen to love you very much – this may be a disease and if it is what better cure?) . . . A companionship will grow which probably no one else may be able to offer you. The feelings you have for me will be clearer and easier to express – our marriage is not based on passion but on tenderness and mutual respect. Why not have them?
What stabilized their marriage and turned it into more of a love story was the arrival of their children, eventually three of them, which brought out the exuberant paterfamilias in Bernstein, and replicated the cherished family structure in which he had grown up. It also provided the social respectability he needed, both professionally and psychologically. Felicia became his closest friend, the indispensable anchor of his peripatetic life, replacing Copland as his confessor. Bernstein wrote some of his best letters to her, warm, loving and keenly observant, though also rife with self-dramatization.
I miss you terribly, and love your letters. They carry a whiff of something warm and joyful and familiar. Imagine – after three years: joyful! Is it wonderful: home has always been the spot in which I happened to be: now it is a place, with all that one place connotes . . . . A new experience.
This idyll came to an end twenty-five years later, in 1976, when he left her to be with a man. "You're going to die a bitter and lonely old man", she reportedly said to him. They were reconciled when she fell ill with cancer, and her death soon afterwards left him rudderless, plagued by feelings of guilt and remorse for the rest of his life.
Though it left him little time to compose, Bernstein's rock-star fame only increased when he became conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1958. Some said his gestural and emotive conducting style was directed more at the audience than at the players, but no one was better at shaping an orchestral interpretation or enabling ordinary concert-goers to grasp it. He inhabited the music as if possessed by it. Though he never satisfied the New York Times critic, Harold Schonberg, or the atonal avant-garde, his tenure was a success by any measure: more American and contemporary music, ambitious touring and over 200 recordings, a younger, more enthusiastic audience. In preview performances and in televised Young People's Concerts, he demonstrated that he could expound music colloquially to laymen as well as he could perform it.
Bernstein's genius as an educator had been evident earlier, especially in Koussevitzky's summer music programmes at Tanglewood, in western Massachusetts. In 1954 he had taken on a new role that made him the voice and face of classical music in America. As part of a television series called Omnibus, funded by the Ford Foundation, he took viewers through the intricacies of Beethoven's Fifth, using the composer's discarded sketches to show them exactly the kind of development he found missing in Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a symphonic progress in which every note feels inevitable. Bernstein was soon acknowledged as one of the best village explainers to set foot on the classical terrain. He was able to think from the audience's point of view, asking – and answering – questions at once simple and fundamental: what makes modern music modern? What are the musical constituents of jazz? How did the American musical evolve into a great indigenous form? Never talking down, instead he breaks things down, always focusing on the notes, not merely the circumstances. It is hardly a surprise that the best of these visual essays is on the art of conducting, which ranges from the use of the baton to "the intangibles, the deep magical aspect of conducting", the passion, the timing, the sculptural sense of proportion that enables a single intelligence to mould so many disparate players and instruments into a satisfying whole.
After eleven years with the Philharmonic, Bernstein spent the best part of his life refining his conducting into utter mastery. The jury is still out on which of his own classical compositions might survive. Copland himself, early on, was in two minds about Bernstein's music, praising his "vibrant rhythmic invention" and "immediate emotional appeal" but seeing it, at its worst, as "conductor's music – eclectic in style and facile in inspiration". Bernstein's Broadway musicals, even the ill-fated Candide, have been repeatedly revived, sometimes by altering or updating the book. He became too famous, too busy, too set in his ways to write the kind of fluent, arresting letters he once did, and the later letters lack the appeal of the gifted young man's self-absorption. "Some day, preferably soon, I simply must decide what I'm going to be when I grow up", he writes in 1955.
From the 1980s, his last decade, when he continued a frenetic round of international travel, lionized everywhere he went, there are hardly any letters at all. One thing was not in doubt: his conducting became ever more personal and probing, especially with the composers with whom he identified. His role in the Mahler revival was critical. He felt akin to Mahler's grandiosity and spiritual ambition, his Jewish origins, his role as a culminating figure in the Austro-German symphonic tradition, but above all to what Bernstein described as Mahler's "doubleness", his "straddling", as a man split between composing and conducting, between sweeping, resonant emotions and kitsch. As early as 1950, Bernstein had written, "Sometimes I feel clearly that his difficulties were the same as my own. Mahler was also 'possessed' by music and his compositions, too, originated during his occupations as a conductor. . . . . With works by Mahler I seem to be playing some of my own". Though "born in the lap of Gershwin and Copland", he wrote to Karl Böhm, he became an "adopted son" of European music, as much at home in Vienna and Amsterdam as in New York and Israel.
Bernstein's letters reveal more about his protean personality than about his work. Strictly musical discussions are rare, for the letters are often the fruit of his travels, while his creative collaborations were usually face to face. Nigel Simeone's impeccable notes and introductions make this a virtual biography but key moments, such as his separation from Felicia, barely figure, perhaps because they're too fraught, too sensitive, to be written about. But what the letters lack in narrative continuity they make up for with an immediacy of feeling, voice, direct exchange. The violinist Isaac Stern loved it when he and Bernstein talked "about life and music, about ideas, about family . . . . The greatest times I had with him were always alone. You could never talk with Lenny this way if one other person entered the room; [he] immediately went on stage". Alive with spontaneous intelligence, Leonard Bernstein's letters display exactly this unforced intimacy, though there were moments when he no doubt knew that posterity was listening in.
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