A lot of ink is being spilled over Leonard Bernstein now that we have reached the 10th anniversary of his death, and many of those writers pondering the legacy of this monarch among American musicians are posing the same questions. What effect did he exert on America’s musical culture? How will he be remembered: as a brilliant conductor, gifted composer of both serious and popular music, innovative musical educator?
Will we ever see another like him? Of course not, because there was only one Lenny. He was unique, inimitable, irreplaceable. No American conductor has emerged during the last decade with anything near his extraordinary gifts, charisma or influence on the world scene.
Yet, despite Bernstein’s great success in every area of music, including being named the New York Philharmonic’s first American music director, his achievement did not open doors for other gifted Americans to be chosen for American symphonic posts. Sad but understandable, given the parochial mind-set of U.S. culture: Symphony boards still are beholden to products of European culture, which is still held as innately superior to our own, like French wine and Italian suits. Because we have not shucked our longstanding inferiority complex, we still are mightily impressed by conductors with pedigrees from across the Atlantic.
Since Bernstein’s passing in 1990, at 72, none of the Big Five American orchestras has appointed an American music director. Of the other leading U.S. orchestras, only the San Francisco Symphony, which is thriving under Michael Tilson Thomas, and the Atlanta Symphony, which recently named Robert Spano as its music director, have dared to engage native sons.
About the best that can be said is that because of Bernstein’s shining example, U.S. musicians who followed him found less prejudice at home as well as abroad. He was the first U.S.-trained conductor to be fully accepted internationally, first gaining widespread attention with his 1943 debut conducting the New York Philharmonic (which appointed him its chief conductor 15 years later) at age 25. He became the first American conductor to have a season contract with Milan’s venerable La Scala Opera. So revered was he overseas that by the time he left New York in 1969, another Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, welcomed him with open arms. Thus began a concert and recording affiliation that lasted until his death.
The tragedy of Bernstein was that there was so little time for him to get where he wished to go. From an early age he felt driven to do it all — write musical masterpieces for the concert hall and Broadway, conduct major orchestras, play the piano, perform jazz, teach, lecture. No matter how much he achieved, somehow it was never enoughfor him. And he refused to pigeonhole himself. As early as 1949 he was defending himself against charges he was spreading himself too thin, telling a New York Times interviewer that “What seems right for me at any given moment is what I must do.”
Great as was his desire to create music, composing is a solitary act. Bernstein needed lots of people around him to love and love him in return. Being in front of an orchestra and an audience was a primal need for him. The intoxication he felt while conducting often translated into ecstatic performances. Bernstein didn’t just wave a baton. He pirouetted. He gyrated. He levitated. He emoted. He swooned. Many critics deplored his podium acrobatics, echoing Oscar Levant’s remark that he used music as an accompaniment to his conducting. In later years, when his tempos became glacial in his determination to wring as much emotional significance as possible from every measure, he pushed his choreographic manner, some felt, into self-parody.
But even his harshest critics had to concede the inordinate breadth of his musical intellect, his comprehensive technique and unforced command, the intense emotional conviction he brought to music. Those who dismissed his manic exuberance as mere showing off missed the point. “The conductor must not only make his orchestra play — he must make them want to play,” Bernstein once remarked. “He must exalt them, start their adrenaline pouring, either by pleading or demanding or raging. But however he does it, he must make them love the music as he loves it.”
Even the most hard-boiled of New York Philharmonic musicians adored Bernstein and they played their hearts out for him, even if some of their performances could be over the top and riddled with technical errors. “He made you play better than you ever knew you could,” Stanley Drucker, the orchestra’s longtime principal clarinet, later observed of the maestro the players still call Lenny.
It’s hard for those who did not grow up during the 1950s and ’60s, when Bernstein delivered his Young People’s Concerts on national television, to comprehend their enormous influence. He and the new medium were a natural for each other. Handsome, witty and glib, he explained music in a way that informed but did not talk down to kids or parents. Through him, the power of classical music reached into America’s living rooms to an extent not known before or since. Because of him, an entire generation grew to love music and to take up music professionally. Sony has released a number of these television lecture-concerts on video, and they are just as appealing today as they were 40 years ago.
Bernstein straddled the worlds of serious and popular music more successfully than any other composer of his generation — and paid the price. The man who gave us “West Side Story,” “Candide” and “On the Town” never could persuade musical intellectuals to accept him as a “serious” composer, while the Broadway bunch wondered why Lenny was wasting his time trying to be Gustav Mahler. Bernstein died expecting he would be forgotten as a composer and only remembered as a conductor.
It doesn’t appear that this will be the case. The best of his popular works are firmly entrenched in the repertory, and concert works such as “Chichester Psalms,” Serenade for Violin, Strings and Percussion and the “Candide” Overture remain symphonic staples. It is true he did not live to compose the grand masterpiece he always wanted to compose. But the fact that he broke down the barrier between “high” and “low” styles in such works as his theater-piece “Mass” gave the green light to several generations of American composers to write their own music, free of the strictures of academic fashion. And so today’s younger composers owe a tremendous debt to his example.
If Bernstein the composer is nowhere to be found on the New York Philharmonic’s newly issued 10-CD set of historic broadcast performances, Bernstein the conductor most certainly is.
Titled “Bernstein Live,” the boxed set contains 13 hours worth of previously unreleased performances from 1951 to 1981, almost all of them of material he never recorded commercially. The set is as thoroughly documented as any of the previous archival boxes issued on the Philharmonic’s Special Editions label, with two fat booklets of program notes, photos, concert and recording lists, and touching reminiscences by Philharmonic musicians and other artists who worked with the maestro. (The set retails for $195 and is available at Tower Records stores or over the Web at www.newyorkphilharmonic.org.)
For those who witnessed Lenny’s larger-than-life performances and knew firsthand the special musical alchemy he could achieve with the New York orchestra, this wonderful set will bring many hours of nostalgic pleasure. Those who never heard Lenny live have the joy of discovery awaiting them. What’s clear is the amazing breadth of his repertory, a catholicity of musical taste his commercial discography barely hints at.
Each disc is crammed with goodies. There are incandescent accounts of Hindemith’s “Mathis der Maler” and Stravinsky’s “Song of the Nightingale,” both from 1956. The Hindemith may be the finest gem of a set crammed with gems. A sinewy and exciting Bruckner Sixth Symphony from 1976 sits alongside a long-treasured pirate tape from 1970 of scenes from Wagner’s “Goetterdaemmerung” with Eileen Farrell and Jess Thomas. The American moderns are exceedingly well represented, from Copland, Barber, Foss, Thomson and Ruggles to the 1951 world premiere of Ives’ Second Symphony. An entire disc is devoted to Bernstein discussing and playing Copland and the avant-garde composers Xenakis, Brant, Boulez and Cage.
If Bernstein the composer is not represented in the set, that aspect of his art is thoroughly documented on commercial recordings. Nearly everything else adds much to our knowledge of how he made music, revealing a kind of hot-wired, risk-taking style of performance one almost never hears in today’s safe, sanitized symphonic environment. That is his great legacy and it is lovingly preserved in this handsome set of recordings — a must for every collector’s shelf and a cherishable tribute to the enduring art of America’s master musician.
