The dominant American musician of the last century? Leonard Bernstein, of course.
It is hard for a generation that did not grow up hearing Bernstein’s concerts, recordings or televised young people’s programs to appreciate the enormous impact he had on the cultural life of this country during the better part of his lifetime. Even the idea of a Leonard Bernstein seems almost quaint today when classical music is being shoved to the margins of American culture.
Bernstein, who would have turned 86 on Aug. 25, died 14 years ago, enough time to begin taking stock of his astonishing life and career. While the musician everybody knew as Lenny was alive, the magnetic field he gave off in front of an audience sent everybody’s compasses spinning. People argued about his relative merits as a conductor, composer, pianist, educator and proselytizer. Some critics deplored him as a podium acrobat, a superficial showman. But none could dispute his boundless talent or his all-enfolding love of music or his ability to make even classical neophytes share that love.
“He was like everybody else, only more so,” observes Ned Rorem, the composer and longtime Bernstein friend in a new radio documentary series on Bernstein’s life and music. “But nobody else was like him.”
A real charmer
Bernstein wanted to charm everybody, but if he failed to fascinate absolutely everybody, he would settle for being talked about. And talked about he is in the 11 hours that make up “Leonard Bernstein: An American Life,” perhaps the most ambitious and thorough documentary on the man and musician ever undertaken. Produced by WFMT and nationally syndicated over the WFMT Radio Network, the 11-part series begins airing at 8 p.m. Tuesday on WFMT-FM 98.7.
More than 100 colleagues, friends and family members provide the anecdotal fodder for this compelling study of an irreplaceable musician who became one of the cultural icons of the last century. Among those who speak about Bernstein in the course of the series are conductors Michael Tilson Thomas, Marin Alsop and Lukas Foss, composer John Adams, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the late author George Plimpton, the late songwriter Adolph Green and members of the Bernstein family, including his late father Samuel, brother Burton and children Jamie and Alexander. Actress Susan Sarandon narrates.
“These 11 hours of radio tell a monumental story,” says Steve Rowland, who produced the series. “It is as much a story of a time and place as it is about a great musician.”
According to the producer, the hardest part about doing the series was not writing the scripts, conducting the many interviews or choosing the music — it was assembling all the pieces. Rowland spent the better part of six years working on it, combing some 17,000 letters in the Library of Congress and hundreds of hours of archival tapes, including many interviews with Bernstein. And his work is far from complete. Although all the scripts are written and all the recorded material is at hand, more than half of the episodes have yet to be finished. “I’m about two weeks ahead of the broadcasts” in the editing process, he confesses.
Rowland admits he never met Bernstein but, like millions, he felt he knew him through Bernstein’s “Young People’s Concerts” on TV, which turned an entire generation into classical music lovers. Producing a documentary on him was, he says, “my crazy idea.” Originally he pitched the concept to Public Radio International but found much more receptive ears in his friend and fellow Bernstein enthusiast, Steve Robinson, WFMT’s vice president.
Rounding up support
Robinson snapped up the series and wasted no time pulling other stations aboard. Thus far the number of U.S. radio outlets that have signed to carry the broadcasts stands at 703, and Robinson also has received nibbles from the BBC and from as far away as Australia and New Zealand. Rowland says he’s “stunned” by the response of broadcasters. “People thought we were overly optimistic when we suggested we might get 300 stations to carry the series,” he says, smiling.
The first episode of “Bernstein: An American Life” serves as prologue and takes us back to Lenny’s years as a Harvard undergraduate during the ’30s, when he first proclaimed his musical gifts to the world. There are a few gushy superlatives but among them glitter nuggets of truth. “Lenny stuck to what he believed in and loved,” Foss says. “Music to him was love.” And there is plenty of music, most of it Bernstein’s own, linking the various spoken bits of wit and wisdom.
In one choice snippet, we hear Bernstein rehearsing Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du Printemps” with a European youth orchestra. He tells his teenage musicians that they should play a particular section as if they were in love with the Earth itself. “Think of yourselves lying face down in a meadow on a beautiful spring day, wanting to kiss the grass,” he says, with the gravity of a Talmudic scholar.
Rowland promises that later episodes will deal straightforwardly with Bernstein’s bisexuality, politics and other more controversial aspects of his life. “Some of those things I don’t consider controversial — that’s who he was,” the producer says. “The things that are really important to me are what he did in public, not in private.”
All told, “Bernstein: An American Life” is must-hear radio, essential listening for those who already know what all the fuss was about, but also essential for a younger generation who never saw or heard him and have only his extensive discography to judge him by.
Meanwhile, another important chapter of Bernstein’s electronic legacy has reached the home video market, reissued in a new format. Kultur last month released on DVD a nine-disc set of “Young People’s Concerts” Bernstein presented in prime time over CBS Television from 1958 to 1973. The set carries a list price of $149.95.
Bernstein the teacher
The “Young People’s Concerts” reveal another side of this protean musician: Bernstein the teacher. He had the great gift of making music appreciation both fun and informative without ever talking down to his young charges, as he sometimes could do with adult audiences. No major artist before him so fully exploited the power of television as an educational medium, and none was blessed with his telegenic charisma or musical brilliance, which allowed him to reach out so effectively to millions of living rooms.
The DVD series is by no means comprehensive. The vaults of New York’s Museum of Television and Radio hold some 70 “Young People’s Concerts,” a trove from which 25 programs have been chosen to fill Kultur’s book-size DVD package. They represent Daddy-Professor Bernstein — “the village explainer,” as Tom Wolfe memorably called him — at his vintage best.
Along with such classic shows as “What Makes a Melody?” “What Is American Music?” and “What Is a Concerto?” are segments about jazz and folk music in the concert hall, sonata form, musical Impressionism and tributes to the composers Mahler, Shostakovich and Stravinsky.
Looking at these programs today shows you why they were so successful and why they have held up so well, despite the many technological advances the medium has embraced. Nothing educational television has done on behalf of serious music since the early ’70s can compare with, let alone surpass, them. And for that, Roger Englander, the CBS producer and director who was responsible for the broadcasts, deserves a bow too.
As composer John Corigliano remarks in the course of the radio series, “Our classical music world would be in a much healthier place if Lenny were [still] around.”
True enough. But if we can’t have the actual Lenny among us anymore, the virtual Lenny will do.
