Continuing a series of
articles about American composers, I reprint this piece from 2002 which asked
if there was more to Leonard Bernstein than West Side Story.
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| Photograph by Al Ravenna, World Telegram |
As American
conductor William Eddins once said to me in an interview published in a
Symphony Australia program booklet about ten years ago: ‘This was always the big rap against
Leonard Bernstein. I still hear composers go, “Oh he wasted so much energy on
Broadway”, and I look at them, I’m like: “You are nothing. You are less than
nothing. You are a musical amoeba compared to Leonard Bernstein. They’re still
going to be doing West Side Story 300
years from now, long after you are a footnote to a footnote, so get over your
bad self”.’
Even
after reading Humphrey Burton’s biography – as comprehensive as it is – you
feel as though you haven’t even come close to half an understanding of the man.
Don’t believe me? See below.
Not
only was he chief conductor and then laureate for life of the New York
Philharmonic; he helped establish the Israel Philharmonic, the Sapporo Music
Festival in Japan, and Europe’s Schleswig-Holstein Festival, replicating there
the mentoring work he’d done with young people at Tanglewood. Some of
Australia’s favourite musicians were beneficiaries of Bernstein’s musical
beneficence – Edo De Waart, Markus Stenz, Marin Alsop, Daniel Mendelow… He
championed American composers, and on his first State Department tour conducted
(in the same program) William Schuman’s American
Overture, Barber’s Second Essay,
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, Roy
Harris’ Third Symphony and Copland’s El
salón México.
The
relationship with Copland is important. They were like a duumvirate of American
music, jointly responsible for creating an American orchestral sound, with
‘Lenny’s’ popular instincts creating a snappier edge. They first met when
Bernstein turned up at a party at Aaron Copland’s apartment, and boasted that
he could play Copland’s Piano Variations. ‘Play it’, said Copland. ‘It’ll ruin
your party,’ said Bernstein. ‘Not this party,’ said Copland. And Bernstein
played. Later, Bernstein prepared the piano reduction of Copland’s El salón Mexico, and conducted Copland’s
work around the world. He gave the European premiere of Copland’s Symphony
No.3, and reported back: ‘Too long, said some. Too eclectic, said Shostakovich
(he should talk!). It lacks a real Adagio, said Kubelick. Not up my street,
said Wee Willie Walton. And everyone found Chaikovsky’s Fifth in it, which only
proves their insanity…’
Towards
the end of his career, Bernstein leaned towards Europe. He enjoyed a close
relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic, created a legendary Fidelio, Rosenkavalier and Falstaff,
and was the first conductor to record the complete symphonies of Mahler, but he
continued to create spectacular landmarks on the American musical scene. His
performance of Haydn’s Mass in Time of
War at the height of Vietnam drew 15,000 people to Washington’s National
Cathedral, massively snubbing Richard Nixon’s inauguration night.
Bernstein
was an icon of American life. When Felicia Bernstein threw a cocktail party to
raise funds for Black Panthers illegally detained, Tom Wolfe chipped out a
place in social history for Bernstein and his wife when he described them in New York magazine as ‘radical chic’. Bernstein
hung out with presidents (‘Come and see us anytime,’ Jimmy Carter wrote on his
place card at a White House dinner). Bernstein the giant wanted to make giant
contributions to the symphonic repertoire. Yet how often does anyone listen to Kaddish, Jeremiah, Facsimile or A Quiet Place, Concerto for Orchestra, Songfest or Arias and Barcarolles? Is there a problem with his music?
Towards
the end of Bernstein’s life, when he was struggling with projects of great
import (at one stage he wanted to write a Holocaust opera), his friend and
sometime lover Tom Cothran wisely said:
It’s clear to one and all,
and should be clear to you as well, that you should be writing first-class
quick musical comedy that borrows from everywhere (including Wagner, if you
want) but that throws out the heavy plush…Your way is to play one thing against
another, and when you are to glide along just above the edge of irony, the
result is good. You get so serious. It’s the knell.
Bernstein
didn’t need this advice in those pieces inspired by New York, West Side Story, Fancy Free or On the Town. But he had so much energy,
and so much to say. He’d saddle himself with the need to ‘be significant’. In
Symphony No.3 Kaddish (1963), a human
being, the narrator, calls God to account, consoles Him, disillusions Him and
then invites Him(!) to a more mature relationship. We probably wouldn’t mind
the tortuousness if we didn’t hear any words, as in the psychological ballet Facsimile, or if the words were in
Hebrew as in Jeremiah (Symphony
No.1), but in Bernstein’s English you wonder if the Job-like railing is from
someone with no more cause for complaint than a suburban mortgagee. Perhaps
Bernstein could have heeded the advice sometimes given to playwrights: let the
characters drive the work and the subtext take care of itself.
‘Bernstein’s music is “conductor’s music”,’ say those who
try to find a reason why the ‘serious’ pieces ‘don’t work’. He’d pull an
appropriate trick out of the ragbag of conductor’s repertoire whenever he
needed to convey depth, say the detractors. A conductor who specialised in
Mahler would have no shortage of these. But eclecticism is not really the
problem. Mass, once described as ‘the
greatest mélange of styles since the ladies’ magazine recipe for steak fried in
peanut butter and marshmallow sauce’ is one of his most successful pieces
(performed somewhere in the world each month). It works because it knows what
it is: a musical. Commissioned by Jacqueline Onassis for the opening of the
Kennedy Center in 1971, Mass is a hippy-era
comment on faith, complete with Godspell-type
characters (the librettist was Stephen Schwartz, later to write Wicked), within the context of the Latin
mass, but if you’re not offended, it’s catchy and coheres. Its eclecticism is
part of a time-honoured American tradition.
Another work that started life as a musical, Candide (1954), tells the story of a
young man who struggles through life to maintain his mentor’s philosophy that
‘all is best in this best of all possible worlds’. The overture will always be
an effective concert opener, but Bernstein and the original co-writer, Lillian
Hellman, wanted Candide to carry a
critique of Eisenhower’s USA, a land of House Committee investigations into
Un-American Activities. Candide, it
seems, ended up between stools, not quite musical, not quite opera. Three
writers and six lyricists later, and it seems no-one was any closer to a
definitive form. The ‘final version’ of 1989 put back more music, and perhaps
it fixed the frame. But no-one had sat down at the start and worked out what
sort of piece it should be? Perhaps not, since the music had apparently just
gushed out of Bernstein.
As
a child visiting relatives in Connecticut and listening to Uncle Harry Levy’s
phonograph, Bernstein made no distinction between the ‘Suicidio’ aria from La gioconda and Barney Rose’s Barney Google (‘with the Goo-Goo-Googly
Eyes’). As an adult he would’ve given ‘my balls to have written four bars of [Mozart’s
Così fan tutte]’. Sure Bernstein had
serious concerns: psychoanalysis and the condition of modern man, the crisis of
faith in a violent century, his Judaism and patriotism. He could certainly ‘do’
uplifting, as when Marlon Brando walks up the gangway, bleeding but triumphant,
at the end of On the Waterfront.
But
was he better off when these things crept out of his unconscious. Bernstein was
proudly patriotic when it was patriotic to be proudly liberal, but his Bicentennial
gift to the nation, 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue, written with no less a collaborator than Camelot’s Alan Jay Lerner, was a flop. ‘School pageant,’ said one
critic. ‘Only two titans could have had a failure like this,’ said West Side Story collaborator Jerome
Robbins. Songfest (1977), on the
other hand, the other bicentennial gift, is sadly little known, a moving tribute
to Bernstein’s favourite American poets while aiming to be no more than a song
cycle.
Left
to his unconscious Bernstein’s music could throw up interesting conjunctions of
pet themes. Voltaire closes Candide
with a throwaway line: ‘“There is a chain of events in this best of all
possible worlds…” “That’s true enough,” said Candide, “but we must go and work
in the garden.”’ Bernstein turns this ending into a virtual anthem, ‘Make Our Garden
Grow’. But if you compare it with (ie. listen to it against) ‘To Burn With Pride’
from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the
family resemblance of musical phrases at key points of the two texts reveal
interesting parallels:
Candide
You've been a fool
And so have I...
We're neither pure nor wise nor good...
And make our garden grow.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
To burn with pride
And not with shame...
Not
hide my head when the flag goes by…
I
love this land. It will prevail.
And
then there is an additional poignancy when you hear the opening chords of ‘To
Burn With Pride’ opening Bernstein’s setting of Whitman’s poem ‘To What You
Said…’ in Songfest, arguably his
only, tentative, public declaration of being gay.
American
music adds important strands to our orchestral repertoire, orchestral
expressions of feelings that are common to many people in this day and age,
when we have passed by the ‘dark-brown Angst of Vienna’ (in Steve Reich’s
words). As only an American could, Leonard Bernstein bridged the divide between
pop and classical. But he could provide perfect examples of those other
American qualities – sentimentality of a ‘Barber’s Adagio’ kind, pep, power, big ‘lump in the throat’ pride. Brando’s
walk up the gangway occupies similar emotional territory to the pioneers
crossing the prairie in Copland’s Billy
the Kid. Bernstein should never have gotten hung up over whether his
European mentors and models would have approved.
Did
Bernstein ever do as well as he hoped? Perhaps when he least expected it. In
1981, writing A Quiet Place, which he
hoped would be the great American opera (as if West Side Story didn’t count), he incorporated the operetta Trouble in Tahihi, written in 1954. Does A Quiet Place’s further
exploration of a dysfunctional family add anything to the operetta it swallows?
Trouble in Tahiti is a sad portrayal
of a stale suburban marriage. It is the closest Bernstein got, I dare say, to a
Mozartean balance between lightness and depth. There is of course arty conceit:
a trio of singers designated as a ‘Greek Chorus’, but they sing in the style of
those Mitch Miller voices that used to advertise Pepsodent and Kemdex on
black-and-white TVs in the Eisenhower era, creating a sitcom-like surface that
suppresses self-indulgence.
Bernstein
was truly a big American. Not everything he wrote hit the mark, but much of
what’s best in Bernstein is the best of American music, and it doesn’t have to
be ‘serious’ to be great.
Gordon
Kalton Williams
Symphony
Australia © 2002/2005
First printed in program booklets for the Symphony Australia network orchestras. Reproduced by kind permission
If you are interested in other of my articles on composers, please see:
Sousa and the Sioux, 19 August 2011
"...above the canopy of stars..." - Beethoven's Ninth, 28 May 2012
Percy Grainger, the chap who "wanted to find the sagas everywhere", 17 June 2012
Igor in Oz: Stravinsky Downunder, 17 July 2012
Wagner - is it music or drama? 27 July 2012
"Beautiful...sad": Puccini's La boheme, 29 July 2012
Philippa - an opera [blog 1], idea for an opera on Philippa Duke Schuyler, 16 Sep 2012
