The Bernstein Machine Chugs On
by Sedgwick Clark
We like to define our favorite artists as “another this” or “another that.” One of my first professional articles, for the Village Voice in the mid-1970s, was about promising young pianists. My editor wanted some sort of angle to enliven a standard subject, so she asked me if there were “a new Horowitz” among this group. That night at Carnegie Hall I ran into Claudio Arrau’s personal manager, Friede Rothe, and told her of this angle. “But Sedge, dear,” she replied, “who wants to be another Horowitz?” I had my title.
We just can’t resist it—this branding of an upcoming young artist with a famous elder’s pedigree. Gustavo Dudamel, the 29-year-old Venezuelan firebrand who just concluded his first season as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic [see my May 26th blog], is only the latest to be labeled “another Bernstein” by some critics. At least there are obvious similarities: his demonstrative, emotional conducting style, his romantic interpretive approach, his instant audience appeal; and he has admitted that he listened to many Bernstein recordings when he was young(er). In another case, a recent article suggested that the New York Philharmonic had found a new Bernstein in its first-rate, if rather restrained, new music director, Alan Gilbert! Such nonsense can only be detrimental to a developing career.
So many musicians’ reputations fade after their demise, but not Leonard Bernstein’s. The books written since his death at 72 in 1990 attest to that. Nearly all their titles begin with his full name, followed by an explanatory subtitle. Schuyler Chapin’s little “[L.B.] Notes from a Friend” (Walker, 1992), should be the uninitiated’s first read—short and sweet, an infinitely engaging memoir of the man and musician as we all want to remember him.
In 1994 came a pair of biographies: The first was just plain Leonard Bernstein without a subtitle by Humphrey Burton (Doubleday), and the second was “[L.B.] A Life,” a johnnie-come-lately effort by Meryle Secrest (Knopf). Burton, a Bernstein friend and colleague for 30 years, who directed many of the conductor’s videos, had the Bernstein family’s blessing and entrée to his papers. Secrest did not, and most reviewers considered the “official” Burton effort more authoritative.
A time followed in which his main record companies, Columbia/CBS (now Sony Classical) in his earlier period and Deutsche Grammophon in his last 15 years, rereleased nearly all (if not all) of his recordings on CD. DG has released the lion’s share of the videos on DVD, most recently the Schumann symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic. Kultur has released two nine-disc sets, the first of 25 New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts and the second of several concerts with various orchestras. Bernstein videos have also turned up on EuroArts (Bruckner’s Ninth with Vienna) and Medici Arts (a rehearsal and performance of Shostakovich’s First and Peter Rosen’s film Leonard Bernstein—Reflections, which includes a performance of Milhaud’s Le Boeuf sur le toit, made at the same time as the 1976 EMI recording).
The past three years have seen a Bernstein book per annum, and there are several more in the works—including a coffee table book of photos from his last six years by the New York photographer Steve J. Sherman to be published by Amadeus in October, a study of West Side Story, a biography aimed at children, and various studies aimed at separate aspects of his art.
In 2008 the New York Philharmonic published “[L.B.] American Original: How a Modern Renaissance Man Transformed Music and the World During His New York Philharmonic Years, 1943-1976” by Burton Bernstein and Barbara B. Haws, Lenny’s younger brother and New York Phil archivist/historian, respectively. The subtitle pretty much tells the story, and is more than a little reminiscent of Joseph Horowitz’s subtitle for his controversial 1987 book, Understanding Toscanini (“How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music”). It’s a collection of essays by several well-known commentators (including Horowitz) on the maestro’s multi-faceted interests and career. The texts rarely depart from the “rah-rah Lenny” program (“Bernstein was a born conductor”), and lord knows there’s plenty to rah-rah about. But despite the many insights, for me the main attraction of this handsomely designed, 223-page oversize volume is the wealth of photos, which bring the man’s persona vividly alive. Great conducting shots abound, of course. Open the book at random, and—ahh, here’s a shot of Bernstein getting a haircut in an open pavilion in Moscow during the Phil’s 1959 Soviet tour, surrounded by Soviet girls, some of whom are actually smiling, but none as broadly as Lenny and his barber. Also, ominously, are many photos of him with his ubiquitous cigarette, reminding us of the lung cancer that eventually claimed him.
I’ve not yet finished Barry Seldes’s book, “[L.B.] The Political Life of an American Musician” (University of California Press, 2009), but its subject is a fascinating one: the consequences of his liberal politics during his career—which embraced Cold War America, the Army McCarthy Hearings, being blacklisted by the State Department in 1950, the founding of Israel, the Sixties’ upheaval in civil rights and Vietnam, being placed on the Nixon administration’s “enemies” list—and how these contentious events affected his composing.
Composer Jack Gottlieb was Bernstein’s assistant at the New York Philharmonic from 1958 to 1966. His new Working with Bernstein (Amadeus Press, 2010) has the immediate distinction of being the first book on Bernstein in the last 20 years not to be entitled with his full name. More importantly, it’s a witty, irreverent memoir that no Bernstein fan should miss. “Is this book biased?” he asks in his Introduction. “You bet it is! However, I fervently hope it is not hagiographic.” It’s not. “The man certainly was not a saint,” Gottlieb continues, “and I dearly want to be honest in my assessment. . . .” He appears to be, even if he has undoubtedly pulled some punches. He divides his book into two parts: (1) a “grab bag” of reminiscences, anecdotes, and observations of working with his boss and (2) his program notes about Bernstein’s music. Of many revelations, I discovered that my favorite Bernstein concert work, Chichester Psalms, consisted of largely recycled music written for an abandoned stage project in 1964, the year he took a sabbatical from the Phil to compose: a collaboration with Jerome Robbins and Comden and Green in an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Maybe I knew that factoid before, but Gottlieb details what music came from where. Recycling is a noble art dating at least back to Handel, Mozart, Beethoven et al., but to my mind it rarely had it so good.