By HERBERT KUPFERBERG

There’s a guy at Tanglewood who’s so good that nobody can figure out whether he should be a composer, a conductor, or a pianist.” The speaker in question was Arthur Berger, a composer himself, and working as a critic for the New York Herald Tribune back in the 1940s. The student in question was, of course, Leonard Bernstein, and the dilemma posed by Berger was, as it turned out, easily resolved: Bernstein went on to become a spectacular success in all three musical branches.

This year, at age 70, “Lenny”—as he is universally known—is receiving the official designation as MUSICAL AMERICA’s Musician of the Year. This isn’t the first time he’s been accorded this accolade; it was conferred on him in 1960, the very first year in which the award was given. Never let it be said that MUSICAL AMERICA was behindhand in recognizing talent!

Bernstein today, remarkably, is as versatile, vigorous, and productive as he has been at practically any point in his nearly 50-year career. He has never lost his zest and enthusiasm for music, or his ability to invigorate almost any project he undertakes. Charismatic, creative, and controversial, he is by all odds the most exciting classical musician America has ever produced. Most significantly, he has never lost his hold upon that ultimate arbiter of musical reputations, the paying audience. Critics have caviled and complained about his terpsichorean podium style; biographers have clucked over his personal life; and a number of his compositions, such as his musical Candide, have obtained recognition only belatedly.

The public has never doubted. From his spectacular unscheduled debut at Carnegie Hall as a substitute guest conductor for Bruno Walter on a Sunday afternoon in 1943, through his 11-year tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic (which conferred the title of Conductor Laureate on him in 1969), to his subsequent conquest of virtually every European and American musical capital, Bernstein has remained at the center of the musical scene, eagerly welcomed by millions who have become his admirers whether through television, radio, recordings, or the concert hall.

That Bernstein is a child of the 20th century there is no doubt. His extraordinary talents would surely have made their mark in any epoch, but they have flourished all the more mightily in the age of the jet plane, the TV screen, and the PR industry. Certainly few musicians have ever risen to fame with such rapidity. A master of another art, the pitcher Lefty Gomez, once remarked on the eve of a World Series game that he would rather be lucky than good, but Leonard Bernstein as a young man was both lucky and good. His first good fortune was to be enrolled at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood in 1940, the first year that classes were held there under the tutelage of Serge Koussevitzky. With Bernstein, then 22, in that conducting course were Lukas Foss, Thor Johnson, and Richard Bales; young Lenny outshone them all and went on to work for a number of summers as Koussevitzky’s assistant.

His second big break, of course, occurred on November 13, 1943 when, having been engaged by Artur Rodzinski as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he stepped in to direct a program consisting of Schumann’s Manfred Overture, Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote, the world premiere of Miklos Rozsa’s Theme, Variations and Finale, and the Prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. What’s sometimes forgotten is that, the night before, young Bernstein had been deeply involved in another important musical event, the New York recital debut of mezzo-soprano Jennie Tourel. On the program, with himself at the piano, was Bernstein’s newly written I Hate Music song cycle, better known as his “Kid Songs,” which included among its lyrics:

Music is a lot of folks in a big dark hall,
Where they don’t really want to be at all . . .
Music is silly! I hate music!
But I like to sing!

So at 25, Bernstein dramatically demonstrated his enormous versatility and, even more important, leaped to national fame with the Philharmonic’s podium as his springboard. The New York Times played the story of his unscheduled debut on page 1 with an ecstatic review by Olin Downes, and even added an editorial rather sententiously entitled “A Story Old, Yet Ever New.” A few weeks afterwards, when the young assistant conductor was called upon to fill in at a second concert, the hard-to-please Virgil Thomson remarked in the Herald Tribune: “His real ability to handle serious music as if it belonged to him (and he to it) makes one certain inside that here is no flash-in-the pan.”

Thus did Leonard Bernstein become an overnight celebrity, but one with staying power. Those early years brought him invitations to guest conduct in other cities (he premiered his Jeremiah Symphony, for example, with the Pittsburgh Symphony in 1944), and he displayed his stylistic versatility with works like the ballet Fancy Free, which he wrote for his close friend Jerome Robbins that same year. Fancy Free was later developed into the boisterous Broadway show On the Town, in which Bernstein first demonstrated his concept of the musical as something more than a succession of hit tunes. Among those who saw the show was Serge Koussevitzky; he enjoyed it, but he also scolded his old pupil for “wasting” six months away from classical music.

Considering that Bernstein’s most consistent claim to fame has been in the area of symphonic conducting, it’s interesting to recall that the first orchestra he could really call his own was the short-lived New York City Symphony, which he directed from 1945 to 1948 at the City Center on 55th Street. Bernstein’s programs put considerable emphasis on 20th-century works to which other orchestras paid minimal attention. For the conductor and his audiences alike, those three years at the City Center were a valuable educational experience. He quickly became one of the busiest guest conductors in the world, with engagements in Britain and on the Continent, as well as in Palestine, where he began a long and warm association with the orchestra that eventually became the Israel Philharmonic.

In retrospect, it seems curious that Bernstein never was offered the conductorship of the Boston Symphony, and that his main association with that organization has been through his activities at Tanglewood, which this past summer staged a week-end gala for him on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Certainly Serge Koussevitzky, who retired from the Boston podium in 1949 (he died two years later), wanted his protégé to succeed him in the worst possible way. The Boston Symphony board of trustees rejected the idea and chose Charles Munch instead. Writing a history of Tanglewood some years ago, I asked Bernstein why he thought the Boston board had turned him down.

“I’ve never inquired,” he replied. “There were some intimate enmities between Koussevitzky and the people on the board. He had it all figured out that I could take a third of the season and then the next year we’d share it equally—he had it figured out month by month—and then the next year he would leave comfortably, knowing that I would have the two years of apprenticeship or whatever you want to call it and that he could leave the orchestra safely in my hands. That was the plan he wanted, and they said no.”

Bernstein insists that he himself didn’t want to take over the Boston, or any other orchestra, at that stage of his career; that he wanted “to write music and be free and flexible.” Maybe so. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to speculate which direction Bernstein, and the Boston Symphony as well, might have taken had Koussevitzky’s wish been honored.

In point of fact, for all of Bernstein’s New England background—he was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, went to Boston Latin School, and graduated from Harvard—his character and personality would seem more naturally suited to brash, bustling New York. And certainly it was in his decade—plus at the helm of the New York Philharmonic that he became one of the dominant conductors of our time.

At the outset, Bernstein shared the Philharmonic’s podium with Dimitri Mitropoulos, but in 1958 he was named music director of the orchestra and the next year led it on a tour of the Soviet Union, Europe, and the Near East. As always, it was the audience rather than the critics who greeted Bernstein with unalloyed enthusiasm. His regime became perhaps the most adventurous, innovative, and progressive that the orchestra had ever known, with a plentiful infusion of new works, many by Americans. Bernstein’s frank emotionalism, his kinetic podium style, his exciting musical approach, and his adroit programming combined to send his audiences home happy. The Philharmonic suddenly became a hot ticket. And although critics freely complained about what they regarded as his excesses, in the end even they were won over—though they professed to conclude that it was Bernstein rather than themselves who had undergone a change. “Mr. Bernstein’s conducting now seems more intent on substance and less on flashiness,” decided the New York Times in 1966.

Bernstein’s years at the Philharmonic gave new focus to his extraordinary gifts as a musical educator. He had begun, even before taking formal charge of the orchestra, with his “Omnibus” television concerts—a series of illustrated musical lectures. At the Philharmonic he continued his efforts with a televised series of Young People’s Concerts that attracted nationwide audiences, so that in 1960 he even received that ultimate popular entertainment accolade, an Emmy Award.

But Bernstein educates not only audiences; he also works hard with young musicians, notably at Tanglewood, where he returns frequently to direct concerts and also to sharpen the skills of the student orchestra and its young conductors. The line of continuity from Koussevitzky to Bernstein to the present generation is clear and unbroken. Seiji Ozawa, who polished his own skills at Tanglewood, puts it this way: “Koussevitzky was big poppa to Lenny and Lenny was big poppa to me.”

Bernstein himself once told an observer who sat in on a Tanglewood rehearsal session with the student orchestra: “I really come here to learn. All those things I teach the kids, I’m learning. Nothing is so exciting to a young person as a chance of getting better. And having gone all through that myself, I relate very strongly to them. I feel very strongly for these kids. I feel when they’re bored and when they think, ‘Oh, this is all too heavy, why are you talking so much, why don’t we just play it?’ And then, when they realize why I’m going into it in such detail, I feel very rewarded.”

Not the least heartening aspect of Bernstein’s career is that nearly 20 years after his departure from the New York Philharmonic, his conducting activities flourish as brilliantly as ever. He is active all over the world—indeed, in 1976 he led the Philharmonic itself on a bicentennial tour of Europe, emphasizing American music. He has added opera to his repertory, conducting everywhere from the Metropolitan in New York to La Scala in Milan—though many Bernstein admirers would like to see a further increase in his operatic activities. He has been one of the instigators of the Mahler boom that influenced so much American symphonic programming. He has lectured, written books, and produced a list of recordings, with a dozen different orchestras, that runs on for columns in the Schwann Catalog.

And then, of course, there is Leonard Bernstein’s own music, which also represents a formidable list. Such works as The Age of Anxiety and the Chichester Psalms still tum up on symphony programs, usually with Bernstein himself conducting them. For the opening of the Kennedy Center, on September 8, 1971, he was commissioned to write a new work; he responded with Mass, an audacious mixture of modern classical styles along with folk melodies, church hymns, show tunes, and rock. Typically, critical opinion was divided, with the New York Times waiting until the 1988 presentation at the Tanglewood birthday festivities to approve it as “a telling document of its time and a prescient harbinger of the future.”

It is no disparagement of Bernstein’s more traditional compositions, including his operas Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place, to say that it is his Broadway show music that has had the most powerful impact on listeners. One show, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, was a failure. Candide, his version of the Voltaire tale, puzzled its initial audiences but now has been incorporated with great success into the repertory of the New York City Opera, with its delightful overture becoming a concert staple. And West Side Story, that remarkable musical updating of the Romeo and Juliet saga, remains, of course, one of the all-time great American shows, with its story and its score seeming as fresh as ever through manifold revivals.

So Leonard Bernstein remains, as he has been for nearly half a century, ac reative, exciting, and unpredictable force not only on the American, but on the world music scene. He entitled his first book The Joy of Music, and after all these years and all those concerts, that joy remains unabated. We congratulate him upon receiving the second Musician of the Year Award of his brilliant career. And who knows whether it will be the last?