Leonard Bernstein's 100th Birthday: So Many Gifts

There are 100th birthday celebrations going on for Leonard Birthday--a Thomas Jefferson-sort of man, who, like Jefferson, perhaps felt that he had accomplished all of which he was capable.

I had three connections with Bernstein. When I was editor of Music Educators Journal for the Music Educators National Conference (MENC), the association's board of directors voted to give Bernstein an award, noting especially his televised "Young People's Concerts," in which he performed classical music for school children and discussed it with them.  The board and selected staff went to New York to Bernstein's office for the award presentation. The group was greeted by his assistant in the reception area and told that Bernstein would be out in a minute. He came out, shook everyone's hand, accepted the award, and posed for photos. It all took about 90 seconds. He then turned to his assistant, handed her the award, and said, "Put this in the closet with the others."

I have told this story a number of times over the years. On hearing it, my arts-savvy friends were always very supportive of Bernstein. Ah, sure, it would have been nice if he had said what he said out of the group's earshot. But Bernstein--a composer for various musical genres, a conductor, recording artist, television personality--received hundreds of awards a year. My arts-savvy friends said that Bernstein was just telling it the way it was.

The second connection was 10 years later when my wife and I were invited to the 60th birthday concert for cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Bernstein was one of the performers, conducting the National Symphony Orchestra in Bernstein's Slava! A Political Overture, which Bernstein had written in honor of Rostropovich, taking melodies from his score for the failed 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Bernstein seemed a little distracted, the overture a little rushed, and he left after it was over. But his embrace of and evident affection for Rostropovich appeared warm and lingering.

As for the third connection, I reviewed for publication two books by Bernstein. One was of his The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, which was based on his 1973 Norton Lectures. The publication was extremely ambitious, containing the text of the lectures and audio of some of the lectures and the musical works he discussed. The topic was ambitious too: "Whither music." Bernstein was reacting to classical music's recent immersion in atonality. He considered the lectures multidisciplinary, utilizing the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky. Bernstein's daughter later said that her father was clearly in over his head in these lectures. My reaction was that Bernstein was cherry-picking from Chomsky, dipping in as it suited him. His writing was generalized and sometimes contradictory. And yet behind it all were some brilliant observations and his undoubted genius. Reactions in addition to mine ranged from mixed to negative. The second book was a collection of his writing titled Findings. It included occasional essays, fiction, poems and his 1939 Harvard Bachelor's thesis "The Absorption of Race Elements in American Music." At the time of publication, the thesis, which took up 20% of the book, was 43 years old. In his introduction, Bernstein confessed that he would liked to have updated the thesis based on more recent scholarship and his own musical experiences. But, he explained, he just didn't have the time to do it. The impression he left is that this ancient academic exercise was inserted to pad out the book and fulfill a book contract.

Bernstein was a world class conductor of symphony orchestras in his 20s. Also in his 20s, he composed the music for a Broadway musical (On the Town) and went on to write the music for one of the landmark works of the American musical theatre--West Side Story. It is energetic, lyrical, and eclectic in its musical influences. He wrote the score for the 1954 Academy Award-winning film On the Waterfront. He wrote for the ballet and the opera, appeared on television, and did humanitarian works. There is no denying his genius and his influence. 

But there is also the sense that he could do so many things that it was impossible for him to excel in everything or to continue to excel after creating masterworks and giving magnificent performances. After the great success of West Side Story, Bernstein walked away from the musical theatre, saying that he was assuming others would pick up where he left off. It didn't happen, and he returned 20 years later with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, which ran for just 20 performances It is a matter of debate how many operas he wrote: either two short ones--Trouble in Tahiti (1952) and A Quiet Place (1983), or one, A Quiet Place as revised by Bernstein in 1986 with Trouble in Tahiti as Act I and the original A Quiet Place as Act II. It seems a blending of old and news like Findings. He wrote just one film score and three ballets. He later said that his conducting took too much time away from his compositions.

As he ended his life, there were some similarities between Bernstein and the filmmaker Orson Welles, also a towering talent who started young, but who left as many unfinished films and he did completed ones and whose later work,  such as F Is for Fake and Filming Othello, was sometimes a melange of old and new material. But, unlike Welles, Bernstein's combined work--his conducting, his recordings, his musicals, his symphonies, his choral works, his television performances--are a substantial oeuvre.

The irony is that it isn't that Bernstein didn't accomplish a great deal. It's that there is a nagging sense, with all of his gifts, that he could have accomplished more. As he wrote in the introduction for Findings, he just didn't have the time. But if he had just written West Side Story and On the Town, that would have been enough to be remembered in the history of musicals; if he had just conducted his concerts and made his recordings, he would be remembered as one of the great classical music conductors; if he had just broadcast the "Young People's Concerts" from 1954 to 1972, he would be remembered as a music educator.

Most of us would be more than content to be remembered as one of those. 

Happy Birthday, Lenny. And, by the way, the lady standing next to you in some of those MENC photos is your receptionist.

Copyright 2018 by John T. Aquino