As a young girl, while my friends were ascending the “Stairway to Heaven,” eating “American Pie” and pledging they “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” I was busy singing an “Old Fashioned Love Song” of another sort. I turned a deaf ear to the popular renderings of great songsters like James Taylor, Elton John and John Lennon. I was in another world, and Leonard Bernstein was its leader.
Admitting Leonard Bernstein is your favorite conductor is a bit like saying Babe Ruth is your favorite baseball player. It is such an obvious choice that it does not convey any higher appreciation for music. Thus, I have kept my love for Leonard Bernstein under wraps until now. Musicians, as a group, are a nerdy bunch, priding themselves on an endless store of trivia knowledge. Comic-Con has nothing on us! At competitions—even today at amateur events where everyone is established in a professional career—the talk inevitably turns to obscure artists and even more obscure recordings. We like to show how we appreciate the tempo of this artist’s recording, the pathos of that one's, and the nuance of still another's. After a performance, it is not uncommon for a well-wisher in the audience to approach me to ask which recording inspired me. They are usually disappointed to find that I try to find my own voice in the music; they cannot simply “have what I’m having”.
The same is the case for symphonic recordings. One does not simply buy a collection of Beethoven Symphonies from a late night television commercial and call it a day. Each conductor inhabits his recording with a unique spirit and insight, trying to communicate to the audience what he thinks the composer was trying to accomplish. In addition, where recordings are captured live, they take on a historical significance—a unique combination of musicians and conductor coming together for a moment in time. The Berlin Philharmonic, or Vienna Philharmonic, or New York Philharmonic has the signature of its particular musicians: a particular oboist, a certain French horn player, that concertmaster and his Stradivarius.
For this reason, Bernstein’s 1979 recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony was a milestone; it marks the only time he would stand on the podium of Herbert von Karajan’s well-oiled Berlin Philharmonic. Equally amazing was his Mahler’s 5th, recorded live with the Vienna Philharmonic for Deutche Grammaphon. Bernstein deserves credit for the importance that Mahler now plays in our mainstream concert literature. (He is buried with a copy of Mahler’s 5th across his chest.) For something more conventional, there are few renderings of Beethoven that approach Bernstein’s “Eroica” (3rd Symphony) with the New York Philharmonic. Equally fulfilling is Bernstein’s accompanying lecture “How a Great Symphony Was Written”.
For my ears, few recordings reach the beauty of Bernstein’s Brahm’s 4th Symphony with the BSO at Tanglewood in 1972. I must confess that Brahm’s 4th happens to be my single favorite piece of music ever written by anyone, anywhere, in any medium. I took an independent study in college just to examine the architecture of this Symphony under an analytical microscope. I crawl on all fours to hear it performed live in any city; I would take that “Stairway to Heaven” if word reached me that Bernstein himself had assembled a Pearly Gate pick-up orchestra to bring Brahms' 4th to "life."
All of this is what we expect of any conductor today. What makes Bernstein so important is that he did it at a time when no American-born musician had yet achieved world prominence as a conductor. Think back to the movie “Amadeus,” when young Mozart was surrounded in the German-speaking courts by Italian composers. They shunned him for daring to sully the purity of Italian opera with the “ugliness” of the German language. Similarly, in the mid-twentieth century, classical music in the US was considered the domain of Europeans. Bernstein honed his craft in the U.S. under great expatriate conductors: Hungarian-born Fritz Reiner, Russian-born Serge Koussevitzky, and German-born Bruno Walter.
Bernstein became an overnight sensation after his appointment to assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic. On November 14, 1943, (a date on which I would be born fifteen years later) Walter was taken suddenly ill; Bernstein stepped in to conduct that evening’s performance without having once rehearsed with the orchestra. The serendipity of the moment, combined with his skill and insight as a musician, were hailed in the New York press, crowning him the next great conductor and conveying upon him instant credibility despite his humble US pedigree.
It wasn’t just the Bernstein of the podium that awed me as a young musician. He was similarly groundbreaking in his contributions as a composer of American music. I have often referred to his Harvard undergraduate thesis, “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music” where he tries to define the essence of a purely American musical idiom. He is remarkable in having been successful in writing both “classical” music and Broadway/movie music. The score to West Side Story is truly one of the most iconic gems of the American theater; On the Waterfront one of the best film scores of the pre-John Williams era. That Bernstein did not draw boundaries between the classical and more popular forms is part of who he was as a person—down to earth and jovial. As a Harvard student, he was generous with his musicality, as likely to play piano duets or accompany a singing group as he was to compose or conduct.
Unfortunately, I had only one opportunity to meet Bernstein during the few decades our lives intersected. A couple of my college friends were enrolled at Tanglewood in the summer of 1980. I went out to visit during July 4th weekend, an occasion where Aaron Copland was in residence to conduct an all-Copland concert in the shed. Can you imagine anything more spine-tingling than Copland himself leading “Fanfare for the Common Man” outdoors in the Berkshires? Perhaps as part of the Copland celebration, Bernstein was there. He was not scheduled to perform or conduct—he was just hanging out with the musicians and students. Every once in a while you could hear his laugh carry through the breeze.
By this time in my life, the man had assumed monumental proportions in my mind. But Leonard Bernstein in life was small of stature—not much taller than I am at five-foot-three. I wanted so much to talk to him, to tell him of the impact he had on my life, how I had gone to Harvard perhaps based upon an essay where I talked about his influence. But there was nothing I could add that was worthy of interrupting his little entourage. I was, after all, turning my life away from the pursuit of music toward a new career. I moved close enough to capture for memory the sound of his voice, to feel the electricity that passed from him to those who encircled him. Then, I respected his space and took my seat to enjoy the concert.
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