LEONARD BERNSTEIN (1918-1990)
Truly a complete musician, Leonard Bernstein was the first conductor born and raised in the United States to achieve world-wide status. He was a conductor, composer, performer and teacher. Moreover he dealt with all facets of music from classical orchestral and opera to jazz and rock. He always supported pop music, calling it more adventurous "than anything being written in serious music today".
YOUTH AND EDUCATION
Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts of parents who were from what
is now the Ukraine. As a young boy he was fascinated with the music he heard
on the radio and in the synagogue. When he was ten, the family acquired a
piano, and he was soon spending every spare moment experimenting on it. Neither
parent had had much interest in music, but they agreed to let him take lessons.
Early teachers were not very competent and he had to figure out theory himself.
At age 14 he found a good teacher, Helen Coates, who remained a friend and
mentor all his life; It was she who enforced discipline on his practice and
technique.
Attending the oldest, and one of the finest public high schools, in the United States, the Boston Latin School founded in 1635, he received very good grades, formed his own jazz band, and was piano soloist with the school orchestra. He began to realize he might be able to make a career as a musician and composer. Entering Harvard as a music major, he took mostly philosophy and language courses, accompanied the college glee club, and wrote and composed for college productions, graduating cum laude. He also began to make influential connections. The conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos was so impressed with Bernstein that he invited him to attended his rehearsals with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. There he learned what was involved in putting together a performance. On a trip to a concert in New York he met Aaron Copland who invited him to a party where, on the famous composer's dare, he played one of Copland's most difficult works. The guests were blown away!
After graduating from Harvard, Bernstein went to New York where he spent a summer as a starving artist. Mitropoulos encouraged him to study to be a conductor and arranged an audition with Fritz Reiner at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. At his audition, Reiner gave him an untitled full orchestral score and asked him to read it at sight and play it on the piano. Such a score can have fifteen or more lines of music for the various instruments, with transpositions for some them. Some of the world's best conductors would be stumped by such a task. Fortunately it was a work familiar to Bernstein, The Academic Festival Overture by Brahms. He played it successfully, became a student and received the only A grade Fritz Reiner ever awarded in his conducting class. After his first year at Curtis, Bernstein started his long association with the Tanglewood summer music school. There he studied conducting morning, noon and night under the command of Serge Koussevitzky. He shared a room with four other students, rehearsed with the student orchestra during the day and share the podium with others at evening concerts.
EARLY CAREER
Now he needed a job. He spent the winter in Boston and worked on some compositions,
but he could not attract any piano students. After another summer at Tanglewood,
he spent the next winter in New York, living in an eight dollar a week room,
playing for classes, giving lessons, and making the rounds of music publishers
and agents, armed with a letter of recommendation from Reiner. He later described
the winter as his valley Forge. Finally, out of the blue, Artur Rodzinski
offered him a position as his assistant conductor with the New York Philharmonic
Orchestra. (Note: Although this was during World War II, his draft status
was 4F because of asthma, so he was not eligible for the military.) He moved
into a studio apartment in Carnegie Hall, attended rehearsals and remained
ready for whatever he was called on to do. One of his tasks was to conduct
newly submitted pieces of American music so that Rodzinski could hear and
evaluate them. Then, one Saturday night he went to a party, returning home
at 4 a.m. At 8 a.m. the phone rang; the guest conductor Bruno Walter was ill
and Bernstein would have to conduct that Sunday afternoon's concert. Moreover,
it was also a radio broadcast; the whole country would hear his debut. Not
even owning a "cutaway", the customary dress for conductors at afternoon
concerts, he wore his only presentable suit. When he was announced, the audience
was lukewarm with disappointment but, at the end, there was a loud standing
ovation. More importantly, the musicians of the orchestra were enthusiastic.
His career had begun.!
SUCCESS
Soon Bernstein was in demand as a guest conductor all over the world; the
first year he traveled 50,000 miles and conducted eighty-nine concerts. No
longer an assistant conductor at the New York Philharmonic, he was now its
chief guest conductor, leading the orchestra one day in four. In addition,
he was invited to write the music for Jerome Robbins's new ballet Fancy
Free. Attendance broke all records at the Metropolitan Opera House during
its run and the show received rave reviews ("... right up-to-date ...
strictly New York from the sidewalk up."). Fancy Free was so successful
as a ballet, it was expanded into the musical On the Town which broke
ground as the first American musical by a classical composer and as
the first to use to black and white dancers on stage together actually holding
hands! (This was 1944.) Even before On the Town appeared on Broadway,
the film rights were sold to MGM resulting in the 1949 movie starring Gene
Kelly and Frank Sinatra. One of the things that made this work so successful
was the sophistication of the music Still, Bernstein's involvement with Broadway
did not sit well with many classical musicians. Koussevitzky was furious with
him for stooping so "low"!
THE CONDUCTOR
After the war Bernstein was able to start conducting abroad. The experience
was often interesting because the European orchestras had lost so many members to
military service; in London, after the bombing, there was no proper concert hall left standing, and many players of the London Symphony orchestra were so
inexperienced he had trouble keeping them in tune!.
Very conscious of his Jewishness, Bernstein refused to change his name as so many of his Jewish colleagues did during the war. 1947 saw the beginning of an very emotional experience for both conductor and audience, conducting in Israel. At that time, Israel was still a British Mandate but, when he returned in 1948, the state of Israel had been formed and was at war. He gave a series of concerts including some for the soldiers, often close to the firing lines, and he became a national hero. Israel still had no proper auditorium and had no money for one; ten years later, Bernstein led a festive concert in a new auditorium, the funding of which had been a favorite project of his.
Soon he discovered a love of opera and became the first American-born, American-trained conductor to conduct at the famous La Scala Opera House in Milan Italy. It was Cherubini's Medea with Maria Callas. Made an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he also became President of the London Symphony Orchestra, and a regular guest conductor with the Israel Philharmonic. In 1957-58 Bernstein became the conductor of the New York Philharmonic. This group had been called "the graveyard of conductors"; they were superb musicians who did not tolerate ineptitude in conductors; some of the most famous have refused to lead them. From the beginning, he was very successful. When he took his orchestra on a tour of Latin America, in 12,555 foot high La Paz, portable oxygen tanks were made available for the players, and adjustments had to be made in the woodwinds to give them the proper sound with the more limited breath control of the players. (In 1969 Bernstein resigned as chief conductor of the Philharmonic and was named lifetime Laureate Conductor.) Speaking five languages, his work took him all over the globe. He was the only classical musician to take part in the gala for Jack Kennedy's 1961 inauguration as president; others performers included Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte, Milton Berle, Nat King Cole, Betty Davis, Jimmy Durante and Gene Kelly.
THE COMPOSER
Bernstein had wanted to compose all his life, but conducting and other chores
kept getting in the way. He had to steal time for his first love. He wrote
the music for Wonderful Town with Rosalind Russell which ran for 553
performances. He also did the music for the sound track of the film On
the Waterfront. Next came
Candide which was a failure at the time, but the great success
of West Side Story made amends. His royalties for it came to $2,000
a week (which would amount to roughly one million a year in today's dollars)
and made him wealthy. Jacqueline Kennedy commissioned him to compose a work
for the inauguration of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. The result was
his Mass. He also wrote a few operas of his own including Trouble
in Tahiti and A Quiet Place.
THE TEACHER
For many people, Bernstein is best remembered for his fifty-three Young
People's Concerts televised on CBS. His was the remarkable ability to
communicate with audiences of all ages and to explain, without oversimplifying,
the sometimes arcane aspects of classical music in terms all could understand.
He also prepared a series on Beethoven for PBS in the 1980s and Omnibus
telecasts on CBS. For two years he taught at Brandeis University near Boston,
commuting there from New York twice a week at first. This was while he was
writing Candide, and he used this to involve his students. Later he
was the 1972-73 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard. His tasks
included giving six lectures, living in a college and conducting seminars.
His first lecture was interrupted by a bomb threat. Finally as he turned 70,
he resolved to spend the rest of his life on education.
THE END
Bernstein and his wife of many years, Felicia Montealegre Cohn, were both
heavy smokers. A life-long sufferer from asthma and emphysema, he refused
to stop smoking when she died of lung cancer. Toward the end of his life,
he had to carry portable oxygen with him, but he continued to work and travel
in spite of illnesses and bad reactions to medication. Finally his condition
deteriorated more and more, and he died October 14, 1990.
Revised September
2008
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