The Bernstein Story Not Told in “Maestro” – His Prophetic Disenchantment with What America Had Become

Leonard Bernstein’s musical odyssey – in some ways, not unlike the marital odyssey dramatized in the film Maestro – was ignited by ecstatic expectations that proved unsustainable.

He eagerly anticipated a Great American Symphony, a new American species of musical theater, and a New World version of the New York Philharmonic. An iconic American journey, it yielded bitterness and disappointment, relieved by an unanticipated second musical home abroad: in Vienna. 

Bernstein’s alienation proved prophetic: he all too well perceived the unravelling of the America in which he had once placed enthralled hopes.  

“I don’t think anyone should doubt for a second the weight on Lennie’s soul,” comments  Thomas Hampson in my latest “More than Music” installment on NPR: The Bernstein Odyssey. Having sung with Bernstein more than any other baritone, Hampson bears witness that “when Lennie was in Vienna, the city stopped.” And he minces no words about what Bernstein increasingly encountered at home: “I think we are in dangerous times for people seeking enrichment to live. That may sound glorious and grand — but I’m a student of Leonard Bernstein. . . .  And I think to understand Lennie’s reaction in the sixties . . . would be terribly illuminating for people today.”

Bernstein’s elder daughter Jamie remembers her father’s response to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, whose White House he visited, then to the deaths of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. “My parents started to feel really pessimistic about the United States. And then we were in the Nixon Administration, and we had the Vietnam War. . . . My father got very discouraged about the state of the union – and that sense of despair did not leave him for the rest of his life.” 

A singular chapter in Bernstein’s American odyssey was a once very famous article by Tom Wolfe in New York Magazine. Coining the withering term “radical chic,” it savagely ridiculed the Bernsteins for hosting a fundraiser for the Black Panthers. Charlotte Curtis, the society editor of the New York Times, chimed in with a caustic piece of her own. Jamie Bernstein remembers:

“And then, after that, there was an editorial! In the New York Times! An editorial, lambasting Leonard Bernstein and his wife for hosting that event. And the subtext was that the Black Panthers were considered by Jewish people to be ‘anti-Zionist.’. . . Friends of my parents and relations of my family were furious at my mother . . . The blowback went on and on. The hate mail started to arrive. The Jewish Defense League was picketing outside our building. . . . And it was only decades later, in the 1980s, that through the Freedom of Information Act my father was able to view his own FBI file, which turned out to be 800 pages long. . . . It was in those pages that we discovered that all that hate mail had been generated by the FBI, and all those JDL protests outside our building were bristling with FBI plants. And this all came sstraight out of J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook – it was his dream come true to pit Jews against Blacks. . . . My mother and father were just sitting ducks.”

Another facet of Bernstein’s despair – which I don’t explore on the NPR show – was the fate of music, both popular and “serious.” He felt it had lost its way. This was the topic of his 1973 Norton Lectures, “The Unanswered Question,” the question being: Whither music in our time? When I first encountered these six talks I was impatient with Bernstein’s discomfort with non-tonal music; having been well indoctrinated in 12-tone compositional practice, my reaction was: Get over it. No longer. Bernstein was, again, prescient. His essential premise, I now realize, was that musical creativity – that any creativity – must not cancel the past, that to start wholly anew is a fool’s errand. He was equally skeptical of Stravinsky’s denial that music can express something other than itself. 

It took some nerve, in 1973, to confront Schoenberg and Stravinsky as Bernstein did. He also, in 1966, celebrated the birthday of Dmitri Shostakovich on a nationally televised Young People’s Concert, fearlessly commenting: “In these days of musical experimentation, with new fads chasing each other in and out of the concert halls, a composer like Shostakovich can be easily put down. After all he’s basically a traditional Russian composer, a true son of Tchaikovsky—and no matter how modern he ever gets, he never loses that tradition. So the music is always in some way old-fashioned—or at least what critics and musical intellectuals like to call old-fashioned. But they’re forgetting the most important thing—he’s a genius: a real authentic genius, and there aren’t too many of those around any more.”

Bernstein concluded his Norton lectures with an obligatory blast of optimism – not least because he believed his own compositional magnum opus lay ahead. “There is a general bubbling and rejoicing and brotherliness among composers that would have been unthinkable ten years go. It’s like the beginning of a new period of fresh air and fun.” It never happened. And Bernstein’s own 1983 opera A Quiet Place proved a dark place. The dialectical tension between present and past, long the mainspring for musical creativity, had gone slack. In Stravinsky and Schoenberg, this conundrum, differently manifest, ran its fatal course. Today’s makeshift music — I am thinking of a variety of temporarily popular operas and concert works — is a further consequence.

To close my NPR program, I asked Thomas Hampson and Jamie Bernstein, and also the conductor JoAnn Falletta: “What is the significance, today, of the Bernstein odyssey?” 

“I feel for people of my time, he will always be a hero, there’s no one who will ever replace him,” said Falletta. “For younger people I’m less sure – and I feel badly about that. I mention Leonard Bernstein and I see a kind of blank look from teenagers. And that is such a pain to me, a pain in my heart.”

Jamie Bernstein has created “a dog and pony show” – an hour-long presentation, which she hosts, titled “Leonard Bernstein: Citizen Artist”: “And in this presentation I explain to young musicians why Leonard Bernstein still matters. And that it was because he used his musicmaking in every way he could think of to try to make the world a better place.”

For Hampson, forgetting who Leonard Bernstein was symptomizes a calamitous failure of American cultural memory. I can only agree. Sampling Bernstein’s 1959 televised concert from Moscow, I observe – referencing a story explored in my book The Propaganda of Freedom — that Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic tour to Soviet Russia became a turning point in American foreign policy.

“Some at the State Department were anxious about this initiative. And in fact, Bernstein proved wholly irrepressible, completely unpredictable. He also proved an exemplary cultural ambassador, extolling American and Russian music both. He shook the hand of Dmitri Shostakovich, the leading Soviet composer, who was at the time a target of CIA-sponsored defamation. He befriended invited Boris Pasternack, the eminent Soviet novelist, who was a target of Russian defamation. And, in an inimitable televised Moscow concert, he insisted that, through music, Russians and Americans could discover a common bond.

“In a matter of days, Bernstein superseded a decade of American cultural propaganda, funded by the CIA, demonizing the Soviet Union as a cultural backwater. Beginning with Bernstein, a new policy of cultural exchange with Soviet Russia, applying the arts as an instrument of mutual understanding, became an indispensable diplomatic tool. 

“If you think back to what Bernstein achieved in the Soviet Union in 1959, and ask yourself who could do something like that today – really no one comes to mind. We lack national spokespersons in the arts. We lack ‘citizen artists.’ We increasingly live in an arts vacuum.”

Challenged to end the show on a positive note, I add:

“All his life, Leonard Bernstein would ricochet between elation and distress. It’s in his music, it’s in his conducting. It’s in his letters, which document ecstasies of fulfillment in alternation with  ‘big, soggy depressions.’ It’s a Mahlerian duality. And here’s a Mahlerian remedy: Bernstein’s signature moment from his signature performance of his signature Mahler symphony — the symphony he led as a 29-year-old Wunderkind with the Boston Symphony, that he led on national television in response to President Kennedy’s assassination, that I heard him lead in April 1987 at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic – a legendary performance of the Resurrection Symphony. 

“The moment in question is an apocalyptic fanfare, heralding a pageant of redemption. At Lincoln Center, in 1987, it was unforgettable. And unforgettably slow. So slow as to demand maximum emotional investment – from Bernstein, from the orchestra, from the audience. 

“You really had to be there.”

That 1987 Mahler/Bernstein fanfare ensues. It still sounds apocalyptic. 

To read follow-up blogs, click here and here.

LISTENING GUIDE:

To hear “The Bernstein Odyssey,” click here.

00:00 — JH shamelessly imitates Leonard Bernstein

3:50 — Thomas Hampson sings a Mahler song and recalls learning it with LB

8:30 — JoAnn Falletta remembers LB teaching at Juilliard

14:20 — Hampson sings “Lonely Town” and explains why it’s “very Lenny”

17::00 — Bernstein in Moscow

21:00 — Bernstein attempts to Americanize the New York Philharmonic

23:45 — Hampson on Bernstein in Vienna: “The city stopped.”

27:00 — Hampson sings and discusses Bernstein’s Yiddish wedding song

29:55 — Bernstein and Mahler’s Ninth

36:00 — Jamie Bernstein on her father’s estrangement from the US

38:30 — JoAnn Falletta, Jamie Bernstein, and Thomas Hampson on the significance of Bernstein today

42::00 — To end on a high note: the signature moment from Bernstein’s signature performance of Mahler 2

For more on the Bernstein odyssey, click here.

For a “More than Music” broadcast remembering Bernstein the cultural diplomat, click here.

For an archive of “More than Music” programs, click here.