According to a well-worn anecdote, Johannes Brahms was heard to say: “I’ll never write a symphony, you have no idea what it feels like to hear the footsteps of a giant behind one” – the giant being Beethoven. And Brahms was all of 43 years old when he finished his First Symphony, whose finale alludes to Beethoven’s Ninth. If Brahms in fact felt intimidated by his mighty precursors, he was assuredly fortified as well: there would be no Brahms symphonies, as we know them, without the forebears he knew and studied.
In the case of Leonard Bernstein – the topic of a previous blog and NPR feature – the weight of the past was a constant topic. It imposed expectations and Olympian standards. But mainly Bernstein worried that cultural memory was a resource that risked being squandered or diminished over the course of the twentieth century. And I believe Bernstein’s anxiety was all too prophetic.
Scripting my NPR show, I returned to Bernstein’s 1973 Norton Lectures, and differently reacted to his discomfort with the course of music in his time. He was a musician whose purview was always unusually broad. Not only because it embraced a variety of genres, but because – as a diehard pedagogue – his explorations of past achievement fed never-ending questions and concerns about the fate and purpose of the arts. His discomfort with the state of music once seemed to me anachronistic. I would now call it courageous.
Another discovery I made, scanning the web, was a one-hour interview with Bernstein about conductors he had known. He expressed pride that “all these conductors were my friends.” In relation to his contemporaries, he was typically inquisitive and acquisitive. He studied – simultaneously — with Serge Koussevitzky and Fritz Reiner, who had virtually nothing in common as technicians or interpreters. He was also influenced by Dmitri Mitropoulos, who was remote from Koussevitzky and Reiner both. And, in the interview (with Paul Hume), one learns that he valued his personal relationships with Arturo Toscanini, George Szell, and Karl Bohm. Bernstein was famously eclectic – and this is nothing if not an eclectic list.
But the most riveting moment in the interview, by far, is a story about Wilhelm Furtwängler. (Go to 35:00.) In the late forties, Bernstein conducted a Mahler symphony at the Concertgebouw, in Amsterdam. He arrived to discover that, the night before his concert, Furtwängler would lead Brahms’ First with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. It was Bernstein’s first (and only) opportunity to hear Furtwängler in concert – he had to go. But his European manager told him this was out of the question. The hall would be picketed by demonstrators denouncing Furtwängler as a Nazi (which he was not). And Bernstein, being Jewish, would attract attention.
Bernstein managed to enter the hall via backstage and sit in a stage box unobserved. “I’d never seen anything like it, I’d never heard anything like it,” he remembers. “I was in tears. I thought, ‘I’ve got to go back to meet him.’ But I was told – ‘you can’t do that. It would be embarrassing for him; it would be embarrassing for you.’’”
Many years later, Furtwängler’s secretary mailed Bernstein a page from his diary. “It said: ‘Tonight I heard the greatest conductor in the world, and I was prevented from meeting him.’ Furtwängler had done the same thing. He had been in that same stage box for my concert. And he asked to go backstage to meet me. We were not allowed to shake hands with one another on two successive nights because of public opinion.”
(Of my older blogs, the ones dealing with Furtwängler continue to be accessed, the most popular being “Furtwangler in Wartime”.)
Among the responses to my first Bernstein blog, one in particular, from a horn player, bears pondering. It reads:
“Western Culture has been demonized by the Social Justice Bolsheviks as irredeemably racist and genocidal. Our contemporary St. Justs and Robespierres do not feel the need to learn about Tradition, because they have identified it as a mere catalogue of injustice and oppression. Young people are being robbed of their own heritage; this fall at UNC Chapel Hill the music history requirement for students has been done away with, after being taught for generations. It’s time for sincere artists to speak up for the integrity of Western Culture without fear; as Heather MacDonald pointed out in her City Journal article (https://www.city-journal.org/article/classical-musics-suicide-pact-part-1) the vast majority of arts leaders and educators have remained shamefully silent in the face of this decay and disintegration. Bernstein would have boldly spoken out, cigarette lit, whiskey in hand. Bless him and his crazy genius, and may his memory inspire American artists to “feel the fear’ and do it anyway.
“Your Bernstein article, and the comments of Thomas Hampson in particular, hit me hard with a feeling that we are losing ground as human beings through the ‘calamitous failure of American cultural memory.’ I spent two years with Michael Tilson Thomas at the New World Symphony, and through him I perceived the tremendous artistic power that Bernstein wielded; a kind of uncompromising sincerity and commitment to the beauty of music. Understanding the incredible musical vitality of post World War II America is impossible without including Lenny — the idea that his legacy might be ignored through basic ignorance is horrible to contemplate.'”
As I have repeatedly observed, Bernstein’s tenacious advocacy of Dmitri Shostakovich, in the midst of Cold War propaganda portraying Shostakovich as a Soviet stooge (not to mention Western cultural propaganda espousing 12-tone orthodoxy), says a lot. We do not much encounter this kind of fearlessness today. Have a look at our political arena. A conductor of my acquaintance adds:
“One sure way to stay unemployed as a conductor is to get known for your political views. “
To read my previous blog on Bernstein and the FBI, click here.
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