The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (33 page)

In 1662 he voyaged to Jerusalem. In a melancholic stupor, ravaged by imagined devils, he married a refugee from Poland, a young whore named Sarah, in imitation of the prophet Hosea (who also had married a prostitute). Sarah was an orphan of the Chmielnicki massacres which in 1648 and 1649 had cost the lives of over 100,000 Jewish men, women and children (almost a tenth of the total world Jewish population of the time). This incident, almost forgotten today, was as brutal in many ways as the Holocaust. A Ukrainian noble named Chmielnicki led raids against his Polish rulers, and threatened by the perceived economic strength of Eastern European Jewry, killed as many Jews as he could on the way. The period traumatized European Jews who had tragically and mistakenly believed that they would not be harmed if they quietly obeyed their Christian masters.

In 1665, Sabbatai Zevi learned of a young rabbi in Gaza, an exorcist, who was said to possess knowledge of the infinite and was capable of seeing straight into a man’s soul. This rabbi, who became known as Nathan of Gaza or Nathan the Prophet, was skilled in the use of propaganda and became Zevi’s ablest organizer and rabble-rouser. The combination of the psychotic, totally self-absorbed Zevi and the master propagandist Nathan proved to be potent.

Nathan insisted that Zevi was the Messiah. At first, Sabbatai did not believe him. They traveled together to holy places. Upon his return to Gaza, Zevi, most probably in a manic state, was consumed with a sense of overwhelming happiness. On May 31, 1665, with the support of his prophet, Nathan, Zevi declared himself the Messiah, King of the Jews.

In the coming weeks, he paraded about Gaza on a horse, reining in many supporters and designating apostles. Nathan soon issued a series of letters to European cities announcing the Messiah’s appearance and calling for acts of repentance. Rumors spread about of miracles, of the Messiah’s great powers, and of an army of ancient Israelites marching against and conquering Arabian cities.

Fifteen hundred years of oppression seemed over. The Chmielnicki massacres were reduced to a bad, evil memory. The light of Messianic fervor illumined centuries of darkness and fear. Jews everywhere, poor and rich, reacted with abandonment, unmitigated joy, mad frenzy. Juveniles were married and urged to procreate so that unborn souls remaining in the cosmos could find homes in babies’ bodies. There was no time to waste, as the end of the world was here.

From a letter of Nathan of Gaza to the Jews of Europe in 1665 showing the anointing of Zevi.

Sabbatai ventured through the Middle East, gathering the support of scholars along the way eager to see messianic predictions come true, meeting little opposition. Arriving back in Smyrna, he prayed in the synagogue during Hanukkah, singing a Castilian love song to a sacred scroll.

At the New Year, Zevi sailed to Constantinople and was immediately arrested as a subversive. Imprisoned in Gallipoli, albeit in royal style, he set up a court in exile, entertaining learned rabbis who left convinced of his divine state. In September, 1666, brought before the sultan in Constantinople Sabbatai Zevi was given the choice of conversion to Islam or summary execution. He immediately chose Islam and was given the name Mehmet Effendi and a royal pension for life. He lived in seclusion and died ten years later, followed shortly thereafter by Nathan.

Nathan spent his last years attempting to explain away in obscure Kabbalistic reference why Zevi converted. It was necessary, Nathan explained, for the Messiah to go “undercover” in the gentile world to collect lost divine sparks. Most Jews reacted to the conversion with immense sadness and embarrassment at being duped. However, worship of this false Messiah was carried on by some for centuries. (Even into the twentieth century a sect in Greece continued to pray, in secret ceremonies, to Sabbatai Zevi.)

This odd and shameful episode had widespread effects on world Jewry. After him, Jews no longer felt totally isolated. Common people had their first taste of freedom since the beginning of the Diaspora. Zevi had unleashed the human passions, which lay smothered beneath rabbinical law. The rise of ecstatic Hasidism, the liberating force of the Jewish Enlightenment which followed, and the aching desire to return to the homeland, Zion, originated in part in this most strange tale.

C
onductor, composer, pianist, author, professor, television personality, Zionist, activist, scholar, producer, world-class raconteur—Leonard Bernstein was the most influential musician of the postwar era.

Aaron Copland, the enabler of American music, beloved of Bernstein, was surely a greater composer; William Schuman and David Diamond, among his closest and oldest friends, were certainly more eminent symphonists. Bernstein’s devotion to their music acknowledged this. Yet, again, greatness is not what this book is about. Through over forty-five years of whirlwind activity, Bernstein became a figure of such authority and charisma that at his death he was remembered in obituaries as a sort of monarch—the John Fitzgerald Kennedy of music. To understand his influence, one must separate out his activities.

Conducting student of Fritz Reiner and Serge Koussevitzky (the great Jewish conductors of the Chicago and Boston symphony orchestras), Bernstein rose to sudden fame in 1943 when he replaced the ailing Bruno Walter (another great Jewish conductor) as guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic on a nationally aired Sunday afternoon radio broadcast. Bernstein was just twenty-five years old.

The circumstances of this famous incident are in many ways symbolic of his career. After undergraduate studies at Harvard and graduate work at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with Reiner, Bernstein ventured to Tanglewood in 1940, armed with references, to study conducting with Koussevitzky. Tanglewood, the summer home of the Boston Symphony since 1936, offered to Bernstein through its new Berkshire Music Center a pathway to fame. Rapidly becoming a pet pupil of Koussevitzky, Bernstein combined the rigorous training he had received from Reiner with the flamboyance and feeling of Koussevitzky to secure a position as assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic under the tutelage of the dictatorial Artur Rodzinski.

The offer to assist Rodzinski came quite unexpectedly. After leaving Tanglewood and the protection of his mentor Koussevitzky, Bernstein secured a twenty-five-dollar-a-week job with a pop music publisher transcribing jazz improvisations and writing popular arrangements under the name of Lenny Amber (Bernstein in English). Shortly thereafter, Rodzinski remembered having seen Bernstein rehearse at Tanglewood and offered him the assistant’s job. The also unexpected substitution for Walter followed, and the short journey from the university to the conservatory, from music festival to Tin Pan Alley, to rising American conductor was complete.

Bernstein’s ability to influence people to secure position and recognition never left him. His Horatio Alger-like vault to fame via live nationally broadcast radio and front-page headlines the morning after taught him the power of the media, a lesson he did not forget as he began to create his legend.

Bernstein was the first American to receive world attention as a conductor, clearing a path for later generations of Jewish American maestros such as Leonard Slatkin, James Levine, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Leon Botstein. In the early years his matinee-idol looks brought bobbysoxers to the concert hall yearning for the opportunity to touch his clothes as he fled into his car after a performance.

Simultaneous with his rise as star conductor, Bernstein was composing musical shows and symphonic works. During the Second World War he took advantage, like so many others, of Americans’ patriotic interest in homegrown creations. His
Jeremiah
symphony and
Fancy Free
ballet (later adapted into the Broadway show
On the Town)
were composed during the same heady period as his celebrated debut with the Philharmonic. During these years he seemed to be everywhere.

From the late 1940s into the 1950s, Bernstein moved in what appear now to be inspired and coordinated strokes to consolidate his position in American music. After exciting but financially unprofitable years as the music director of the New York City Symphony, he taught at Tanglewood and at Brandeis University and guest-conducted with leading orchestras and opera houses from New York to Milan to Tel Aviv. After another successful New York—inspired musical,
Wonderful Town,
Bernstein tried film scoring and triumphed with
On the Waterfront.
His attack through operetta on McCarthyism,
Candide,
was a box office flop at first, then a cult favorite, and finally a recognized classic of sarcastic wit and intellect based on a well-meaning but disjunct play by Lillian Hellman.

In 1957 he collaborated with the great choreographer Jerome Robbins, the twenty-seven-year-old lyricist Stephen Sondheim, and the creator of
Gypsy,
Arthur Laurents, on a work that would transform musical theater forever, an adaptation of
Romeo and Juliet
set in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, the unique
West Side Story.
This musical represents Bernstein’s essence as a creative artist, what the world will best remember of him. “Broadway Lenny” had put it all together (at thirty-nine) in one fast-moving lyrical show, mixing social commentary, dramatic movement through Robbins’s revolutionary ballet dancing, soaring lyrical melodies, pounding ethnic rhythms, and low comedy contrasted by high catharsis. The next year he became the music director of the Philharmonic.

He retired from the orchestra twelve years later to become its laureate conductor, freeing himself from administrative duties to pursue guest-conducting engagements throughout the world, most notably in Vienna, Jerusalem, and London, but always finding time to return most seasons to New York. As the years went by his ecstatic, athletic style of conducting produced increasingly more beautiful and profound results. He championed the works of American composers and introduced an ever-widening listening public to a special understanding of America’s first truly great composer, Charles Ives, and the Weltschmerz of Gustav Mahler (another greatly suffering Jewish composer-conductor whom Bernstein revered and to whom he was often compared).

Despite all these activities, some might say his greatest influence was on musical education. First on the
Omnibus
series and later as the star of the Philharmonic’s own Young People’s Concerts, he taught millions of viewers (probably more children than had ever heard music in the history of public concerts) the intricacies of Beethoven’s
Fifth,
of jazz and orchestration. Most baby-boomer musicians today happily acknowledge that their primary musical influence was Bernstein’s televised classroom. He made our garden grow.

Bernstein’s desire to teach often expanded into a need to preach. His activism of behalf of civil rights yielded practical results in his hiring of minorities to play in his orchestra and bad publicity through Tom Wolfe’s characterization of his fashionable dinner party for the Black Panthers as “radical chic.” His production company, Amberson Productions, videotaped his performances and lectures for widespread commercial dissemination. Video performances were usually preceded by lengthy musical analyses, with Bernstein continuing his children’s concert tradition of explaining the “why” of the work to be performed. He lectured at Harvard (of course the lecture was followed by books and tapes memorializing the talks), attempting to answer music’s unanswerable questions. He sought through imaginative words to translate tones.

His later years took him on lengthy tours of the Orient, Europe, and Latin America, exposing young and old in foreign lands to his special American way of dominating music and enthralling his audience. He championed causes such as AIDS while battling Republican administrations over what he perceived as increasing governmental threats of censorship. Bernstein, the Jew, conducted in Jerusalem during the 1967 War (a documentary celebrated this triumph) and also ironically Beethoven’s
Ode to Joy
during 1989 in almost
Judenrein
Berlin as the Wall came tumbling down amid choral shouts of
“Freiheit!”