Read The Leonard Bernstein Letters Online
Authors: Leonard Bernstein
The Leonard Bernstein Letters (72 page)
55
West Side Story.
56
Spanish for “gifts” or “treats”.
57
Vera Zorina (1917–2003) was the stage name of Brigitta Lieberson, wife of Goddard Lieberson. From 1938 to 1946 she had been married to George Balanchine. Zorina was a dancer and actress who specialized in playing the title role in Honegger's
Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher
.
58
Goddard Lieberson (1911–77), English-born record producer who became president of Columbia Records (1956–71 and 1973–5). After studying composition at the Eastman School, he joined the classical division of Columbia Records. He took a leading role in the introduction of the long-playing record. As well as overseeing important classical recording projects (such as Stravinsky's recordings of his own work), Lieberson also produced many of the most successful Broadway cast recordings, including
West Side Story
, which was recorded a month after this letter, on 29 September 1957 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio.
59
A stage adaptation of
The Diary of Anne Frank
, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, opened on Broadway on 5 October 1955 and ran for 717 performances.
60
Albert Sirmay (1880–1967; originally Szirmai), Hungarian operetta composer who moved to New York in 1926 where he took a job with Chappell & Co., becoming music editor for the likes of Gershwin, Porter, and Jerome Kern. He is credited as the editor of the piano-vocal scores of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musicals:
Allegro
,
Carousel
,
Flower Drum Song
,
The King and I
,
Me and Juliet
,
Oklahoma!
,
Pipe Dream
,
The Sound of Music
, and
South Pacific
; and he also edited the piano-vocal score of Weill's
Lady in the Dark
. He later became a great Bernstein enthusiast, particularly
West Side Story
in which he invested $500 as one of the show's original backers (see Simeone 2009, pp. 30 and 113).
61
West Side Story
opened for try-outs in Washington on 19 August 1957, then in Philadelphia on 10 September, before the Broadway opening on 26 September.
62
Dame Margot Fonteyn de Arias (1919–91), ballet dancer who became
prima ballerina assoluta
of the Royal Ballet, London. She married the Panamanian diplomat Dr. Roberto Arias in 1955, and was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 1956.
63
Lauren Bacall (b. 1924, as Betty Joan Perske), American actress. Her idol was Bette Davis and both were friends with Bernstein. Bacall married Humphrey Bogart in 1945. When Bogart became ill in 1956, she wrote a touching letter to Bernstein. (“So sweet of you to take time out to write, and so lovely to hear from you as always. Bogie is coming along, still terribly weak from the treatments and still twenty-five pounds under weight. But in about three weeks it will all be over, thank God, and we can start fattening him up and getting him really well. He's had a time of it but has been saintly throughout.”) Bogart died on 14 January 1957. In 1988, Bacall made a memorable appearance at Bernstein's 70th birthday gala at Tanglewood, singing “The Saga of Lenny” (Stephen Sondheim's witty parody of “The Saga of Jenny” by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin).
64
Sondheim wrote this letter on the day of the Broadway opening of
West Side Story
.
65
Roger L. Stevens (1910–98), American theater producer and real-estate magnate. Stevens remained loyal to the production of
West Side Story
when Cheryl Crawford withdrew – the “dark days” to which he refers. He later became Chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Stevens was a larger-than-life figure. He was a property developer by profession and someone who relished the big gesture – none bigger than in 1951, when he led a syndicate to buy the Empire State Building. Stevens gave enthusiastic support to
West Side Story
, and this extended to organizing the opening-night party in New York. His continued involvement resulted in rather a convoluted formula for the original production credits: “Robert E. Griffith and Harold S. Prince (by arrangement with Roger L. Stevens).”
66
Sondheim's detailed and amusing account of
West Side Story
early in its Broadway run is a mine of information, as is his discussion of the one-day recording session for the Columbia Records cast recording made on Sunday, 29 September 1957. Bernstein was unable to be at the recording as he had flown to Israel for the inaugural concerts in the Frederick Mann auditorium straight after the opening night of
West Side Story
.
67
The original cast members of
West Side Story
mentioned in this letter played the characters shown in parentheses: Stephanie Augustine (standby for Maria); Lee Becker (Anybodys); Mickey Calin (Riff); Martin Charnin (Big Deal); Grover Dale (Snowboy); Al De Sio (Luis); Larry Kert (Tony); Carol Lawrence (Maria); Eddie Roll (Action); Lynn Ross (Estella).
68
Stephanie Augustine was married to Joseph Hyman.
69
Frank Lewis compiled the cryptic crosswords in
The Nation
. “Ground rules” was the example given by Lewis in a note at the bottom of the puzzle as a potential clue for “lures”. Sondheim and Bernstein shared an enthusiasm for fiendish cryptic crosswords.
70
Harold Clurman's review of
West Side Story
(
The Nation
, 12 October 1957) was a rather bitter attack on the show and its authors, and Sondheim's quotations from the review are exactly as they appear in Clurman's original. The only number he seemed to enjoy was “Gee, Officer Krupke”.
71
Irwin Kostal and Sid Ramin, the orchestrators of
West Side Story
.
72
This is a phrase that crops up occasionally in Bernstein's correspondence. Traditionally, a “groaning board” was a table weighed down by an abundance of food.
73
Paul Tortelier (1914–90), French cellist. He played in Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra (1937–40) before embarking on a very successful solo career. Though not a Jew, he was very sympathetic to the State of Israel, and he stayed regularly with his family on a kibbutz.
74
Joshua Logan (1908–88), American theater and film director. Logan's Broadway credits included
Annie Get Your Gun
and
South Pacific
, for which he also co-wrote the book and shared a Pulitzer Prize with Rodgers and Hammerstein. Logan had known Bernstein for several years by the time of
West Side Story
. A telegram from Logan dated 17 November 1955 reads: “Dear Leonard, I know this will be an exciting evening and the more so because of you. Josh Logan” (sent on the opening night of Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's
The Lark
, for which Bernstein wrote the incidental music).
6
The New York Philharmonic Years
1958–69
In 1940, Aaron Copland had joked with Bernstein about the time “forty years from now when you are conductor of the Philharmonic.” In fact it was just eighteen years later that Bernstein became Music Director of the orchestra, and over the next decade he was to take it on tour all over the world, to make hundreds of recordings, and to give a staggering number of concerts: in 1971 he conducted his 1,000th concert with the Philharmonic, and plenty more followed (his last concerts with the orchestra were in October 1988). In 1958, the press, particularly the
New York Times
, was often critical of playing standards in the orchestra, but Bernstein soon lifted both the morale of the musicians and the quality of their performance. Howard Taubman was chief music critic of the
Times
from 1955 to 1960 and wrote enthusiastically about Bernstein: he warmly welcomed his appointment and was generally positive about his concerts. Taubman's place was taken by Harold Schonberg, who grumbled for years about Bernstein's showmanship and often questioned the value of his musical interpretations. It is sometimes true that a hostile critic can ruin the career of a music director, but Bernstein's popularity was such that even Schonberg's most acidic notices made little impact.
This was the decade where Bernstein had the most regular contact with other composers: commissioning a great deal of new music (something for which he doesn't always get the credit he deserves), arranging events like the celebrations for Aaron Copland's sixtieth birthday at the Philharmonic, encouraging Stravinsky to come and conduct the orchestra, and corresponding with a startling range of composers about their work: the likes of Stockhausen, Xenakis, Feldman, Cage, and Carter, alongside Poulenc, Messiaen, and friends such as Copland, Foss, Diamond, and Bernstein's erstwhile orchestration teacher Randall Thompson.
Tours with the Philharmonic resulted in some remarkable personal encounters, and one of the most memorable came early in Bernstein's tenure, when the orchestra traveled to the Soviet Union in 1959. During this visit he met Boris Pasternak, at a time when the author had been publicly denounced by the Soviet authorities for
Doctor Zhivago
, and a year before his death. For the rest of his life Bernstein would treasure Pasternak's letters – and their meetings at the author's
dacha
and in the green room at one of the concerts. When Bernstein took the
orchestra to Japan, Felicia stayed at home, and a long letter he wrote to her is a wonderfully evocative description of the sights and sounds of that country.
Back in the United States, Bernstein was becoming an ever more public figure. Euphoric about the election of President Kennedy in November 1960, he was involved in the ball for Kennedy's Inauguration the following January, and was quite a regular visitor to the White House during the Kennedy years. When the president was assassinated in November 1963, Bernstein was quick to pay tribute to the death of a leader who had become a friend, conducting a televised performance of Mahler's “Resurrection” Symphony. Five years later, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, it was Jacqueline Kennedy who took care of the funeral arrangements, and she asked Bernstein to be in charge of the music. Her moving letter of thanks is eloquent testimony to the warm friendship between the two of them.
In the 1964–5 season, Bernstein took a sabbatical year in order to compose. He conducted just one concert (of his own music) right at the end of the season, and otherwise limited his activities to four Young People's Concerts. The largest project that presented itself at the start of this year was a new musical based on Thornton Wilder's
The Skin of Our Teeth
, a collaboration with two of Bernstein's best friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. By January 1965, this had foundered, and Bernstein wrote to David Diamond about “a dreadful experience, the wounds still smarting. I am suddenly a composer without a project, with half of that golden sabbatical down the drain.” The friendship with Comden and Green survived this unhappy episode, but the “golden sabbatical” threatened to produce no new music whatsoever. What saved the day was a commission from Rev. Walter Hussey of Chichester Cathedral on England's south coast for a set of Psalms. Some of the music originally composed for
The Skin of Our Teeth
was quickly recycled in the
Chichester Psalms
(the opening movement and the lyrical theme of the second). The correspondence with Hussey contains no mention of this, but it does show Bernstein laying out his preliminary thoughts about the work in some detail, the decisive moment when he decided that setting the Psalms in Hebrew was something that excited him, and the circumstances of the first British performance on 31 July 1965 – seemingly a rather idyllic visit, at least by Bernstein's standards, with all the family able to travel with him to England. Two weeks before the Chichester performance, these same
Chichester Psalms
had featured as the new work in his only New York Philharmonic concert of the season – a programme that also included the
Serenade
and
The Age of Anxiety
. In short, the sabbatical didn't produce the new Broadway show that was hoped for, but it did result in one of Bernstein's most popular concert works. The
Chichester Psalms
was one of just two substantial pieces to be composed during his years at the Philharmonic – the other was the
Kaddish
Symphony, finished in time for its premiere in Israel in December 1963, but not without a struggle. As the most searching and musically advanced expression of Bernstein's Jewish faith, the work
required of him a large emotional investment. The dedication to the memory of President Kennedy was, of course, only added at the last moment, and by the time the symphony was first played in the United States (by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Munch), Bernstein's friend Marc Blitzstein had also been murdered in Martinique. Bernstein's use of the word “Kaddish” refers to its specific meaning as a prayer of mourning: praising God in spite of personal loss. Thus, Bernstein wrote ruefully to his sister Shirley in January 1964 that “It's an open season on Kaddish, all right. The President. Marc.”
Both works from the 1960s were described by Bernstein during his interviews with John Gruen in 1967: “I've written two works in the last 10 years, can you imagine, since I took the Philharmonic, which was at the point when I finished
West Side Story
. Since then I've written two works, neither of them for the theatre […] one was
Kaddish
and one is the
Chichester Psalms
– they're both biblical in a way. So obviously something keeps making me go back to that book.”
1
In spite of his commitment to the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein continued to work in Europe and Israel, including his first visit to Vienna since 1948. On that occasion he had worked with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, but now he was conducting concerts and recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic. His relationship with this orchestra was to flourish over the next quarter century, but initially Bernstein was profoundly disturbed by the anti-semitism within it. Georg Solti, another Jewish conductor with extensive experience of working with the orchestra, wrote not to allay Bernstein's concerns, but to counsel a spirit of forgiveness. Solti added that Helmut Wobisch – the former SS man who was the orchestra's manager and one of its trumpeters – was “despite everything […] probably one of the few trustworthy members of that orchestra.” Neither Solti nor Bernstein found it easy to work with the Vienna Philharmonic, despite its fabled past, but both managed to establish a musical relationship that became increasingly close over the years.