The Leonard Bernstein Letters (86 page)

Dear Lennie,

It's 4:00 in the morning – after this long, long day. We stayed in Washington, at my mother's house.

Everyone has gone to bed but I just want to stay up by myself – to think about so many things – and about today.
¹⁶⁶

In awful times I think the only thing that comforts you is the goodness in people.

I want to write you that tonight – or this morning – whatever it is – because when I come home I will be so tired – and I may start thinking about the badness in people.

When your Mahler started to fill (but that is the wrong word – because it was more this sensitive trembling) the Cathedral today – I thought it the most beautiful music I had ever heard. I am so glad I didn't know it – it was this strange music of all the gods who were crying. And then – if only you could have seen it – it was the time when Ethel had thought of the most touching thing – having the littlest nephews and nieces, small children, before that terrifying array of Cardinals and gold and Gothic vaults, carry all the little vessels for Communion up to the high altar, so they could have some part in the farewell to the uncle they all loved so much. They were so vulnerable – and your music was everything in my heart, of peace and pain and such drowning beauty. You could just close your eyes and be lost in it forever. That is what I thought the whole service might be like – but as you and Monsignor Duffy and the Archbishop have found out, I don't know very much about liturgy and ritual.

So out of all the confusion – all your days of conferring, postponing, canceling, adding etc., etc., etc., – with every one under strain and out of control, I think something emerged that is as beautiful as your Mahler, and that is the way you have been, through all of this.

The only thing that mattered in the world was that Ethel should have what she wished as music for her husband.

All the music that meant so much to her – all the music the church could or couldn't play – all the intermediaries who cling to their old ways, even through
this. Now [we] have the most Ecumenical of Archbishops – through all that, dear Lennie – you were so tender and gentle and understanding – and tactful and self effacing – so she had
everything
she wanted, including the last solo that I didn't know of until I heard it – and that is what I mean by what I said in the beginning of this endless letter – it is the goodness of people that is the comfort.

I think your goodness and those few soaring moments of Mahler together are more beautiful than if you had played the most beautiful Requiem all the way through.

And it was so much more appropriate for this Kennedy – my Kaleidoscopic brother-in-law – and his wife who loved him mystically. If there had been anything organized or unified about it, it would not have been Bobby and Ethel!

And now we know they were something this world will never see again.

Will you tell your noble orchestra, drowning in heat and cables when I passed them – that so many people all this day have said: how beautiful you were – how many people cried – people who don't know music, and all the ones who were saying the day before, “You should have so-and-so's trumpets, Fourmier (or a name that sounds like that)
¹⁶⁷
Requiem, a Beethoven quartet – a brass quartet?” etc. etc. all the people who really know music – which I don't – today, yours was the time when they wept.

Thank you dear Lennie – I had better not write any more – I could have spared 6 pages of my mother's writing paper and said all I mean and feel so much more coherently, but I wanted to thank you tonight.

With my love, and to Felicia

Jackie

Dear Lenny,

Not being one of the valiant ones (already, is this sentence defiantly grammatical???), I have tasted death on a considerable number of occasions (no, but it's certainly going to be haphazardly, helplessly, convolutedly kind of maybe Jamesian) – well, anyway, blackest despair – the dark night of the soul – the journey into cold sweatland 7 nights a week, the sprawling, crawling, pumping,
exploding, expanding and contracting, 4 A.M. – Mippy-Bosch time – lost and screaming in the depths – the pits of hell. (Wow!!)

However – like others of my ilk who have descended whimpering into the maelstrom, I have from time to time been conversely blessed (this is not Jamesian at all, it turns out – rather Micawber-Dickensian), emerging suddenly from darkness to light, tasting unexpected moments of re-birth.

Most fortunately, in one or two of the instants that I have been re-born, I have known it and recognized it, not by hindsight, in a sad desperate, wandering through the jungles of Recherche à temps perdu (wow, wow!!) in search of a landmark that may never have been there – but known it and gloried in it, at the very moment of borning.

One such on-the-spot recognized re-birth occurred on a hot July night in 1937, when I, a sallow, bloated (195 lb.) unemployed Hungarian-American Pirate King-to-be, disembarked on the steps of the mess Hall of Camp Onota, to be greeted by my mentor, monitor, R[obert] Weil, counselor of Dramatics, who had loyally and rigorously and self-effacingly plotted and planned my engagement extraordinaire at Uncle Lou's Heavenly Haven for Healthily well-fed young Hebrews.

I was immediately introduced by Robert to you, a handsome lad of possibly 12 to 14, or so you appeared in the well-gathered post-dusk as you came down the steps to greet me and whisked me at once indoors, to the inner sanctum of the outer mess-hall – with piano, for our first music quiz. About 5 minutes after we had made our first tentative and mutually suspicious hellos and I had triumphantly
not
identified your Anna Sokolov music (??) as Shostakovitch (was this the future Miss Turnstiles??) and you had sprung up and thrown your arms about me for accomplishing this sensational-non-feat, I felt a sudden, complete exuberance, the fresh air of 1,000,000 windows opening simultaneously and a sense that my life had been building towards a turning point and that it had happened – now.

My sense of the “turning point” was as sure and conscious, as Judy H[olliday] knew and felt in her own more subterranean way about me when we met the following summer, and she took me up to her apartment and pressed my tattered trousers, on an ironing board with me standing around before the eyes of her horrified mother in my less than provocative jockey-shorts. She told her mother that this unappetizing young stranger and she were going to go places together and very soon (based on no knowledge, information or past association whatever).

But back to us (or have I left us at all?), since in not too long a time to come from
our
meeting, we were all 3 and 4 and more bound together with mysterious and continuing consequences that still continue, on and on.

We trouped the Onota Hills that night, for hours and hours up and down, to the dock and back to the camp gate and up and around the bunks and back
and forth, and every moment was a new miracle. I knew I had been listening to music all these years and making my funny and odd full-orchestra phonograph sounds, with soloists thrown in simultaneously, in preparation for this meeting and that I had been carefully rehearsing Sibelius' 5th Symphony to give you its definitive performance that night. All those seemingly hopeless years that I wandered around NY in my sloppy shabbiness, conspicuously sporting rubbers over my shoes in every kind of weather, were not hopeless, were not wandering at all. I had always been on the road, leading straight to these hills, this night.

Have I ever told you that I often used to sing aloud to myself in those days as I stumbled around Times Square or Bryant Park – Brahms' First, the Sibelius 5,
Petrouchka
, or whatever, always hoping, some kindred spirit would perk up his or her ears and join me on the next phrase with arms thrown round me? I was looking for
you
to join me the whole time.

On and on we hiked that night, and the miracles kept exploding around me. Why had I treasured every word and measure and record scratch of [
I Wish That I Was Born In
]
Borneo
, all those years from my pre-historic childhood, if not to share them with you with that night? There was no other soul in the universe, besides you and me, to savor and bellow that Crumit masterpiece with every treasured nuance, into the starry midnight sky. Somehow, someway back in Sharon and the Bronx we had stored up
Borneo
, shored up our memories of it, for this night.

What am I wheezily, puffily, floridly trying to tell you??? The simple fact that suddenly there was meaning in my life. I felt
alive
. There was
Borneo
, Sibelius, T. S. Eliot,
Alice In Wonderland, L'Histoire du soldat, Of Thee I Sing
, with Auden and Spender, Gilbert and Sullivan, old old movies, Palestrina, Black Pete, eighteen million wires and associations I had been waiting all this time to connect with.

I knew as we walked and sang and talked, that you, the boy L. B., was nothing less than a genius, but this knowledge was only another comfortable fact to me, by now – part of the magic of our continuing dialogue.

Leonard, my friend, it seems that you are now 50 or about to be, and I am 50 and certainly have been (and never the twain shall meet, and that last phrase certainly means nothing, but my pen jes' wrote it down).

Whatever our ages, and until we stop all walking, we are still taking that walk in the night around the Onota hills. It seems haphazard, and unexplained as ever, but it goes on, and it is all still the same moment of re-birth of me.

How happy your friendship makes me. It fills me with the simple and complicated joy of knowing there can be a meaning to life – that our haphazard and rambling walk is filled with endless connections into the past and the future.

Hwhatt I'm saying is – I'm not writing – I'm only looking for a way to say I love you, my friend. Happy birthday.

Adolph

My dear Leonard Bernstein,

It was more than a good deed (just here in Germany) to bring Mahler's Fifth. Since I have done this work innumerable times myself (as all other works by our beloved Gustav Mahler), I am in a position to really embrace you as a
Brüder in Apoll
, as Mahler called people (la Burlesca of the Ninth). Your insight into the “cookies” of Mahler's spiritual secrets touched me profoundly. You see, right after coming back from the USA in 1952, I started to re-introduce Mahler in many a European country. Your Mahler-cycle on records is one of the great achievements of our period, I mean also in a “missionary” way.

When Mrs. Byrns and I came backstage after your last concert, you asked me – after Shonah Tovah and before Leihitraoth
¹⁷⁰
– if I played still under Mahler. Great Jove, no! I was not even 7 when he passed on.

But I wanted you to see a fagotto part retouched 3 times by Mahler's own hand. In fact, being a close friend of Alma Mahler and Franz Werfel, I studied most of Mahler's work anew with his
manuscripts
. Quite an exciting experience.

Perhaps, you do remember me, my name was, until 1939
Bernstein
and it was our great late friend K[o]ussevitzki who suggested to me to change into Byrns. It was K[o]ussevitzki who gave me the first breaks in the USA.
¹⁷¹

And more than that: some time ago, many European papers carried headlines in the music columns: “Two Bernsteins get the Mahler Medal” from the Bruckner Mahler Society of America, as some people still remember me under my real name (which is your name!).

From 1952 I conducted Mahler cycles in many European centers (Vienna, Roma, Torino), where I am for the past 17 years steady guest. Also I am steady guest conductor at the Norddeutsche Rundfunk Hamburg and Hanover (I was actually born in Hanover, where my father had one of Europe's leading concert managements – Gieseking, Erdmann, Hindemith, etc., etc.) […]

Mahler, my dear Leonard Bernstein, is the very backbone of my spiritual and human existence. I was 15 when I played (4-mains) the
Fifth
with a schoolmate, and I knew I would be a conductor and my life's main task would be to help Mahler.
His day
, indeed,
has come
!

I was interested to hear you went to [Walter] Felsenstein's
Traviata
. He is one of my oldest friends and I conducted
Entführung
and
Zauberflöte
and Mahler's 3rd and 4th at the Komische Oper 9 and 8 years ago! Yes, you are so right (and so said Klemperer): “the chorus is fabulous”. […]

And now let me sign off. I want to reassure you that this missive is a sign of my – how shall I say – inner relation, and
subsequently
friendship for another Bernstein.

Take good care of yourself and, when I come to New York again, I should very much like to just chatter with you. There are many things about Mahler's life and stories (true ones) that you may not know yet. Have you been to Toblach where I induced the mayor of the town (with the Wiener Mahler Gesellschaft) to have the plaquettes on the tiny cottage and the Bauernhaus (where I stay frequently)?

Again, lehitraoth, mazal tov,

Harold Byrns

To Adolph, on his 50th(?)
¹⁷²
Birthday

As the Romans would say,

L