The Leonard Bernstein Letters (91 page)
Read The Leonard Bernstein Letters Online
Authors: Leonard Bernstein
167
Presumably one of the suggestions was Fauré's Requiem.
168
This undated letter was sent on the occasion of Bernstein's 50th birthday in August 1968. It is particularly valuable for Green's recollections of their first meeting at Camp Onota in 1937. Bernstein and Green were near contemporaries, though not quite as near as Bernstein imagined when he responded a few months later (2 December 1968), with a poem to celebrate “Adolph, on his 50th(?) Birthday,” actually his 54th.
169
Harold Byrns (1903–77), German-born conductor (born Hans Bernstein) who studied with Erich Kleiber and Walter Gieseking at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and became Kleiber's assistant. After moving to the United States, Byrns became known as a specialist in contemporary music. In October 1949, he conducted a concert for Schoenberg's 75th birthday in Los Angeles (attended by both Schoenberg and Stravinsky), including the First Chamber Symphony; the same year he made the first recording of Bartók's
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
and gave one of the earliest performances of Stravinsky's Mass. Byrns was particularly devoted to Mahler's music, and was a friend of Alma Mahler.
170
Hebrew greetings, meaning “a good year” and “see you soon.”
171
Bernstein has added two exclamation marks beside this paragraph: the remarkable coincidence of two conductors called Bernstein, both of whom Koussevitzky attempted to persuade to change their names. Byrns took his advice, whereas Bernstein didn't.
172
In fact, Adolph Green's 54th birthday.
173
Alan Fluck (1928–97) was Director of Music at Farnham Grammar School and the moving force of the Farnham Festival with its numerous commissions of pieces for young musicians. Fluck had a warm friendship with Bernstein. He commented on this letter that for Bernstein's 50th birthday he “made a gigantic crossword puzzle, 50 words across and down. Clues and answers were all based on the life and works of LB. I sent it to him in Brussels and received this [letter] a month later.”
174
“Our symphony” given Bernstein's long history conducting the work, as well as the enduring friendship between the two men. Bernstein conducted Thompson's Second Symphony at Tanglewood in 1940, and later with the New York Philharmonic in 1959 and 1968 (followed by the recording praised in Thompson's letter of 16 January 1970, Letter 545).
175
Michael Overbury (b. 1953), English organist. After his youthful success as a pianist, he was organ scholar at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and subsequently held positions at New College, Oxford, St. Alban's Cathedral, and Newark Parish Church, before being appointed Director of Music at Worksop Priory in 1999.
176
Elliott Carter (1908–2012), American composer. He studied with Walter Piston at Harvard and later with Nadia Boulanger. Stravinsky called Carter's
Double Concerto
(1961) “the first American masterpiece.”
177
Carter's
Concerto for Orchestra
was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Bernstein conducted the world premiere performances at Lincoln Center on 5, 6, 8, and 9 February 1970, and recorded it on 11 February.
178
The following is an English version of the quoted passages, in the translation by Hugh Chisholm:
These were very great winds over all the faces of this world, great winds rejoicing over the world, having neither eyrie nor resting-place,
Having neither care nor caution, and leaving us, in their wake,
Men of straw in the year of straw … Ah, yes, very great winds over all the faces of the living!
Over all things perishable, over all things graspable, throughout the entire world of things. …
And airing out the attrition and drought in the heart of men in office,
For a whole century was rustling in the dry sound of its straw, amid strange terminations at the tips of husks of pods, at the tips of trembling things.
When violence had remade the bed of men on the earth,
A very old tree, barren of leaves, resumed the thread of its maxims …
And another tree of high degree was already rising from the great subterranean Indies,
With its magnetic leaf and its burden of new fruits.
7
Triumphs, Controversies, Catastrophe
1970–78
Bernstein relinquished his post as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1969, but he remained firmly in the public gaze. Two events stirred up controversy – both of them for questionable reasons. When Felicia hosted a reception (at the behest of the American Civil Liberties Union) to raise funds for the legal costs of thirteen members of the Black Panthers, this was seized upon gleefully by the press and widely misreported. Declassified files reveal that it gave the FBI yet another excuse to take an interest in Bernstein's allegedly suspicious activities. “Radical chic,” the phrase coined by Tom Wolfe to describe the event, is a resonant one, and doubtless contributed to sustaining the widely reported but largely mythical version of the story – that Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers. As Bernstein told Jonathan Cott in 1989, “It's a legend and it dies hard. It
wasn't
a party and
I
didn't give it. […] So what am I to do? You can't beat the legends … except by telling the truth. And ultimately, maybe, legends die.”
In 1971, Bernstein caused controversy again, this time at the highest levels of government – in this case the paranoid and criminal administration of Richard Nixon. The problem was a rumor, investigated by the FBI, that Bernstein's newly finished
Mass
was intended to embarrass the President by promoting an agenda of peace. Nixon detested Bernstein, and when the FBI passed the investigation back to the White House, what ensued was something close to black comedy. So convinced were Nixon's aides that Bernstein was out to cause trouble that they lost any kind of grip on common sense. Pat Buchanan – then an advisor to Nixon, later a conservative pundit – wrote this memorandum on 28 July 1971:
My view is that we ought to find someone who can definitely translate that Latin Mass Bernstein is working on – to make sure this is accurate. Then, we might want to sand-bag him; i.e. wait until it is too late for him to change his format – and then unload on him. Another course would be to have this released to front-page and force him to back down. However, we should be able to get a copy of what he is preparing – as there will have to be rehearsals – and once we get that, get us a good Jesuit to translate, maybe Father McLaughlin
will do and once translated – leak the thing. But we ought to move rapidly lest the President be tied into attending and forced to back down.
1
Mass
was Bernstein's first work to be written in the 1970s, much of it conceived during a stay at the MacDowell Colony. It was followed by three other large-scale pieces. The ballet
Dybbuk
– which Jerome Robbins had been urging him to write since the 1940s – finally saw the light of day at New York City Ballet in 1974: it turned out to be the last of their collaborations. It is a very demanding score, making use of some twelve-tone techniques, about which Oliver Knussen wrote as follows: “After the militant anti-atonal statements which abounded in his Norton Lectures at Harvard, it is surprising to find Bernstein making use of numerical formulas derived from the Kabbalah […] and producing his most austerely contemporary-sounding score to date.”
2
The Norton Lectures, given on six consecutive Tuesday evenings in October and November 1973 and published as
The Unanswered Question
, were the most fully developed expression of Bernstein's thoughts on music, and his attempt to apply Noam Chomsky's theories of linguistics to it. Bernstein's work was criticized by some academics as unsystematic – but surely the important point is that his conclusions are so often inherently musical. Virgil Thomson and Bernstein had known each other for thirty years, and Thomson was sometimes a harsh critic of Bernstein's music; but he was impressed by the lectures. He praised Bernstein's “skill in explaining music” and went on: “Myself I find nothing reprehensible about your bringing in linguistics. You needed an authority to support an ‘innate musical grammar’ and Chomsky's heavy artillery is surely that.”
The musical
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
turned out to be an unhappy experience. It was overlong when it was tried out in Philadelphia, but the score includes a great deal of music that is beautiful (some of the best numbers were later salvaged by Charles Harmon and Sid Ramin for
A White House Cantata
). Written by Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner as a celebration of the United States Bicentennial, by the time the show opened on Broadway it was doomed – especially as it had been cut to shreds, against Bernstein's wishes. Friends were well aware of the trials and tribulations, and rallied round: during the try-out in Philadelphia, Robbins did his best to encourage his old friend (“Take care of your house. You can do it. Come on kid, get
the spirit up again. No limp cocks!”), while Sondheim sent a telegram saying “you're still the only artist writing musicals with one exception that is.” The great photographer Richard Avedon was (understandably) overcome by the beauty of the music. But it was to no avail. Despite the wonderful score, and clever lyrics by Lerner,
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
was a failure. Another commission intended for the Bicentennial (finished a year too late) was
Songfest
, an anthology of thirteen poems for solo voices and orchestra. Completed in 1977, it was much admired by Bernstein's old friend and collaborator Oliver Smith, and was praised by others: Oliver Knussen pointed out the lessons Bernstein appeared to have learned from Britten, especially the
Spring Symphony
(which Bernstein knew well, having conducted it in 1963), but he also valued the originality of the score: “I can't think of another living composer who could approach Bernstein's complete involvement with and response to such varied texts.”
3
Despite the quality of the music (and the sensitivity of Bernstein's settings),
Songfest
is hardly ever performed. It deserves better.
From a creative point of view, the 1970s must have been rather disheartening for Bernstein: of four major works, only
Mass
could be counted a success, and even that was the focus of some very hostile criticism. But the musical disappointments were as nothing to the turmoil in Bernstein's personal life. In 1974, Felicia was diagnosed with cancer – Bernstein's letter to her from New Zealand is full of reminders to see her doctor. But things quickly got even worse. By 1976 their marriage was in tatters:
Newsweek
announced a “trial separation” – Felicia was increasingly disturbed by what Humphrey Burton has described as “intimations that her husband was abandoning the discretion that was part of their unspoken covenant” (Burton 1994, p. 414). Burton's evidence is pretty damning: Bernstein was having affairs with at least two men, one of them Tom Cothran, a young musician Bernstein had met in 1973. Felicia was not prepared to see their family life put in peril and gave him an ultimatum: either he must stop seeing Cothran alone, or he need not come home. Bernstein's daughter Nina – who was 13 at the time – recalled some difficult family scenes in an interview with Ginny Dougary in 2010: “My mother was a fairly conventional lady and so she expected to be treated like one. The deal was that he would be discreet and that she would maintain her dignity. And then he was not discreet, and so that was that.”
4
Bernstein and Cothran set up in a new apartment for a few months, but then Felicia was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Bernstein begged to be allowed back. Nina recalls that “The whole thing was terribly awkward and painful,” and, of course, matters were made worse by the intrusive glare of publicity. When Felicia died on 16 June 1978, Bernstein blamed himself. Humphrey Burton writes about this with harrowing honesty: “The crushing impact on Leonard Bernstein was that he believed himself responsible for his wife's death, and his sense of guilt never left him. Felicia was the greatest love of his life. He never recovered
from her loss, and he never forgot the curse she uttered when he told her he was leaving her for Cothran. She had pointed her finger at him in fury and predicted, in a harsh whisper: ‘You're going to die a bitter and lonely old man.’”
5
545. Randall Thompson to Leonard Bernstein
22 Larch Road, Cambridge, MA
16 January 1970
Dear Leonard,
What a glorious recording of my Second Symphony!
6
What can I say to express my appreciation and my happiness? The whole interpretation is perfect – and inspired. The orchestra is superb and seems to be breathing with you all the way through. The engineering is both sensitive and powerful, refined in solo passages and rich in the
tutti
. And throughout, the rhythm is so vital that the whole work throbs with life. I wrote it exactly forty years ago, in this very village, for Koussy. It's yours now, and I see him smiling.
Thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Ti abbraccio.
Randall
546. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
7
to Leonard Bernstein
Baur au Lac, Zurich, Switzerland
9 February 1970
Dear Lennie,
Just because I don't want to miss a chance of making music with you please give me a hint whether you would like me as Kurwenal in the Bayreuth
Tristan
production of which I heard.
8
You know how opera houses are in their short notice planning.
In case of “yes” it would be a great thrill. Should you already have made an agreement with somebody else, I am still your greatest admirer. Only – I am dying to sing with you again. So please let me know.
Ever,
Sir Dieter Falstaff
547. Rabbi Judah Cahn
9
to Leonard Bernstein
10 Park Avenue, New York, NY
28 February 1970