New Yorkers take a forgiving stance toward any celebrity, however flamboyant, who keeps them entertained. And few proved more amusing than Leonard Bernstein-with his great shock of hair, piercing eyes, ermine coat, glitzy parties and glamorous friends. His underlying musical talent was assumed to lend authority to even his most preposterous ideas.
Who was to say if he was for real or something of a fraud? Most seemed not to care much at the time. At 51 he was the Wunderkind of American music, wrote Tom Wolfe in 1970 in his famous essay, “Radical Chic,” on the Bernsteins’ fund-raiser for the Black Panthers. Wolfe then added wickedly, “Everyone says so.”
This wildly over-titled book – Bernstein hardly transformed music or the world – seems to take the everyone-says-so position as evidence that Bernstein was indeed the dominant musical genius of the late 20th century. He wasn’t that, but he surely was music’s foremost public spokesperson – no mean feat. He burst upon the nation’s consciousness in “A Star Is Born” fashion the afternoon of Nov. 14, 1943, when the renowned maestro, Bruno Walter, became too ill to conduct the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. The program, recalls his younger brother, Burton, in the foreword, was “rather a knotty one” of Schumann, Rózsa, Strauss, and Wagner that would have been tough going for even for a healthy Walter. Bernstein “proceeded to conduct one hell of a concert,” writes Burton, “that nudged some war news off the front pages the next day.”
Ah, but just how good was he? Burton quotes the Daily News, comparing the debut to facing a shoestring catch in center field – make it and you’re a hero, muff it and you’re a dope. Bernstein made it.
His timing was brilliant. The country was finishing World War II (he’d been declared 4F, due to asthma) and New York was about to embark upon its triumphant ascent to becoming capital of the world. As Philharmonic archivist Barbara Haws notes, the city became “the center of wealth, entertainment, television, recording, art, baseball – the most exciting place where anyone could hope to live, the place everyone outside looked to.”
Bernstein was its prince. Music critic Alan Rich writes, “It was a time of discovery in all the arts: Picasso, Klee, and Kandinsky at the Museum of Modern Art upstairs; great, almost-forgotten movie classics downstairs.” Bernstein welcomed the new, even as he held onto the classics. He became an extraordinary popularizer and educator. His televised Young People’s Concerts have probably never been surpassed.
His self-styled mission, says Haws, was to convey his “particular world view of universal understanding through music.” The hubris may be astonishing, but he knew well that music could be a compelling vehicle. After all, the son of Polish Jewish immigrants who ran a beauty supplies business in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Bernstein had shoved aside the European aristocrats who had always led the Philharmonic to become its first American-born conductor. When his brother called their father, Sam, an “ogre” for having tried to force Lenny into the family business, Sam asked the press, “How could I know he would grow up to be a Leonard Bernstein?”
He had triumphed over those considered his betters and he spent his life helping others do the same. He loved almost all music (except the atonal New Music that became stylish in the 1950s) and roamed the world playing, conducting and listening. At home he recognized the musical genius of American blacks, making a point, says historian Paul Boyer, of recruiting African-American musicians and promoting their careers. In 1947, a time of ruthless racial segregation, he conducted the Philharmonic with Marian Anderson singing. In 1963, he gave the 16-year-old pianist, André Watts, his own introduction to fame when he chose him to replace the ailing Glenn Gould. There were dozens of other cases, not so renowned but perhaps more fundamental in their effects. He also appointed the first woman to the Philharmonic – double bassist Orin O’Brien in 1966.
As a composer he was often ridiculed. His Kaddish, for example, should have been titled “Chutzpah,” wrote Alan Rich at the time. Yet at least one composition, “West Side Story,” is likely to live a long life, though not entirely by his design. It opened in 1957 – the year before New York’s crime started to take off in what historian Eric Monkkonen called “a rogue crime wave” that deviated from what came before. Until then, New York had looked benign in relation to other American cities or even the nation at large. But the men behind West Side Story understood that something ominous was happening. Anita’s angry words to Maria – “Forget that boy and find another, One of your own kind, Stick to your own kind!” – written by Stephen Sondheim, were never Bernstein’s sentiment. Whatever his missteps, he saw that New York’s strengths lay partly in its glorious diversity, its embrace of the new, its tolerance of differences.
He was indeed a New York original – and New Yorkers were right to cherish him.
Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Leonard Bernstein, American Original
How a Modern Renaissance Man Transformed Music and the World During His New York Philharmonic Years, 1943-1976
Edited by Burton Bernstein and Barbara B. Haws
Collins