Legende Leonard Bernstein
Dirigent en componist Leonard Bernstein was een man, zo schrijft een biograaf, ‘met duistere spelonken en bundels verblindend licht’. De klassieke muziek zou na zijn verschijning nooit meer hetzelfde zijn.
Íeder genie heeft een handicap. Lenny had een vader’
‘Waar je hem ook prikt, overal komt zijn begaafdheid naar buiten stromen’, zei moeder Jennie over haar zoon Leonard Bernstein. Hij kwam ter wereld als een mager en ziekelijk – want astmatisch – kind, die zich onzichtbaar moest maken voor de antisemitische bendes in de buurt. Hij bleef iemand die onder de radar vloog, totdat de piano van een gescheiden tante in het ouderlijk huis kwam te staan. Volgens Bernstein zelf, schrijft biografe Joan Peyser, ‘was dat instrument ‘de ontdekking die hem van een zwak en onbetekenend persoon veranderde in een sterk karakter dat de wereld kon veroveren.’
Als peuter kroop hij over de vloer, herinnerde zijn moeder zich, en als hij dan muziek hoorde, bleef hij doodstil zitten en begon te huilen. De piano werd zijn beste vriend. En dat had de kleine Lenny nodig, want hij groeide op te midden van ouders, die over alles ruzieden, ook over hun kinderen. Zo koesterde zijn moeder Jennie haar zoons muzikale talent, maar zag vader Sam daar niets in – hoewel hij Leonard als puber wel meenam als hij van zakenrelaties kaarten voor concerten kreeg. ‘Ieder genie heeft wel een handicap gehad’, verzuchtte Sam Bernstein. ‘Lenny had een vader.’
En hij leek misschien meer op zijn vader dan hij wenste, want hij erfde diens zakelijke instinct. In Bernstein gingen kunst en kapitaal hand in hand. Hij wist zijn muzikale genie te gelde te maken.
‘Het was nooit bij me opgekomen om dirigent te worden’
Al gedurende zijn middelbare school maakte Bernstein muziekvoorstellingen. Hij studeerde muziek aan Havard, maar viel daarna in een gat. Hij kon aardig piano spelen, bewerken en componeren, maar niemand had werk voor hem. Vruchteloos zocht hij in de zomer van 1939 in New York naar een baan. Het was crisistijd en – net terug in Boston – brak in Europa ook nog de Tweede Wereldoorlog uit. De vooruitzichten waren grimmig.
Op een dag kreeg hij telefoon uit New York van zijn vriend Leonard Burkat. Die sprak, zei hij, in de haven met de pas aangekomen dirigent Dmitri Mitropoulos. Deze Griek meende zich te herinneren dat hij op Harvard een begaafde jongen had ontmoet van wie de naam wel wat op die van Burkat leek. Kende hij die knaap misschien en wist hij hoe het met hem ging? Toen hij hoorde over de nijpende situatie van Bernstein, nodigde hij hem via Burkat uit om langs te komen in zijn New Yorkse hotel, waar hij een week zou blijven, voordat hij doorreisde naar Minneapolis, waar hij chef zou worden. Bernstein was blut, maar hij kreeg een vriend zover om hem van Boston naar New York te rijden.
In de hotelkamer gaf Bernstein Mitropoulos een overzicht van zijn toestand.
‘Wat moet ik doen?’ vroeg hij.
‘Dat weet je best’, antwoordde Mitropoulos. ‘Je moet dirigent worden.’
Voor Bernstein, vertelde hij later, was de dirigent een mythische figuur, ‘zo ontzagwekkend en onbereikbaar, dat het nooit in mijn hoofd was opgekomen dat ik zoiets zou kunnen worden.’
Hoe je dirigent zou kunnen worden? wilde Bernstein weten.
‘Dat leer je’, zei Mitropoulos.
Bij Juilliard kon Bernstein niet terecht, maar in Philadelphia was er nog plek op de nieuwe cursus van dirigent Fritz Reiner. Ten prooi aan hooikoorts deed hij auditie. ‘Ik kon amper uit mijn ogen kijken en zat hoestend en proestend tegenover die barse, weinig toeschietelijke man, die maar wat gromde en humde.’ Maar hij maakte indruk toen Reiner een orkestpartituur ergens middenin opensloeg en hem vroeg om welk werk het ging. Tot verbazing van de dirigent herkende Bernstein meteen de Akademische Festouverture van Brahms. Hij werd aangenomen.
Een musicalhit tegen alle voorspellingen in
In 1940 werd hij toegelaten tot de zomercursus van de beroemde dirigent Serge Koussevitzky in Tanglewood, onder de rook van Boston. Bernstein kreeg een soort vader-zoonrelatie met de oude Rus, die in hem een geboren dirigent zag. En zo werden Reiner en Koussevitzky zijn twee grote leermeesters. Al ging hij uiteindelijk zijn eigen weg. Bernstein besloot bijvoorbeeld liever te dirigeren met zijn handen dan met een baton. Dit was tegen het zere been van de oude maestro’s, maar hij wist ze beiden te overtuigen dat dit het beste voor hem werkte. ‘Koussevitzky maakte zich daar eerst zorgen over’, zei diens vrouw later. ‘Hij heeft zijn eigen vingers urenlang zitten bestuderen. Hij stak zijn wijsvingers uit en zwaaide daar wat mee heen en weer. Ten slotte glimlachte hij. Hij was tot de slotsom gekomen dat wijsvingers hetzelfde kunnen aangeven als een baton.’ In een filmpje liet Bernstein later zien, dat hij zelfs alleen met zijn ogen kon dirigeren.
Zijn doorbraak kwam toen Bernstein – als assistent – in 1943 mocht invallen voor de grieperige Bruno Walter in Carnegie Hall. Zijn optreden met de New York Philharmonic werd een sensatie. Het haalde de voorpagina van de New York Times, die sprak over ‘het 25-jarige genie uit Boston’. Het concert werd uitgezonden in heel Amerika, zodat Bernstein op slag een beroemdheid was. De jaren erna kon hij op die ervaring voortbouwen. En begon hij met zijn muziek ook succes te oogsten op Broadway. Hij trouwde met actrice Felicia Kohn Montealegre, ondanks het feit dat hij homoseksueel was. En volgens vrienden was het geen ongelukkig huwelijk. Het echtpaar kreeg zelfs drie kinderen.
In 1957 ging een diepe wens in vervulling, toen de New York Philharmonic hem tot chef-dirigent koos. Meteen na zijn aantreden een jaar later begon Bernstein aan zijn Young People’s Concerts, razend populaire tv-programma’s waarin hij een jong publiek de wonderen van de muziek toonde. In die jaren kende hij eveneens zijn grootste kaskraker op Broadway: de musical West Side Story.
Het stuk kende een moeilijke aanloop. Sommige producenten haakten af, overtuigd van de artistieke waarde, maar bang voor een commerciële flop. Want de gebruikelijke glamour en glitter ontbrak op het toneel. Daar zagen bezoekers een straatarme Puertoricaanse buurt als decor. En dan eindigde West Side Story ook nog eens met de moord op de mannelijke held. Toch adoreerde het publiek de musical, die liefst 732 opvoeringen op Broadway kreeg.
Hij bracht de Amerikanen liefde bij voor hun eigen muziek
Na zijn benoeming tot chef-dirigent van de New York Philharmonic kwijnde de liefde voor Broadway weg. Tijd om te componeren vond Bernstein nauwelijks meer. Wel bracht hij de Amerikanen de liefde bij voor de muziek van Gustav Mahler, en Scandinavische helden als Carl Nielsen en Jean Sibelius. Maar bovenal wierp hij zich op als pleitbezorger van eigentijdse Amerikaanse componisten.
Elf jaar lang was hij de figuur waar het klassieke muziekleven in New York om draaide. In 1969 nam hij ontslag, om weer als componist aan de slag te kunnen. Hij wilde de wereld ook zijn eigen muziek nalaten. Hij werd nooit meer ergens chef, maar dat hij nou minder ging dirigeren, daar leek het niet op. Zo was hij vaker te horen en te zien bij de Wiener Philharmoniker, waarmee hij zowel een symfonieëncyclus van Mahler als van Beethoven opnam.
De mediagenieke Bernstein had een neus voor televisie en presenteerde tal van programma’s en documentaires. Zijn politieke betrokkenheid leidde er bovendien toe dat hij vaak bij belangrijke gebeurtenissen was. Zo dirigeerde Bernstein op Eerste Kerstdag 1989 in Berlijn het concert waarmee de Duisters de val van de Muur vierden.
Een jaar later stierf hij, vooral door zijn extravagante levensstijl. Hij was een mateloos roker en drinker – na een optreden in het Concertgebouw stond er achter de deur van de trap altijd iemand klaar met een sigaret en een glas whiskey, zodat hij tussen de applauzen door alvast een trek en een slok kon nemen. Hij sliep weinig en ging zich graag te buiten aan seks. ‘Een liederlijk leven’, noemde Bernstein het zelf. Hij overleed in oktober 1990, op 72-jarige leeftijd. Onderweg naar zijn graf zwaaiden de bouwvakkers met hun petten naar de auto en riepen: ‘Goodbye Lenny.’ Hij bleef een jongen van het volk.
Leonard Bernstein (Lawrence, Massachusetts, 25 augustus 1918 – New York, 14 oktober 1990) was een Amerikaanse componist, dirigent, pianist en muziekpedagoog.
Levensloop
Leonard Bernstein is de zoon van de Russische Joden Sam Berstein en Jennie die in 1908 hun sjtetl ontvluchten voor de tsaristische dienstplicht. Later studeerde hij aan de Harvard-universiteit en aan het Curtis Institute of Music te Philadelphia. Hij werd voor het eerst bekend toen hij in 1943 bij een concert te New York als dirigent inviel voor de zieke Bruno Walter. Hij maakte in de jaren veertig diverse musicals, die succesvol draaiden op Broadway. In de jaren vijftig dirigeerde hij een keer zo goed als onvoorbereid aan La Scala te Milaan de Medea van Luigi Cherubini met Maria Callas in de hoofdrol. Jarenlang presenteerde hij op televisie een educatief programma over klassieke muziek.
Van 1958 tot 1969 was hij eerste dirigent en artistiek leider van de New York Philharmonic. Met dit orkest nam hij alle symfonieën van Gustav Mahler op. Bernsteins bevlogen interpretaties leidden tot hernieuwde belangstelling in de VS voor deze componist. Hij zorgde verder bijvoorbeeld voor eerste uitvoeringen van enkele symfonieën van Charles Ives. Na 1969 legde hij zich ook toe op componeren. Een van zijn bekendste werken is de (ook verfilmde) musical West Side Story. Hij schreef ook de opera Candide. Bernstein dirigeerde regelmatig de Wiener Philharmoniker, het Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest en het Boston Symphony Orchestra. Met deze orkesten maakte hij ook live-opnamen van concerten.
Tot Bernsteins grootste wapenfeiten als dirigent behoort de wereldpremière van de Turangalîla-symfonie van Olivier Messiaen in 1949. Op 23 december 1989 (in de West-Berlijnse Philharmonie) en op 25 december 1989 (in het Oost-Berlijnse Schauspielhaus, nu: Konzerthaus) dirigeerde Leonard Bernstein de Negende Symfonie van Ludwig van Beethoven. Het tweede concert werd wereldwijd op televisie uitgezonden ter viering van de val van de Berlijnse Muur, eerder dat jaar. Bernstein verving daarbij in Schillers tekst van het slotkoor Ode an die Freude het woord “Freude” (vreugde) door “Freiheit” (vrijheid).
In 1968 zorgde hij ervoor dat radiostations in de VS een toen zeer omstreden nummer uitzonden van de 14-jarige Janis Ian, getiteld Society’s Child, over een verhouding van een blank meisje met een zwarte jongen. Radiostations waren huiverig om de plaat te laten horen, maar Bernsteins invloed zorgde voor de doorbraak.
Bernstein musiceerde meeslepend, met inzet van heel zijn wezen. Hij legde veel emoties in de muziek, volgens sommigen ook als er meer aanleiding was tot distantie. In zijn laatste jaren gaf hij de voorkeur aan live-opnamen met publiek boven studio-opnamen. Bernstein was vele jaren de icoon van de klassieke muziek in de VS. Als eerste Amerikaanse musicus werd hij geaccepteerd als volledig gelijkwaardig aan Europese topmusici. Hij bezat niet enkel de kwaliteiten van uitvoerend musicus en componist, overschreed ook grenzen tussen klassieke muziek en andere muziekgenres en wist als weinig anderen mensen enthousiast te maken voor muziek.
Leonard Bernstein overleed op 72-jarige leeftijd in New York.
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Leonard Bernstein (1918 ~ 1990) |
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In de afgelopen vijftig jaar is er geen charismatischer dirigent geweest dan Leonard Bernstein, een musicus bovendien die zijn grote flair en verbale talent effectief gebruikte om de jongste generatie op een bijna speelse maar altijd indringende en overtuigende manier kennis te laten maken met de klassieke muziek. Wie kent niet zijn Young People’s Concertsdie hij met met zijn ‘vaste’ orkest, het New York Philharmonic, tot een enorm, zelfs wereldwijd succes maakte en waarvan het eerste al plaatsvond op 18 januari 1958, nauwelijks twee weken na zijn benoeming tot chefdirigent? De tv-uitzendingen gingen over de hele wereld. Veertien jaar lang, tot 1972, behandelde Bernstein in totaal 53 programma’s een gevarieerd aantal muzikale onderwerpen, die hij zelf bepaalde en die pasten bij zijn ‘educational mission’ (de programmascripts schreef hij zonder uitzondering zelf). Hoevele componisten kwamen er niet voorbij: Ives, Copland, Holst, Sjostakovitsj, Liszt, Hindemith, Beethoven, Mahler, Stravinsky, Berlioz, Bach, enzovoorts. De behandelde onderwerpen waren niet minder gevarieerd: driekwartsmaat, sonatevorm, variaties, humor, ballet, jazz, het symfonieorkest, klassieke, Amerikaanse en Latijns-Amerikaanse muziek, concertvorm, toonsoort, melodie, harmonie, impressionisme, opera enzovoorts.Wie herinnert zich niet dat Bernstein gebogen stond over de meer dan levensgroot geprojecteerde eerste maten van Beethovens Vijfde symfonie en zijn kennis over en enorme bewondering voor dit geniale werk op zijn jonge publiek én hun ouders overbracht? Er werd niet alleen bijna ademloos gekeken en geluisterd, maar ook de lachsalvo’s vulden regelmatig de zaal. Tienduizenden moeten op die manier voor het eerst hun weg naar de klassieke muziek hebben gevonden. Het programma werd oorspronkelijk op de zaterdagochtenden live uitgezonden, maar later ging de omroepmaatschappij CBS over op uitzending op de zaterdagavonden, vanaf halfacht, in ‘prime time’. Ten slotte verhuisden ze naar de zondagmiddag. Later zou hij ervan zeggen dat die concerten behoorden tot zijn “favorite, most highly prized activities of my life.” De gehele serie is gelukkig voor het nageslacht bewaard gebleven en zowel in boekvorm als op dvd uitgebracht. De dirigent Het is ‘Lenny’ vaak verweten dat hij zich teveel door zijn emoties liet meeslepen en in zijn benadering van de muziek van met name Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms en Schubert de ‘klassieke’ proporties daarvan uit het oog verloor. Dat hij Schuberts Negende eigenlijk niet anders behandelde als Tsjaikovski’s Pathétique. Bovendien werd zijn manier van dirigeren nogal eens in verband gebracht met wat werd gezien als de typische uiterlijkheden van de Amerikaanse levensstijl, waarin showelementen en uiterlijk vertoon dan een gapende leegte moesten verbloemen.
Zijn buitengewone muzikaliteit heeft echter nooit ter discussie gestaan. Aan Harvard University studeerde hij bij o.a. de componist Walter Piston, aan het Curtis Institute of Music piano bij Isabella Vengerova, hij nam directielessen bij Fritz Reiner en liet zich de fijne kneepjes van het orkestreren bijbrengen door Randall Thompson. In 1940 kwam hij in het door het Boston Symphony Orchestra opgerichte muzikale zomerkamp in Tanglewood voor het eerst in aanraking met chefdirigent Serge Koussevitzky, die daar les gaf en concerten leidde. Daaruit ontstond een warme vriendschap die tenslotte uitmondde in de benoeming van Bernstein tot zijn assistent. Bernsteins eerste doorbraak was eigenlijk een gelukstreffer. Op 14 november 1943 stond hij in Carnegie Hall in New York voor het New York Philharmonic in een programma dat hij niet had kunnen voorbereiden: Bruno Walter was onverwacht ziek geworden en Bernstein moest hem op stel en sprong vervangen. Het concert zou live worden uitgezonden. Lenny moet zich er met grote flair doorheen hebben geslagen, want de pers was na afloop laaiend enthousiast. Zijn naam was plotsklaps bekend, en niet alleen in Amerika. In 1945 volgde zijn benoeming als ‘music director’ van het New York City Symphony Orchestra, maar die verbintenis werd al in 1947 ontbonden. Niet lang daarna volgende een reis naar Israël, het land waarmee Lenny zijn verdere leven lang een bijzondere band zou onderhouden en daar nog vaak zou optreden. Als dank voor zijn grote verbondenheid met Israël door de jaren heen wijdde het Israëlisch Filharmonisch Orkest in 1978 een festival aan de muziek van Bernstein en werd hem in 1988 de titel van dirigent-laureaat verleend.
Na de dood van Koussevitzky in 1951 nam Bernstein diens taken in Tanglewood over. In datzelfde jaar trouwde hij met de Chileense pianiste en actrice Felicia Montealegre Cohn. Twee jaar later was Bernstein de eerste Amerikaanse dirigent die aan de Milanese Scala een opera dirigeerde: Medeavan Cherubini, met Maria Callas in de titelrol. In 1958 volgde de tweede belangrijke doorbraak in Amerika: Bernstein werd chefdirigent van het New York Philharmonic, de post die hij tot 1969 zou bekleden en die meer dan tweehonderd studio-opnamen tot gevolg had.
Bernstein wierp zich al vanaf de jaren vijftig op als groot pleitbezorger van de muziek van Amerikaanse eigentijdse componisten, in het bijzonder van Aaron Copland, waarmee hij zeer nauwe banden onderhield. Lenny had reeds als jonge pianist Coplands Variations for pianoop zijn programma gezet, maar later zou hij vrijwel alle orkestwerken van de componist uitvoeren én opnemen, sommige ervan zelfs meerdere malen. Ook in zijn populaire Young People’s Concert serie besteedde Bernstein relatief veel aandacht aan de muziek van Copland. Het was ook Bernstein die Coplands ter gelegenheid van de opening van de nieuwe concertzaal in Lincoln Center, New York gecomponeerdeConnotations for orchestra daar in 1962 ten doop hield. Het zwaartepunt van zijn dirigeeractiviteiten lag echter bij de grote Weense klassieken en het (laat)romantische repertoire (van Berlioz en Tsjaikovski, van Richard Strauss tot Mahler). Dat neemt niet weg dat hij ook veel succes had met bijvoorbeeld de symfonieën van Carl Nielsen. Hij introduceerde deze Deense componist voor het eerst in Amerika en werd in Denemarken beschouwd als een vooraanstaande Nielsen-vertolker. Bernstein stond eveneens aan de wieg van de grote Mahler-hausse. Met het New York Philharmonic voerde hij – tot groot genoegen van Mahlers in New York wonende weduwe Alma – in de jaren zestig alle symfonieën en vrijwel alle orkestliederen uit en nam ze in de studio op. Evenals Mahler was Bernstein van joodse afkomst, was hij een componerende dirigent (of dirigerende componist!) en had hij een vast orkest tot zijn beschikking, maar Bernstein voelde met Mahler ook een bijzonder soort persoonlijke verbondenheid, wat mogelijk de enorme inzet en betrokkenheid verklaart waarmee Lenny de muziek van Mahler niet alleen uitvoerde, maar die later bij de Wiener Philharmoniker (die er eerst weinig van wilde weten) er zelfs min of meer in ramde. Wie de videobeelden van de repetities ziet krijgt in dit verband een goed beeld van de enorme weerstand tegen Mahlers muziek die Bernstein bij de orkestleden moest overwinnen. Men gelooft zijn eigen ogen niet: zelfs meer dan een halve eeuw na Mahlers dood was de componist die zo lang in Wenen had gewoond en gewerkt voor de Weners zelf een persona non grata. In 1959 gingen Bernstein en het New York Philharmonic op tournee in Europa en de toenmalige Sovjet-Unie, waarbij ook Moskou werd aangedaan. Daar dirigeerde Bernstein in het midden van de Koude Oorlog de Vijfde symfonie van Dmitri Sjostakovitsj in aanwezigheid van de componist. Na terugkomst in New York werd het werk in oktober voor het Columbia-label opgenomen. In april 1962 was er het bekende ‘incident’ met de Canadese pianist Glenn Gould. Bernstein verscheen op het podium voor de uitvoering van Brahms’ Eerste pianoconcert, met Gould als de solist. Tijdens de repetities had Gould aangedrongen op langzamere tempi, hetgeen echter niet in overeenstemming was met Bernsteins visie op het stuk. Een oplossing van het probleem kwam niet in zicht. Lenny richtte zich daarom tot het publiek:
“Don’t be frightened; Mr.Gould is here (gelach) He will appear in a moment. I’m not- um- as you know in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I’ve ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms’ dynamic indications. I cannot say I am in total agreement with Mr. Gould’s conception and this raises the interesting question: “What am I doing conducting it?” I’m conducting it because Mr. Gould is so valid and serious an artist that I must take seriously anything he conceives in good faith and his conception is interesting enough so that I feel you should hear it, too. But the age old question still remains: “In a concerto, who is the boss (gelach)- the soloist or the conductor?” The answer is, of course, sometimes the one and sometimes the other depending on the people involved. But almost always, the two manage to get together by persuasion or charm or even threats (gelach) to achieve a unified performance. I have only once before in my life, had to submit to a soloist’s wholly new and incompatible concept and that was the last time I accompanied Mr. Gould. (gelach) But, but THIS time, the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal — get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct? Because I am FASCINATED, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much played work; because, what’s more, there are moments in Mr. Gould’s performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can ALL learn something from this extraordinary artist who is a THINKING performer, and finally because there IS in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call “the SPORTIVE element” that FACTOR of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it HAS been an adventure this week (gelach) collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it’s in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.” Harold Schonberg, de belangrijkste muziekcriticus van de New York Times, meende uit die speech op te kunnen maken dat Bernstein zijn verantwoordelijkheid wilde ontlopen en Gould in de kou liet staan, maar dat heeft Bernstein altijd ontkend. In tegendeel, hij had zelfs Goulds consent voor zijn publieke uiteenzetting. Zijn bewondering voor Gould stond wat hem betreft trouwens in het geheel niet ter discussie.
De componist De joodse wortels spelen in meerdere composities van Bernstein een belangrijke rol. Zijn drie symfonieën zijn daarvan excellente voorbeelden: de Eerste (Jeremiah) uit 1943, de Tweede (The Age of Anxiety) uit 1949 en de Derde (Kaddish) uit 1963, de laatste ter herinnering aan John F. Kennedy en voor het eerst uitgevoerd door het Israëlisch Filharmonisch Orkest. Dat Lenny – in tegenstelling tot menige collega-componist – een uitstekende vertolker en pleitbezorger van zijn eigen werk was blijkt al even overtuigend uit de vele opnamen die hij heeft gemaakt. Mogelijk biedt het slot van Dover Beach (ca. 1850) van Malcolm Matthew, een van Bernsteins favoriete dichters, een helder zicht op de kern van Bernsteins levensbeschouwing: Ah, love, let us be true De componist Bernstein beleefde zijn grootste successen met zijn gemakkelijk aansprekende theaterstukken die waren geënt op de grote Broadway-shows en die als musical Amerika veroverden. Hij voelde instinctief aan wat het grote publiek wilde en dat kon hij leveren, zoals de immens populair geworden West Side Story uit 1957. Deze melkkoe van de theaterkassa’s en de filmindustrie neemt nu nog steeds, vijftig jaar later, een belangrijke plaats in de amusementsindustrie in. Er was al meer ‘Broadway’ aan voorafgegaan: On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953) en Candide (1956). De samenwerking met Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Lillian Hellman, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Wilbur en later ook Alan Jay Lerner (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue) was voor die vele successen mede van doorslaggevende betekenis.
De ‘serieuze’ componist Bernstein vinden we vooral terug in Prélude, Fugue and Riffs voor soloklarinet en jazzensemble (1949); de Serenade (after Plato’s Symposium), voor soloviool, strijkers, harp en slagwerk (1954), de Symfonische Dansen uit West Side Story (1960), de Chichester Psalms voor jongenssopraan, koor en orkest (1965), Mass, een theaterstuk voor zangers, acteurs en dansers (1971), Songfest, een liedercyclus voor zes zangers en orkest (1977), het Divertimento voor orkest (1980), Halil, voor fluitsolo en kamerorkest (1981), Touches voor pianosolo (1981), Missa Brevis voor zangers en slagwerk (1988); Thirteen Anniversaries voor pianosolo (1988), Jubilee Games, een concert voor orkest (1989) en Arias and Barcarolles voor twee zangers en piano vierhandig (1988).
Bernstein heeft er lang onder geleden dat zijn serieuze composities in de schaduw bleven van zijn theatermuziek en zijn populariteit als dirigent. In de jaren zeventig werd hij als componist door meer progressief georiënteerde collega’s zelfs min of meer in de ban gedaan. De aanhangers van de Tweede Weense School, Stockhausen, Henze, Messiaen, Boulez, Milhaud, Tippett, Birtwistle en zovele andere ‘nieuwlichters’ verweten hem gemakzucht en het streven naar gemakkelijk publiek succes. In die hoek zag men Bernstein toch vooral als de bedenker van commercieel goed gebekte pastiches die speelden met de waarden der hogere edele toonkunst. Daarbij zag men gemakshalve over het hoofd dat het juist Bernstein was die als wegbereider fungeerde voor componisten als Reich, Glass en Adams. Wel moet worden aangetekend dat het Bernstein zelf was die nooit onder stoelen of banken stak dat in zijn gehele compositorische oeuvre het theater op de een of andere manier wel aanwezig was. De componist Ned Rorem (1923) vatte die invalshoek briljant samen met ‘de theatraliteit van het ritueel’. De versmelting van de Amerikaanse volksmuziek met de kunstmuziek was weliswaar een belangrijk kenmerk van Bernsteins composities, maar de negermuziek en de jazz doemden in pure vorm daarin toch niet op. Hij hergebruikte – zoals zovele componisten – de in de tradities van het Amerikaanse Zuiden gewortelde muzikale nalatenschap in een nieuw idioom. Het is niet zo eenvoudig om een shortlist samen te stellen van Bernsteins beste werken (buiten het theater), maar de Serenade, het Divertimento, de Chichester Psalms en de drie symfonieën horen er in ieder geval uitdrukkelijk bij. De schrijver en verteller Dan zijn er de vele boeken van zijn hand: The Joy of Music (1959), Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts (1961), The Infinite Variety of Music(1966) en Findings (1982). Dan zijn er de fameuze Harvard Lectures, de serie lezingen die Bernstein tussen 1972 en 1973 aan Harvard University verzorgde en zowel in boekvorm werden gepubliceerd als op de televisie werden uitgezonden, onder de titel The Unanswered Question, naar het gelijknamige werk van Charles Ives. Bernstein als verteller kennen we evenzeer van zijn vele orkestrepetities en ‘master classes’, waarin hij zijn musici en leerlingen, jong en oud, niet alleen inwijdde in de hogere kunst van het orkest- en solospel, maar op een uitermate aanstekelijke manier de onder handen zijnde composities en componisten nader tegen het licht hield. Hij deed dat het liefst met behulp van metaforen of zo op het oog nogal bizarre vergelijkingen, maar wel met als resultaat dat ‘het kwartje viel’ en er vervolgens – direct hoorbaar – op een héél andere manier muziek werd gemaakt. Wie dergelijke sessies weleens heeft gevolgd weet dat het niet zo belangrijk was of Lenny nu wel of niet de spijker helemáál precies op de kop sloeg, maar wel dat hij met zijn onnavolgbare aanpak het beste uit de musici wist te halen. Tezamen vormden ze niet alleen het bewijs van Bernsteins diepgaande muzikale inzichten, maar ze profileerden hem tevens als de man die bereid was op de barricaden te springen, actie te voeren tegen allerlei misstanden (hij werd al kort na de oprichting van Amnesty International daarvan een warme en actieve pleitbezorger) om tegelijkertijd een dam op te werpen tegen de zijns inziens afkalvende morele en artistieke waarden en de zijns inziens dreigende teloorgang van in traditie verankerde schoonheid. Zijn zorgen over de bedreigde wereldvrede kwamen duidelijk in zijn toespraken naar voren, zoals in 1980 aan de John Hopkins University en in 1983 in de St. John kathedraal in New York. Maar evengoed tijdens zijn tournee met het European Community Youth Orchestra naar o.a. Hirosjima in 1985, ter herdenking van de atoomaanval op die stad. In december 1989 was Bernstein in Berlijn present, waar hij in zowel de West- als de Oostzone (de Muur beleefde toen zijn laatste dagen) met Beethovens Negende de Herwonnen Vrijheid symboliseerde. Hij had bij die gelegenheid de ‘Ode an die Freude‘ vervangen door de ‘Ode an die Freiheit‘. De orkestleden kwamen – al even symbolisch – uit West-Duitsland, de zojuist onttakelde DDR en uit de vier landen die in 1945 het verslagen Duitsland hadden opgedeeld. De man Bernstein dankte zijn muzikale en maatschappelijke status aan talent, kennis, geldingsdrang en acceptatie. Of zijn beminnelijke innemendheid en zijn onverflauwde belangstelling in mensen daarbij eveneens een rol hebben gespeeld ligt voor de hand. Wie de moeite neemt zich in zijn geschriften, lezingen en commentaren te verdiepen ontmoet daarin een buitengewoon sterk karakter met een grote eruditie en een indrukwekkend analytisch vermogen. Het is zeker niet zo dat alles in goud veranderde wat hij aanpakte, maar het is toch onmiskenbaar dat een van zijn grote verdiensten voor met name de muziek voort is gekomen uit het enthousiasme waarmee hij zijn musici, jong en oud, wist te bewegen alles uit de kast te trekken, hetgeen op het publiek zijn uitwerking niet miste. Hij bracht de synergie voort die kon ontstaan uit een zeldzame combinatie van extroverte bevlogenheid en naar binnen gerichte contemplatie. Bernstein was een doener en een denker tegelijkertijd. Het was daarbij om het even of hij een pianoconcert van Mozart speelde, een symfonie van Mahler dirigeerde of een orkestklas onder zijn hoede had.
Bernstein heeft als echtgenoot en vader moeten leven met zijn promiscuïteit (hij zei er zelf over geen voorkeur te hebben voor voedsel, muzikaal genre of seks) die al terugging naar zijn uitbundige sociale leven in de beginjaren in New York City, waar hij met zowel mannen als vrouwen seksuele relaties onderhield. Zijn huwelijk met Felicia Montealegre Cohn op 9 september 1951 kwam niet zonder veel problemen tot stand, waarbij het verhaal hardnekkig de ronde deed dat het min of meer een verstandshuwelijk waarmee hij zijn kansen zou vergroten om chefdirigent van het Boston Symphony Orchestra te worden. Bernsteins mentor, de toenmalige dirigent van het New York Philharmonic Dimitri Mitropoulos, zou hem hebben geadviseerd ‘een vrouw te zoeken’ om op die manier het conservatieve orkestbestuur ervan te overtuigen dat de verhalen rond zijn homoseksualiteit niet meer dan roddels waren. Arthur Laurents omschreef het kort en krachtig: Bernstein was gewoon een “gay man who got married.” Shelly Rhoades Perle zei erover: “He required men sexually and women emotionally.” Die last moet hij lang hebben meegetorst. Het draaide uiteindelijk toch om de keus tussen zijn seksuele geaardheid en zijn gezin. Lenny en Felicia kregen drie kinderen, Jamie, Alexander en Nina (kleinkinderen: Francisca, Evan, Anya and Anna). Naarmate Lenny ouder werd en de homoseksualiteit meer en meer van zijn maatschappelijke en sociale boeien werd ontdaan, viel het Bernstein moeilijker er ‘discreet’ mee om te gaan, zozeer zelfs dat hij Felicia in 1973 verliet en samen ging wonen met zijn nieuwe liefde, de jonge Tom Cothran. Toen Felicia aan longkanker leed keerde hij naar haar terug, waarna hij haar tot haar dood op 16 juni 1978 bijstond. Ook Cothran overleed vroegtijdig, aan aids. Hun beider dood greep Bernstein bijzonder aan. Het overlijden van Felicia heeft Bernstein zichzelf lange tijd zelfs persoonlijk aangerekend. Zijn leefstijl kwam meer en meer in het teken van drugs en alcohol te staan, zijn homoseksualiteit bleef voor de buitenwereld steeds minder verborgen. In het boek van Alan Helms, Young Man from the Provinces, A Gay Life before Stonewall, wordt een gebeurtenis uit 1977 gememoreerd, een ‘date’ met de dronken Bernstein. Dan is er het verhaal van de pianist William Huckaby die na een recital op het Witte Huis met de toenmalige president Carter in gesprek was: “I felt these hands clamped on my shoulders, I was whirled around and engaged in a deep kiss of the French variety and Bernstein was saying, ‘I haven’t heard such virile piano playing for fifteen years. It was magnificent.’ President Carter watched all this with his mouth open and then walked away. I was charmed in a way, but in retrospect one had to concede he was crude.” In de jaren tachtig behoorden aantrekkelijke jonge mannen tot Bernsteins vaste entourage.
Zijn muzikale energie bleef ook in zijn laatste jaren ongebroken. Een voormalige klarinettist van het New York Philharmonic zei hierover na Bernsteins overlijden: “Lenny was zijn leven lang jong en ging toen dood.” De zware roker en enorm harde werker ondervond in die laatste jaren als gevolg van een longziekte (bronchitis, longemfyseem en uiteindelijk ook nog mesothelioom) meer en meer beperkingen, maar tussen de hoestbuien en aanvallen van benauwdheid door bleef hij dirigeren en onderwijzen, met datzelfde vurige enthousiasme waarmee het allemaal was begonnen. We zien Bernsteins uiteindelijk toch hopeloze strijd tegen zijn ziekte weerspiegeld in het beperkte aantal concerten dat hij een jaar vóór zijn dood dirigeerde. Het lijstje is weliswaar niet geheel compleet, maar laat de sterke afname van zijn activiteiten toch wel duidelijk zien:
Op 9 oktober (1990) volgde dan Bernsteins aankondiging dat hij als gevolg van zijn slechte gezondheid al zijn werkzaamheden definitief had gestaakt. Het einde van zijn werkzame leven, zoals hij dat eens in de New York Times zo had samengevat: ”I don’t want to spend my life, as Toscanini did, studying and restudying the same 50 pieces of music. It would bore me to death. I want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write for Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do justice to them all.” De tragiek daarvan was het overlijden van de grote dirigent op 14 oktober 1990 in zijn appartement in New York.. ‘Lenny’ werd 72 jaar. |
Leonard Bernstein (/ˈbɜːrnstaɪn/ BURN-styne; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the US to receive worldwide acclaim. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was “one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history.”
His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world’s leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, Peter Pan, Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On the Waterfront, his Mass, and a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works.
Bernstein was the first conductor to give a series of television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. He was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.
As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and critical success of West Side Story.
Biography
Early life
He was born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of Ukrainian-Jewish parents Jennie (née Resnick) and Samuel Joseph Bernstein, a hairdressing supplies wholesaler originating from Rovno (now Ukraine).
His family spent their summers at their vacation home in Sharon, Massachusetts. His grandmother insisted that his first name be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard, which they preferred. He officially changed his name to Leonard when he was fifteen, shortly after his grandmother’s death. To his friends and many others he was simply known as “Lenny.”
His father, Sam Bernstein, was a businessman and owner of a hair product store in downtown Lawrence (no longer standing) on the corners of Amesbury and Essex Streets. Sam initially opposed young Leonard’s interest in music. Despite this, the elder Bernstein took him to orchestral concerts in his teenage years and eventually supported his music education. At a very young age, Bernstein listened to a piano performance and was immediately captivated; he subsequently began learning the piano seriously when the family acquired his cousin Lillian Goldman’s unwanted piano. As a child, Bernstein attended the Garrison Grammar School and Boston Latin School. As a child he was very close to his younger sister Shirley, and would often play entire operas or Beethoven symphonies with her at the piano. He had a variety of piano teachers in his youth, including Helen Coates, who later became his secretary.
After graduation from Boston Latin School in 1935, Bernstein attended Harvard University, where he studied music with, among others, Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston. Although he majored in music with a final year thesis (1939) entitled “The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music” (reproduced in his book Findings), Bernstein’s main intellectual influence at Harvard was probably the aesthetics Professor David Prall, whose multidisciplinary outlook on the arts Bernstein shared for the rest of his life. One of his friends at Harvard was philosopher Donald Davidson, with whom he played piano four hands. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for the production Davidson mounted of Aristophanes’ play The Birds in the original Greek. Bernstein reused some of this music in the ballet Fancy Free. During his time at Harvard he was briefly an accompanist for the Harvard Glee Club.[9] Bernstein also mounted a student production of The Cradle Will Rock, directing its action from the piano as the composer Marc Blitzstein had done at the premiere. Blitzstein, who heard about the production, subsequently became a friend and influence (both musically and politically) on Bernstein.
Bernstein also met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos at the time. Although he never taught Bernstein, Mitropoulos’s charisma and power as a musician was a major influence on Bernstein’s eventual decision to take up conducting. Mitropoulos was not stylistically that similar to Bernstein, but he probably influenced some of Bernstein’s later habits such as his conducting from the keyboard, his initial practice of conducting without a baton and perhaps his interest in Mahler. The other important influence that Bernstein first met during his Harvard years was composer Aaron Copland, whom he met at a concert and then at a party afterwards on Copland’s birthday in 1938. At the party Bernstein played Copland’s Piano Variations, a thorny work Bernstein loved without knowing anything about its composer until that evening. Although he was not formally Copland’s student as such, Bernstein would regularly seek advice from Copland in the following years about his own compositions and would often cite him as “his only real composition teacher”.
After completing his studies at Harvard in 1939 (graduating with a B.A. cum laude), he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. During his time at Curtis, Bernstein studied conducting with Fritz Reiner (who anecdotally is said to have given Bernstein the only “A grade” he ever awarded), piano with Isabelle Vengerova, orchestration with Randall Thompson, counterpoint with Richard Stöhr, and score reading with Renée Longy Miquelle. Unlike his years at Harvard, Bernstein appears not to have greatly enjoyed the formal training environment of Curtis, although often in his later life he would mention Reiner when discussing important mentors.
1940–1950
After he left Curtis, Bernstein lived in New York. He shared an apartment with his friend Adolph Green and often accompanied Green, Betty Comden and Judy Holliday in a comedy troupe called The Revuers who performed in Greenwich Village. He took jobs with a music publisher, transcribing music or producing arrangements under the pseudonym Lenny Amber. (Bernstein in German = Amber in English.) In 1940, Bernstein began his study at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s summer institute, Tanglewood, in the conducting class of the orchestra’s conductor, Serge Koussevitzky.
Bernstein’s friendships with Copland (who was very close to Koussevitsky) and Mitropoulos were propitious in helping him gain a place in the class. Other students in the class included Lukas Foss, who also became a lifelong friend. Koussevitsky perhaps did not teach Bernstein much basic conducting technique (which he had already developed under Reiner) but instead became a sort of father figure to him and was perhaps the major influence on Bernstein’s emotional way of interpreting music. Bernstein later became Koussevitzky’s conducting assistant and would later dedicate his Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, to him.
From 1945 to 1947, Bernstein was the Music Director of the New York City Symphony, which had been founded the previous year by the conductor Leopold Stokowski. The orchestra (with support from the Mayor) was aimed at a different audience than the New York Philharmonic, with more modern programs and cheaper tickets. Also in regard to a different audience, in 1945 Bernstein discussed the possibility of acting in a film with Greta Garbo—playing Tchaikovskyopposite her starring role as the composer’s patron Nadezhda von Meck.
In addition to becoming known as a conductor, Bernstein also emerged as a composer in the same period. In January 1944 he conducted the premiere of his Jeremiah Symphony in Pittsburgh. His score to the ballet Fancy Free choreographed by Jerome Robbins opened in New York in April 1944 and this was later developed into the musical On the Town with lyrics by Comden and Green that opened on Broadway in December 1944.
In 1947, Bernstein conducted in Tel Aviv for the first time, beginning a lifelong association with Israel. The next year he conducted an open-air concert for troops at Beersheba in the middle of the desert during the Arab-Israeli war. In 1957, he conducted the inaugural concert of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv; he subsequently made many recordings there. In 1967, he conducted a concert on Mount Scopus to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem. During the 1970s, Bernstein recorded his symphonies and other works with the Israel Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon.
In 1949, he conducted the world première of the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Part of the rehearsal for the concert was released on CD by the orchestra. When Koussevitzky died two years later, Bernstein became head of the orchestral and conducting departments at Tanglewood.
1951–1959
After much personal struggle and a turbulent on-off engagement, he married the Chilean-born American actress Felicia Cohn Montealegre on September 10, 1951. One suggestion is that he chose to marry partly to dispel rumors about his private life to help secure a major conducting appointment, following advice from his mentor Dimitri Mitropoulos about the conservative nature of orchestra boards. In a book released in October 2013, The Leonard Bernstein Letters, his wife reveals his homosexuality. Felicia writes: “you are a homosexual and may never change—you don’t admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?” Arthur Laurents (Bernstein’s collaborator in West Side Story) said that Bernstein was “a gay man who got married. He wasn’t conflicted about it at all. He was just gay.” Shirley Rhoades Perle, another friend of Bernstein, said that she thought “he required men sexually and women emotionally.” But the early years of his marriage seem to have been happy, and no one has suggested Bernstein and his wife didn’t love each other. They had three children, Jamie, Alexander, and later Nina. There are reports, though, that Bernstein did sometimes have brief extramarital liaisons with young men, which several family friends have said his wife knew about.
Bernstein was a visiting music professor from 1951 to 1956 at Brandeis University, and he founded the Creative Arts Festival there in 1952. He conducted various productions at the first festival, including the premiere of his opera Trouble in Tahiti and Blitzstein’s English version of Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. The festival was named after him in 2005, becoming the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts. In 1953 he was the first American conductor to appear at La Scala in Milan, conducting Maria Callas in Cherubini’s Medea. This Opera had been virtually abandoned by performers and the pair learnt it in a week. It was to prove a fruitful collaboration and Callas and Bernstein went on to perform together many times. That same year, he produced his score to the musical Wonderful Town at very short notice, working again with his old friends Comden and Green, who wrote the lyrics.
In 1954 Bernstein made the first of his television lectures for the CBS arts program Omnibus. The live lecture, entitled “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony”, involved Bernstein explaining the work with the aid of musicians from the former NBC Symphony Orchestra (recently renamed the “Symphony of the Air”) and a giant page of the score covering the floor. Bernstein subsequently performed concerts with the orchestra and recorded his Serenade for Violin with Isaac Stern. Further Omnibus lectures followed from 1955 to 1958 (later on ABC and then NBC) covering jazz, conducting, American musical comedy, modern music, J.S. Bach, and grand opera. These programs were made available in the U.S. in a DVD set in 2010.
In late 1956, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in concerts that were to have been conducted by Guido Cantelli, who had died in an air crash in Paris. This was the first time Bernstein had conducted the orchestra in subscription concerts since 1951. Partly due to these appearances, Bernstein was named the music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1957, replacing Dimitri Mitropoulos. He began his tenure in that position in 1958, having held the post jointly with Mitropoulos from 1957 to 1958. In 1958, Bernstein and Mitropoulos took the New York Philharmonic on tour to South America. In his first season in sole charge, Bernstein included a season-long survey of American classical music. Themed programming of this sort was fairly novel at that time compared to the present day. Bernstein held the music directorship until 1969 (with a sabbatical in 1965) although he continued to conduct and make recordings with the orchestra for the rest of his life and was appointed “laureate conductor”.
He became a well-known figure in the United States through his series of fifty-three televised Young People’s Concerts for CBS, which grew out of his Omnibus programs. His first Young People’s Concert was televised a few weeks after his tenure began as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He became as famous for his educational work in those concerts as for his conducting. The Bernstein Young People’s Concerts were the first and probably the most influential series of music appreciation programs ever produced on television, and they were highly acclaimed by critics. Some of Bernstein’s music lectures were released on records; a recording of Humor in Music was awarded a Grammy award for Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording (other than comedy) in 1961. The programs were shown in many countries around the world, often with Bernstein dubbed into other languages. All of them were released on DVD by Kultur Video (half of them in 2013).
In 1959, he took the New York Philharmonic on a tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, portions of which were filmed by CBS Television. A highlight of the tour was Bernstein’s performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony, in the presence of the composer, who came on stage at the end to congratulate Bernstein and the musicians. In October, when Bernstein and the orchestra returned to the U.S., they recorded the symphony for Columbia. He recorded it for a second time with the orchestra on tour in Japan in 1979. Bernstein seems to have limited himself to only conducting certain Shostakovich symphonies, namely the numbers 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 14. He made two recordings of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, one with the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s and another recorded live in 1988 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (one of the few recordings he made with them, also including the Symphony No. 1).
1960–1969
In 1960 Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic held a Mahler Festival to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. Bernstein, Walter and Mitropoulos conducted performances. The composer’s widow, Alma, attended some of Bernstein’s rehearsals. In 1960 Bernstein also made his first commercial recording of a Mahler symphony (the fourth) and over the next seven years he made the first complete cycle of recordings of all nine of Mahler’s completed symphonies. (All featured the New York Philharmonic except the 8th Symphony which was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra following a concert in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1966.) The success of these recordings, along with Bernstein’s concert performances and television talks, was an important, if not vital, part of the revival of interest in Mahler in the 1960s, especially in the U.S.
Other non-U.S. composers that Bernstein championed to some extent at the time include the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (who was then only little known in the U.S.) and Jean Sibelius, whose popularity had by then started to fade. Bernstein eventually recorded a complete cycle in New York of Sibelius’s symphonies and three of Nielsen’s symphonies (Nos. 2, 4, and 5), as well as conducting recordings of his violin, clarinet and flute concertos. He also recorded Nielsen’s 3rd Symphony with the Royal Danish Orchestra after a critically acclaimed public performance in Denmark. Bernstein championed U.S. composers, especially those that he was close to like Aaron Copland, William Schuman and David Diamond. He also started to more extensively record his own compositions for Columbia Records. This included his three symphonies, his ballets, and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story with the New York Philharmonic. He also conducted an LP of his 1944 musical On The Town, the first (almost) complete recording of the original featuring several members of the original Broadway cast, including Betty Comden and Adolph Green. (The 1949 film version only contains four of Bernstein’s original numbers.) Bernstein also collaborated with the experimental jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck resulting in the recording “Bernstein Plays Brubeck Plays Bernstein” (1961).
In one oft-reported incident, in April 1962 Bernstein appeared on stage before a performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with the pianist Glenn Gould. During rehearsals, Gould had argued for tempi much broader than normal, which did not reflect Bernstein’s concept of the music. Bernstein gave a brief address to the audience starting with “Don’t be frightened; Mr Gould is here…” and going on to “In a concerto, who is the boss (audience laughter)—the soloist or the conductor?” (Audience laughter grows louder). The answer is, of course, sometimes the one and sometimes the other, depending on the people involved.” This speech was subsequently interpreted by Harold C. Schonberg, music critic for The New York Times, as abdication of personal responsibility and an attack on Gould, whose performance Schonberg went on to criticize heavily. Bernstein always denied that this had been his intent and has stated that he made these remarks with Gould’s blessing. In the book Dinner with Lenny, published in October 2013, author Jonathan Cott provided a thorough debunking, in the conductor’s own words, of the legend which Bernstein himself described in the book as “one … that won’t go away”. Throughout his life, he professed admiration and friendship for Gould. Schonberg was often (though not always) harshly critical of Bernstein as a conductor during his tenure as Music Director. However, his views were not shared by the audiences (with many full houses) and probably not by the musicians themselves (who had greater financial security arising from Bernstein’s many TV and recording activities amongst other things).
In 1962 the New York Philharmonic moved from Carnegie Hall to Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) in the new Lincoln Center. The move was not without controversy because of acoustic problems with the new hall. Bernstein conducted the gala opening concert featuring vocal works by Mahler, Beethoven and Vaughan Williams, and the premiere of Aaron Copland’s Connotations, a serial-work that was merely politely received. During the intermission Bernstein kissed the cheek of the President’s wife Jacqueline Kennedy, a break with protocol that was commented on at the time. In 1961 Bernstein had conducted at President John F. Kennedy’s pre-inaugural gala, and he was an occasional guest in the Kennedy White House. He also conducted at the funeral mass in 1968 for the late President Kennedy’s brother Robert Kennedy.
In 1964 Bernstein conducted Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Verdi’s Falstaff at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1966 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera conducting Luchino Visconti’s production of the same opera with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Falstaff. During his time in Vienna he also recorded the opera for Columbia Records and conducted his first subscription concert with the Vienna Philharmonic (which is made up of players from the Vienna State Opera) featuring Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with Fischer-Dieskau and James King. He returned to the State Opera in 1968 for a production of Der Rosenkavalier and in 1970 for Otto Schenk’s production of Beethoven’s Fidelio. Sixteen years later, at the State Opera, Bernstein conducted his sequel to Trouble in Tahiti, A Quiet Place. with the ORF orchestra. Bernstein’s final farewell to the State Opera happened accidentally in 1989: following a performance of Modest Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina, he unexpectedly entered the stage and embraced conductor Claudio Abbado in front of a cheering audience.
With his commitment to the New York Philharmonic and his many other activities, Bernstein had little time for composition during the 1960s. The two major works he produced at this time were his Kaddish Symphony dedicated to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy and the Chichester Psalms which he produced during a sabbatical year he took from the Philharmonic in 1965 to concentrate on composition. To make more time to composition was probably a major factor in his decision to step down as Music Director of the Philharmonic in 1969, and to never again accept such a position elsewhere.
1970–1979
In 1970 Bernstein wrote and narrated a ninety-minute program filmed on location in and around Vienna as a celebration of Beethoven’s 200th birthday. It featured parts of Bernstein’s rehearsals and performance for the Otto Schenk production of Fidelio, Bernstein playing the 1st piano concerto and the Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic and the young Plácido Domingo amongst the soloists. The program was first telecast in 1970 on Austrian and British television, and then on CBS in the U.S. on Christmas Eve 1971. The show, originally entitled Beethoven’s Birthday: A Celebration in Vienna, won an Emmy and was issued on DVD in 2005. In the summer of 1970, during the Festival of London, he conducted Verdi’s Requiem Mass in St. Paul’s Cathedral, with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Like many of his friends and colleagues, Bernstein had been involved in various left wing causes and organizations since the 1940s. He was blacklisted by the US State Department and CBS in the early 1950s, but unlike others his career was not greatly affected, and he was never required to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. His political life received substantial press coverage though in 1970, due to a gathering hosted at his Manhattan apartment on January 14, 1970. Bernstein and his wife held the event seeking to raise awareness and money for the defense of several members of the Black Panther Party against a variety of charges. The New York Times initially covered the gathering as a lifestyle item, but later posted an editorial harshly unfavorable to Bernstein following generally negative reaction to the widely publicized story. This reaction culminated in June 1970 with the appearance of “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”, an essay by satirist Tom Wolfe featured on the cover of the magazine New York. The article contrasted the Bernsteins’ comfortable lifestyle in one of the world’s most expensive neighborhoods with the anti-establishment politics of the Black Panthers. It led to the popularization of “radical chic” as a critical term. Both Bernstein and his wife Felicia responded to the criticism, arguing that they were motivated not by a shallow desire to express fashionable sympathy but by their concern for civil liberties.
Bernstein’s major compositions during the 1970s were his Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers; his score for the ballet Dybbuk; his orchestral vocal work Songfest; and his U.S. bicentenary musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue written with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner which was his first real theatrical flop, and last original Broadway show. The world premiere of Bernstein’s MASS took place on September 8, 1971. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., it was partly intended as an anti-war statement. Hastily written in places, the work represented a fusion not only of different religious traditions (Latin liturgy, Hebrew prayer, and plenty of contemporary English lyrics) but also of different musical styles, including classical and rock music. It was originally a target of criticism from the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand and contemporary music critics who objected to its Broadway/populist elements on the other. In the present day, it is perhaps seen as less blasphemous and more a piece of its era: in 2000 it was even performed in the Vatican.
In 1972 Bernstein recorded Bizet’s Carmen, with Marilyn Horne in the title role and James McCracken as Don Jose, after leading several stage performances of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera. The recording was one of the first in stereo to use the original spoken dialogue between the sung portions of the opera, rather than the musical recitatives that were composed by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet’s death. The recording was Bernstein’s first for Deutsche Grammophon and won a Grammy.
Bernstein was appointed in 1973 to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair as Professor of Poetry at his alma mater, Harvard University, and delivered a series of six televised lectures on music with musical examples played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. However, these lectures were not televised until 1976. Taking the title from a Charles Ives work, he called the series The Unanswered Question; it was a set of interdisciplinary lectures in which he borrowed terminology from contemporary linguistics to analyze and compare musical construction to language. The lectures are presently available in both book and DVD form. The DVD video was not taken directly from the lectures at Harvard, rather they were recreated again at the WGBH studios for filming. This appears to be the only surviving Norton lectures series available to the general public in video format. Noam Chomsky wrote in 2007 on the Znet forums about the linguistic aspects of the lecture: “I spent some time with Bernstein during the preparation and performance of the lectures. My feeling was that he was onto something, but I couldn’t really judge how significant it was.”
Chevy Chase states in his biography that Lorne Michaels wanted Bernstein to host Saturday Night Live in the show’s first season (1975–76). Chase was seated next to Bernstein at a birthday party for Kurt Vonnegut and made the request in person. However, the pitch involved a Bernstein-conducted SNL version of West Side Story, and Bernstein was uninterested.
A major period of upheaval in Bernstein’s personal life began in 1976 when he decided that he could no longer conceal his bisexuality and he left his wife Felicia for a period to live with the musical director of the classical music radio station KKHI-FM in San Francisco, Tom Cothran. The next year she was diagnosed with lung cancer and eventually Bernstein moved back in with her and cared for her until she died on June 16, 1978. Bernstein is reported to have often spoken of his terrible guilt over his wife’s death. Most biographies of Bernstein state that his lifestyle became more excessive and his personal behavior sometimes cruder after her death. However, his public standing and many of his close friendships appear to have remained unaffected, and he resumed his busy schedule of musical activity.
In 1978, Bernstein returned to the Vienna State Opera to conduct a revival of the Otto Schenk production of Fidelio, now featuring Gundula Janowitz and René Kollo in the lead roles. At the same time, Bernstein made a studio recording of the opera for Deutsche Grammophon and the opera itself was filmed by Unitel and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in late 2006. In May 1978, the Israel Philharmonic played two U.S. concerts under his direction to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Orchestra under that name. On consecutive nights, the Orchestra, with the Choral Arts Society of Washington, performed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at Carnegie Hall in New York.
In 1979, Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time, in two charity concerts for Amnesty International involving performances of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony. The invitation for the concerts had come from the orchestra and not from its principal conductor Herbert von Karajan. There has been speculation about why Karajan never invited Bernstein to conduct his orchestra. (Karajan did conduct the New York Philharmonic during Bernstein’s tenure.) The full reasons will probably never be known—reports suggest they were on friendly terms when they met, but sometimes practiced a little mutual one-upmanship. One of the concerts was broadcast on radio and was posthumously released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon. One oddity of the recording is that the trombone section fails to enter at the climax of the finale, as a result of an audience member fainting just behind the trombones a few seconds earlier.
1980–1990
Bernstein received the Kennedy Center Honors award in 1980. For the rest of the 1980s he continued to conduct, teach, compose, and produce the occasional TV documentary. His most significant compositions of the decade were probably his opera A Quiet Place, which he wrote with Stephen Wadsworth and which premiered (in its original version) in Houston in 1983; his Divertimento for Orchestra; his Halil for flute and orchestra; his Concerto for Orchestra “Jubilee Games”; and his song cycle Arias and Barcarolles, which was named after a comment President Dwight D. Eisenhower had made to him in 1960.
In 1982, he and Ernest Fleischmann founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute as a summer training academy along the lines of Tanglewood. Bernstein served as artistic director and taught conducting there until 1984. Around the same time, he performed and recorded some of his own works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. Bernstein was also at the time a committed supporter of nuclear disarmament. In 1985 he took the European Community Youth Orchestra in a “Journey for Peace” tour around Europe and to Japan.
In 1985, he conducted a recording of West Side Story, the first time he had conducted the entire work. The recording, featuring what some critics felt were miscast opera singers such as Kiri Te Kanawa, José Carreras, and Tatiana Troyanos in the leading roles, was nevertheless an international bestseller. A TV documentary showing the making of the recording was made at the same time and is available on DVD. Bernstein also continued to make his own TV documentaries during the 1980s, including The Little Drummer Boy, in which he discussed the music of Gustav Mahler, perhaps the composer he was most passionately interested in, and The Love of Three Orchestras, in which he discussed his work in New York, Vienna, and Israel.
In his later years, Bernstein’s life and work were celebrated around the world (as they have been since his death). The Israel Philharmonic celebrated his involvement with them at Festivals in Israel and Austria in 1977. In 1986 the London Symphony Orchestra mounted a Bernstein Festival in London with one concert that Bernstein himself conducted attended by the Queen. In 1988 Bernstein’s 70th birthday was celebrated by a lavish televised gala at Tanglewood featuring many performers who had worked with him over the years.
In December 1989, Bernstein conducted live performances and recorded in the studio his operetta Candide with the London Symphony Orchestra. The recording starred Jerry Hadley, June Anderson, Adolph Green, and Christa Ludwig in the leading roles. The use of opera singers in some roles perhaps fitted the style of operetta better than some critics had thought was the case for West Side Story, and the recording (released posthumously in 1991) was universally praised. One of the live concerts from the Barbican Centre in London is available on DVD. Candide had had a troubled history, with many rewrites and writers involved. Bernstein’s concert and recording were based on a “final” version that had been first performed by Scottish Opera in 1988. The opening night (which Bernstein attended in Glasgow) was conducted by Bernstein’s former student John Mauceri.
In the summer of 1990, Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. Like his earlier activity in Los Angeles, this was a summer training school for musicians modeled on Tanglewood, and is still in existence. Bernstein was already at this time suffering from the lung disease that would lead to his death. In his opening address Bernstein said that he had decided to devote what time he had left to education. A video showing Bernstein speaking and rehearsing at the first Festival is available on DVD in Japan.
In 1990, Leonard Bernstein received the Praemium Imperiale, an international prize awarded by the Japan Arts Association for lifetime achievement in the arts. Bernstein used the $100,000 prize to establish The Bernstein Education Through the Arts (BETA) Fund, Inc. Leonard Bernstein provided this grant to develop an arts-based education program. The Leonard Bernstein Center was established in April 1992, and initiated extensive school-based research, resulting in the Bernstein Model, the Leonard Bernstein Artful Learning Program.
Bernstein made his final performance as a conductor at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, with the Boston Symphony playing Benjamin Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from Peter Grimes, and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. He suffered a coughing fit during the Third Movement of the Beethoven Symphony, however the maestro continued to conduct the piece until its conclusion, leaving the stage during the ovation, appearing exhausted and in pain. The concert was later issued on CD as Leonard Bernstein – The Final Concert by Deutsche Grammophon (catalog number 431 768).
He announced his retirement from conducting on October 9, 1990, and died of a heart attack five days later, brought on by mesothelioma. He was 72 years old. A longtime heavy smoker, he had battled emphysema from his mid-50s. On the day of his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan, construction workers removed their hats and waved, calling out “Goodbye, Lenny.” Bernstein is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York, next to his wife and with a copy of Mahler’s Fifth lying across his heart.
Social activism
While Bernstein was very well known for his music compositions and conducting, he was also known for his outspoken political views and his strong desire to further social change. His first aspirations for social change were made apparent in his producing (as a student) a recently banned opera, The Cradle Will Rock, by Marc Blitzstein, about the disparity between the working and upper class. His first opera, Trouble in Tahiti, was dedicated to Blitzstein and has a strong social theme, criticizing American civilization and suburban upper-class life in particular. As he went on in his career Bernstein would go on to fight for everything from the influences of “American Music” to the disarming of western nuclear weapons.
Bernstein was named in the book Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (1950) as a Communist along with Aaron Copland, Lena Horne, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw and other prominent figures of the performing arts. Red Channels was issued by the right-wing journal Counterattack and was edited by Vincent Hartnett, who was later found to have libeled and defamed the noted radio personality John Henry Faulk.
Philanthropy
Among the many awards Bernstein earned throughout his life one allowed him to make one of his philanthropic dreams a reality. He had for a long time wanted to develop an international school to help promote the integration of arts into education. When he won the Japan Arts Association award for lifetime achievement, he used the $100,000 that came with the award to build such a school in Nashville, that would strive to teach teachers how to better integrate music, dance, and theater into the school system which was “not working”. Unfortunately, the school was not able to open until shortly after Bernstein’s death.
In a 1990 Rolling Stone interview Bernstein outlined his conception of a school called The Academy for the Love of Learning.
I and a musician friend named Aaron Stern have conceived of an institution called the Academy for the Love of Learning. We haven’t done too much with the idea yet, but it’s registered as a nonprofit corporation, and besides the obvious attempts to get music and kids together, there will be the overriding goal of teaching teachers to discover their own love of learning.
The Academy for the Love of Learning was completed in 1998 and is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico where it continues to explore Bernstein’s dream of integrated arts in education by offering courses in transformational learning.
Artful Learning
Artful Learning is based on Bernstein’s philosophy that the arts can strengthen learning and be incorporated in all academic subjects. The program is based on “units of study,” which each consist of four core elements: experience, inquire, create, and reflect. After two decades of research and implementation across the United States, Artful Learning Schools demonstrate that Units of Study that utilize rigor, cognitive complexity and deep understanding through a commitment to collaborative and independent learning demonstrate high levels of student engagement and academic achievement.
Influence and characteristics as a conductor
Bernstein was one of the major figures in orchestral conducting in the second half of the 20th century. He was held in high regard amongst many musicians, including the members of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, evidenced by his honorary membership; the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he was President; and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he appeared regularly as guest conductor. He was probably the main conductor from the 1960s onwards who acquired a sort of superstar status similar to that of Herbert von Karajan, although unlike Karajan he conducted relatively little opera and part of Bernstein’s fame was based on his role as a composer. As the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, his rise to prominence was a factor in overcoming the perception of the time that the top conductors were necessarily trained in Europe.
Bernstein’s conducting was characterized by extremes of emotion with the rhythmic pulse of the music conveyed visually through his balletic podium manner. Musicians often reported that his manner in rehearsal was the same as in concert. As he got older his performances tended to be overlaid to a greater extent with a personal expressiveness which often divided critical opinion. Extreme examples of this style can be found in his Deutsche Grammophon recordings of Nimrod from Elgar’s Enigma Variations (1982), the end of Mahler’s 9th Symphony (1985), and the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony (1986), where in each case the tempos are well below those typically chosen.
Bernstein performed a wide repertoire from the baroque era to the 20th century, although perhaps from the 1970s onwards he tended to focus more on music from the romantic era. He was considered especially accomplished with the works of Gustav Mahler and with American composers in general, including George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Roy Harris, William Schuman, and of course himself. Some of his recordings of works by these composers would likely appear on many music critics’ lists of recommended recordings. A list of his other well-thought-of recordings would probably include individual works from Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Nielsen, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Shostakovich, among others.[63] His recordings of Rhapsody in Blue (full-orchestra version) and An American in Paris for Columbia Records, released in 1959, are considered definitive by many, although Bernstein cut the Rhapsody slightly, and his more ‘symphonic’ approach with slower tempi is quite far from Gershwin’s own conception of the piece, evident from his two recordings. (Oscar Levant, Earl Wild, and others come closer to Gershwin’s own style.) Bernstein never conducted Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F, or more than a few excerpts from Porgy and Bess, although he did discuss the latter in his article Why Don’t You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?, originally published in The New York Times and later reprinted in his 1959 book The Joy of Music.
In addition to being an active conductor, Bernstein was an influential teacher of conducting. During his many years of teaching at Tanglewood and elsewhere, he directly taught or mentored many conductors who are performing now, including John Mauceri, Marin Alsop, Herbert Blomstedt, Edo de Waart, Alexander Frey, Paavo Järvi, Eiji Oue, Maurice Peress, Seiji Ozawa (who made his American TV debut as the guest conductor on one of the Young People’s Concerts), Carl St.Clair, Helmuth Rilling, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Jaap van Zweden. He also undoubtedly influenced the career choices of many American musicians who grew up watching his television programmes in the 1950s and 60s.
Recordings
Bernstein recorded extensively from the mid-1940s until just a few months before his death. Aside from those 1940s recordings, which were made for RCA Victor, Bernstein recorded primarily for Columbia Masterworks Records, especially when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic between 1958 and 1971. His typical pattern of recording at that time was to record major works in the studio immediately after they were presented in the orchestra’s subscription concerts or on one of the Young People’s Concerts, with any spare time used to record short orchestral showpieces and similar works. Many of these performances were digitally remastered and reissued by Sony as part of their 100 Volume, 125 CDs “Royal Edition” and their later “Bernstein Century” series. In 2010 many of these recordings were repackaged in a 60 CD “Bernstein Symphony Edition”.
His later recordings (starting with Bizet’s Carmen in 1972) were mostly made for Deutsche Grammophon, though he would occasionally return to the Columbia Masterworks label. Notable exceptions include recordings of Gustav Mahler’s Song of the Earth and Mozart’s 15th piano concerto and “Linz” symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra for Decca Records (1966); Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy (1976) for EMI; and Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1981) for Philips Records, a label that like Deutsche Grammophon was part of PolyGram at that time. Unlike his studio recordings for Columbia Masterworks, most of his later Deutsche Grammophon recordings were taken from live concerts (or edited together from several concerts with additional sessions to correct errors). Many replicate repertoire that he recorded in the 1950s and 60s.
In addition to his audio recordings, many of Bernstein’s concerts from the 1970s onwards were recorded on motion picture film by the German film company Unitel. This included a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies (with the Vienna Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra), as well as complete cycles of the Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann symphonies recorded at the same series of concerts as the audio recordings by Deutsche Grammophon. Many of these films appeared on Laserdisc and are now on DVD.
In total Bernstein was awarded 16 Grammys for his recordings in various categories, including several for posthumously released recordings. He was also awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1985.
Influence and characteristics as a composer
Bernstein was an eclectic composer whose music fused elements of jazz, Jewish music, theatre music and the work of earlier composers like Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, George Gershwin, and Marc Blitzstein. Some of his works, especially his score for West Side Story, helped bridge the gap between classical and popular music. His music was rooted in tonality but in some works like his Kaddish Symphony and the opera A Quiet Place he mixed in 12-tone elements. Bernstein himself said his main motivation for composing was “to communicate” and that all his pieces, including his symphonies and concert works, “could in some sense be thought of as ‘theatre’ pieces.” According to the League of American orchestras, he was the second most frequently performed American composer by U.S. orchestras in 2008–09 behind Copland, and he was the 16th most frequently performed composer overall by U.S. orchestras. (Some performances were probably due to the 2008 90th anniversary of his birth.) His most popular pieces were the Overture to Candide, the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, the Serenade for Violin, Strings, Harp and Percussion and the Three Dance Episodes from On the Town. His shows West Side Story, On the Town, Wonderful Town and Candide are regularly performed, and his symphonies and concert works are programmed from time to time by orchestras around the world. Since his death many of his works have been commercially recorded by artists other than himself. The Serenade, which has been recorded more than 10 times, is probably his most recorded work not taken from an actual theatre piece.
Despite the fact that he was a popular success as a composer, Bernstein himself is reported to have been disillusioned that some of his more serious works were not rated more highly by critics, and that he himself had not been able to devote more time to composing because of his conducting and other activities. Professional criticism of Bernstein’s music often involves discussing the degree to which he created something new as art versus simply skillfully borrowing and fusing together elements from others. In the late 1960s, Bernstein himself reflected that his eclecticism was in part due to his lack of lengthy periods devoted to composition, and that he was still seeking to enrich his own personal musical language in the manner of the great composers of the past, all of whom had borrowed elements from others. Perhaps the harshest criticism he received from some critics in his lifetime though was directed at works like his Kaddish Symphony, his MASS and the opera A Quiet Place, where they found the underlying message of the piece or the text as either mildly embarrassing, clichéd or offensive. Despite this, all these pieces have been performed, discussed and reconsidered since his death.
Bernstein’s works were performed several times for Pope John Paul II, including at World Youth Day in Denver on August 14, 1993 (excerpts from MASS), and at the Papal Concert to Commemorate the Shoah on April 7, 1994, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra(Chichester Psalms and Symphony No. 3, Kaddish [excerpt]) in the Sala Nervi at the Vatican. Both performances were conducted by Gilbert Levine.
Although he taught conducting, Bernstein was not a teacher of composition as such, and he has no direct composing heirs. Perhaps the closest are composers like John Adams, who from the 1970s onwards indirectly adopted elements of his eclectic, theatrical style.
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