AT CURTIS, LEONARD was plunged into a professional musical world that was in stark contrast to the broadly intellectual environment he was accustomed to at Harvard. He took orchestration with Randall Thompson and conducting with Fritz Reiner. Turned down for piano studies with Rudolf Serkin, he was assigned instead to the redoubtable Isabelle Vengerova.
Bernstein was extraordinarily fortunate to encounter three utterly different conducting styles as a student. Where his principal future mentor Serge Koussevitzky, soon to be encountered at Tanglewood, would be inspirational and expansive, a conductor of warmth, flexibility, and large gestures, who emphasized what he called music’s “internal rhythm,” Reiner, a far sterner personality, was the epitome of discipline and control, managing to convey all the musical power he needed to with a tiny beat pattern and an impassive facial expression. From Reiner Leonard learned once and for all, if he needed to, that one could not stand in front of an orchestra unless, at the very least, one had internalized every last detail of the score one was conducting. Leonard was also deeply marked by his encounter with the saintly, lonely Mitropoulos, a man who emanated humility in person but was extraordinarily impassioned on the podium, even more extravagant in his conducting style than Koussevitzky, and an early advocate for Gustav Mahler, who would become such a central figure in Bernstein’s world.1
Isabelle Vengerova had a similarly transformative effect on Leonard’s pianism. She was born in Minsk and, like Heinrich Gebhard, had studied in Vienna with Theodor Leschetizky, who had himself studied with Beethoven’s celebrated pupil Carl Czerny. Her piano lineage was thus impeccable.2 Bernstein dubbed Vengerova “Tyranna,” and the name stuck, because she was indeed a terrifying figure, as much for the relentless psychological torture that could characterize her lessons as for her uncompromising attention to detail and devotion to the composer’s markings. She believed that one had to be “200 percent prepared” for a performance, since one was destined to lose 100 percent of it onstage. Certainly no one dreamed of being unprepared for a Vengerova lesson, since she seemed able to tell from only a few notes not only how many hours you had practiced, but even, it was rumored, on which days of the week. While she sometimes taught through “intimidation, fear, and personality destruction,” in the words of one student, she was a great pedagogue of the piano and was fiercely devoted to her students.3 She had an ability to inculcate a beautiful legato; she paid a rare degree of attention to the physical distinction between playing on black keys and white keys (“One plays on two levels”) and to matters of pedaling, balance, and dynamics.4 She taught Leonard how to hear himself.5
Renée Longy-Miquelle was his teacher in score reading, a task at which he was a spectacular natural. The two also had a brief romantic liaison, despite the age gap. (She was forty-four, and he was twenty-two.) He studied orchestration with Randall Thompson, whose Second Symphony would later figure in his repertoire, and counterpoint with Richard Stöhr. Stöhr was a middle-aged refugee from Vienna, who had known Mahler and Korngold and had once had a flourishing career.6 Having previously studied counterpoint with Walter Piston, Leonard gave him a hard time at first but ended up as his friend and later co-taught the class with him. (Stöhr lost his job when the theory department was downsized years later, and Bernstein sent him $500 a month for the rest of his life.)
Bernstein’s talent and brash self-confidence incurred enmity from some of his classmates, to the extent that another conducting student reputedly purchased a gun and told Thompson that he was going to shoot Bernstein, Reiner, and Thompson, too. After this rival was escorted away, tensions apparently eased between Leonard and his fellow students.
Before the year was out, Leonard had conducted both the Tannhäuser overture and Brahms Third Symphony. But for a few months, his plans for the following year were thrown into disarray when Dimitri Mitropoulos proposed that Leonard join him the following year in Minneapolis as pianist for the orchestra and apprentice assistant conductor. By mid-April an apologetic Mitropoulos had written Leonard that the plan had turned out to be impractical, and that he should return to Curtis for his final year after all. Meanwhile, in March, Copland wrote Koussevitzky’s secretary urging the conductor to admit Leonard as a summer conducting student at the newly formed Berkshire Music Center: “I have seldom met his equal for sheer musicianship. His musical memory is remarkable, and so is his ability to sight-read both scores and piano music. He is besides a first-rate pianist. . . . Randall Thompson told me that Mr. Reiner considered Bernstein one of the best students he had ever had.”7 Later that month, Leonard met with Koussevitzky in Boston and was instantly accepted into his summer class.
In the spring of 1940, thanks to Thompson, Leonard’s Four Studies for Two Clarinets, Two Bassoons, and Piano were included, almost apologetically, on a League of Composers broadcast from Philadelphia, alongside works by Samuel Barber, Vincent Persichetti, Oscar Levant, and others. (Bernstein was, of course, not a composition student.) Writing in Modern Music, composer Conlon Nancarrow singled it out as the most interesting of the works played.8
The summer of 1940 was the fulfillment of a dream Serge Koussevitzky had cherished even while still in Russia: the establishment of a music academy of international standing, with renowned musicians and composers on the faculty. Situated on the idyllic Tanglewood estate (named for the Tanglewood Tales Nathaniel Hawthorne had written while staying there), with its serene great lawn and giant oak and spruce trees, what had been a short summer festival of Boston Symphony Orchestra performances was now expanded to include a school, in which 312 students, many on scholarship, would study with a faculty that included Aaron Copland, Paul Hindemith, and Gregor Piatigorsky. As Koussevitzky’s student at the Berkshire Music Center, Leonard once again found a champion and father figure who had much to teach him. For the older conductor it was the discovery of a surrogate son and potential successor at the very moment when his lifetime dream was finally being realized. In the first summer, Leonard was already conducting the Institute Orchestra of the Berkshire Music Center in works by Haydn, Brahms, Copland, and Gardner Read. He roomed with several friends: Harold Shapero, violinist (later violist) Raphael Hillyer from Harvard, and Lukas Foss from Curtis.9 Copland and Hindemith were teaching composition, and it is noteworthy that Leonard never enrolled in either of their classes, as he similarly had avoided formal composition study at Harvard and Curtis. (Walter Piston once remarked that, as far as composition went, Bernstein seemed to just “have it” and didn’t need to study.) Fortunately, during this period he had many opportunities to show Copland his music. Copland’s focus was on Leonard’s recognizing his own voice and discarding outmoded influences. “That’s all warmed over Brahms or Scriabin,” he would say, “but these two bars are you. Go back home and work on these two bars.”10 Such meetings, looking his music over with Copland during the first years of their friendship, constituted the only real lessons in composition he ever had, and they taught him about “taste, style, and consistency,” as he later put it.
When the summer was over, Leonard nostalgically recalled the time he and Copland had spent together: “Not seeing you is something of a shock. . . . I’ve never felt about anyone before as I do about you, completely at ease, and always comforted by you. This is not a love letter, but I’m quite mad about you.”11 For his part, Copland’s letters to Leonard convey a degree of warmth, abandon, and joy matched nowhere else in his correspondence, even while being tempered frequently, as the years went on, by practical, paternal advice and sometimes stern admonitions. The exchanges between the two show that they had briefly been lovers, but their enduring connection was on a far more essential level. Copland was among the sanest, shrewdest, most level-headed and generous of artists, and he would remain a lifelong source of common sense in Leonard’s peripatetic life. He always took the long view. Even in his composing, he made it a habit to give compositions a “cooling-off period” before making final critical refinements in them. In one letter written right after news of the Anschluss had reached America in March 1938, he cautioned Leonard, “As for your general ‘disappointment’ in Art, Man, and Life I can only advise perspective, perspective and yet more perspective. This is only 1938. Man has a long time to go. Art is quite young. Life has its own dialectic. Aren’t you always curious to see what tomorrow will bring?”12 Over the years there were several shifts in their relationship, as Bernstein’s fame grew and “mentorship” was left behind. But they remained close and profoundly affected the course of each other’s lives.
The presence of Copland and Hindemith in the same environment, combined with Leonard’s friendship with the young violinist Raphael Hillyer, who would later help found the Juilliard String Quartet and remain with it as violist for twenty-three years, apparently stimulated Leonard to compose his first fully integrated work. The Sonata for Violin and Piano, begun in 1939 and dedicated to Hillyer, fulfills the promise of the earlier Trio and Piano Sonata and leaves behind the youthful disjunctions of idiom the earlier pieces contained. The work owes at least as much to Hindemith’s quartal harmonies, long lyrical lines, and lucid counterpoint as to Copland’s bold Americanism, but it has its own voice: serious, lonely, honest, on the pastoral side.
The two-movement structure of the Violin Sonata capitalized on a faculty of Leonard’s musical mind that was to mark many of his works: a penchant for variations, for musical forms that evolve forward in a straight line through continuity and change, rather than through development and return. Perhaps this associative thinking related to his gift for word games—anagrams, crossword puzzles, acrostics. It is noteworthy that two of the first pieces that had a galvanizing effect on him were Ravel’s Bolero and Copland’s Piano Variations, two obsessive works that mine a succinct musical idea in a succession of transformations.13
The Violin Sonata employs variation principles in a highly original way, concealed behind what seems like an unaffected stream of plaintive, lyrical invention, much of it in three-part counterpoint. The first movement could be described as a modified sonata form, with a compressed recapitulation in which the second theme returns before the first, making it a kind of palindrome.14 The second movement is a long footnote to the first: four variations on its second theme, followed by two variations on its first theme. Variation four is arguably one of the most beautiful passages in all of Bernstein. He later used it, with some modifications, as the third variation in the “Seven Ages” movement of his Age of Anxiety Symphony.
The poignant Violin Sonata became overshadowed by the more outgoing Clarinet Sonata of 1942, and remained virtually unknown and unpublished until after the composer’s death. One could argue that it was an equally strong work, and that young Leonard seriously underestimated it.
Back in Philadelphia, Leonard lived in a second-floor apartment above a grocery store, just down the street from the Delancey Pharmacy on South Twenty-Second and Pine Streets, which was a central gathering place for students at Curtis. Shirley Gabis, a sixteen-year-old pianist, used to see him there, and in the fall of 1940 he sat next to her at a concert and they soon began spending a great deal of time together. He was her first boyfriend, and they remained close for the next fifty years. (Gabis eventually married composer George Perle.) The young pair played the Hindemith Four-Hand Sonata together, and she found him “an incredible teacher, the way he sat there and labored with me over those pages. And I remember once when he sat down with my mother and analyzed a Beethoven Sonata for her . . . you knew he was a born teacher. He had an extraordinarily electrifying communicative gift. . . . He was a gorgeous young man, warm, charming, all embracing of the world. His extroversion was extreme. . . . I found myself always backing away slightly from that aspect of him. No one at Curtis had ever seen anyone like him. There were camps—there were people who were for Lenny and there were people who couldn’t stand Lenny. The ones who loved him were in love with him, and the ones who didn’t, hated him.” Yet Leonard’s detractors often ended up on his side. For all his air of knowing more than everyone else—and of being a literate Harvard student and not just a “pianimal”—he was not someone Gabis saw as being self-centered. On the contrary, he had an unmatched ability to take in other people and to understand them. “When you were with Lenny, it was as if he saw right into you” she said. “He would listen, and he knew what you were—he was very smart that way, very intuitive. He almost understood you better than you understood yourself in some way that was quite uncanny.” He may have had passionate impulses toward anyone of either sex that he was drawn to, but his homosexual side tormented him. According to Gabis, “he was still torn,” not yet the openly “omnisexual” person of later years. He told Gabis: “I have a canker in my soul.”
Gabis’s mother, Rae, ran a beauty salon. One day Samuel Bernstein visited her and ended up discussing his son’s life. He said to her, “What does he have to go and be a musician for? If he worked for me, I could pay him $100 a week.”15
In his final year at Curtis, Leonard was an active pianist and conductor. Among other things, he performed the Scriabin Fifth Sonata and the Stravinsky Concerto for Two Pianos (with Annette Elkanova, to whom he may also have proposed), and conducted the Brahms Serenade No. 2 in A Major. He received his diploma in the spring, with As in orchestration and form, an A+ in piano from Vengerova, and the only A that Fritz Reiner ever accorded a student in conducting.
Before returning to the Berkshires, he appeared in Boston’s Jordan Hall on May 26 as soloist with the Women’s Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Thiede, performing both Joseph Wagner’s Fugal Triptych and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, op. 15. On June 11 he had the unexpected opportunity to conduct the Boston Pops in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger overture in front of twenty-two thousand people at the Esplanade on the Charles River, where he acquitted himself very well.16
In his second summer at the Berkshire Music Festival, he and Harold Shapero both went out with Kiki Speyer, a beautiful young woman who was the daughter of the English horn player at the Boston Symphony. Kiki was in love with Leonard, and the two even talked of marrying. But in the end he disappointed her, confessing his attraction to both women and men and saying that he didn’t think he would ever marry. (He confided to some of his friends at the time that he found men even more beautiful than women.)
That summer he performed the piano in Copland’s Vitebsk trio and conducted young William Schuman’s American Festival Overture and Randall Thompson’s Second Symphony. In the Berkshire Eagle he was described as talented and inspiring, “although unable to obtain complete hold on his players.”
Before facing his unknown future, he took a train to Key West, Florida, where he was able to escape from his romantic entanglement with Kiki and, inspired by hearing Cuban bands over Radio Havana, wrote sketches in a Latin American style for a ballet he called Conch Town.17 These sketches would later be put to use in Fancy Free and West Side Story. He also began working on a Sonata for Clarinet and Piano for his friend David Oppenheim.
Samuel was becoming grudgingly reconciled to his son’s choice of career. He helped find him a studio in Boston at 295 Huntington Avenue, printing up business cards advertising lessons in piano and musical analysis. Unfortunately, Leonard set up shop on December 5, 1941, just two days before Pearl Harbor. (Leonard was of draft age but had received a deferment as a result of his asthma.) Few students materialized, and the following year was a frustrating one, although it included the premiere of his Sonata for Clarinet and Piano with clarinetist David Glazer at Boston’s Institute of Modern Art. (Dedicatee Oppenheim played the New York premiere with Bernstein and recorded the work in 1943.)
The Clarinet Sonata is a luminous little piece that crystallizes Leonard’s early forays into composition into ten minutes. It is outgoing compared with the Violin Sonata, due to the sonorousness and precision of the piano writing, the prioritizing of the melodic line in the clarinet, the relegation of counterpoint to a more textural and accompanimental function, the danceable, often motoric rhythms in the fast sections, and the gemlike clarity of the form. The first movement is probably the purest and most audible sonata form in Bernstein’s output, with first and second themes that are instantly distinguishable (they could be described as “Hindemithian” and “Bernsteinian,” respectively).18 The pensive, heartfelt second-movement Andantino in 3/8 time introduces lively, deftly accompanied dance music in 5/8 that anticipates the Broadway Bernstein with its jaunty, songlike melody, to which words could easily be set.
The sonata is a model of balance that Nadia Boulanger would surely have admired. Copland found too much Hindemith in it. He jokingly warned his young friend that he wouldn’t talk to him until he had written something that had “no Copland, no Hindemith, no Strav[insky], no Bloch, no Milhaud and no Bartok in it.”19
After only a few compositional efforts, Leonard had developed the ability to settle on an idiom and vocabulary for a given work. While the Violin Sonata and the Clarinet Sonata are both refined and classically restrained works, the Violin Sonata speaks in an internalized, psychologically exploratory voice, and the Clarinet Sonata in a more sociable and genial one.20
Koussevitzky hoped that Leonard would eventually succeed him as conductor of the Boston Symphony, but he worried about the effect of his homosexual tendencies (which he called “pederastical”), and of his Jewish name, on his chances.21 When, in his third summer at Tanglewood, Koussevitzky suggested to his protégé (now also his official assistant) that he change his name to “Leonard S. Burns,” the young conductor told him he wouldn’t do that, apparently saying, “I’ll do it as Bernstein or not at all.”22
With prospects for work in Boston grim, Leonard moved to New York in the fall of 1942, where he worked at the Harms-Wittmark publishing company and played the piano for dance classes. He expressed his frustrations to Harold Shapero in anguished postcards. At Harms his job was to transcribe tricky improvised solos from jazz recordings and to make piano versions (including four-hand and two-piano versions) of popular songs. These appeared under the pseudonym “Lenny Amber.” (The word “Bernstein” means “amber” in German.) With his phenomenal ear he was ideally suited for the first task, and with his pianistic and compositional skills he was well-prepared for the second. Drudgery though it often was, the work drilled into him the structures, idioms, and notational norms of the American popular song tradition, preparing his imagination and technical skills for the many works he was to write that included popular songs or in which he evoked improvisation and jazz.
Koussevitzky had told him about a contest the New England Conservatory of Music was holding for American composers, which would award the first-prize winner the opportunity to conduct his or her work with the Boston Symphony. Koussevitzky himself was to be one of the judges. Leonard decided to orchestrate the Hebrew Lamentation he had written more than two years earlier and precede it with two movements for orchestra alone also inspired by the Book of Jeremiah, the first intensely dramatic and songful, evoking Jeremiah’s “pleas to his People,” and the second a kind of pagan dance, suggesting “the destruction and chaos brought about by . . . corruption within the priesthood and the people.” The spread of the war and the news about the fate of Jews in Europe had given the text from Lamentations and indeed Jeremiah’s entire prophecy a new relevance. This was the first of countless times that Bernstein would build a major work by using materials drawn from his own earlier music. He decided that the three movements would be played together without pause, and that the pagan dance would lead directly into the last movement, with its mezzo-soprano soloist.
He was still in the middle of orchestrating the music for the third movement as the December 31 deadline for the score’s submission neared. It took an entire team of musician friends plus his sister, Shirley—who came down from Mount Holyoke College—to help notate his pencil score into ink in the final three days of 1942, while he finished the orchestration. He had an asthma attack while rushing to complete the work.23 With no time to mail it, he took it with him by train to Boston on the 31st and, completely exhausted, submitted it in person. After all this effort, it still lost the competition to Gardner Read’s Second Symphony. Yet it was an enormous artistic leap forward, and it was one major work he never felt the need to revise, even when both his father and Fritz Reiner urged him to add an optimistic fourth movement after the poignant Lamentation.
The language of the Jeremiah Symphony brings to fruition a kind of full-throated lyricism hinted at in the opening of the youthful Piano Trio and in passages in both the Violin Sonata and the Clarinet Sonata. (In fact there are already fragments of the melody that opens the Symphony’s first movement, in the first page of the Violin Sonata.) As much as the pagan dance, with its restless shifting meters, hemiolas, woodblock claps, and bass drum thwacks, builds on the kinetic side of Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid (which in turn have their roots in Stravinsky’s Firebird and Petrushka), the dance also has its own distinctly Hebraic tone. In the lyrical movements of Jeremiah, the melodic lines are longer and more vocal in character than Copland’s are (closer in spirit to those of Leonard’s friend and contemporary William Schuman) and are sometimes drawn directly from music sung in temple. As there are in later Bernstein works, there are abrupt stylistic shifts in the work that can be disconcerting. Listening now, there is no mistaking the future composer of On the Town and Wonderful Town in the infectiously lilting middle section of the Profanation movement, which also seems to derive from the earlier Clarinet Sonata. Here, in the midst of a symphony, as in the later Age of Anxiety, the idea of “profanation” seems to have led Bernstein as if by instinct to music evoking show business. And when the “Broadway” music is then joined by the French horn declaiming the prophecy from the first movement, one hears ancient Jerusalem in collision with 1940s New York. But the composer was living in 1940s New York, and if the music suggests a composer in collision with the prophets in his life, and divided within himself, this only adds to its heartfelt authenticity.
The vocal lament reflects Bernstein’s own most direct, clear-cut musical self. It draws on his distinctive gift for both melody and harmony and, most important, like the limpid, plaintive counterpoint that begins his Violin Sonata, shows that he has the ability to be alone and to write what he hears when he is alone. It is beautiful and unaffected music. The notes are the right ones (Boulanger’s “la note choisie”), and the final chord—like the last chord in West Side Story of fifteen years later—combines the main notes of the theme into the right harmony to rest on. Although it was certainly unusual to have a vocal soloist in a symphony, there were of course precedents for that in Beethoven’s Ninth and in Mahler. What was more uncommon in concert music was the use of Hebrew for the text. Leonard, grandson of a rabbi, who had proudly kept his own family name, was here affirming his allegiance with grandfather Yudel Bernstein of Ukraine and his imperiled kin across Europe. He no doubt also hoped that the work would be meaningful to his father, and he dedicated it to him.
In the spring of 1943, Sam Bernstein sat behind Harold Shapero when Leonard performed the 1941 Copland Piano Sonata, at that time his favorite of all of Copland’s works, at an all-Copland concert presented by New York’s Town Hall Music Forum. After the score’s near mystical closing moments, the audience erupted in cheers. Sam tapped Shapero on the shoulder and said, “Fine, but where’s the money?”
The year 1943 would change Bernstein’s life and would change his father’s perception of him too. In 1940 Samuel Bernstein had sat in Rae Gabis’s parlor in Philadelphia, worrying about his son’s future. Three years later he would famously defend his previous apprehensions to a reporter with the exclamation, “How could I know my son would grow up to be Leonard Bernstein?”