IN THE SUMMER of 1943 Bernstein was introduced by Koussevitzky to Jennie Tourel, a beautiful Russian-born mezzo-soprano of passionate temperament, who had become known for her performances of Carmen at the Paris Opéra-Comique and was scheduled to join the Metropolitan Opera in the fall.1 Tourel was at least eight years older than he was (her year of birth is variously given as 1900 or 1910); she could sing in six languages, including Hebrew. The two became fast friends and gave a recital together in the Lenox, Massachusetts, Public Library on August 24, 1943, the eve of Bernstein’s twenty-fifth birthday, adding as an encore a song cycle he had composed for her entitled I Hate Music. Apparently Koussevitzky disapproved of the songs, probably because he considered them too lightweight for Tourel. Tourel’s manager also thought them unworthy of her, saying that they were “not art songs.” Bernstein’s original texts for the cycle’s five songs express his identification with children, capturing their longing to understand life:
I have lots of thoughts;
like what’s behind the sky; and what’s behind what’s behind the sky:
But everyone says,
“Isn’t she sweet? She wants to know everything!”
The lyrics for the title song imagine a child’s mystified impression of classical music concerts:
I hate music! . . .
Music is a lot of men in a lot of tails,
making lots of noise like a lot of females;
Music is a lot of folks in a big dark hall,
Where they really don’t want to be at all . . .
The music for this unpretentious song cycle shows a gift for finding just the right intervals and harmonies to convey emotions, and an aptitude for making the flexible rhythms of American English sing. Bernstein exhibited the same wit, concision, and dramatic flair in a later cycle for Tourel, La bonne cuisine, settings of his own translations of recipes from a French cookbook, which are as light and enjoyable as a soufflé.
A touching succinctness informed a group of Seven Anniversaries he finished in 1943, the first in an ongoing series of twenty-nine such Anniversaries completed over the next forty-five years. Named for important people in his life, these short character pieces often served Bernstein as sketchbooks, furnishing the thematic materials for larger works. There is virtually no touch of Broadway in any of the twenty-nine pieces. They test a quiet, personal voice, shorn of pretense. Once tested, the ideas then surfaced in works as diverse as the Serenade, Mass, Dybbuk, and A Quiet Place, where they infused the music with a personal, confessional resonance. It was appropriate that they were portraits of family members, friends, and mentors, and not still lifes or pictures of clouds or hillsides. Bernstein may have been manifestly “full of himself,” but he would have found no meaning in that fullness without constant interaction with others. He wasn’t dissembling when he began his one-minute contribution to the radio series This I Believe with the words, “I believe in People. I feel, love, need, and respect people above all else.” Conductor Marin Alsop, who studied with Bernstein in the late 1980s, once said of him that “he didn’t look at people as a means to an end. He looked at people as the end.”2
Of all the sets of Anniversaries, the first set may be the most significant from a personal point of view, in that it forms a portrait of the composer’s world at the age of writing. There are his two crucial musical father figures, Copland and Koussevitzky, exemplifying his two principal musical pursuits—composing and conducting; his family, represented by his sister Shirley, female confidant and emotional anchor; his male peer group, represented by a piece written in memory of his Eliot House roommate Alfred Eisner, sadly dead of a brain tumor at twenty-two years old, and by another for his friend the optimistic and gifted young composer William Schuman; and his literary, theatrical, and, perhaps, sexual side represented by the multifaceted composer-writer Paul Bowles, a friend since their first encounter at Copland’s loft.3
From these and other early works, one can see that a preoccupation with the details of performance was a lifelong compositional trait. For example, in Anniversary No. 6, a short adagio in mostly quarter-note motion dedicated to Koussevitzky, Bernstein carefully differentiates between four types of articulation. In seventeen measures there are fifteen different dynamic markings. There are three sforzandos, and two double sforzandos. At one point he gives a different increasing dynamic marking on each of five successive quarter notes, to distinguish it from a less precise, gradual crescendo. Such notations convey the future conductor’s knowledge of the practical means needed to achieve a desired musical result.
A letter to David Diamond from 1940 illustrates Bernstein’s frequently blunt way of expressing his opinions about details in the work of friends, which they didn’t always appreciate. He had agreed to record Diamond’s Prelude and Fugue No. 4 in C-sharp Minor for Henry Cowell’s New Music Recordings (this was to be his first recording), but he had reservations about some of the fugue (“there are ‘stains’; your second stretto, for instance”) and also about the notation: “From my point of view there must be a dynamic growth—involving especially a drop to piano in the 17th measure, & a rise to the first climactic stretto, and possibly the same thing again (modified) before the second stretto.” Miffed at first, Diamond ultimately made the suggested changes and later acknowledged that they had made the work “perfect.”4
At the end of the summer, Bernstein was rescued from the prospect of another season of professional drift when he was invited to meet with the great conductor Artur Rodzinski at his farmhouse in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and was offered a job as assistant conductor of the Philharmonic Society of New York (later the New York Philharmonic). Rodzinski may indeed have told him that “God said ‘Take Bernstein,’” as has been frequently repeated, but in view of the earlier correspondence back and forth between the two men, the process was evidently not purely supernatural. In any event, by September, Bernstein was living in a studio room at Carnegie Hall, fulfilling his duties as assistant conductor, composing, and often getting a bite to eat at the Russian Tea Room on the same block.
One afternoon he had a visit from a young choreographer who was a soloist with Ballet Theatre, a company that performed at the Metropolitan Opera House and was known both for its Russian repertoire and its new works by Fokine, Tudor, Massine, Bronislava Nijinska, and Agnes de Mille, all of whom worked directly with it. Jerome Robbins was only a month and a half younger than Bernstein. Like him, he was a first-generation American, born to Russian Polish immigrants. (His family name, Rabinowitz, means “son of a rabbi.”) Although there were several ballroom dancers, acrobats, and vaudevillians in the family tree, his father, who ran a corset business in Weehawken, New Jersey, had been deeply antagonistic to his son’s interest in being a dancer. Like Bernstein, Robbins had a sister, Sonia, to whom he was closer than he was to his parents. A child star at the age of four, she had been his first role model as a dancer.5 Robbins had likewise followed her example in becoming a member of the (then legal) Communist Party in 1943, attracted to its promotion of minority rights and unemployment benefits and its opposition to Jim Crow and poll taxes. Robbins had been an extraordinarily artistic child—he played the piano and violin and composed; he painted pictures, wrote poetry, and played with a toy puppet theater. As a child, he later said, “art seemed like a tunnel to me. At the end of the tunnel, I could see light where the world opened up, waiting for me.”6 He had come to ballet late, after dropping out of New York University at nineteen, and started out under the wing of Gluck Sandor, the charismatic modern dance choreographer. In his early twenties he choreographed a number of small works, many on political themes, some for musicals. Like Bernstein he was driven by creative ambitions and also by the need to prove to his father that he could make a career out of his art.
When he knocked on Bernstein’s door he was still living with his parents in Weehawken but had finally broken out of the chorus and had excelled in several solo roles, notably in Tudor’s Pillar of Fire and Romeo and Juliet and in Fokine’s Bluebeard and, apparently unforgettably, in the role of Petrushka.7 The ballet project for which he needed a composer, his first opportunity to create a major work, had an entertaining premise: three sailors on shore leave for a day in New York who compete for the attentions of two girls and finally run off after a third. The scenario had been inspired by a Paul Cadmus painting, The Fleet’s In, which had an implied homosexual subtext that Robbins would ignore. Like Bernstein, he was wrestling with a divided sexuality (he had had affairs with both women and men), about which he was deeply ashamed. (It needs to be remembered that in this era, while homosexuality was often accepted among artists, it was otherwise almost universally regarded as a mental illness and as a “problem” to be “solved.”)
The composer and conductor practically started to work right then and there. Only that afternoon Bernstein had jotted down a lively theme on a paper napkin at the Russian Tea Room. When he played it for Robbins, the young choreographer shouted, “That’s it, that’s what I had in mind!” So began Fancy Free and perhaps Bernstein’s most crucial creative partnership.
While work on the ballet proceeded, with Bernstein and Copland sometimes making four-hand recordings of the music to send to Robbins while he was on tour, Leonard continued to study all the scores that the principal and guest conductors at the Philharmonic were scheduled to conduct, to attend all rehearsals, and to theoretically be ready to step onstage to take over at a moment’s notice, should the conductor of a program become indisposed. As far back as anyone at the Philharmonic could recall, however, no conductors had ever been sick. That fall he recorded his Sonata for Clarinet and Piano with clarinetist David Oppenheim, and otherwise things were quiet.8 The main excitement was hearing the New York premiere of his song cycle I Hate Music at Jennie Tourel’s New York recital debut at Town Hall on November 13. Leonard’s parents and younger brother journeyed down from Boston for the occasion, and the audience response to the cycle was enthusiastic. Leonard returned home from the postconcert party for Tourel at four in the morning on Sunday, November 14, 1943. It was the date of Copland’s birthday (and the date the two had first met at Anna Sokolow’s concert).
Leonard was suddenly awakened, at 9 a.m., hung over, by a telephone call from the gruff-voiced Bruno Zirato, manager of the New York Philharmonic, saying, “Well, this is it; you are on for this afternoon.” Guest conductor Bruno Walter had come down with influenza, and Rodzinski was out of town and unable to return to New York. Years later Bernstein remembered the rest of the day as segments with blank spaces between them. He remembered rushing over to the ailing Walter in his hotel room to look at Schumann’s Manfred overture (named for Byron’s dramatic poem), the contemporary work, Miklós Rózsa’s Theme, Variations and Finale, Strauss’s thirty-five-minute tone poem Don Quixote, which would open the second half, and Wagner’s prelude from Die Meistersinger, which was to conclude the program. He had never rehearsed these works with the orchestra, and there wouldn’t be time for a minute with them before the performance. Fortunately, he had been fascinated by the complex Strauss score and had painstakingly studied its intricacies and how they mirrored events in the Cervantes novel. Walter, dressed in his robe, coughing in between each point, helpfully went over beat patterns, tempo changes, tricky spots, and urgent cues.
After this Bernstein remembered wandering around in his one good suit (there was no way to get to his tuxedo hanging in the Carnegie Hall closet) and stopping at his local pharmacy, where he sat at the counter having several cups of coffee, telling the pharmacist that millions of people would soon be hearing his concert in a coast-to-coast broadcast. The pharmacist thought he looked anxious and drained, and gave him two pills that he should take five minutes before walking out onstage, saying, “One pill will quiet you, and the other will give you energy.” Leonard remembered waiting in the wings backstage while the orchestra was tuning up, feeling the tension in the air as the gigantic Bruno Zirato came out to tell the audience that Bruno Walter was ill, and hearing a collective groan from the audience. He remembered taking the pills out of his suit pocket and flinging them across the Carnegie Hall backstage, walking out to the podium, and raising his arms for the three strong opening chords of the Manfred overture. He remembered how the sound of the chords had steadied his nerves and focused his mind on the music. He remembered that during intermission the principal violist and cellist had hurried into his dressing room to go over how he was going to handle certain passages in the Strauss.9 But he didn’t remember anything else of the concert until the end, when the entire audience and even the orchestra were on their feet, cheering.
In Family Matters, Burton later recalled what it was like to sit in the box seats that had been hastily arranged for the visiting family; how Jennie had clutched his knee and Samuel had sighed when their son walked onstage; how he had recognized Die Meistersinger from hearing his brother pound out its themes on the family piano; how in the intermission Leonard had a smile “so broad that it covered his whole face,” and how at the end of the concert “the house roared like one giant animal in a zoo. It was the loudest human sound I had ever heard—thrilling and eerie.”10 Violinist Jacques Margolies later recalled the Schumann as “the most exciting Manfred overture I ever played in my life. . . . The idea was he’d follow us, but it didn’t work out that way. You couldn’t believe a young man could create that kind of music. . . .”11
The front page of the New York Times of November 15, 1943, carried the story, and there was even an editorial about it the next day (“The warm friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread far over the air waves”). There were also instant rumors that Sam Bernstein had bribed Bruno Walter to pretend to be sick so that his son could have a chance on the podium, a hint of the double-edged nature of fame that Bernstein would experience often in later years. Within the next two weeks, the young conductor was interviewed by Life, Time, Newsweek, Pic, Look, Vogue, PM, Pix, Harper’s Bazaar, the Times, the Herald Tribune, the Jewish Forward, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jewish Day, the News, the Post, and the New Yorker. He basked in the attention and talked so unguardedly to reporters—at one point referring to a newspaper chain as being run by “fascists”—that both of his parents cautioned him to be more circumspect. Jennie wrote him, “Lenny, dear, please don’t tell reporters of your personal views. . . . It may have bad repercussions.”12
As if unhinged by the presence of such a talented understudy waiting in the wings, a second Philharmonic conductor, Howard Barlow, fell ill on December 16, bringing Bernstein back to the podium to lead the orchestra in works by Brahms, Delius, and Beethoven. Virgil Thomson’s review of this concert offered the opinion that “Bernstein’s striking quality as a conductor is largely due to his rhythmic understanding. His enlightenment in this respect is superior to the contemporary great, save only Beecham.”13 Rodzinski himself became indisposed later in the season, and there were signs of his jealousy, culminating in a moment of anger when he turned on Bernstein and “grabbed him fiercely by the collar.”
All the excitement surrounding the young musician did not guarantee a career, of course, and would have dissipated in a month had he not continued to prove himself. But in fact his conducting debut was only the beginning of an astonishing series of successes over the next year. He was invited by Fritz Reiner to conduct the premiere of his Jeremiah Symphony with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on January 28, 1944, and this was followed by his conducting the work with the Boston Symphony in February. The symphony so moved and excited audiences and critics that Rodzinski compensated for his flareup in the fall and generously invited him to conduct another entire program with the Philharmonic in the spring, as long as it included the Jeremiah. In May it received the New York Critics Circle Award for best new work of the season.
Thomson’s review of the Jeremiah held that “Bernstein orchestrates like a master but does not compose with either originality or much skill. His pieces lack contrapuntal coherence, melodic distinction, contrapuntal progress, harmonic logic, and concentration of thought.”14 Paul Bowles differed, thinking it outranked “every other symphonic product by an American composer . . . of the younger generation” and particularly drew attention to the last movement, with its “definite personal tenderness expressed in the simplest and most direct terms,” as “the most moving of the three.”15
In March Bernstein directed his first concerts outside the United States at Les concerts symphoniques de Montréal. That same spring, work on the ballet with Robbins went into high gear. Robbins was constantly observing how people walked and moved and chewed gum and gestured, and he folded these real-life details into the elegance of ballet steps.16 Choreographically, he drew from the world he saw around him: the sailors on the street in Times Square, social dances such as the Lindy hop, shorty George, and boogie-woogie. He was also able to articulate exactly what he needed from the composer, from “mood and tempo” to the exact number of beats. Like Bernstein, he had traveled to Mexico and been drawn to the people and music he had encountered there. The composer was able to make wonderful use of material from his abandoned Cuban-inspired Conch Town ballet sketch for the “Mexican” solo Robbins wanted for his own character, a danzón that culminates in a blazing tutti orchestration redolent of the climax of Ravel’s Bolero.17
The high-spirited score of Fancy Free is in nine sections linked by a few memorable recurring ideas: the joyfully swinging sailors’ motive that starts the work; the lyrically descending melody after it, first played by the French horn; the sashaying, sexy music heard when the girls enter; the syncopated jazz figurations on the piano that echo it; and the hornpipe motive that follows. As he would in On the Town, Bernstein introduced the piece with a quiet musical prologue, the bluesy song “Big Stuff,” heard on an onstage jukebox in the bar before the sailors enter. Written with Billie Holiday’s voice in mind, and later recorded by her, “Big Stuff” was sung in its first performances by Shirley Bernstein.
The work’s craft and satisfying structure (which hints at sonata form) are disguised behind a manner of carefree spontaneity. Within the first twenty measures of the orchestral opening, Bernstein creates an infectious rhythmic variety using only the opening sailors’ idea, setting the pace for the inventiveness to follow. The tranquil Coplandesque music in the bar cunningly anticipates the theme of the danzón. The fourth section, a sensuous, stirring pas de deux, is a variation on “Big Stuff.” The “competition scene,” coming at the work’s midpoint, is a development section in which the motives associated with both sexes are finally combined. This is followed by three character pieces for the sailors: a manic, Satie-esque “Galop”; a blues-tinged waltz in unevenly shifting meters of 3/4, 3/8, and 4/4; and the Latin danzón. Bernstein manages to insert variations on the lyrically descending horn theme in all three of them.
The premiere of Fancy Free was given on April 18, 1944, at the old Metropolitan Opera House at Thirty-Ninth Street and Broadway, with the composer conducting. There were twenty-four curtain calls. Robbins was so stunned by the response that Agnes de Mille had to cradle him in her arms backstage. The ballet received a rapturous reception in the press and was such a success that it was in demand wherever the company toured and became a kind of signature work for it.
Robbins proved to be the catalyst Bernstein needed to move from the realm he had occupied in his early chamber works and his first symphony into the world of theater for which he had such an aptitude. One of the parallels between the two young artists was their shared immersion in both the popular and classical realms, and their ability to bring equal seriousness to both. And it was their collaboration on Fancy Free that was, in the words of Bernstein’s daughter, Jamie, the “bridge” that allowed him “to go from Symphony to Broadway stage.” That the score came to epitomize New York for many people is confirmed by its use as the music heard issuing from the window of the young ballet dancer, “Miss Torso,” working on her routine in Hitchcock’s film Rear Window.
Set designer Oliver Smith, who was also a producer, suggested that a Broadway musical could be developed out of the concept behind the ballet. Both Bernstein and Robbins were at first reluctant but then agreed to do it. Bernstein suggested that Betty Comden and Adolph Green could draft the book and lyrics. Hitherto completely untested in such capacities, the duo were currently performing at the Blue Angel on Fifty-Fifth Street, having unsuccessfully taken their nightclub act to Hollywood. As it turned out, the assignment transformed their lives.18 Robbins and Bernstein were twenty-six years old; Comden was twenty-five; Green was turning thirty. The electricity generated between Robbins and Bernstein now went four ways, helping to carry Bernstein across what might have otherwise been an intimidating aesthetic divide.
Comden later described their work process as “spontaneous combustion.” As she put it, it was “as if some bomb planted in a marble quarry had exploded and, as we all closed our eyes and plugged our ears, a million pieces had miraculously fallen together to form Michelangelo’s ‘David.’” None of them had previous experience working on Broadway, and therefore defying musical theater conventions came naturally. Yet they were also courageous—creatively and socially. On the Town was the first racially integrated musical on Broadway, and it even starred a Japanese American, Sono Osato, during the very period when the United States was at war with Japan, as the “all-American girl,” Miss Turnstiles. The show also celebrated the modern American woman. The three sailors in Fancy Free had had to fight over two available women, but in On the Town there are three female leads, all of them confident, employed, and sexually bold. Comden and Green wrote central parts for themselves: Green was the debonair sailor Ozzie; Comden played the anthropologist Claire de Loone. And Bernstein’s sister, Shirley, having made her professional debut as the voice on the radio at the start of Fancy Free, was in the chorus. She stayed with the musical until 1946, eventually with a speaking role.
Other than the three sailors on leave, there is no overlap between Fancy Free and On the Town, either in story or in the music. There were long ballet sequences—thirty minutes of dance in all. In rehearsals, choreographer Robbins alternated between being lovably fun and being a tyrant who was sadistically critical of particular cast members. Facing problems during the Boston previews, he panicked and disappeared for two days. It was Oliver Smith who convinced director George Abbott to wait before finding another choreographer.
The breakthrough Bernstein made in composing Fancy Free—in which he had let loose the balletic potential of his rhythms and achieved a superbly successful overall form out of episodic sections—continued in On the Town, which moved seamlessly between musical comedy songs and elaborate ballet numbers that bring bitonality, polyrhythms out of Stravinsky, and canonic imitations at different speeds into a Broadway context. As he did later in West Side Story, Bernstein found a way to speak in his own accent, building on precedents in Gershwin, Copland, and Stravinsky’s Petrushka, Le Sacre du Printemps, and L’Histoire du soldat, which he had been studying since his undergraduate years. The score has a huge range of musical reference points: from ballet and symphonic music (the eleven-minute overture, the dance interludes “Times Square” and “The Imaginary Coney Island”); to the musical cubism of Satie, Milhaud, and Les Six; to nightclub rhythms (the rumba “Ya Got Me”), vaudeville (the topical review song “I Can Cook Too”), and big-band jazz.19
The show gave Bernstein a chance to contribute to the “American songbook” he knew so well. In his hands, upbeat comic numbers such as “I Can Cook Too” are no less sophisticated than serious ballads such as “Lonely Town,” which, with its uneven phrase lengths, harmonic ambiguity, and soaring melodic shape, has the emotional depth of an aria. As Sir Arthur Sullivan had done in Pirates of Penzance, Bernstein could also create parodies of opera (“Carried Away” in this show) that were all the funnier for being excellent, genuinely operatic music. He could bring an unparalleled harmonic variety to songs that still sound plausible as sung by the show’s “everyday” characters (as in the modulations that give “New York, New York” its air of excitement). He could write a hilarious blues parody (“I’m Blue”), in the middle of the nightclub sequence, that is both wonderfully funny and strikingly original.20
In some cases, as with “Come Up to My Place,” Comden and Green handed Bernstein a complete lyric and he set it to music.21 Sometimes they created lyrics alongside him. At still other times, they looked through music he had already composed, found songs they particularly liked, looked for places where these could be fit into the show, and then wrote lyrics for them. This happened with “Lucky to Be Me” and the poignant “Lonely Town,” where their collaborative alchemy achieved perfection.22 In the latter instances, Comden recalled later, “We tentatively, nervously showed him these, and he was sort of taken aback.” Then, after a pause, “he would say, ‘Gee, that’s really good.’”23
The extended dance episodes allowed Bernstein’s penchant for variations free rein (for example, there are seven character variations on the waltz-like “Miss Turnstiles” song in the ballet that follows it, corresponding to the series of male types Miss Turnstiles courts); he also used them to develop motives from the songs, giving the score an almost symphonic unity.24 He also didn’t hesitate to draw from his old chamber music. The scherzo from his undergraduate Piano Trio for Mildred Spiegel makes an appearance in the brief interlude between “Lonely Town” and the pas de deux based on it.25
Fifty-seven-year-old director George Abbott, whose previous productions had included, among others, On Your Toes in 1936, choreographed by George Balanchine, and Pal Joey in 1940, choreographed by Gene Kelly, both of which had scores by Richard Rodgers, left Bernstein’s complex dance music alone. He just kidded him about it, calling it “that Prokaaaafieff stuff.”26
The combination of the show’s youthful energy, the refinement and range of its music, and the harsh reality it gracefully incorporated made for something original and affecting. In December 1944 the war was at its height, and although the Allies were winning, a positive outcome was not assured. Sailors on shore leave for one day faced trauma, maiming, or death when they returned to the front. Betty Comden’s own husband was in combat at the time. The underlying poignancy of the work surfaces especially in the tenderly understated song at the day’s end, “Some Other Time.”
On the Town opened December 28, 1944, at the little Adelphi Theatre and was such a hit that it was moved to the 44th Street Theatre and then the Martin Beck, running for a total of 463 performances. Robbins, now a success in ballet and on Broadway, was soon writing in the New York Times Magazine about his vision of a form of musical theater that would combine all the arts into a completely integrated, thoroughly American work.
In the wake of Bernstein’s spectacular conducting triumph with the Philharmonic, he was now in demand as a guest conductor all over the country. Gunther Schuller, soon to be a famed composer, conductor, and music scholar himself, was in the first horn chair at the Cincinnati Symphony when Bernstein filled in for Eugene Goossens, in November 1944, conducting a program that included Stravinsky’s Firebird. He noted Bernstein’s physical gifts and musical dynamism: “We were all bowled over by Bernstein’s conductorial talent, especially the lightninglike almost explosive physical energy, his ability to abandon himself totally to the music and yet not lose technical control. . . . What I noticed particularly was the suppleness of Bernstein’s hands; it was as if he had ball bearings in his wrists that enabled him to bend, flex, rotate them at will—a remarkable gift, that I believe . . . was unique to him.”27
In March 1945 Bernstein wrote Helen Coates a humorous poem about his struggle to find ideas for a choral setting commissioned by the cantor of the Park Avenue Synagogue in Manhattan.28 Hashkiveinu, a five-minute work for tenor, choir, and organ, performed two months later, was the result, the composer’s only work written for use in synagogues. The Hebrew Sabbath prayer expresses a hope for peace in the outer sections and speaks of warding off threats in the middle one. Bernstein scholar Jack Gottlieb has written of the music’s perfectly symmetrical arch form, and of the tranquility generated by organ pedal points occurring in the outer sections. At the arch’s center, the mode and tempo shift and the music becomes more animated, evoking the terrors of the world with folk fragments reminiscent of Stravinsky’s Les Noces. As peace is restored, and the cantor’s slow tenor line enters over the mellifluous Phrygian canons in the choral parts, the listener can imagine what the young Bernstein must have felt, hearing the devotional singing in Roxbury’s Temple Mishkan Tefila.
In May Bernstein made extensive sketches for a setting of words from W. H. Auden’s poem For the Time Being, a sixty-page “Christmas oratorio” in verse written during the war, that with its choruses of angels, recitatives, wise men, and shepherds, was tailor-made for music. He wrote the title “Songs of Fear” on the cover page but soon abandoned the effort. He would return to Auden for inspiration a few years later.
Bernstein led fourteen different American orchestras in 1945. Everywhere he went he chatted with members of the press in the green room, playing the piano (everything from Haydn to the “Weeping Willow Blues”), and in almost every respect behaving with an informality and expansiveness that was the polar opposite of what people had come to expect a classical music conductor to be like. Feeling pressured by his mentor Koussevitzky’s disapproval of his excursion onto Broadway, he swore off further involvements in show business. “I’ve done that now,” he said in St. Louis. “I like to do everything once, just to see what it feels like.”29
He was ready to direct an entire concert season of his own and to develop a relationship with one ensemble, and an opportunity to do so came at the end of the 1945 season, when Leopold Stokowski resigned his position as director of the New York City Symphony to become conductor at the Hollywood Bowl. Koussevitzky wrote Mayor La Guardia suggesting that his protégé would be the perfect person for the job, and Bernstein received the offer on his twenty-seventh birthday. The orchestra played its concerts in the City Center (formerly the Shriners’ Mecca Temple), also home to George Balanchine’s New York City Ballet.
Posters for the first season of the New York City Symphony featured a striking photo of a casual-looking Bernstein and promised “Vital Music old and new—superbly performed under a stimulating young conductor.” Programs included many premieres and unusual works, including Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony (narrated by Orson Welles), Carlos Chávez’s Sinfonía india, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, Hindemith’s Concert Music for Strings and Brass, and Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1. Bernstein also led Mitropoulos’s string orchestra version of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, op. 131. In the New York Herald Tribune, Virgil Thomson had high praise for Bernstein’s innovative programming, while offering cautionary words about his extravagant podium manner.
After a performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor on February 5, 1946, in which Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau was soloist, the conductor attended a party at Arrau’s house in Queens. There he met an elegant, intelligent, and beautiful young actress, Felicia Montealegre, who had grown up in Chile and was currently studying piano with Arrau. Although deeply interested in music and literature, she considered acting her true vocation and, unbeknownst to her parents, was honing her skills at the Herbert Berghof Studio at the New School. The previous summer she had appeared in Federico García Lorca’s play If Five Years Pass at the Province-town Playhouse in Greenwich Village.
Born Felicia Montealegre Cohn in Costa Rica, to an American Jewish father and Chilean Catholic mother, she was four years younger than Bernstein. She had grown up Catholic in a privileged environment (her father, the grandson of a rabbi, was the president of the American Smelting and Refining Company in Chile). Bilingual and with dual citizenship, she had made the choice at twenty-one to become an American citizen. With her finely shaped nose, delicate features, and dignified but animated personality, she could perhaps almost have passed for a Bernstein sibling, were it not for her Spanish accent. Yet she also had an aristocratic reserve that was not a characteristic Bernstein trait.
According to those who attended the party, Leonard and Felicia were instantly smitten and sat together on a sofa talking animatedly. It was rumored that Felicia had already fallen for Bernstein while watching him conduct and had determined to marry him. All indications are that they went home together that night and were together the next morning, February 6, which was Felicia’s twenty-fourth birthday. But then Bernstein was off to San Francisco, then Vancouver, and on to Czechoslovakia and England, where he played the Ravel Piano Concerto in G Major, tabling the romance for the time being. In letters to Helen Coates, Leonard’s attentions appear to have instantly turned to someone named Seymour.
In the summer of 1946 at Tanglewood, Bernstein finally got to meet composer Benjamin Britten, whom he greatly admired, in the context of conducting the American premiere of his opera Peter Grimes. Although the performance suffered from being performed by students, it left a deep impression on Koussevitzky, on Bernstein himself, and on many in the audience. In his very last concert, forty-five years later, Bernstein would conduct the Four Sea Interludes from the work. But at this time, in spite of being on good enough terms to have dinner together twice a week, the older and younger composer were somewhat cool to each other. Bernstein was apparently disturbed when Britten invited Leonard’s younger brother, Burton, then fourteen, to sit on his knee backstage. While Britten was in a monogamous relationship with tenor Peter Pears, he plainly enjoyed the proximity of all the young men at the festival. Perhaps the connection between the two musicians had not gotten off to the best start. When he was still at Curtis, Bernstein, then just twenty-three, had written Britten a letter praising his new Sinfonia da Requiem, describing the work as Britten’s “best so far.” To this the English composer had answered “maybe there is something in what you say,” but that in terms of perceived flaws in previous works, “maybe those particular vices are less vicious than some others I can think of—such as inhibitions, sterility, self-conscious ideas of originality.”30 At the cast party after Peter Grimes, where he played boogie-woogie, Bernstein got to speak with the living poet whose work he most revered: W. H. Auden. Auden was in fact in the midst of writing the poem The Age of Anxiety, which Bernstein would later use as the basis for his Second Symphony.
On the heels of the production of Peter Grimes, Jerome Robbins arrived at Tanglewood to sketch out a scenario with Bernstein for a new ballet that would need to be completed within a month. The collaborators developed their scenario in five days, and Bernstein then spent the next three weeks, during which time he turned twenty-eight, composing the score. By September he had made a piano recording of the ballet for Robbins to work with in New York. Facsimile opened at the Ballet Theatre on October 24. The theme of the ballet was one that, as much as the search for faith, could be applied to many of Bernstein’s large-scale works: the search for meaningful connection with others. The triangular relationship between two men and one woman was also one Bernstein could relate to from firsthand experience.31 In a program note Bernstein described the dancers as “unintegrated personalities,” “three lonely people—a woman and two men—who are desperately and vainly searching for real interpersonal relationships.” He called the music “neurotic,” “mirroring the neuroses of the characters involved.” (Both Bernstein and Robbins were in psychoanalysis by this time.) The scenario resembles that of Vaslav Nijinsky’s 1918 ballet Jeux, which had a luminous one-movement score by Claude Debussy.32 The three young people who romantically tussle with each other on the beach in the Robbins/Bernstein work find, in Jack Gottlieb’s words, “only a facsimile of companionship” and are left with a sense of emptiness; hence, the title. The work is full of interesting music but leaves a tenuous impression. Even though it is economical and rigorous in the way it develops a small cluster of musical ideas, it seems to lack a thematic and stylistic center. This is partly because its reference points in music other than Bernstein’s own do not feel digested and internalized, as they do in most of his other works. (In On the Town’s “Lonely Town” pas de deux and “Imaginary Coney Island” pas de deux, for example, we may hear Gershwin, but it is still Bernstein’s Gershwin.) The best passages in Facsimile are the slow sections derived from the first theme of the Violin Sonata of 1940. Otherwise, the eighteen-minute work echoes Copland and Stravinsky in short episodes that seem to skate on thin musical ice, lacking sufficient conviction to override a sense of impersonation.
Facsimile was also at the heart of a strained moment between Bernstein and his mentor Koussevitzky, sparked by a discussion between them about Bernstein’s planned guest appearances with the Boston Symphony, in which the protégé had voiced his intention to program his new work. Koussevitzky’s stern letter of December 26, 1946, echoes in a paternal way Rodzinski’s discomfort with the young conductor’s ambitiousness:
Dec. 23, 1946
Dear Leonard,
My last talk over the telephone with you left a very disturbing impression. . . . Speaking of your programs you stubbornly insist on the performance of your own composition, even for broadcast. Do you realize that you are invited as a guest conductor, to show your capacities as interpreter of great musical works? May I ask you: do you think that your composition is worthy of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Organization? Can it be placed on the same level as Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Stravinsky, Prokofieff, Bartok, or Copland? . . .
Bernstein quickly penned a contrite reply:
Dear Serge Alexandrovich,
I have been deeply grieved all day on account of your last letter. . . . And you know I am happy to play only what you suggest and approve in my Boston concerts. . . . Certainly I believe in my music, or else I would not have written it—not on a level with Beethoven and Bartok, naturally, but in its own smaller terms. . . . I have had a very difficult year trying to adjust myself to the conventions of my profession. The réclame means absolutely nothing to me . . . the whole desperate race with time would be worth nothing were it not for the magical joy of music itself.
In September Bernstein had caught Felicia’s final performance in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Swan Song on Broadway, and their romance had been rekindled. Late in December they announced engagement plans, to which his parents had very different responses. Jennie, alone in Brookline with Burton while Sam vacationed in Florida, questioned his choice: “I tell you dear that I’m not too happy about this affair of yours. Aside from the religious angle I still don’t think she is the girl for you. You deserve someone better. Don’t let that accent fool you.”34 Meanwhile Sam, writing from Florida, was overjoyed: “My dear Son, Your letter this morning came to me like a sunrise after a dark night. . . . It was the most wonderful news I dreamed of for a long time.”35 But over the course of the next several months, during which Felicia briefly pursued her prospects in Hollywood, while Leonard conducted in Boston, New York, Belgium, and Palestine, the momentum behind their plans dissipated, and by the end of 1947 they were called off.
Meanwhile, during his rise to prominence as a conductor and composer, Bernstein’s FBI file had filled with references to his left-leaning affiliations. Such things as his support for organizations in opposition to Franco’s Spain (which was now receiving the American support it had been denied in the Roosevelt era); his appearances at rallies and functions with Paul Robeson, Dashiell Hammett, Billie Holliday, Rockwell Kent, and Lena Horne; his membership in the Council on African Affairs, the National Negro Congress, and the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship—all put him at risk of scrutiny by the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and to attacks by the anticommunist crusader Senator Joseph McCarthy. He had begun to feel the pressure. For example, in February 1946, when he was about to give a speech and performance at a Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee dinner in San Francisco, he received a telegram from his manager Arthur Judson forbidding it and threatening him with breach of contract. Unbeknownst to him, his file was further augmented in December 1946 by a Musicians’ Union informant’s declaration that he was “a Communist.” (He had not, in fact, ever joined the Communist Party.) Bernstein meanwhile lent his support to left-wing composer Hanns Eisler when he was threatened with deportation, and he conducted a concert of Eisler’s music. He participated in a trip to Washington by delegates from the film and Broadway communities in support of the “Hollywood Ten” screenwriters who had opposed testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Reassured by studio heads that they too planned to protest the intimidation and totalitarian tactics of HUAC and to call for its dissolution, he was aghast when Eric Johnston, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, reversed position and announced complete support for the committee’s investigations into communism in Hollywood. (The members of the Hollywood Ten were subsequently cited for contempt of Congress and fired by the studios, and the Hollywood blacklist became official.)36
In April 1947 Bernstein, accompanied by his father and sister Shirley, had an emotional first visit to Palestine and his initial encounter with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. At that time, Palestine was still a British protectorate with a population that was one-third Jewish. He arrived there in the middle of a tense conflict between rival Jewish groups, some pacific, others violent, seeking the formation of the independent Jewish state mandated by the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Bernstein had broadly humanitarian and pacifist inclinations but was also staunchly pro-Zionist. He bonded with the members of the orchestra, many of them survivors of the Nazi scourge, who had once been prominent instrumentalists in Germany, Poland, Austria, and Russia. His concert at the Edison Cinema in Tel Aviv consisted of his Jeremiah Symphony (dedicated to his father), the Ravel Piano Concerto, and Schumann’s Second Symphony (also a favorite work of Sam Bernstein’s). As they would later in Haifa, Jerusalem, and on a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley, the audience responded with an overwhelming ovation and tears. With his ability to speak Hebrew, his affinity for the place and its people, and the passionate bond he had created with the members of the orchestra, Bernstein felt himself deeply at home.37
In May he was in Prague, conducting the first European performance of Copland’s expansive Third Symphony. In a letter to his friend extolling the symphony’s virtues, he wrote, “Sweetie, the end is a sin. You’ve got to change.” Later he unilaterally inserted a cut in the finale, which he pronounced very effective. Though briefly offended by this unauthorized editing, Copland eventually did cut eight measures from the finale.
The 1947–48 season with the New York City Symphony was Bernstein’s third and last with the orchestra. It was book-ended by two memorable performances, the Mahler “Resurrection” Symphony, Bernstein’s first performance of Mahler, and the premiere of the orchestral version of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock. The season also included all-Mozart and all-Stravinsky evenings.
In the spring he toured Europe, appearing in Budapest, Milan, Vienna, and Munich. Having declined to conduct in Vienna the previous year, he now followed Yehudi Menuhin’s lead in considering it an opportunity to perform as a Jewish musician in formerly Nazi territory. He was shocked by the destruction, starvation, and misery he saw on the ruined streets of Munich, and by the physical frailty and undernourishment of the orchestra members. His May 9 concert with the Bavarian State Orchestra elicited a frenzied response from his German and American audience, after which he was carried through the streets as a hero. The German papers called him a “Paganini of the Symphony” and praised his “astounding, demonic gifts.” At a refugee camp he gave two concerts, conducting an orchestra of survivors of Dachau, now homeless, in which he accompanied Jewish soloists, and played Rhapsody in Blue. Five thousand refugees attended each concert.
He continued his European tour in Budapest, where the excitement generated by the first part of the broadcast orchestral concert made people rush to the hall from their radios to hear the final works live. Once again he was carried by happy crowds through the streets. In Paris his fingers “went dead,” as they sometimes did, playing Beethoven’s First Concerto on the air. In Vienna he was received with enormous audience enthusiasm but with open hostility from the Vienna Symphony (Wiener Symphoniker). In the middle of this Vienna trip, on May 14, came news that the state of Israel was now an official reality. Yet this was immediately followed by a summer in which the new state came under siege from all sides. Bernstein made plans to return there in the fall, and in the meantime he organized a benefit for the Palestine Resistance Fund. Yet here his idealism collided with the complexities of Israel’s internal political realities. The violent extremist group Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, was engaged in its own struggle with the moderate government of David Ben-Gurion. Unsure which Israel faction would benefit from the concert, several prominent participants, including his friend Jennie Tourel, withdrew from it.
In the summer of 1948, with the Boston Symphony awaiting a new composition for performance the following year, and a commission from Woody Herman’s band also due, he was at Tanglewood teaching fifty-seven conducting students, performing the Mahler Second Symphony, and celebrating Koussevitzky’s seventy-fourth birthday. After the season ended, he and his brother, Burton, accompanied Stephen Spender on a road trip to the D. H. Lawrence Ranch near Taos, New Mexico, where he worked on an out-of-tune piano on his new symphony, inspired by Auden’s Age of Anxiety. From there they continued on to Sheridan, Wyoming, where they stayed at a cattle ranch run by a Tanglewood student’s family, rode horses, and worked as ranch hands.
In September Bernstein arrived in war-torn Israel accompanied by Helen Coates, performing forty concerts in sixty days under terrifying conditions. Artillery explosions accompanied Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 in his October 14 Jerusalem concert with the orchestra, now renamed the Israel Philharmonic. He played the piano at kibbutzim and for wounded soldiers at hospitals. He conducted Copland’s Third Symphony. At Rehovot he was called offstage after the first movement of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, to be alerted to the threat of an imminent air raid, and played the ensuing Adagio as if it were the last music he would ever hear. He took thirty-five volunteers from the orchestra with him from Jerusalem through the Negev Desert to the contested city of Beersheba, an active war zone, to play for troops and settlers in an amphitheater there. Thousands gathered to hear him play three piano concertos—Mozart’s Concerto No. 15 in B-flat Major, K. 450, Beethoven’s First, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody—in such numbers that Egyptians viewing it from the air thought that it was a military maneuver. His last concert in Jerusalem consisted of Mahler’s transcendent “Resurrection” Symphony.
While in Israel (where he was briefly in love with an Israeli army officer) he also composed the Dirge movement of his new symphony, orchestrated it, and presented it at a benefit in Tel Aviv. It wasn’t until the following winter, at a time when he was already writing music for what would eventually become West Side Story, that he completed it. At that time he told Louis Biancolli of the New York World-Telegram that in a way he contained two personalities: “The composer, besides being independent, is an introspective person, with a strong inner life; his primary mode of activity is to stay at home and compose whenever he feels the impulse. The conductor . . . is an extrovert. He is dealing constantly with audiences, orchestras, critics . . . great numbers of people. . . . When you find yourself being both people, being . . . a born performer and a born creator, you discover that you are supporting two lives, psychologically speaking.” He added, “I’m always just barely keeping up with myself.”38
Those who had recognized his gifts early on—Helen Coates, David Prall, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Aaron Copland, Marc Blitz-stein, and Serge Koussevitzky—would surely have agreed with this self-portrait.