THE CONFLICTS BETWEEN Bernstein’s many gifts, interests, and needs could not be resolved simply by his leaving his position at the Philharmonic. By 1969 he had already founded Amberson Productions (named for the German equivalent of his name) to film and videotape his concerts, and he was embracing his new relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic by committing himself to a series of conducting and film projects there, including performances of Beethoven’s Fidelio and the Ninth Symphony, Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, tours of Germany, Switzerland, England, and Italy, and much more. Furthermore, he would be maintaining his close ties with the New York Philharmonic, as well as with the Israel Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Bavarian Radio Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw, and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in Rome. Over the next twenty years he would conduct forty-two different orchestras.
According to his children, the process of decompressing from the heady, demanding, and ultrasocial public realm of conducting to the quiet, private inner world where the notes came from was increasingly difficult. As daughter Jamie put it, “It stripped his gears every time.” Looming over him as he departed his full-time role at the Philharmonic was Jacqueline Kennedy’s commission to compose a work for the opening of the new John F. Kennedy Center in Washington in 1971. He also had several “smaller” composing projects in the works, including writing music for a film on the life of Saint Francis of Assisi to be directed by Franco Zeffirelli. The night after his final Philharmonic appearance as music director, he attended a Jimi Hendrix concert. Then he was off to Europe.
Bernstein’s new freelance life began with a few monumental performances. The first was a rendition of Verdi’s Requiem given in Christopher Wren’s magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, with Martina Arroyo and Placido Domingo as soloists. This was also the first of his many filmed performances, at the time a risky financial gamble to undertake, but in the end remarkably valuable. The films disseminated music to vast new audiences, while preserving live performance practices of their era and the interpretation and artistry of all involved in a more comprehensive and authentic way than modern studio recordings do.
From London, Bernstein traveled to Paris, Rome, and Tel Aviv before going to Vienna, where he performed and conducted Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, led the Ninth Symphony, and delivered an inspired performance and production of Fidelio. It was an extraordinary honor to participate in the celebration of the Beethoven bicentennial in such an important way, and the depth and excitement of the performances changed the way he was perceived even in America. In early February 1970 he returned to the New York Philharmonic to conduct Elliott Carter’s new Concerto for Orchestra, a Philharmonic commission, along with Haydn and Tchaikovsky works. He helped the orchestra master the intricate rhythmic language of Carter’s remarkable work, which was inspired by a long poem, Vents (Winds), by the French poet Saint-John Perse, concerning the regenerating and devastating power of winds. The concerto seemed to simultaneously evoke the winds of political change sweeping the United States in the late 1960s and those occurring within the art of music. Carter called for the orchestra to be divided into four ensembles, which played music of highly contrasting characters, making use of the composer’s “metrical modulations” and exploiting the talents of individual musicians such as pianist Paul Jacobs, whose artistry Carter deeply admired. Even each bass player had his own individual part. The musicians grew increasingly enthusiastic the more they conquered the score’s challenges, and a decision was hastily and unexpectedly made to record the work. The recording session grew festive when Aaron Copland unexpectedly joined the conductor, composer, and many of the musicians in the sound booth to listen to the spatial separation of the four large ensembles. Bernstein’s rendering of the work was dark, turbulent, and expressive. Carter later said that Bernstein conducted it “very well—without that marvelous attention to detail that Boulez gave it later, but he did succeed perfectly in capturing its broad line, that long breath running through the piece.”1
The early 1970s represented a period of exploration and branching out for Bernstein. Many observers believed that he was becoming an even better conductor. His two major creative accomplishments of the period—the musical theater work Mass and the Charles Eliot Norton lectures (The Unanswered Question) he gave at Harvard, which later became a book and a series of videos—seem to have been attempts to synthesize everything he had ever done and thought.
Bernstein’s experience of his European tour had been marred by the publication of a scathing article in the June 8, 1970, New York Magazine by Tom Wolfe, and a controversy surrounding his “relationship” with the Black Panthers had awaited him back in New York. In April 1969 there had been a series of police raids on members of the Black Panther Party in Harlem that had uncovered stockpiles of arms and pipe-bomb materials. Twenty-one Panthers were charged with “plotting to kill policemen . . . and [to] bomb police stations, department stores and railroad facilities,” charges that eventually did not add up in court. The suspects were being kept in solitary confinement, and bail had been set at such exorbitant amounts that civil libertarians considered that they were being subjected to “preventive detention.” Solidarity of any kind with the Black Panthers, who were opposed to the Gandhian principles once espoused by Martin Luther King Jr., the Congress of Racial Equality, and the NAACP, entailed considerable risk.2 But in January Felicia Bernstein organized a legal-defense fund-raiser to be held at the Bernsteins’ Park Avenue apartment, with the goal of providing funds to ensure that the Panthers had a fair trial and that their wives and children were taken care of while they were being detained. When Bernstein arrived at the party, the center of gravity shifted to his interactions with the single representative of the Panthers who was present.
Unfortunately for the Bernsteins and their cause, two members of the press who attended the event incognito, Wolfe and New York Times columnist Charlotte Curtis, ridiculed their efforts in a damaging way. Curtis reported sarcastically on the evening in a full-page article on the social page on January 15, Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday (“Black Panther Philosophy Is Debated at the Bernsteins”), and the paper followed with a blistering editorial the next day, declaring that “the group-therapy plus fund raising soiree at the home of Leonard Bernstein . . . represents the kind of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. . . . Responsible black leadership is not likely to cheer as the Beautiful People create a new myth that Black Panther is beautiful.”3 William Buckley followed suit with a humorously derisive column in the New York Post, “Have a Panther to Lunch,” and in June, Wolfe’s 25,000-word article (“Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s”) made the event and Wolfe’s catchphrase world-famous, and the Bernsteins subject to mockery, hate mail, and picketing outside their apartment building. The conductor was even booed at the Philharmonic. Many of those who attended the event later received letters outlining the anti-Semitic positions of the Panthers, anonymously signed “A Concerned and Loyal Jew.” The “Loyal Jew” was none other than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who had compiled a list of those present and instituted a letter-writing campaign designed to discredit the Bernsteins. Lost in the shuffle was the fact that the fund-raiser didn’t represent an espousal of armed violence, let alone of anti-Semitism, but a defense of due process. The Wolfe article proved highly effective in squelching events of this kind. Its arch and flowery prose managed to wound the Bernsteins, and it particularly upset Felicia, whose activities on behalf of others were normally so private.
Nevertheless, the couple hosted another potentially controversial fund-raising party on May 10, 1970, for the legal defense fund of Philip Berrigan and Sister Elizabeth McAlister, two members of the Harrisburg Seven, voices of conscience against the Vietnam War, who had been charged with plotting “to kidnap Henry Kissinger and blow up Washington’s underground heating tunnels” (charges that were pure fantasy on the part of the FBI). The complicated story behind their case is brilliantly told by Barry Seldes in his book The Political Life of Leonard Bernstein.4 After reading a 1970 sermon written by the imprisoned Daniel Berrigan, in which he drew parallels between the American Catholic left and the clergy of Nazi-occupied Denmark, and attending Berrigan’s play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, the composer went to see him at the Danbury Penitentiary on May 24, to ask for his advice about Mass. Berrigan later described his visitor: “He seemed tired and harassed but gentle as a lamb. He said the press had coined a new word, ‘Catholic Chic’ to describe the meeting last wk, at which they raised 30 grand for the cause. . . . He seems quite awed by the prison thing. . . . Almost like someone waiting in a novitiate or an old time rectory.”5
While the meeting did not engender any specific text for Mass, it may have influenced its urgency of mood and strengthened the composer’s sense of mission about its communal tone. Berrigan believed that Bernstein would be using his sermon as the basis for lyrics, and clearly the FBI did too. They soon issued a memo making sure that Bernstein would be denied a second planned visit to Danbury Penitentiary in July, and cautioning President Nixon not to attend the premiere of Mass, lest he be seen applauding an attack directed at him in Latin. In the end, despite its outbursts of anger against the powers that be and its fiercely antiwar mood, Mass seems more the eclectic expression of a world that has lost its spiritual center than a specifically political statement.
Mass is a succession of linked musical numbers in a nearly bewildering variety of musical idioms. Even today it remains a bumpy ride, with reminders of the rock and pop idioms of the time, musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair, brass band music, and composers as different as Ives, Carl Orff, Copland, Stravinsky, and Krzysztof Penderecki. It remains difficult to have a consistent, settled opinion about a work so wildly heterogeneous in its materials and performance styles. Of course, Bernstein had proved himself a master of synthesis before. Listening today, when such a variety of reference points is quite common, the work is exciting, moving, and full of good music, but it also seems uneven.
As in the Kaddish Symphony, Mass juxtaposes a sacred text and contemporary reflections on it. While the Celebrant, with the support of the chorus, sings through the entire Mass text, soloists from the congregation offer skeptical commentary in vernacular styles. When eventually the Celebrant has a breakdown, a boy soprano takes up the song of praise that the Celebrant has lost, leading him and the congregation to gradually join in a hymn of peace that is passed along to the audience. The ending has the tone of equivocal hopefulness that is not unlike that of The Age of Anxiety, suggesting that each individual is responsible for preserving the spirit of worship embodied in the liturgy. Bernstein biographer Humphrey Burton convincingly traces the concept of Mass to three sources: work on Franco Zeffirelli’s film about Saint Francis of Assisi, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, for which “A Simple Song” had been intended (as the music of Saint Francis’s creed); the experience of conducting at Robert Kennedy’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; and the Beethoven centennial in Vienna in 1970.6 The composer began by writing the vernacular lyrics himself, but six months prior to the premiere of the work he was still way behind in the composing process, and he sought help in finding a co-librettist. His sister Shirley, who was now an agent for playwrights and lyricists, recommended that he see the musical Godspell, which had lyrics by her client Stephen Schwartz, and in the spring of 1971 Schwartz began working with him on the text. (There was also a small, memorable contribution from Paul Simon.)7
Mass begins strikingly with a pileup of six voices and seven percussion instruments, all in competing meters and keys (aptly described by Robert Craft, in a negative review, as “Les Noces, as it might have been recomposed by Berio”). This is then “answered” by the Celebrant’s “Simple Song.” Both are true aspects of Bernstein—the opening in fact resembles the cacophonous eight-voiced “Amen” just before Kaddish II in the Third Symphony—but the “Simple Song,” because of its words, reads like a commentary on the “crazy modern music” of the work’s introduction. Throughout Mass, idioms bounce off each other in similar ways, fascinatingly but not always convincingly. An attractive aspect of the work is that the purely instrumental passages—which are in Bernstein’s late, nearly atonal idiom—have the function chorales do in the Bach Passions. They provide moments of reflective commentary. Ironically, it is at these moments, when the voices are silent, that the piece conveys the strongest religious quality, and perhaps the deepest feeling. They include not only the three Meditations Bernstein later extracted from the work as an orchestral group, which are positioned at key points in the structure, but also connecting passages of solo wind writing. The first Meditation, one of the best things in Mass, originated as a poignant piano Anniversary dedicated to Helen Coates on July 17, 1970, and published after her death as a memorial to her in Thirteen Anniversaries. The second is a short series of variations on the unharmonized atonal eleven-note “row” in the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, which occurs when Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” describes the human race bowing down to the Creator in the starry sky. (Along with the variations in the second movement of his early Violin Sonata, this is the composer’s strictest set of variations.) The second variation is only three measures long and piles Beethoven’s row into giant dissonant chords. The third Meditation, which would not be out of place in the Kaddish Symphony, expands canonically on an angular theme that includes all twelve chromatic half steps.
In the days leading up to the premiere of Mass, Bernstein was urged by Felicia, Schuyler Chapin, and others to make cuts in the score. He complied for one performance but then restored all the deleted music. Certainly he was right, in the sense that the work’s problems do not originate in its length (it lasts roughly two hours), and cuts would only damage the carefully planned structure. Each of the five sections of the Mass has its own key and tempo relationships. Once again, a “chain reaction” principle often links one section to the next. For example, in the second introit, the theme of the Middle Eastern–sounding Acolytes’ music in 9/8 (in rhythmic groupings of 3/8 + 3/4) becomes transformed into the melody of the calm chorale “Almighty Father” in 4/4 that follows it; after an interruption by solo oboe, the cadential harmonies of the chorale are then turned into the ferociously dissonant chords (C minor above A major) of the Confiteor, at the end of which these same dissonant chords, now played in groups of six, generate the accompaniment and some of the harmony of the Trope that follows, “I Don’t Know.” This kind of linkage between sections could be likened to the connections between “blocks” in early Stravinsky (such as Le Sacre du Printemps), were it not for the fact that here there are also 180-degree shifts in idiom from one passage to the next.8
Near the end of the evening, the fervent gospel chorus that erupts on the words “Dona nobis pacem” (Give us peace), and repeats with increasing intensity until vocal improvisations are added (replicating the spirit of the ending of Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, but this time with actual improvisation), cannot help but be stirring to anyone who experienced the Vietnam War era. The eruption (which several writers think was influenced by Beethoven’s use of “warlike” music at the same point in the Missa solemnis) almost seems to cause the Celebrant’s breakdown near the end, a passage the composer was still working on almost up to opening night. This fifteen-minute “mad scene” is a moving stretch of music that recapitulates thematic material from throughout the score, beginning with the second Meditation (with the Beethoven row in both the vocal and instrumental parts) and culminating in the theme from the first Meditation.
Helen Smith rightly draws parallels between the roles of priest and conductor, noting that Bernstein’s three symphonies share Mass’s subject matter of a “crisis of faith” and likewise feature “the presence of a solo voice.” She also observes that, while the presence of rock instrumentation serves as a timbral reference point to the music of the 1960s, the music the rock instruments play is more rooted in “blues, soul and jazz.”
The opening-night audience of 2,200 included neither President Nixon nor, in the end, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.9 But the rest of the Kennedy family, including eighty-year-old Rose Kennedy and Senator Ted Kennedy, were there, as were many ambassadors, dignitaries, and, surprisingly, Henry Kissinger. Also in the audience was Aaron Copland, who later proposed the work for a Pulitzer Prize, which it did not receive.
The first-night audience applauded for half an hour, and many of the Washington reviews were wildly enthusiastic. Some others focused on the personality of the composer rather than on the music, even referring obliquely to the Tom Wolfe affair. For example, in the New York Times, the distinguished drama critic Eric Bentley called Mass “ideology” and “group therapy at a bargain rate.” Also in the Times, music critic Donal Henahan praised the work’s ambitions, calling it “a major effort by a protean composer” and observing that in American music “no one since Ives has felt quite so much at home in the skin of his own culture while at the same time possessing the historical and intellectual breadth to move outside that skin when he thinks it suits his purposes. . . . This sounds like a work wrenched out of the artist almost against his will, like something he had to do for us, whether we like it or not.” In the same paper, Harold Schonberg described the piece as a “mé-lange of styles,” “slick, chic, sentimental . . . a combination of superficiality and pretentiousness.” In the New Yorker, music critic Winthrop Sargeant, an expert on Mahler and Bruckner and a Sanskrit scholar who had translated the Bhagavad Gita, was roused by Mass to one of the most enthusiastic reviews he ever accorded a contemporary work: “The message seems to be that religion may go into eclipse in a materialistic age but that it never dies. As for the music Bernstein has written for this spectacle, I find it sincere, moving, and often subtle. . . . In fact I was surprised by the real originality of the score. . . . He utilizes the whole array of musical resources available in his time. It is, I think, quite a feat for a contemporary composer to evolve a style that is both a personal medium of expression and a wholly communicative one for the audience.”10 Stephen Sondheim admired Bernstein’s chutzpah and the fact that his mistakes were “not just little errors, not just a dog piddling in the middle of the carpet,” but on a gigantic scale. That said, he found the work “a huge, titanic disaster.”11
In Mass Bernstein approached the issue of what Copland once called “style and consistency” by rebelling against it, choosing to link musical numbers through internal means and a tight theatrical structure rather than by style. He never went as far in this direction again.
In the spring of 1972 Bernstein led the Vienna Philharmonic in the Third, Fifth, and Ninth Symphonies of Mahler. In the fall he directed a new production of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera, in the original version with French dialogue, with Marilyn Horne in the title role. He guided a superbly shaped and tragic reading, in which his restrained tempos brought out the vitality and tension in a work he had loved since his adolescence.
Later that fall, Bernstein moved into Eliot House at Harvard University and began recording music with the Boston Symphony to serve as examples in his forthcoming Norton Lectures, scheduled for that term. He loved being back at Harvard so much and became so engrossed in the project that he ended up staying an entire year, giving the first lecture the following fall. To Bernstein’s children, the lectures were a natural outgrowth of the Young People’s Concerts, for which they had always been the sounding board. Since they were now college age, it was logical that the talks had grown up, too. Jamie Bernstein was then a junior at Harvard, and she naturally found her father’s year-long presence a mixed blessing. “Whatever slim hopes I had of finding out who I was as an autonomous person were dashed the moment he arrived,” she said, laughing. “On the other hand, it was exciting having him there, and thrilling to experience the lectures in real time.” Each of the six talks was offered at Harvard Square Theater and then filmed, with an onstage audience, two days later at a WGBH studio in Boston.12
Like Mass, the lectures were fascinating but also uneven. Bernstein’s reading of Noam Chomsky’s book Language and Mind had suggested to him an intellectual armature on which he could hang his discussions of music and the question of its direction. In contemporary linguistics Bernstein found the provocative hypothesis that humans have both the innate capacity to produce certain speech sounds (phonology), such as “Ma,” and also an innate linguistic capacity to derive language from these elements. Chomsky postulated inborn, genetically endowed, structural linguistic parameters loose enough to account for the varieties of human languages, but restrictive enough to explain how all languages work. The presence of these parameters would explain why children can develop the ability to speak after exposure to only a limited field of model sentences. Chomsky outlines in minute detail the ways in which an almost infinite variety of different linguistic “surface structures” can be derived from the same “deep structures.” He calls the innate ability to invent these derivations (the ability to construct sentences based upon deep structure in innovative ways that do not need to be taught) “transformational grammar.”13
This gave Bernstein a model for postulating a similar underlying universal human predisposition for music: the idea that we are born both with an instinctive understanding of sound (“musical phonology”), and with a basis for deploying these sounds in structures that convey specifically musical meanings (“musical syntax” and “musical semantics”). But, of course, being Bernstein, he tried to wed this notion of a universal musical substructure to his views of music’s current predicament and where music might be headed. The title of his lectures, The Unanswered Question, referred both to Ives’s composition of 1908 and to the question of music’s future.
Bernstein had always believed that human biology and the laws of physics accounted for the universality of tonal/modal scale patterns in all musical cultures, and lay behind the fact that children instinctively sing along with adults in their own range, without knowing what an “octave” is, and dance to a beat without knowing what “rhythm” is. In his Young People’s Concerts, he operated on the assumption that musical comprehension has a strong instinctive component, that, given the opportunity to listen to works by Beethoven, anyone could eventually learn to follow their syntax and semantic processes, just as, under the proper conditions, anyone could eventually learn any of the human languages.
Using analogies from linguistics to examine the way Western music’s many languages evolved, the lectures began with an explanation of the overtone series and then reviewed music history from the Middle Ages to the present day. Among the high points were Bernstein’s analyses of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony; his comparison of the actual opening of Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony to a four-square hypothetical “deep structure” he had the orchestra perform; his discussions of poetry as the linguistic equivalent of music, including his digressions about Mallarmé, T. S. Eliot, and E. E. Cummings; his insights into Stravinsky’s aesthetics; and the fine performance of Oedipus Rex he offered as a pendant to the final lecture. As an application of Chomsky’s ideas to music, the lectures were inevitably flawed and could not possibly match Chomsky’s rigor. But as a more intuitive response to Chomsky on the part of a musical thinker, the lectures were fascinating and musically illuminating.
Bernstein’s proposition that the structures of musical grammar point to an innate human musical capacity was provocative enough for some scholars and music theorists to take up the challenge of looking further into the matter, most notably linguist Allan Keiler, and the team of linguist Ray Jack-endoff and composer Fred Lerdahl. Bernstein’s conclusion that some form of tonality is essential to musical coherence may be problematic, given how mutable and subjective the concepts of “tonality” and “coherence” appear to be. But he may have meant the word “tonal” in a broad, almost metaphorical sense. In a period in which serious music seemed in danger of becoming disconnected from its social purpose—to become a form of pure research—he was arguing that good composers should not abandon the aims of the giants of the past who had created art on the highest level that still resonated with the intuitive understanding of lay listeners. By speaking of musical fundamentals within the context of linguistics, he was arguing for a complex music that builds its cosmic edifices on the “nya, nya” taunts of children on the street, the lullabies sung by mothers to infants, and the festive dances of folk traditions. Seen in this way, the lectures seem prophetic.
When he had spoken of Beethoven’s “universality” in his 1970 film made during that composer’s 200th birth year, Bernstein was also speaking of his own goals as the composer of West Side Story or Chichester Psalms: “That dubious cliché about music being the universal language almost comes true with Beethoven. No composer ever lived who speaks so directly to so many people. . . . It has a purity and directness which never becomes banal. It’s accessible without being ordinary.”
Perhaps Bernstein’s lectures communicated some viewpoints that he was already outgrowing. Aligning himself, as if by habit, with the Boulanger school of thought, recommending, as he had at the Young People’s Concerts, great works of Stravinsky’s such as L’Histoire du soldat and the Symphony of Psalms, and espousing “tonality,” he speaks with brisk assurance but not much emotion. But when he is discussing Schoenberg, we feel in his manner and voice, and in the sound of his piano playing, how intrigued and involved he is, note by note, phrase by phrase, even as he voices skepticism about the numerical schemes lying behind Schoenberg’s twelve-tone music. At the very moment he was speaking these words he was moving closer to Schoenberg’s sound world, or at least to that of Berg, in his music. In his later work, he occupied a territory halfway between the rigors of the academics who paid little attention to his music and the open-hearted expressivity of his own previous theater and concert music. But he was now rather far from the world of early Copland, Roy Harris, William Schuman, and Stravinskian neoclassicism. In his later years he also performed the music of his American friends far less frequently, and felt increasingly at home both in Vienna and in the works of the great European tradition.