MISERABLE THOUGH HE was in 1979, Bernstein was fortunate on most levels, and he knew it. He had his children; his brother, sister, and even his mother were still alive; he had his métier and his many gifts; he had the love and admiration of millions; he had worldly security. He had lived more fully than most people could ever imagine doing. Yet many of his own inner conflicts had now caught up with him. His composing may have often taken a backseat to his life as a performer, but it must have become painfully obvious to him by this time that his nature compelled him to do both, and that the option that he could chose a private life over his public one had been an illusion.
After Felicia’s death, Bernstein showed no inclination to settle into any new stable domesticity. While he was now “free” to lead what was in 1980 called a “gay lifestyle”—frequently surrounded by groups of adoring young men, he also had a number of fulfilling, deeper relationships—he was neither a happier nor a more unified person as a result. He still relied heavily on those who had always been at the center of his life: his children, whom he had taken with him all over the world when he could, and his brother and sister. Yet his new way of life also had the effect of alienating those who cared about him most, not because of its homosexual aspect but because the atmosphere of unalloyed adulation he was surrounded by obscured the private man they loved. Without the rudder of his marriage he became more extreme and more insecure. Even an admirer such as composer Ned Rorem was taken aback by his friend’s self-absorption and need to be reassured and flattered during this time. In public, Bernstein’s physical demonstrativeness—which was not always entirely consensual—was sometimes too much of a good thing. As one old friend put it, “He had his tongue down everyone’s throat—men and women. He wanted to French kiss the world.” Copland, Blitzstein, and Laurents had cautioned him about the destructive and drug-like properties of fame. Writer and composer Paul Bowles, a friend since the 1930s, told a biographer that fame had made Leonard “smarmy and false.” Yet this was only one side of him. After they had visited together in Tangier, Morocco, in 1977, Bowles described him in a letter to a friend as “exactly the same as he had been” when they first met, and wonderful to be with: “we talked for three days. . . . I can’t see any difference except in appearance.”1 A literary friend of Felicia’s, who did not know Bernstein’s musical side (she describes herself as “unmusical”) and tended to see him when he was not at his best, remembers being startled by glimpsing the power of his mind when she sat next to him on a plane and watched him complete the formidable London Times crossword puzzle in a flash, “almost without thinking.”
Despite his complicated personal life, Bernstein continued to grow as a musician and was able to rise to extraordinary achievements in his final decade, both as composer and conductor. Nor did he ever lose his curiosity, generosity, superhuman energy, or capacity for joy. But from a personal point of view, it seems fair to say that his happiest years were behind him. His grief over Felicia stayed with him for the rest of his life.
In September 1979 he conducted and recorded the musicians of the Vienna Philharmonic in the string orchestra version of Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor, op. 131, which he had first heard forty years earlier at Mitropoulos’s American debut. Several orchestra members had written him that it was a foolhardy idea—that achieving unanimity of bowing, phrasings, and articulations in a work of such intricacy and virtuosity, intended for single players, was impracticable. But he was of the opposite opinion, that it was easier than playing the piece as a quartet, since a conductor with a single conception of it was there to shape it, and he had persisted—buying fifteen sets of quartet parts, plus extra ones for the basses, marking the bowings and the places to be played and not to be played. He was prouder of this recording than of any he had ever done, and he dedicated it—an unusual thing to do with a recording—to Felicia’s memory. In Vienna he not only performed Mahler, standing where the composer had once stood, but Haydn and Mozart, in the city where each composer had spent their last years. In conducting, he said, “one rides something like waves of love which are created by the composer whom we happen to be playing.” He still performed as a pianist, although now increasingly with what he called “popsicle fingers” (stiff from stage fright and insufficient practice).
In July 1980 he fulfilled a commission from the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. (Works are often composed specifically for recital competitions to test the ability of performers to quickly prepare and memorize music for which there is no performance tradition.) Bernstein composed a compact ten-minute work that explores an enormous range of moods, characters, and piano textures. He titled it Touches, dedicating it “To my first love, the keyboard.”
Bernstein’s memory of the arrival of his Aunt Clara’s piano fifty years before was, in fact, tactile: “I remember touching this thing the day it arrived, just stroking it and going mad.” Perhaps composing Touches gave him momentary refuge from the tormented state he was in that summer, reconnecting him with memories of childhood and with his undergraduate days, when, full of youthful ardor and still relatively anonymous, he had last written an extended work for solo piano. Like that 1938 Piano Sonata, Touches has a solitary, even bleak quality, suggesting in its fleeting chain of associations the nocturnal ruminations of an insomniac. It is a more modest offering than the youthful sonata, not a declaration of artistic ambitions but a tentative starting from tabula rasa. However, as he had so often before, Bernstein “started again” with a preexisting kernel of music, an intimate, spare, one-page meditation (“Virgo Blues”) he had written for his daughter Jamie’s twenty-sixth birthday on September 8, 1976. To this “chorale” he added eight variations and a climactically resonant restatement of the theme that subsided into a quiet ending. But only the second and ninth sections, which are nearly identical, qualify as variations in the traditional sense, in that they retrace, in quirky fits and starts, the exact pitches and phrasing of the theme. The other sections behave like the variations in The Age of Anxiety, each evolving from features in the preceding one. The “chorale” somehow evokes both a blues and the opening of Tristan und Isolde. Although there is no underlying tone row, the way the notes appear individually, one at a time, suggests one.2 The fifth variation resembles the music of Leon Kirchner and could almost be a part of that composer’s song cycle on Emily Dickinson’s poetry written at about the same time. (Both composers were fond of the eight-note octatonic scale.) The outburst of the climactic restatement of the theme at the end occurs at the second phrase of its return, not its first, giving the impression of a sudden welling up of feeling in midthought. Bernstein’s assistant Jack Gottlieb suggested that perhaps there might be one more variation before this one. While Bernstein appeared to agree, he never altered this rewarding little piece.
Amazingly, the spirit of entertainment still coursed through him, like a stream buried under ice. He had written an orchestral work in a pops vein in 1977, Slava!, dedicated to Mstislav Rostropovich and reusing the rousing numbers “Rehearse!” and “Grand Old Party” from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and he composed a second one in 1980, A Musical Toast, dedicated to conductor André Kostelanetz. But his full-length Divertimento for Orchestra for the Boston Symphony, completed in September 1980 for the orchestra’s centenary celebration, was a more substantial contribution to the long tradition of elegant suites written in a spirit of fun. The eight movements in assorted idioms are linked by the recurring use of the notes B–C, standing for “Boston Centennial,” and of the fanfare motive that opens the first, “Sennets and Tuckets.” The ensuing movements include a Schubertian Waltz for muted strings in 7/8; a mysterious slow Mazurka for double reeds and harp, which is interrupted by the oboe solo from the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; a rousingly balletic Samba; an amusing Turkey Trot in alternating 4/4 and 3/4; a short interlude, Sphinxes, in which two lugubrious twelve-tone rows resolve tonally; a fine twelve-tone Blues, orchestrated in the style of Miles Davis and Gil Evans’s Sketches of Spain album; and a finale that begins with a beautiful canonic threnody for three solo flutes (marked “In Memoriam”) and resolves into a raucous March (entitled “The BSO Forever”) in alternating meters of 2/4 and 5/8.
In October 1980 Bernstein received a letter from a twenty-seven-year-old writer and editor named Stephen Wadsworth, asking to do an interview with him for Saturday Review. It included a strategically placed mention of the possibility of “a game of anagrams” (something Bernstein might have found hard to resist) and ended with a postscript: “P.S. Interested in librettos?” Bernstein agreed to meet him, and even to being interviewed, on condition that Wadsworth bring along an outline for a sequel to Trouble in Tahiti.
Bernstein had dreamt of a follow-up to Trouble in Tahiti for many years, envisaging it as a serious opera in a completely different idiom, part freely atonal, part strictly twelve-tone, part diatonic, free of the stylization and satirical edge that had made Trouble in Tahiti’s characters somewhat two-dimensional. He was frankly tired of Broadway, of pleasing producers, of thinking in terms of “formulas” and of conventional rhyming, strophic “numbers written to boost the show at 10:30.” He imagined a story occurring thirty years after Trouble in Tahiti, which would include Dinah’s death and the family’s reunion at her funeral, and which would deal with family life in a manner that was “strong, sad, even depressing and deeply investigatory of interpersonal pain.”
Wadsworth, who had met Bernstein’s daughter Jamie at Harvard, turned out to be a handsome, literary young man who was then managing editor of Opera News. He too was grieving, having recently lost his sister Nina in a car accident. In his outline for a sequel to Trouble, he independently included a central scene that was a funeral. Almost immediately, the idea of an interview was forgotten in favor of discussing an actual collaboration.
In the spring of 1981, with the new opera in its early stages, Bernstein composed Halil (“Flute” in Hebrew). The fifteen-minute work, scored for solo flute, string orchestra, and percussion, was written in memory of a nineteen-year-old Israeli flutist, Yadin Tanenbaum, who had been killed in 1973 while serving as a soldier in the Sinai. Like many of Bernstein’s compositions from the Kaddish Symphony on, it combines music derived from a twelve-tone row with tonal music growing out of related interval patterns. The form is dreamlike and episodic, with a theatrical element created by music suggesting the soldier’s death. There is a distant dramatic link to the Berg Violin Concerto in its musical evocation of youthful vitality cut short—here suggested by the Gershwinesque dance music midway into the score—and the peaceful, tonal close. The composer conducted the premiere in Tel Aviv on May 27, 1981, in the presence of Tanenbaum’s parents, with Jean-Pierre Rampal as soloist.
But it was the opera A Quiet Place that would most powerfully bring to fruition the eclectic explorations of Bernstein’s later years. As he had when he composed Mass, the composer again found creative inspiration in working with a young man who had been introduced to him by a family member. Wadsworth was a writer and singer who had fallen in love with opera as a child and teenager growing up in the New York metropolitan area. Much like his mentor, he had an “erratic and grudging relationship with American theater music,” believing that too much on Broadway was unadventurous and inauthentic, and that most American operas were remote, neo-European constructs painted in pastels, not urgent musical and theatrical expressions of American issues and problems.3
The concept of using an existing opera as the basis for a new one was the culmination of Bernstein’s lifetime practice of carrying forward ideas from one work to another. It was the ultimate “chain reaction” variation. Since Bernstein was thirty years older than he had been when he composed Trouble in Tahiti, the work would necessarily be a reflection on his own aging. By turning to the one-act opera for his source material, he would be revisiting music he had been working on when he was first married to Felicia, on their honeymoon in Cuernavaca, and would be musically recalling their life together. The opera became a way of reviewing the two families in his life: the one he had been born into and the one he had created with Felicia.
The man Wadsworth met at first gave him pause. “He was a complicated guy at a complicated juncture of a complicated career, and still in mourning for Felicia,” he later said. But by himself, apart from admirers who expected him to behave like the public Bernstein, “he was a gem. Incredibly dear, respectful, kind beyond words, deeply funny, the best intellectual companion imaginable, interested in truth, and brilliant with words. It was exhausting just keeping up with his mind.” For obvious reasons both men were initially apprehensive about undertaking the huge project. At first they spent a great deal of their time together studying musical works, everything from jazz and popular song to Britten’s Owen Wingrave, which Bernstein was very taken with at the time, and to Leoš Janáček’s The Cunning Little Vixen and Berg’s Wozzeck. The challenge of setting vernacular American English was uppermost in their minds. In their first conversation, they had talked about Janáček and Bartók (whose centenary would be celebrated in 1981) and their shared “passion for the inflections of language as it was spoken rather than as it was idealized in song.” “We worked hard to avoid writing in schemes, to avoid the disease we coined ‘schematoma,’” Wadsworth later wrote. “Rhyme schemes, meter schemes, closed forms, ‘well-made play’ schemes were viewed suspiciously and only grudgingly allowed.”4
Wadsworth did some writing in December 1980 in New York, and the composer wrote some music by himself the following summer. Then they had a period of working side by side in a Massachusetts farmhouse, which was sufficiently productive for them to decide to look for a commission for the work. The moment of truth arrived when they were preparing for a workshop of the piece at Indiana University in Bloomington. First Bernstein fell ill and was bedridden for nine days. Then, with Wadsworth near at hand crafting the text and the vocal structure (and literally dragging him out of bed and pushing him to the piano at times), he drafted most of the first-act music in one extended work period. With Wadsworth taking an increasing role as a sounding board for the music, and Bernstein participating in every aspect of the libretto, they wrote much of the opera without yet knowing where it would end.
To the characters of Dinah, Sam, and Junior from Trouble in Tahiti, the collaborators added Junior’s sister, Dede, and her husband, François (who is also the former lover of Junior), along with several important subsidiary characters, including the Funeral Director, the Analyst, and Doc and Mrs. Doc. Bernstein had in mind a “troubled Junior,” with a “possible boyfriend,” but Wadsworth made him psychotic and gave him incest fantasies about his sister. Wadsworth created Mrs. Doc out of vivid memories of dyspeptic, alcoholic women he had known as a child. (He didn’t know Lillian Hellman, whom some writers later speculated was the model for the character.)5
The original production, which was given its premiere by the Houston Grand Opera in June 1983, followed through on the original premise: Trouble in Tahiti was presented first. After an intermission, A Quiet Place moved the action forward thirty years. The second opera, in four scenes lasting roughly two hours, covered a twenty-four-hour period (as Tahiti had) from the afternoon funeral to the fragile family peace achieved in the garden the following afternoon. Several reviewers described the plot as a gloomy soap opera about uninteresting characters, with an emphasis on incest and homosexuality. Donal Henahan in the New York Times wrote, “To call the result a pretentious failure is putting it kindly.” Only Leighton Kerner of the Village Voice and Andrew Porter of the New Yorker responded enthusiastically. Porter in particular valued the score’s remarkable setting of American English. “The melodic lines are as sharp-eared as Janáček’s in their transformation of speech rhythms and speech inflections,” he wrote.
Before the two scheduled subsequent productions at Milan’s La Scala in June 1984 and at the Kennedy Center in Washington in July, the authors, along with conductor John Mauceri, revised and trimmed the work to give the evening a more satisfying structure and to more convincingly link the two operas. The solution, suggested by Mauceri, was to embed the entirety of Trouble in Tahiti into the second act of A Quiet Place as a flashback (divided into two parts), triggered by Sam’s reading of his dead wife’s journals from early in their marriage. The new version was better received, although there remained many, including the New York Times’s Bernard Holland, who simply didn’t care for the music or its text at all. For the Bernstein family members who attended the premiere, the opera stirred too many unsettling memories of the sorrow they had gone through at the time of Felicia’s death, and of their father’s pain, to be easily enjoyed.
The three acts of the revised version have three distinct profiles. The entire first act takes place in the funeral home after Dinah’s death and is the single longest continuous stretch of music Bernstein ever wrote, not counting the Dybbuk score. Here friends and acquaintances mingle around Dinah’s coffin, while Sam remains mute and immobile at the side of the stage until he finally explodes in rage in a confrontation with his children at the end of the act. The libretto in this extended scene, Joycean in its layered overlapping dialogue, is also reminiscent of a Robert Altman film. Exceptionally beautiful hymnlike chorales sung by the chorus give the act a religious aura. Otherwise the subsidiary characters often sing twelve-tone music, creating a dark, disturbing backdrop, against which the more tonal “arias” sung by Dede, François, Junior, and finally Sam are vividly differentiated, encouraging emotional identification.
The first-act orchestral prologue evokes the car accident in which Dinah was killed, using as a source a principal motive from Trouble in Tahiti that stood for the couple’s anguished attempts at connection, and the notes of which formed that work’s final chord. A Quiet Place begins with this same chord. The prologue suggests, at least subliminally, that Dinah’s accident was in some sense deliberate, the ultimate outcome of her marital unhappiness.
The twelve-tone music in the funeral home seems to represent the mystery and violence of her death and is also used when conversation is forced, ironic, or ritualized. There are passages, such as the dialogue between the Funeral Director and Dinah’s brother, Bill, that are strictly twelve-tone. At other times, versions of the row are used almost like a leitmotif or cantus firmus, in conjunction with ideas not derived from them. Both the chorales and the music of Sam incorporate parts of the row. Throughout the act, which is among the most musically striking in American opera, death itself seems ever-present in the gigantic twelve-note chords that punctuate the proceedings, the hushed, chromatic chorales intermittently sung by the chorus, and the tolling, repeated-note motive that, first heard near the opening as the car crash in which Dinah is killed is evoked in the orchestra, subsequently returns periodically, sounding like the beep of a heart monitor in an intensive care unit.
The second act, which takes place in the family home that night, also carries poignant autobiographical overtones, as Sam and Dede go through Dinah’s things while, simultaneously in another room, François tries to console Junior. As Sam reads from Dinah’s diary, Trouble in Tahiti emerges from his present reveries as a flashback.6 Multiple cross-references to both Trouble in Tahiti and to the row forms and new materials of A Quiet Place proliferate in this scene, making it like a development section. Here the family members connect to each other musically, if not humanly.
The third act is set outside the house the next morning. Amid family games and childish taunts, tensions erupt again, but a reading of a letter from Dinah results in Sam’s finally reaching out to his son, and the work concludes on a note of fragile peace. Dede’s third-act aria, perhaps the most excerptable vocal music in the opera, subtly builds on motives from Dinah’s “There Is a Garden” aria in Trouble in Tahiti and also incorporates a slowed-down version of the song “This Time” from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (There is also a hint of “Maria” near the beginning.) It is Dinah’s own voice, heard near the very end of the third act, that leads to the concluding gesture toward healing between father and son. Surely this moment must have had an aching significance for the composer.
In A Quiet Place, the principal characters are all haunted by their memories of Dinah, and their music is haunted by her music in Trouble in Tahiti. Dede’s opening waltz (marked Valse manique in the score) carries her mother’s musical DNA melodically and harmonically, as well as in its 3/4 time signature.7 Junior’s instability is first rendered in music of vacillating eighth-note patterns. His memorable and quintessentially Bernsteinian blues melody, subjected to many variants over the course of the work, was originally intended for Fischer-Dieskau to sing as Humbert Humbert in the abandoned opera based on Nabokov’s Lolita, but it also has audible roots in Dinah’s garden aria.8 Sam’s long tirade, first directed at Junior and eventually ranging over his whole life, uses aggressively shifting accents that recall the rhythms of the ambitious young Sam from the earlier opera. When he breaks down in tears of recrimination, grief, and guilt, he is answered in a trio of internalized reminiscences, “Dear Daddy,” which is sung by the younger protagonists over an accompaniment derived from the street scene in Trouble in Tahiti.9 Junior’s mocking striptease in front of his mother’s coffin near the end of the act is sung to his Lolita tune in pure show-business G major. The orchestral postlude that brings the act to a close sounds a third version of the melody: first quiet, exquisitely harmonized in muted strings, and then reaching a powerful orchestral climax reminiscent of Berg. Bernstein infuses Wadsworth’s Junior with his own swagger, and both the striptease and its brief big-band orchestral answer provide the work with a surprising jolt of musical joy. It is hard not to read these jazzy outbursts against Sam as the composer’s irreverent nose thumbing at the father figures in his life who had disapproved of his popular vein.
Despite the deep links between the music in the new work and the older one, it is perhaps not entirely believable that the stylized period piece Trouble in Tahiti represents the actual past behind such a searingly realistic present.10 But like Baba the Turk or the bread machine in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress, this theatrical difficulty can be overcome by imaginative direction. Many operas are flawed. The mastery, vitality, and beauty of this one puts it in a very rare category.
In May 1983 an article by musicologist and conductor Leon Botstein appeared in Harper’s Magazine that may well have been the single most devastating critique to date of Bernstein’s career. While Tom Wolfe had ridiculed Bernstein’s political positions, and Harold Schonberg and others had often derided his conducting; while his compositions had sometimes had a mixed reception, and his Norton Lectures had been disparaged by some, the Botstein article was the first to portray the entire course of his professional life as a “tragedy” and cautionary tale. The article was all the more effective because it came from a scholar who could cite chapter and verse in making his case that “the most gifted musician of twentieth-century America,” as he described Bernstein, had failed to develop a personal voice in his compositions and had vitiated his teaching and performing gifts in a “celebration of personality, fame, and publicity, at the expense of art.” If Botstein’s article had only been unremittingly negative, it would have carried less weight than it did. But by first acknowledging Bernstein’s accomplishment as the composer of Candide, his gifts as a pianist, his occasional successes as a conductor, and his impressive achievements in the Young People’s Concerts, Botstein established a credible basis for then attacking what he called the “overwrought efforts at self-proclaimed profundity” of the Norton Lectures and the “pedestrian,” “disappointing” level of most of Bernstein’s performances as a conductor, whose dullness stemmed sometimes from a lack of discipline and “the overeagerness to display feeling,” and at other times from simply being “unexceptional in tempo, phrasing and balance” and therefore lacking a distinguishing point of view. Perhaps most woundingly of all, Botstein was disparaging about the derivative, middlebrow nature of most of Bernstein’s compositions. Of Bernstein’s Broadway work he opined that “theatricality . . . is both the source of his wide popularity and the root of his triviality. . . . Like Kurt Weill, but with less originality, Bernstein studied the techniques of ‘serious’ composers and adapted them for the popular stage.” He was no fan of West Side Story, describing it as “a danceable, decorative, frenetic journey—with maudlin pauses—through a condescending urban version of Romeo and Juliet.” And in detailing the limitations of such later Bernstein works as the Kaddish Symphony, Mass, and Halil, Botstein, perhaps unconsciously echoing Copland’s censure of twenty-five years earlier, stated that “All you hear is the overworked emulation of how a musical idea might be pursued and developed if it existed.” Then he added, even more damagingly, that “Bernstein’s inner necessity is not really musical. Rather it is to register, grandly, how he feels about serious life-and-death matters.” The article ended by pointing out that conductors live a long time, urging the sixty-five-year-old musician to “seize the opportunity to change.” “He should discipline himself,” Botstein wrote, “stop being a corporation and become an artist again.”11
The article articulated what was in fact a common view among intellectuals, fellow composers, and musical academics of the time, or at least what they often said publicly. Bernstein seemed to some to have become emblematic of the commoditization of serious music and, as a conductor, of the celebration of the performer over the composer. It was hard to keep up with him; he appeared to be scattered compositionally, almost desperate. Other composers must have envied the facts that his musical theater works were known and loved throughout the world, and that every one of his concert works had been performed instantly upon completion and was available on recordings. (By contrast, to take two examples, neither Roger Sessions’s ambitious opera Montezuma nor Leon Kirchner’s Lily, based on Saul Bellow’s Henderson the Rain King, has been recorded to this day.) Surely many in the shadows resented his seemingly unapologetic position in the limelight, even when he used it to promote their music.
Many saw him as a “popular” composer who was trying to prove that he was “serious.” But the opposite was true. He wrote his first musical only after consolidating his own serious idiom with three fine sonatas, his first symphony, and the ballet Fancy Free. Another myth was that he couldn’t orchestrate. Yet the time constraints of putting together a Broadway show are such that orchestration is almost always delegated. Because of his hectic schedule (the result, of course, of his own decisions), he also availed himself of orchestration help when he was writing Mass, A Quiet Place, and also parts of Jubilee Games. But as Fancy Free, his three symphonies, Serenade, Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, Songfest, Dybbuk, and many other works demonstrate, Bernstein was a superb orchestrator. The one skill in this regard he may have lacked was that of creating the lush big-band sound of Broadway—a specialty of Sid Ramin (a lifelong Count Basie fan) and Irwin Kostal, orchestrators of West Side Story and other works.
Comments coming from Copland and Virgil Thomson, the former referring to “conductor’s music” and the latter to criticisms about Bernstein’s technical inadequacy, also affected the way his concert music was viewed. For whatever reason, Copland, who was usually so astute, didn’t hit the mark in his early comments about his friend and ally. Bernstein’s music is theatrical but it is not merely a music of effects; its sounds and gestures are achieved through the careful accretion of its smallest elements. Like all good music, it is just as interesting, sometimes even more so, when it is played at the piano, apart from its orchestration.
But while no one would describe Bernstein as excessively modest, one could be justified in calling him uneasy, even awkward, in his relationship to his own concert music. When he turned from the security of conducting the greatest of all musical works to the loneliness of composing, Bernstein suffered the same terror all composers do. When he resurfaced, he did not comfortably reconcile his inner world with his outer one. His titles, public comments, and program notes all betray insecurity. His description of The Age of Anxiety was distractingly grandiose; his accounts of Chichester Psalms and Trouble in Tahiti too glib; in the Kaddish Symphony, he undercut his powerful music with an overwrought spoken text. This most confessional, sociable, and seemingly shameless of beings was, I believe, unsure how much value to place on his music and remained vulnerable and insecure about it, even while circling the globe and basking in seemingly universal acclaim. In addition, when he tried to explain himself as a “dual personality,” as he frequently did, it somehow rang false. Yet the self-description was undeniably accurate.
The gulf between his versatility as a composer and the expectations of even those who admired him was particularly large because, at least in the United States, no one audience exists that could encompass the catholicity of his musical interests. The Broadway audience did not know or care for the music that inspired or gave a context to his less accessible works, and the academics, who were often snobs about his show music, stopped paying attention to his concert music. Fortunately, he never had to read director Jonathan Miller’s description of him as “a wonderful show-biz composer whose talent rather inconveniently overflowed into other areas.” Yet the “Broadway” Bernstein and the “concert” Bernstein were the same man, exploring different sides of life in different musical contexts. None of the shows are without music adapted from earlier classical projects, and few of the major concert pieces lack material derived from the musicals.12
Bernstein the man was hip and bold, but his music was steeped in tradition and often reflected the innovations of composers from a generation before him. Even the jazz that most marked his own “jazzy” music was not new, and his twelve-tone and “avant-garde” explorations postdated those of his peers by twenty years. But, as twentieth-century composers as diverse as Sergei Rachmaninov, Jean Sibelius, Frank Martin, Maurice Duruflé, Henri Dutilleux, Francis Poulenc, Grażyna Bacewicz, Samuel Barber, John Harbison, and many others have reminded us, originality is not the same thing as history-making innovation. Bernstein’s life was original, and the way he put together the elements of his musical language was as well. His music is melodically, harmonically, and rhythmically distinctive. Heard apart from the publicity surrounding the man and his public life, it is personal, moving, ingeniously constructed, musically substantial, and fresh. It has remained captivating long after the music of many composers he championed, and many once deemed “significant,” has begun to sound historical. Even a work such as Fancy Free, in which the influence of Copland and Gershwin is palpable, and which was comparatively old-fashioned when composed, still retains the imprint of its composer’s personality and the musical vitality it had seventy years ago. Perhaps each aspect of Bernstein’s kaleidoscopic musical life would have been easier to understand by itself than it was alongside everything else. Had composing been his only art, had he labored in obscurity as a professor in some small New England college, say, or been an unglamorous, timid, and laconic solitary, his compositions’ many virtues and their unprecedented range might be more readily acknowledged.
One member of the musical intelligentsia able to take the long view on Bernstein’s career was Elliott Carter. Carter nominated his friend for membership into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1981 (Carter himself having been elected in 1956) and wrote the following words: “Leonard Bernstein is America’s most renowned musician because he has gained a universal reputation as a conductor of classical music, as pedagogue, and as a composer of outstanding scores of concert music and of music for the theatre. His concern with broad communication has led him to write very telling, highly imaginative works for Broadway that have freshness and newness and yet wide appeal. His concert works of wide variety have captured musical audiences everywhere.”13