IN THE FALL of 1986 Bernstein toured two continents with the Israel Philharmonic in celebration of their fiftieth anniversary, bringing along a new two-movement work entitled Jubilee Games. The first movement applied many techniques he had first explored as a conductor in the early 1960s, when he conducted such works as Earle Brown’s Available Forms II and Lukas Foss’s Time Cycle and led the New York Philharmonic in controlled group improvisations. The seven-and-a-half-minute structure is a kind of rondo in which the recurrent theme is a rhythmic percussion refrain, accompanied by shouts and whispers of the Hebrew words for seven (sheva) and the jubilee number, fifty (hamishem), which Judaic tradition views as attained after seven cycles of seven. Interspersed with these recurrences are brass fanfares suggestive of shofar calls; improvisational passages assigned to different orchestral choirs; and a slow, dissonant chorale played first by brass alone (where it sounds like Carl Ruggles’s Angels), then by brass with the percussive refrain, and finally by the entire orchestra (at which point it sounds like a mammoth orchestral hymn by Messiaen). The second movement, Diaspora Dances, has the musicians whispering hai (alive) and hayim (life) to buoyant dance music in eighteen beats, made up of groups of nine (2 + 3 + 2 + 2). (The numerical equivalent of the Hebrew hai is eighteen.) A figure reminiscent of the whistle call of the Jets occasionally breaks through the texture. The middle section is a gentler, Hasidic dance in the vein of Dybbuk. When the opening eighteens return, they are given a jazzy new twist, and sent into further contrapuntal adventures.
In December, for the reopening of Carnegie Hall, Bernstein composed a six-and-a-half-minute hymn for baritone and orchestra, using a prayer in Hebrew from the Book of Numbers (“May the Lord Bless You and Keep You”). The hymn opens with brass music anticipating the prayer’s melody. What follows is closely modeled after a lyrical Anniversary written a month earlier for the composer’s friend Aaron Stern. The first half of this Anniversary is played by oboe, accompanied by other winds. Then the trumpet intones a bit of the prayer again, after which the music of the Anniversary resumes in the strings. Finally the baritone voice enters for the last minute and a half, intoning the peaceful message. The trumpet is heard again at the final cadence, which mixes major and minor in a telling way.
After the first performances of Jubilee Games, Bernstein added the Carnegie Hall hymn to the work as a slow movement. Not until he had added a further movement in 1989 did he consider the work complete, at which point he retitled it Concerto for Orchestra (“Jubilee Games”).
In May 1987 Joan Peyser’s biography of Bernstein became a best seller. While it made valuable points about the music world and showed insight into Bernstein’s musicianship and his work as a composer, the book seemed to interpret his every personal gesture and undertaking in the most venal way possible, portraying him as a man of personal excesses, hypocrisy, and monstrous egotism. It also managed to be unkind to Felicia. Bernstein’s children made him promise not to read it, and it is possible he never did. Perhaps in reference to the Peyser volume, his friend Lukas Foss, who had known him for fifty years, commented, “People who have many contradictions are much harder to understand. In Lenny’s case, the books written about him do a lot to make him less understood than before.”1
In August Bernstein was conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in Salzburg, where he celebrated his sixty-ninth birthday. On his evenings off he went with Betty Comden to see James Levine conduct Mozart’s The Abduction from the Seraglio and Strauss’s Capriccio. Most memorably of all, Comden sat with Bernstein at a performance of Schoenberg’s towering Moses und Aron:
Lenny told me he had heard it only once before and was not sure how he felt about it, that it might be rough going, and we might want to wander out at some point. We sat there totally mesmerized and deeply moved. The prologue was a brief reenactment of Kristallnacht with Jews hunted and cemeteries and synagogues defiled and destroyed. Onstage through the whole opera there was a menorah, overturned and broken, lying on its side. During the Golden Calf scene, they ingeniously used the arms of the candelabra to construct the golden horn of the idol. At the end Lenny turned to me and, visibly shaken, said that that was the opera he wished he had written.2
But while Moses und Aron is built entirely from one twelve-tone row, in his own music Bernstein continued to explore an idiom that straddled the line between the tonal and the nontonal, and in which twelve-tone rows rub shoulders with passages firmly in a key. His rows characteristically comprised primarily half steps and major and minor thirds, which make them singable and chromatic rather than angular. In his 1988 Arias and Barcarolles, a cycle of eight songs originally for four singers and piano four-hands (later reduced to two singers, mezzo-soprano and baritone, and piano four-hands), he explores twelve-tone writing in three of the pieces. For a person as brash and public as Bernstein, the work might at first seem a surprising summation. It is pervaded by a sense of nostalgia and remembrance, and its texts, like the libretto of A Quiet Place, are focused on family relationships. Unlike Songfest, the cycle is deeply unified not only in terms of its musical materials but also in its subtle, haunted tone and in the familial connections embodied in its texts and encoded dedications. Later orchestrated twice, first by Bright Sheng, and then by Bruce Coughlin, the cycle loses some of its poignancy on a bigger scale. The sound of the work in its original form conveys the voice of the private man. The piano writing has the quiet clarity of the Anniversaries, while inevitably stirring wistful memories of Bernstein’s piano partners in youth: Mildred Spiegel, Harold Shapero, Annette Elkanova, and others. Accompanied by piano alone, the singers can remain intimate.
The cycle’s fifth song, “Greeting,” dedicated to “J. G.” (presumably his assistant, Jack Gottlieb), has a tender, paternal simplicity. The narrow range and purity of its vocal line and accompaniment recall Bartók’s folk song settings for children, or Ives at his most consoling. The world of Trouble in Tahiti is not far away from the two “couple” duets, the first of which could be heard as a dialogue either about a marriage or about the music being sung (“Funny the way it goes . . .”), as it wanders from key to key. The duet “Mr. and Mrs. Webb Say Goodnight,” the penultimate number in the cycle, is a kind of scena depicting a couple trying to go to sleep and drifting in and out of memories as their children make a racket in the background. The chatty, witty lyrics suggest a seven-minute cabaret scene in nine sections. Here the composer expresses his lifelong “fascination with matrimony,” to use Harold Shapero’s phrase, and, behind a protective shield, his own memories of marriage and being the parent of small children. “Little Smary” sets to music a bedtime story his mother used to tell him when he was small (she is credited with the text), in a piece that comes close to a twelve-tone idiom and includes some satirical piano writing in the style of early Berg. Bernstein evokes the world of his father’s Hasidic dancing in “Oif Mayn Khas’neh” (“At My Wedding”). The final number, “Nachspiel,” represents an additional, unacknowledged tribute to his mother and to the piano. For this piece he adapted a song called “First Love” he had composed for her in March 1986 for her eighty-eighth birthday, removing lyrics that had related her to the eighty-eight keys of the piano and replacing them with wordless humming from the singers.
Bernstein’s life after he left the Philharmonic had afforded him more time to compose, and there is a catalogue of late compositions to prove it. Equally important, it gave him the freedom to continue to grow as a conductor with a variety of great orchestras and to revisit much of the repertoire he had previously performed and recorded, music he never tired of re-studying and never lost the ability to see freshly. A look at what he rerecorded during the 1980s reveals the repertoire he cared most about, as well as how he viewed the strengths of various orchestras. It is clear that his relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic deeply inspired him, and, in the opinion of many critics, his recordings with them contained some his greatest achievements. Bernstein was naturally increasingly conscious of his mortality throughout the 1980s, and his performances and recordings were his attempts to put down once and for all how he viewed various key works.
Among the particular triumphs of these years were his second complete Mahler symphony cycle, divided between four orchestras (the Vienna Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, and New York Philharmonic); the Mozart Requiem with the Bavarian Radio Symphony; various Mozart symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic; the complete Beethoven symphonies and the Missa solemnis with the Vienna Philharmonic (of which the Seventh and Ninth are often singled out for special praise); the complete Brahms symphonies and Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with Vienna; the Sibelius Symphonies Nos. 1, 2, 5, and 7, and superb recordings of the Schumann symphonies, also with Vienna; and the Tchaikovsky Symphonies Nos. 4, 5, and 6 and Romeo and Juliet with the New York Philharmonic. He revisited some, but not all, of the American music of his early conducting career, mainly with the New York Philharmonic, most notably the Second Symphony and small orchestral works of Ives; Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue; the Harris Third Symphony; many of Copland’s large-scale works, including Connotations and the Third Symphony; and William Schuman’s Third Symphony. These remain incomparable performances of American music. Of current music he conducted Ned Rorem’s Violin Concerto and David Del Tredici’s Tattoo. But of the music he had once termed “avant-garde” there was virtually nothing. One is entitled to regret that he did not conduct Berg’s Lulu or more Webern and Schoenberg; Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress or Threni (a late work Bernstein particularly admired, which set the Hebrew letters at the beginning of every stanza for four-part choir); more current music by contemporaries Kirchner, Messiaen, Ligeti, Takemitsu, Schnittke, or Kagel.
As Bernstein approached his seventieth birthday, he became ever more focused on young people and on teaching, and he was constantly working with young orchestras, composers, musicians, and conductors. Having founded the Schleswig-Holstein Orchestral Academy in 1987, he looked forward to joining Michael Tilson Thomas in Japan in 1990 for the inaugural season at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo (modeled on Tanglewood), which they were creating together. He planned on conducting both the London Symphony and the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra there. He hoped for time to compose one last major work but no longer seemed to speak of abandoning his other activities to do so. He also knew that he couldn’t wrap up his accomplishments in a tidy package the way someone who had stayed at home composing for decades might have been able to. In 1988, he told a newspaper reporter, “I can’t assess myself or decide whether I have achieved everything, or a portion, or a fraction. I feel as though I have led many, many lifetimes . . . and achieved more than I had any right to expect. . . . Certain risks have to fail. What’s amazing is that so many have worked. . . . I don’t know anybody who has been as lucky as I have.”3 Those around him worried about his health. “Always asthmatic and prone to emphysema, he remains a heavy smoker,” wrote John Rockwell in 1988. “At times he is afflicted with a hacking cough that makes his friends wince.” The truth was that the aerobic exercise of conducting usually alleviated the asthma and bronchitis that afflicted him when he was composing.
At Tanglewood his seventieth birthday was celebrated on an unprecedented scale. Sandwiched in between performances by two dozen musical luminaries from all over the world, a “musical bouquet” of eight variations on “New York, New York” composed by Berio, Kirchner, Jacob Druckman, Foss, John Corigliano, John Williams, Takemitsu, and William Schuman was offered. Kirchner’s variation began with references to both Schoenberg and Stravinsky. After a dazzling quotation from the finale of Stravinsky’s 1945 Symphony in Three Movements, a passage with upward whoops in the French horns and brilliant orchestral flurries, the instrumental canon from “New York, New York” was heard in the highest winds at twice its original speed, at which tempo it evoked the opening of Petrushka, suggesting Bernstein’s provenance (Stravinsky via Copland) even more than the man himself. The fanfare-like rising “New York, New York” fourths in the horns that followed this passed by almost subliminally. How this was intended is anybody’s guess, but Kirchner had a complicated sense of humor and probably regarded Bernstein’s life with his characteristically complex emotions, as well as with admiration. After the concert Bernstein joked with Kirchner: “I know you; you’re going to take the first two minutes and you are going to use it to write your own piece.”4 Kirchner later did just that, using the orchestral fragment as the opening of his Music for Orchestra II (dedicated “to Leonard Bernstein and to Igor and Arnold”), in which he achieved a visceral, sensual, colorful idiom that was unusually brash for him. Indeed, one could almost say that he met Bernstein in the middle of the same road, arriving there from the opposite direction, that of Schoenberg and Berg.5
The four-day birthday celebrations moved and exhausted Bernstein and also left him, as often in those years, wondering how he would be remembered. Perhaps this degree of acclaim surpassed what would have been reassuring.
Bernstein continued to use the visibility of his position to fight for political causes he believed in. The presidential campaign between George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis in the summer of 1988 was a dispiriting one for progressives. Bush had draped his party and his campaign in pro-American symbolism, making a fetish of the flag, the Pledge of Allegiance, and prayer in school, and intimidating his Democratic rival with an advertising campaign that portrayed him as weak on crime and in foreign policy. As Democratic candidates had frequently done, Dukakis backed away from articulating his more complex views on the campaign trail and didn’t dare use the word “liberal,” which Bush’s rhetoric had somehow given an anti-American connotation. A week before the election, Bernstein published an op-ed commentary in the New York Times titled “I’m a Liberal and Proud of It,” in which he described dreaming of a Dukakis who would stand up for the noble tradition of American liberalism:
I want to redefine that word liberal, not run from it, nor cower defensively at its insulting abuse, but proudly to clarify it. The word derives from the Latin “liber,” meaning free. . . .
Who fought to free the slaves? Liberals. Who succeeded in abolishing the poll tax? Liberals. Who fought for women’s rights, civil rights, free public education? Liberals. Who stood guard and still stands guard against sweatshops, child labor, racism, bigotry? Lovers of freedom and enemies of tyranny: Liberals.6
In April 1989 Bernstein was again in Israel and presented Jubilee Games in its final form, adding a fourth movement, a theme and variations (based on a duet originally written for recorder and cello), to what by then had already become a three-movement piece. The new structure begins with the raucous and exciting improvisational first movement (Free-Style Events), followed with the theme and variations, then Diaspora Dances, and concludes with the final prayer (Benediction). While the first movement emphasizes wildness and massed choirs, the second movement is a study in refined chamber music played by pairs of soloists: after the theme in the strings, the pairs are flute and French horn; trumpet and double bass; clarinet and trombone; tom-toms and mallet instruments; two violins; flute/piccolo and bass clarinet; and oboe and bassoon. These are followed by a coda of an almost Webernian spareness.
A spirit of acceptance hovers over Jubilee Games, now better known as the Concerto for Orchestra. One might almost call it the spirit of Nadia Boulanger, who believed that in many cases composers would do better to concentrate on celebrating music and their musicality, rather than to seek “greatness.” To emphasize this point, she would often quote words from Ecclesiastes: “Eat your bread and be satisfied.” With the Benediction now at the end of the work, in the same position as the Hebrew prayer that closed Jeremiah forty-five years earlier, the opening trumpet melody sounds like an echo of the shofar calls in the first movement, and the open-string entrance of the strings harks back to their improvisatory tuning up. The piece is another work in which atonality and tonality coexist peacefully. Indeed, its use of dissonance is celebratory. It introduces a more personal note in the concluding prayer, but it also conveys a beneficent communal message.
In November 1989 Bernstein was expected at the White House to receive the National Medal of Arts, along with eleven other honorees, but within days of the occasion he withdrew himself from the proceedings in protest. His complaint was against the current climate of artistic intimidation spearheaded by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, which had caused the National Endowment for the Arts to rescind a grant for an exhibition in New York of provocative works dealing with the AIDS epidemic. Bernstein wrote a letter to President Bush saying that he could not risk being seen as an “official artist content to collect a medal in kind and gentle silence” in such an environment.
With Tom Cothran and many other friends now dead from AIDS, the health crisis was near the top of the list of causes Bernstein publicly fought for. Sometimes his outspokenness struck observers as attention-grabbing, but from his point of view he was simply taking seriously his responsibilities as a citizen and public figure. He was not a political scientist, and his political views might not add up to a systematic ideology, but they were of a piece with his view of music as a social art, expressive of our shared humanity, and as such a force for peaceful coexistence, tolerance, and, by implication, for social progress. He had learned about Zionism and community and civic responsibility at the Mishkan Tefila Temple in Roxbury. When he was a student at Harvard, his social and political awareness had been expanded by contact with Copland, Blitzstein, David Prall, Archibald MacLeish, and many others, and he had offered his support to left-wing causes and produced an early performance of the pro-union The Cradle Will Rock. He believed in worker’s rights, civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights. He revered the Declaration of Independence and the idealism behind the American Constitution, and wanted to hold those in power accountable for the eventual realization of the equitable, race-blind society these documents promised. He was a skeptic about the uses and abuses of American power, including the use of government agencies to squelch domestic dissent, and scornful of the values exemplified by American consumerism. His ideal of government had been formed in the Roosevelt era, exemplified by the New Deal. He had been essentially a socialist in his youth, a left-leaning “progressive” at a time when liberals opposed progressives, and then a liberal when the term had come to describe progressives. He believed in a people’s right to self-determination. He advocated nuclear disarmament. He believed in mediation, coexistence, and brotherhood. His belief in the resolution of conflict by peaceful means might seem to be contradicted by his staunch support of Israel, but this support was rooted in Israel’s fragile beginnings, when its very existence was at stake. He had supported the Middle East peace process pursued by President Jimmy Carter.
When the Berlin Wall began to come down on November 9, 1989, Bernstein seized on the opportunity to celebrate the ideals of peace and free speech on an international scale. He assembled German musicians from both East and West, and from the United States, Britain, and France, for a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Audacious as always, he changed a crucial word in Schiller’s text: “Freude” (joy) became “Freiheit” (freedom). The first performance took place on December 23 at the Philharmonie Hall in West Berlin, and the second took place on Christmas Day at the Schauspielhaus in East Berlin. That day bells tolled throughout the city. The performance combined his humanistic message and sense of music’s purpose with the music of the composer he loved the most. Jon Deak, who experienced the Beethoven from his position in the bass section of the orchestra, said it was something one would remember for a lifetime: “There was so much joy, and suffering, and forgiveness in the same performance.”7
The December trip to Berlin was the culmination of many grueling months of activity, even by Bernstein’s usual standards. In September he had been in Warsaw on the fiftieth anniversary of Hitler’s invasion, conducting the Leonore Overture No. 3 and Chichester Psalms. Then came Vienna and several important Beethoven performances, including another string quartet (No. 16 in F Major, op. 135) arranged for string orchestra. Then it was back to New York to lead an all-Copland program at the Philharmonic, which ranged from his favorite “roller coaster,” El salón México, to the eloquently prophetic twelve-tone Connotations. Now in his late eighties, Copland was too unwell in body and mind to be present. In Newsday Tim Page remarked that future generations would think of such a program in legendary terms. Then there was the London Symphony Orchestra performance of the final and most complete version of Candide, when the conductor and stellar cast were dogged by the influenza that was sweeping through the city at the time. In the recording one hears a durable, expert work of American music performed as it should be, by a great orchestra, chorus, and soloists. In the video of the concert performance one sees a haggard, white-haired maestro, clearly drained and in pain, conducting with extraordinary discipline and control.
In late February he completed another series of videos and recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic of Sibelius’s First, Second, Fifth, and Seventh Symphonies. Although he had recorded his first complete cycle of the symphonies in the 1960s, his belief in the composer (which had been shared initially among conductors primarily only by Herbert von Karajan and Sir John Barbirolli) had only deepened over time. By 1990 the Finnish composer, who had once seemed so connected to the nineteenth century, seemed prescient to younger composers such as John Adams, who viewed his organically expansive, visionary structures and unusual rhythms as a formative influence. In these videos, Bernstein the glamorous icon has disappeared. We see an elderly musician, visibly exhausted by the time of the final video (Sibelius’s First Symphony), making transcendent music with a great orchestra against the inexorable forward motion of his own declining health.
On February 27 Helen Coates died. She had stood by her unruly piano student for fifty years. Her archive of Bernstein letters and 130 scrapbooks, spanning fifty-five years (1933–87), have now become central sources of information about his life and career.
Even though he was declining, Bernstein still had more fire than most people have in their prime. In 1989 he was rehearsing the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony, a work he had conducted countless times, with the New York Philharmonic, an orchestra that had played it so often that “it was like a weed-encrusted parking lot,” in the words of bassist Jon Deak. “He came in with the last movement, no less, which is in a way the most clichéd movement in the piece, like he was just coming from a revival meeting, and he said, ‘I just stayed up all night and rethought the whole fourth movement. From beginning to end we’re going to do everything differently, you’ll see, you’ll get it’—he could hardly contain himself. He had one year to live. He had done it how many times, and we had, too, but . . . by God, after the rehearsal, that movement had suddenly been invested with such freshness—I couldn’t believe it.”
“Bernstein always had a need to have somebody to communicate with,” Deak continued. “During a rehearsal, it was the musicians. Here he’s exhorting the cello section to play this passage with passion, and he needs to reach them, to turn them on, right down to the last player on the last stand. Then, of course, at the concert, he is doing the same thing with the audience. If they are not responding, numerous times he would turn around, and he would say, ‘You didn’t get that at all. You didn’t cry. This is one of the deepest expressions of the human spirit. I want you to feel this,’ and he would play the movement again, and, boy, they would sit up and listen.
“He was not ever content talking into a vacuum. Some people speak and speak, and the person they are speaking to is not that important. But even at a cocktail party, he would always make sure that the person was responding, and he didn’t let anyone interrupt their exchange. He needed to see a result, that he was getting to somebody, that he was reaching somebody.
“When we were flying over the Atlantic to Berlin for that famous concert we played on both sides of the Wall in 1989, I ran up to his seat and I said, ‘Lenny, look, it’s Greenland! We’re flying over Greenland.’ And he looked down, and he said ‘Yeah? So?’ I said, ‘One of the ambitions of my life is to walk across Greenland, across the ice cap’ (which, of course is melting now, but wasn’t then). He looked out and said, ‘You want to walk across that? Why?’ I said, ‘Because it’s there to be discovered. I want to discover this new territory.’ And he said, ‘But there’s nobody to talk to down there.’”8
My friend Hank Chapin, who narrated Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in the Young People’s Concert of March 19, 1961, when he was twelve years old, particularly remembered the feeling of connection Bernstein established with him in the context of the performance. After the conductor had suggested that it would be wonderful to have a child do the narration, Hank was chosen because he could read music—he played the cello—and had natural poise and a nice, clear speaking voice. He remembers being picked up by his father from school a few days before the concert and being taken to Carnegie Hall just as the morning rehearsal was ending, and then going up the back stairs to the dressing room overlooking Fifty-Seventh Street. There, during the musicians’ lunch break, he and his father sat with Bernstein, the producer, and a secretary, going over the text in the Britten score. “Okay, Hank,” Bernstein said in his beautifully resonant, surprisingly deep voice. “So the words here are kind of stodgy. Let’s rewrite them.” The conductor proceeded to go through the score, updating the somewhat pedantic language of the original, while not changing the placement of the narrator’s words. The secretary took it all down, so that the new text could be pasted later into Hank’s score and into the television script. “My one memory,” said Hank, “is that when we got to the cellos, Bernstein said, ‘Hank, you’re a cellist. What do you think about the cello?’ And I said, ‘Oh! I think the tone is rich and warm and wonderful,’ and he said, ‘Great. I like it. We’ll put that in: rich, warm, and wonderful,’ and that went right into the script. He treated me as an equal, as a musician and a collaborator during that hour. I felt real, whole, honored, and comfortable. Then at the performance it was the same. He was somehow doing a flawless job of conducting the piece—the music of which was so extraordinarily vivid to me while I was sitting there onstage—and also of relating to me.”9
In April 1990 Bernstein was diagnosed with “a tumor near the top of his left lung,” and while a needle biopsy revealed no cancerous cells, it was determined that he had mesothelioma, a malignancy of the “membrane surrounding the lung,” which is normally the result of exposure to asbestos rather than of smoking. He went for regular radiation treatments for two weeks, but the news that he was seriously ill was kept secret from his mother, from most of his professional colleagues, and from the public. From this point on, he proceeded with his plans but must have wondered at what point he would simply have to stop. He went to Prague to conduct Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the Spring Festival there, and his sister Shirley went with him. He met with Czechoslovakian president Václav Havel, attended a party in his honor, and even took walks along the Moldau River, all the while with tubes of oxygen at the ready and receiving acupuncture many times a day to alleviate the pain when he breathed. While there he wrote a poem in which he imagined a bargain with God, hoping to be allowed to write that one major work he hadn’t yet managed.
Someone who left such an enormous record of himself in action clearly needed a great deal of attention and love; one might imagine him having had an abnormal dread of extinction. Yet in this valedictory poem he wrote, “Afraid / Died in my vocabulary / Long ago—except of hurting / Someone I love and then / Of not writing my Piece / Before my Not-To-Be.” In Bernstein’s case, the need for attention can’t be disentangled from an equal or greater hunger to know others, to reach them, and to benefit them by spreading what he called “the joy of music.” These needs were the sources of his musical and political reach and of the human connections he kept forging up to his final days, particularly with young musicians such as those at the Schleswig-Holstein Festival who performed the Shostakovich First Symphony, and with all of the anonymous people he never met, whom he reached with his work.
Back in New York he had surgery to drain fluid from his lung and suffered a painful allergic reaction to tetracycline injections. He was scheduled to go to Sapporo, Japan, in early July to inaugurate the Pacific Music Festival along with Michael Tilson Thomas. He made the trip and appeared at a press conference in which he said in a shaky voice that he wished to spend “most of the remaining energy and time the Lord grants me in education and in sharing as much as possible with younger people.” He conducted two programs with the London Symphony but then was found collapsed on the floor in his hotel room and was flown home. He was suffering from “progressive emphysema complicated by a pleural tumor.”
On August 19, 1990, two weeks before his seventy-second birthday, Bernstein was scheduled to conduct the Serge and Olga Koussevitzky Memorial Concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the Music Shed in Tanglewood. It had been fifty years since he first stood before an orchestra in this very spot, and fifty years since the founding of Tanglewood. He had already signaled that he was not well enough to take the student orchestra on a European tour in celebration of both anniversaries, as planned. A week earlier he had led them in a noble account of Copland’s Third Symphony. His old friend Shirley Gabis Perle had met him after the rehearsal. When she came toward him, her face must have registered how terrible he looked. As they walked to his dressing room, he turned to her and said, “Don’t cry.”
The day of the Boston Symphony program, the Sunday afternoon sky was dark and overcast, and it rained, in complete contrast to the “Bernstein weather” that had become a kind of standing joke at Tanglewood over the years. Somehow when Bernstein was there, no matter what the weather had been doing in previous days, the sun would always shine, as if nature itself was somehow susceptible to his charm and energy. This day was exceptionally dismal. Bernstein, unable to lead some of the rehearsals for the program, had delegated the conducting of his own Arias and Barcarolles, in the orchestration by Bright Sheng, to a young protégé, Carl St. Clair. Looking extraordinarily frail, his face a sickly gray, and dressed in his Tanglewood summer white jacket and black bow tie, Bernstein mounted the podium for the very last time to lead Britten’s Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, followed by a performance of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The performance of the Beethoven represented a sustained and agonizing act of will. He had a lifetime of experience behind him thinking about and shaping this symphony, and a lifetime of responding to his own inner rhythms and sense of the moment in performances. Tim Page remembers that on this occasion Bernstein could barely stand upright, let alone do what he himself used to call his “Lenny dance.” Trained by Fritz Reiner, he now by necessity came close to Reiner’s measured and restrained conducting style.
Bernstein’s experience did not fail him. As someone who could express a rhythm with the lift of an eyebrow, he probably could have led the orchestra with pure mind if he had wanted to. His face and gestures still contained a multitude of information and an amazing degree of strength and tension. It must have taken superhuman effort to mold such a majestic reading of the work, one that, on the recording later issued by Deutsche Grammophon, sounds extraordinarily spiritualized. The tempos are expertly judged and are not, as one might expect, excessively slow. In the first movement one can almost sense, at first, the orchestra’s concern and caution. The Poco sostenuto has never sounded so modern and deliberately spacious; it opens up vast, strange vistas of abstraction.
The solemnity and grandeur of the funereal second movement has an extraordinary, singing eloquence and inner rhythm. The third bursts out with youthful energy. Here Bernstein “nearly broke down” according to Page, conducting much of it “leaning against the back of the podium, gasping for breath.”10 Yet somehow there is a sound of triumph in the exhortations heard from the brass in the wonderfully held-back trio section. The final movement, taken at a moderate tempo, has an irresistible forward momentum; it conveys not joy but rather an ecstatic struggle. Despite all that this performance must have cost in terms of physical effort and pain, it is not pain one hears but Beethoven’s sublime architecture.
After the concert Bernstein made the effort to go to Seranak, Koussevitzky’s house at Tanglewood, to attend the party that always followed the concerts. When he walked in, he said to the pianist Leon Fleisher, “Who am I kidding? I can’t do this.”
An announcement of his retirement from conducting was prepared, to be released on October 9. It indicated that Bernstein would devote his time to composing, writing, and education, and said that his physician had advised him that performing was “too strenuous for his stamina to support.” Bernstein changed the wording to “too strenuous for his present stamina to support.”
Many friends and colleagues came to visit him during this period. Among them were conductor John Mauceri, who told him that work on restoring Blitzstein’s Regina had finally been completed and that the opera would be mounted the next year at the Scottish Opera. Bernstein seemed happy to hear this, yet also sad “that the project had gone on without him, and that he would never hear the fruits of his own work.” Arthur Laurents called on him and was horrified by his convulsive coughing and the degree of his pain. (Still relishing an opportunity for a frank chat, Bernstein asked Laurents about his sex life.)
Bernstein spent his last days in a wheelchair, a shocking, almost unimaginable sight to his brother Burton. On October 13 he played a trilingual word game with actor Michael Wager, listened to Aaron Stern read poems by Rumi, and joked that his eulogy should begin “Cut down in the prime of youth.” He had a horrible night in which he woke up frequently, gasping for breath, and was violently sick. On the morning of October 14 he seemed to feel better. He spent much of the day with his son Alexander. His sister visited; he phoned his daughters; he watched Yo-Yo Ma and Jeffrey Kahane play the Rachmaninov Cello Sonata on television, humming along. Late in the afternoon Betty Comden called on him. She sat on the side of his bed and, as she later wrote in a reminiscence, “he lay there, his beautiful leonine head looking diminished and his lids heavy from illness.” For some reason she found herself chatting about an old song from the Revuers’ nightclub act of 1938, about “three movie psychopaths,” but all she could remember were a few scattered lines from it. Bernstein “rattled off the whole thing without hesitation, verse and all.”11
Death came at 6:15 p.m. as Kevin Cahill, his doctor, was giving him an injection and his friend Michael Wager was holding him. Humphrey Burton writes that his “body suddenly stiffened,” and he asked incredulously, “What is this?” Almost as soon as he had spoken, his heart gave out.
Suddenly this whirlwind life was over. Musicians all over the world expressed a sense of shock. The flagpoles at Lincoln Center were wreathed in black, and the marquees of Broadway theaters were darkened for a minute. Flags were lowered to half-staff in countries around the world, including Germany, but, to quote Burton Bernstein, “for reasons best known to the Bush administration,” not in the United States. In contrast to the lavish, public, super-celebrations of his final birthdays, the funeral service in the Dakota apartment building was intimate and personal. A large coffin occupied the place in the living room where the two pianos normally stood. The rabbi intoned words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah (and Bernstein’s First Symphony): “Eicha yashva vadad ha’ir” (How desolate lay the city). Crowded into the room were collaborators who had known him for nearly his entire life—Adolph Green, Betty Comden, Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins, and Sid Ramin—and younger ones such as Stephen Wadsworth and Michael Tilson Thomas. Bernstein’s final lover, Mark Adams Taylor, was there. There were his children, Jamie, Alexander, and Nina; his ninety-two-year-old mother, Jennie; his sister, Shirley; and his brother, Burton, who seemed to sum up what everyone was thinking with his opening words: “My brother, Lenny, who was always larger than life, turned out to be smaller than death. Amazingly—just like that—he is no more.”12
Bernstein had spoken of the transience of life quite often, particularly as it is evoked by the phenomenon of music. In the 1955 Omnibus program “The Art of Conducting,” he said, “In music we are trapped in time. Each note is gone as soon as it is sounded, and it can never be recontemplated or heard again in that particular instant of ripeness.”
The police-escorted motorcade of twenty black stretch limousines bearing his body to Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn became momentarily stalled in heavy traffic in front of a construction site just outside the East River Tunnels. Hasidic Jews, mothers with baby carriages, people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds stopped to watch silently. When the cortege started up again, the workmen removed their hardhats, and everyone suddenly waved, shouting “Goodbye, Lenny! Goodbye!”
Leonard Bernstein was buried at Green-Wood next to Felicia. In his coffin were placed a piece of amber, a lucky penny, a baton, a pocket score of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, and a copy of Alice in Wonderland. Buried with him, along with his learning and his many gifts, was a nearly unmatched degree of aliveness, of “present stamina.” It is doubtful that a person of such dynamism and wide-ranging interests could ever have existed in one dimension only. It is difficult to picture him living a twilight existence, composing quietly, without being able to leap to the podium, play the piano, teach, talk, sermonize, complain, argue, rage, provoke, laugh, embrace, recite poetry, and tell stories. A hunger for experience in all of its aspects and a need to share were essential to his nature.13 Buried with him, preserved, as if in amber, beneath the extraordinary hubbub of his life, was his still vivid sense of wonder at the sounds he had discovered long ago in the music he heard at temple and in Aunt Clara’s piano, when the universe suddenly made sense to him.