Leonard Bernstein: An American Musician (Jewish Lives)

by Allen Shawn

Leonard, grandson of a rabbi,

Leonard returned home from the postconcert party for Tourel at four in the morning on Sunday, November 14, 1943. It was the date of Copland’s birthday (and the date the two had first met at Anna Sokolow’s concert). Leonard was suddenly awakened, at 9 a.m., hung over, by a telephone call from the gruff-voiced Bruno Zirato, manager of the New York Philharmonic, saying, “Well, this is it; you are on for this afternoon.” Guest conductor Bruno Walter had come down with influenza, and Rodzinski was out of town and unable to return to New York.

Hashkiveinu, a five-minute work for tenor, choir, and organ, performed two months later, was the result, the composer’s only work written for use in synagogues.

(He had not, in fact, ever joined the Communist Party.)

In April 1947 Bernstein, accompanied by his father and sister Shirley, had an emotional first visit to Palestine and his initial encounter with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra. At that time, Palestine was still a British protectorate with a population that was one-third Jewish.

Bernstein had broadly humanitarian and pacifist inclinations but was also staunchly pro-Zionist.

With his ability to speak Hebrew, his affinity for the place and its people, and the passionate bond he had created with the members of the orchestra, Bernstein felt himself deeply at home.37

According to biographer Humphrey Burton, it seems likely that John F. Kennedy (then a Massachusetts senator) intervened on his behalf. Kennedy and Bernstein met in connection with an Omnibus program about Harvard, took a liking to each other, and had lunch together on March 27, just after Bernstein learned of the investigation. Soon after that, Representative Rooney’s investigation into Bernstein’s affiliations was called off.

Bernstein’s manic ebullience is at its peak in the overture, which eventually became his most performed orchestral composition.

the “Hallelujah” chorus, which Bernstein felt would more properly belong earlier, with the story of Christ’s birth.

This was also the first program he conducted at the Philharmonic using a baton. He had first tried a baton in Israel after injuring his back, and the practice had stuck.

Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (in the orchestration by Ravel that Koussevitzky himself commissioned).

Mozart’s Fortieth Symphony—always a touchstone work for him.

Bernstein introduces “the most incongruous piece of all,” the funeral march from Mahler’s First Symphony.

there is “no such thing” as “the sound of an orchestra,” he says, “or at least there shouldn’t be. All that matters is the sound of the composer.”

The conductor delivered fifty-three televised Young People’s Concerts between 1958 and 1972. He was proud of them, returning to do them even during his sabbatical year 1964–65 and after his retirement as music director of the New York Philharmonic.

Bernstein then paused to wonder whether contemporary artists’ turning inward “toward molecular dissection” didn’t reflect the “decline in religious spirit in our time—that spirit that turns outward to the unknown, secure and confident in faith.”

In the summer Bernstein began work on his Third Symphony (Kaddish), a composition that would occupy him over a two-year period and which bears the imprint of his identification with Mahler in its intensity, overt emotionality, extremes of contrast, and prophetic tone. It may also reflect the impact of his recent experience performing Berg. His rendition of Berg’s opus 6 was revelatory, showing a deep understanding of both its impressionistic side and its roots in Mahler, and a shattering identification with its emotional climate.13 But above all, the Kaddish Symphony was his response to the threat of nuclear war.

Bernstein’s ascent to prominence coincided with the rise of John F. Kennedy (who may well have removed a barrier to Bernstein’s conducting career back in 1956), creating a subliminal connection in the public consciousness between these two glamorous American leaders in their forties, at their peak of popularity and influence, both Bostonians and Harvard graduates, one a Catholic, the other a Jew. One could argue that there were distinct parallels between the personalities of the two men. Both had extraordinary magnetism, a need to have people around them, and the capacity to have many different kinds of relationships. Both combined complexity and high intelligence with a kind of personal directness. Both led extraordinarily public lives and projected an aura of fearlessness. Yet each man remained in some ways private; each was highly compartmentalized; each had sexual secrets. In an archival interview about the president from July 1965, the conductor described Kennedy as having a “remarkable combination of informality and stateliness—that’s not precisely the word—casualness and majesty. . . . It’s very hard to come by—that combination; I don’t know many people who have it. Utter informality, great readiness to laughter, very quick perception, immediate understanding of anything you say, even if it’s veiled or is only suggested, not actually stated, and yet an ability to juggle various matters in his mind simultaneously.”

Although the film differs structurally and musically from the original stage show (it further reduces some of the operatic complexities and changes the order of some numbers), it solidified the perception of the work as a “classic” and made its music almost universally known. The film received ten Academy Awards.

While Bernstein did not perform nearly as much Mozart as he did Haydn, he had a deep connection to certain works (including Symphony No. 40 in G Minor) to which he returned repeatedly.

In the summer of 1963, Bernstein had resumed work on his Kaddish Symphony. He finally completed the short score in August in Fairfield, Connecticut, apparently much to the relief of his entire family, who had watched him brooding over it for two long years. When he emerged from his studio waving the score above his head, shouting “I finished it!,” Felicia joyfully jumped into the swimming pool with her clothes on.19

In Bernstein’s work, the Kaddish text, which is traditionally recited by men, is sung three times through by the soprano solo, chorus, and boys’ choir. His treatment of the prayer, which is already both an affirmation of life and a requiem, both praise and supplication, and written in two languages, explores additional dualities. There are two soloists: one a speaker, the other a singer. The score combines the traditional prayer, in Hebrew and Aramaic, with a personal mediation upon it in English. There are both sacred and “profane” elements in the score: choral singing suggestive of Jewish cantillation, alongside jazzier, American-sounding music. There are dueling musical idioms: anguished, highly chromatic segments using twelve-tone rows, alongside tonal and modal music.

Even the speaker’s parts in Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, and Copland’s Lincoln Portrait are difficult to perform convincingly.

On November 22, shortly after completing the final touches on the orchestration of the work, he was at a staff meeting in Philharmonic Hall, planning a Young People’s Concert, when he heard the news that President Kennedy had been assassinated. That afternoon the Kaddish Symphony became a posthumous tribute to the slain president. That night was the first time that Jamie Bernstein ever saw her parents cry. An unusually somber Bernstein conducted the Philharmonic in a televised memorial concert on Sunday, November 24, bringing Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony once again into the center of American consciousness, at a time of collective shock and grief. Speaking the following night at a Madison Square Garden benefit for the United Jewish Appeal, Bernstein told an audience of eleven thousand people that he had chosen the Mahler work “for the resurrection of hope in all of us who mourn him.” He spoke of Kennedy’s “reverence for the life of the mind,” citing words from a speech Kennedy was to have delivered on the day of his death: “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason.” “Learning and reason,” Bernstein continued, “precisely the two elements that were necessarily missing from the mind of anyone who could have fired that impossible bullet. Learning and reason: the two basic precepts of all Judaistic tradition, the twin sources from which every Jewish mind from Abraham and Moses, to Freud and Einstein, has drawn its living power. Learning and reason: the mot...

he could “only think of these Psalms in the original Hebrew.”

Chichester Psalms,

At St. Patrick’s Bernstein conducted the hushed middle section from the finale of Verdi’s Requiem and, as the Kennedy children, dressed in white, filed past the coffin of the slain senator, the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

Sam’s favorites, the Schumann Second Symphony, with its extraordinarily beautiful slow movement.

The night after his final Philharmonic appearance as music director, he attended a Jimi Hendrix concert.

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.

(There was also a small, memorable contribution from Paul Simon.)7

Integrated, focused, and as inward-looking as his grandfather’s daily life, it should be heard in its entirety rather than in the two suites it was eventually carved up into.

in France he recorded Bloch’s Schelomo and the Schumann Cello Concerto with Mstislav Rostropovich, in performances so compelling that the cellist believed he could never surpass them.

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

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.

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.

On the morning of October 14 he seemed to feel better.

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.

“My brother, Lenny, who was always larger than life, turned out to be smaller than death. Amazingly—just like that—he is no more.”

Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn

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!”