LEONARD BERNSTEIN - a biography in Words and Music

Suddenly, a door opened as assistant to the newly appointed leader of the New York Philharmonic. The newly installed Rodzinski appointed him assistant conductor despite fierce opposition from his board, even though the twenty-five year old was only beckoned to serve in emergencies. It was too unusual at the time for a 25-year-old schnook, and an American at that, to fill this position.

However, for the first time, Bernstein received an appreciable salary and achieved the independence he longed for from his father. Bernstein began to fill this routine job with diligence, fearing that he would wither away the next few years as an assistant away from the limelight.

But fate would have it otherwise. On November 14, 1943, the famous guest conductor Bruno Walter was indisposed and he canceled early in the morning of the concert day.
The special thing was that the performance was broadcast nationally on the radio by CBS. The only one who could be considered to replace the famous Walter was Leonard Bernstein. What followed became a legend.

Concert 14 November, 1943 – Announcement, anthem and Manfred (Tchaikovsky)

The first success as a composer: Fancy free

Bernstein was no stranger to success as a 25-year-old composer. The first symphony, Jeremiah, had been well received in 1939, but generated no response in the concert circuit.

The turning point came with a visit from a man who got him excited about a project. The man was Jerome Robbins. He was a principal dancer with a ballet company and now wanted to stage his own work and was looking for a composer.

The collaboration between the two congenial artists resulted in Fancy free, a 25-minute ballet work about 3 sailors who get shore leave on New York Harbor, which Bernstein set to music in a classical-jazz style. The rousing piece became a great success at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1944 season.

Fancy free (excerpt)

Cult status with “on the town”

Now potent producers decided to put a lot of money into turning it into a Broadway production.Betty Comden and Adolphe Green came on board to do the dialogue. Bernstein became one of many in this production and about a quarter of the songs were by other composers.

The Broadway adaptation, now called “on the town,” became nationally famous when it was made into a film starring Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra and quickly achieved cult status.

On the town (excerpt)

West Side Story – Bernstein makes himself immortal

But the composition that would forever identify Leonard Bernstein came a few years later. 4 great artists teamed up in 1949 to create West Side Story. Again Jerome Robbins was on board, Arthur Laurents wrote the story and Stephen Sondheim was responsible for the verses. After a good start, the project was delayed again and again, and in 1959, 10 years after work began, it became the biggest Broadway sensation after Oklahoma 20 years earlier. The electrifying rhythms, jazzy sound and catchy tunes like Maria or America made the 41-year-old Bernstein immortal.

West Side Story (excerpt)

European travels and the beginning of conducting in Israel

But let us return to the forties. The successes as a conductor and composer opened Bernstein the doors to foreign countries and shortly after the end of the World War Bernstein gave his first concerts in Europe. However, with little yield, his extroverted conducting style was still too unusual for European audiences.

More important was his first trip to Palestine in 1947, where he performed a staggering 40 concerts in 60 days with a ragtag orchestra, thus heralding the beginning of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra.

The very next year he returned and the open-air concert for the Israeli troops in the desert city of Be’er Sheva during the Arab-Israeli war became a myth. The relationship with this orchestra lasted a lifetime and Bernstein later became a living legend in Israel.

Documentary: A JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM 1967 with Leonard Bernstein & Isaac Stern

Triumph at La Scala with Maria Callas

1954 was the year when he first became a celebrity in Europe. Leonard Bernstein was on a North American tour when he was asked to conduct Medea at La Scala in Milan, which had been scheduled at short notice.

At first he was speechless, having never conducted an opera in an opera house before. “What is Medea? And who is Cherubini?” asked the 35-year-old prodigy, who had never heard of the work. Maria Callas had recommended the American to La Scala because she had recently heard a radio broadcast of one of his concerts. Just ten days later, he and Maria Callas celebrated one of the greatest operatic triumphs of the postwar years with this work.

Medea, 1954 – Finale Act 1 – Callas / Bernstein

Bernstein as homo politicus, Candide

Bernstein had never made a secret of his left-wing political views. Already at the age of 21, he and fellow students had put on a well-received performance of “the cradle will rock,” an American opera in Brechtian style that proclaimed unionist theses, thus drawing the attention of the surveillance authorities to him.

He was also chalked up to the fact that he had neither served as a soldier nor acted as a troop entertainer during the World War. In 1956, he wrote Candide. The literary model came from Voltaire, who accused institutions such as the church or the nobility of manipulating the population. He seemed to have hit the nail on the head with this, because the Vatican put the work on the index shortly after publication.

200 years later, the addressee of the criticism was no longer the church. Bernstein’s Candide is a work that was written under the impression of the McCarthy era in the USA of the 1950s. People suspected of communist activities were dragged before parliamentary investigative committees (e.g. the House Committee on Un-American Activities), interrogated and thus stigmatized. Many artists were affected, and as a result suffered boycotts and de facto occupational bans because theaters feared reprisals if they became involved.

Both main authors of Candide, the composer Bernstein and the librettist Hellman, were personal targets of fierce persecution by the tribunals. For both, Candide was an affair of the heart. Bernstein accompanied the premiere with an article published in the New York Times that indicted America’s puritanical snobbery, its double standards, and its inquisitorial attacks on the individual.

This opera(ette) by Leonard Bernstein is an absolute gem. Each of the pieces has stunning humor, passion and musicality. It is comedy and social criticism at the same time. It is the overture that has made it to fame, and one almost has to go back to Rossini to find a prelude that so perfectly captures the comedy of the plot.

Candide (Overture) – Bernstein

The gifted communicator

In 1954, Bernstein was commissioned by CBS to produce a didactic introduction to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony for television audiences (Omnibus).
The audience and CBS were enthusiastic and this became a 5-year series, succeeded from 1958 by the even more famous Young People’s Concerts. A program for children to whom music was to be brought closer.

The series lured an audience of millions in front of their televisions for a whopping 14 years, and Bernstein became a household brand for a generation of Americans.

Omnibus: Bernstein and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony

Mahler – the first complete recording with the New York Philharmonic

Bernstein repeatedly emphasized that of all composers, Gustav Mahler’s music was the one closest to his heart. Mahler was a kindred spirit to Bernstein, as he was both a conductor and composer, and faith played an important theme in his compositions. Mahler’s music was not Jewish, but the heritage of synagogue music and klezmer music always shines through in Mahler’s music.

Gustav Mahler’s widow Alma even graced Bernstein with her presence at a rehearsal in 1960 to mark the 100th anniversary of Mahler’s birth.
In the 1960s, Bernstein became the first composer to undertake a complete recording of Mahler’s symphonies, sparking a worldwide revival of the almost forgotten composer.

And when Bernstein had the Adagietto of the 5th Symphony played infinitely slowly and mournfully on the occasion of Roberts Kennedy’s funeral, it led to a Mahler enthusiasm in wider circles that continues to this day.

Mahler 5th Symphony (Adagietto) – Bernstein

Mahler and the Vienna Philharmonic

In the seventies, Bernstein turned his attention to Europe. Softened by Schonberg’s unflattering reviews and flattered by the high fees in Vienna, he changed his artistic center to the Austrian capital. There he experienced the appreciation he missed in New York.

His greatest artistic concern was to bring back to the Viennese their Mahler. He could not understand how they could simply leave the composer, who had become Viennese, to the left.

Bernstein recognized that remnants of anti-Semitism were still in the air in Vienna. There were still musicians in the orchestra who had once been party members. Bernstein jokingly called the Philharmonic’s trumpeter, who was a former SS member, “my favorite Nazi.”

Bernstein rehearses Mahler’s 1st Symphony with the Viennese Philharmonic

Last years and Beethoven’s Ninth in Berlin

In the 1980s, health problems began to make themselves felt. His lifelong heavy tobacco and alcohol consumption were now taking their toll.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Bernstein was on hand. Just two weeks later, he performed Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in Berlin with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. He supplemented the orchestra with musicians from Paris, London, New York and Leningrad, the Allied powers, and together they sang the Ode to Freedom (Bernstein had changed the last word). The concert became a musical monument to this historic event.

For the last time Bernstein could enjoy the big stage.

Beethoven 9th Symphony (4th movement) – Bernstein

Religiosity in Bernstein’s music

Father Samuel was an immensely enterprising man and managed a remarkable career from a dispossessed teenager to an independent, successful entrepreneur in Massachusetts. With each success in business, the family moved to better accommodations. This put a strain on sensitive little Leonard. In addition, the parents fought constantly, and Leonard developed into a shy, sickly child.

The only bright spot of these first years were the services in the synagogue, where his devout father regularly took him. There he enjoyed the singing and the organ playing of the cantors. These experiences were so formative that later no other well-known classical composer left so many traces of Jewish, Hasidic music as Leonard Bernstein.

In all of his 3 symphonies he thematized the Jewish faith. He dealt with people’s doubts about faith, but also saw in faith the place where they could ultimately find confidence.

Bernstein thus returned to his roots in his serious music when he was captivated by synagogue music as a child.

Bernstein was not religious, in the sense that he believed in a wise old man with a beard. More he was fascinated by religiosity, and he was deeply convinced that music was the only language that could express religious feelings. His symphonies are about this spirituality (1st Symphony Jeremiah, 2nd Symphony The Age of Anxiety, 3rd Symphony Kaddish).

But Bernstein’s symphonies remained music for lovers, even if certain movements, such as the party scene of the second symphony, or the slow movement with soprano voice of the third symphony, could inspire a wider audience.

LEONARD BERNSTEIN – a biography in Words and Music