TIME: Almanac 1995

home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search

/ TIME: Almanac 1995 / TIME Almanac 1995.iso / time / caps / 50s / 50bernst.000 < prev next >

Wrap

Text File | 1994-03-25 | 26KB | 488 lines

<text id=93HT0301> <title> 1950s: Wunderkind:Leonard Bernstein </title> <history>Time-The Weekly Magazine-1950s Highlights</history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> TIME Magazine February 4, 1957 Wunderkind </hdr> <body> "He's learned to crawl!" Jennie Bernstein, a bright-eyed Boston housewife, was in a dither as she popped through the neighbor's back door with little Lennie in her arms. She put him down on the living-room rug, and the two women stood back to watch. What they saw made musical history. With the teetery determination of a puppy bound for breakfast, little Lennie pattered out on all fours into the next room and over to the piano. Seizing a leg of it, he hauled himself erect and planted a pinkie firmly on the nearest key. As the note struck, an expression of paregoric bliss passed over his infant features. The world of music had found a slave--one who would, if he could, become its master. Jennie Bernstein's little buster started slowly, but at 20 he came busting out of Boston's unfashionable suburbs with alarming drive and talent. The tone for his spectacular career was set with the now legendary incident, 13 years ago, when, as a virtually unknown, 25-year- old assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, he triumphantly substituted for ailing Bruno Walter--without rehearsal. "Like a shoestring catch in center field," explained the New York Daily News. "Make it and you're a hero. Muff it and you're a dope...Bernstein made it." Ever since then, Bernstein has been making it everywhere, with a versatility that reminds his more enthusiastic admirers of Renaissance Man. In an age of specialization, he refuses to stay put in any cultural pigeonhole. He is a Mickey Mantle of music, a brilliant switch hitter, conducting with his right hand and composing with his left--not to mention several other occupations that would be full-time careers for other men. Like a juggler whose oranges have suddenly acquired a demonic will of their own, Bernstein today finds himself with five careers in the air at once. Career No. 1, conducting, has led him to the podium of almost every major symphony orchestra from Pittsburgh to Palestine. He has conducted Italian opera at La Scala, Schumann in Munich, Bartok in Budapest--each time to cheers. He has just been appointed co-conductor of the New York Philharmonic (with Dimitri Mitropoulos, who is very likely to quit soon). This week he would up a six-week conducting stint with the Philharmonic that was notable for his unhackneyed programming, e.g., Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Vivaldi's rarely heard Concerto for Strings, Cembalo and Two Mandolins. As always, the critics found fault here and there--his extraordinary gyrations have earned him, in some quarters, a reputation as the Presley of the Podium--but no one could deny Conductor Bernstein's virtuosity. He is the first U.S.-born conductor with a major international reputation. Career No. 2, composition, has given the U.S. some of the brightest, most promising music of the past decade. He has written impressive serious scores (two symphonies, a large violin work and a short opera), three exciting musical comedies, as well as two ballets. Candide, Bernstein's latest Broadway show, is about to go under after a stay of two months, because of a heavy-handed collaboration in the book department between Voltaire and Lillian Hellman, but its witty score remains a triumph--it is both melodious and satirical in a manner rarely surpassed since Offenbach. Career No. 3, the piano, almost gets lost between the other two, but Bernstein is a strongly talented pianist and probably could be a great one of he took the time (currently his piano repertory includes only half a dozen concertos). At Carnegie Hall last month, he played Revel's Piano Concerto in G--after five months without so much as five hours of practice--while conducting the orchestra from the keyboard. The critics raved: "Miracle in music...absolute perfection..." Career No. 4, his music classes at Brandeis University and his musical lectures in the Ford Foundation's TV program, Omnibus, show him to be a gifted and exciting teacher--not only at home in all the world's music, but sensitively capable of relating it to the here and now. Two of his TV lectures have recently been released on records--along with three other disks presenting Conductor, Composer and Pianist Bernstein. Career No. 5, the arduous business of being a celebrity, devours every minute of Bernstein's life that escapes the other four. Occasionally fortified with Dexamyl, he copes with interviews, conferences, half a dozen different agents, the management of his income (an estimated $100,000 last year), greenroom receptions and after-concert parties--at which he may call for a pot of caviar and talk lucidly for hours. "My God!" cried Lennie as he staggered to bed at three one recent morning and surveyed the next day's schedule, "Who do I think I am--everybody?" Behind the Glamorpuss. At 38, Leonard Bernstein is not everybody, but very definitely Somebody--a unique, perennial and very American Wunderkind. He is perfectly cast for the role. His lion head, swept with a sensuously flowing mane of black hair that in recent years has been greying at the temples, makes him seem a big man, even though he is stocky and only 5 ft., 8 1/2 in. tall. The jaw is powerful, the skin rough and swart, the profile jutting and rudely masculine, the lips sensitively curved and humorous. At a glance from Bernstein, men recognize an extraordinary personality, and women acquire the expression of pole-axed sheep; he exudes sex appeal like a leaky electric eel. He chooses his clothes with care--the Italian shoe of exotic cut, the chesterfield with the velvet collar, the bright red sweater that makes his eyes seem green. And when he decides to give somebody the full charge of charm, the eyes glow like coals that have been blown on, the educated nostrils flare just the least little bit, and the rich low cello voice begins to murmur intelligently. Behind the glamorpuss, however, there stands a solid character of many-sided balance. Bernstein is a phenomenal extravert. In his nature, to think is to act. Until recently he never seemed to tire of doing things, handling situations, arranging schedules, playing the life of the party, being all things to all people. He lives in a vague world of superficial friendliness, where charm is an easy way of life, and genuine warmth is reserved for work. And yet, at the worst of his extravertigo, Bernstein never lost sight of his first principles; truth to his word, loyalty to friends and family, devotion to music for its own sake. Nor did he ever lose his highly engaging, childlike wonder at being famous and doing exciting things, like meeting movie stars or the New York Philharmonic's august board of directors. Bernstein hates criticism, can quote whole paragraphs from unfavorable reviews that appeared ten years ago. He likes reassurances--the backstage compliments, the perquisite Cadillacs, the fawning headwaiters, the fluty dowagers, the company of fame. He is brash and often tactless. He suffers from what was once described as a pre-Copernican ego, i.e., seeing the whole world revolve around him. The condition was described by his onetime mentor, Conductor Artur Rodzinski, with an expressive Jewish world that means cheek, nerve, monumental gall. "He has hutzpa," says Rodzinski, and illustrates what he means with the story of how Bernstein, a mere 35, dared to conduct Beethoven's sacrosanct Ninth Symphony with the great Santa Cecilia chorus in Rome. "And he had the nerve to move his hips in time to the music. Hutzpa!" Me and Millay. He has hutzpa all right, but always with more than a grain of justification. "Nobody," he once announced, "can handle the sonnet form like me and Millay"--but he could point to some entirely respectable poetry he had written in spare moments. He pronounces foreign words with elaborate accuracy--but it is not just an affectation, for he speaks five foreign languages (German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Hebrew). He loves to give advice to experts on their own specialty--theater technicians on lighting, or classicists on Latin--but he has an impressive body of general information and education, including excellent Latin. Everything seems provocatively easy for him. He writes music in taxis, airplanes, railroad stations and hotel lobbies--even in men's rooms. He studies piles of scores in a couple of days. He makes a wry joke of how little he practices--and wears out the nerves of his wife and friends, who fear that he will flub during a performance. All this may be hutzpa, but it works. In fact, he rarely flubs, never falls on his face, despite his hurry. The quality that allows him to do in a breeze what others must plod to accomplish is a never-say-die rationality, a formidable ability to put his life in order and his work in form. He can divide his brain into three or four separate task forces, attack three or four different objectives--prepare a script, study a score, work out a melody, amuse a child--all at the same time. His talent for patterns has made him a passionate crossword puzzler and anagrammarian (these days, though, he feels guilty about being caught wasting time, and hides crossword puzzles inside scores or books). Reason sometimes seems to check emotion, the head to rule the heart--in his music as in his life. And yet, there is in Bernstein's character a power of belief, a religious strain so insistent that it drives him at times for the mystic verges. In his music, too, there can arise, like an ancestral memory, a whisper of Semitic mystery, a shadowy Hasidic laugh. A New Discovery. If, in the minds of some, hutzpa is the key word to Leonard Bernstein, his father uses another Jewish expression to describe his hopes for his son. It is ruach Elohim, the godly spirit. "I've tried to give it to him through learning, understanding and religion," says Sam Bernstein. "With ruach Elohim a man does not become dizzy when he reaches high places. Without it he is nothing, and the food in his mouth is like straw." Samuel Bernstein, the son of a Hasidic scholar, fled Russia when he was 16, to escape both the Czar's draft and the ghetto life. In New York City, in 1910, he found a job cleaning fish underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, for $1 a day. After a while he managed to get himself "in hair"--he worked in a wigworks that made "rats" and "transformations." By the time Lennie was born, Sam had moved to Boston's Allston section and was building a prosperous business of his own as a beauty-parlor supplier. Lennie was sickly, had an asthmatic allergy (to cats and dust). He recalls: "I was a miserable, terrified little child." When he was eight, Sam took him to the synagogue, and noticed that when the choir began to sing, Lennie was so moved that he began to cry. As for the organ--"It was the Mighty Wurlitzer itself for me." Despite his interest on the neighbor's piano, the Bernsteins never had a musical instrument in the house until Lennie was ten. Then they were saddled with a "brown upright horror" that Aunt Clara wanted to get rid of. To Lennie it sounded like a seraph's harp. His reluctant parents--who really hoped he might go onto the beauty-parlor supply business--allowed him to have piano lessons. A New Lennie. Music was not Lennie's only talent. He was brilliant in almost every subject in school; and when he turned 13 his body all at once caught up with his mind. "It was wonderful," he says. "One day I was a scrawny little thing that everybody could beat up, and the next time I looked around I was the biggest boy in the class. I could run faster, jump higher, dive better than almost anybody, and all the girls wanted to feel my muscles." His sense of relief was so terrific that it became a kind of constitutional euphoria, a lifelong fizz of high spirits. The new Lennie was the life of a thousand parties. "I just ran for the piano," he recalls, "as soon as I got in the door, and stayed there until they threw me out. It was as though I didn't exist without music." He played anything and everything from Ravel to riverboat, at sight or from memory. He barreled through the local public library's scores of the great operas and croaked the male parts while his sister Shirley shrilled the upper registers--and mother and father sat and wondered helplessly what God had wrought. Until he was 16, Lennie never heard a live symphony orchestra, but later he would often take his girls to Boston's Symphony Hall. One night, he and a girl named Mildred heard Koussevitzky. At the end of the concert there was an ovation, but Lennie just sat there, clapping very softly. "What's the matter?" asked Mildred. "Didn't you like it?" Said Lennie: "I'm so jealous!" Everybody told Sam Bernstein that his boy was a born musician--which was exactly what Sam was afraid of. He thought of the musicians he had known as a boy in Russia as klezmer, the ghetto pagliacci, moving from one free meal to the next, and he shuddered for his son's future. A New Koussevitzky. Lennie, who had whizzed through Boston's notoriously tough public Latin School with a top-tenth record, now whizzed through Harvard (class of '39). He majored in music--counterpoint with Arthur Tillman Merritt, theory with Walter Piston--but he spread his interests straight across the academic boards, and laid down a strong foundation of culture to support his musical taste. He also found time to play the piano for silent movies at the student film club, tried out--but was rejected--for the job of second Glee Club accompanist (years later Bernstein, who never forgets, came to Harvard to conduct the Glee Club; during rehearsal he turned to one of the two pianists and said: "You have the job I wasn't good enough for"). After Harvard, Lennie vainly tried to find a musical job, even hung out his shingle as a piano teacher ("No pupils," he recalls). But Fritz Reiner, then at Philadelphia's famed Curtis Institute of Music, was impressed by a dazzling Bernstein audition, took him on as a student in conducting. But it was in the late Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's matchless showman, that Bernstein found his musical father. Koussevitzky invited him to join the conducting class at Tanglewood's summer music school. The old man called him Lenyushka, and told friends: "The boy is a new Koussevitzky, a reincarnation!" A New Tchaikovsky. Bernstein was the sensation of Tanglewood that year (1940). One day a famous actress saw him conduct. "Dahling!" she husked at him later. "I've gone mad about your back muscles. You must come and have dinner with me." Then there were some difficult decisions to make. Serge Alexandrovich Koussevitzky, himself a Jew, and rather sensitive, begged Lennie to change his unglamorous name so that his way to success would not be blocked by anti-Semitism. Lennie said, "I'll do it as Bernstein (he pronounces it "stine," not "steen.") or not at all." Three years after his Tanglewood debut came the legendary Carnegie Hall break when Bernstein had to substitute for Walter (it wasn't all luck, either; Bernstein knew that Walter was not well, and sat up restudying the scores, just in case). Before long, almost everyone of the world's great orchestras was angling for his services as a guest conductor. Paramount gave him a screen test to play the part of Tchaikovsky (he was terrible). The U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce named him one of the outstanding young men of the year, along with John Hersey and Nelson Rockefeller. Week after week the fan mail ran to more than 500 letters; it came from the silk-stocking district ("My dear, you were the charisma of agape last night"), and it came from the bobby-soxers who, after concerts, ripped his clothes and attacked his car. "I didn't believe it was all happening," recalls Lennie today. "I didn't believe it was really me. I kept on working, and tried to forget about it." Settling Down. At 27, Leonard Bernstein was offered an orchestra of his own: The New York City Symphony (now defunct). It was not one of the great ones, but Lennie hurled all his energies into making it great. From both the old and new repertories, he lovingly brought to light neglected and exciting works. Before he was 30, Bernstein had become a big name in U.S. music. He was no longer a beamish boy to whom older men would give condescending pats, and he began to pay the price of swift success. Cocktail-party taunts and sneers grew louder, and a famous conductor was said to have smashed an office full of furniture in his rage at Bernstein's fame. As Lennie kept running off to Israel (where he gave 40 concerts in 60 days "and was worshiped," said one reporter "like a musical Messiah"), chasing across the U.S. (25 concerts in 28 days), banging out ballets and symphonies (Facsimile in 1946, The Age of Anxiety in 1949), slanging out Broadway scores (incidental music to Peter Pan in 1950), everybody passed knowing looks and said he was spreading himself too thin. Lennie heard the mocking voices. All at once, in 1951, he announced that he was taking 18 months off, in Mexico, to "take stock." Instead, he took a wife--a beautiful young TV actress from Chile named Felicia Montealegre. On their honeymoon in Mexico, Lennie happened to discover that Felicia did not know what a past participle was, and proceeded to give grammar lessons till she burst into tears. She admits that Lennie has been "hard to live with--but what man worth living with isn't? And every now and then he just makes you want to cry. `Oh, thank you for loving me!'" Despite her porcelain fragility, Felicia soon instilled some fireside virtues in her man. They have two children--Jamie, 5, and Alexander Serge (named for Koussevitzky), 19 months--and live in a nine-room duplex just cater-cornered from Carnegie Hall. But Lennie's fierce energy makes it hard for him to relax; when he plays with the children, reports Felicia, "he plays too hard, throws them too high, squeezes them too tight." For all his "settling down," Bernstein has not noticeably slowed his pace. He seems to feel that he is still living the overture. "We still sit up nights," says an old friend, "and talk about what we'll do when we grow up." And yet Bernstein knows that "in the next year or two, when I grow up, I'll have to decide what to do. It used to come so easy. Now I get tired." The wonder boy has become the man who wonders. The Central Line. At 38, Bernstein must tell himself that his talents have so far produced great excitement but no great works. He has leaped and dived and didoed like a scintillating porpoise in the mainstream of musical life, without having changed its course. Neither has any other contemporary musician of his age--but Bernstein insists that he must follow "that central line" as he once called it, "the line of mystery and fire," that, as he believes, is followed by all truly dedicated artists. How close does he come to that line? As a conductor, his unquestionable brilliance is sometimes obscured by his podium manner. He never uses a baton, relying instead on his highly expressive hands and indeed on his whole body. Is the music delicate, finely and rapidly interwoven? "Watching Lennie for some parts of Scheherezade," says Composer Walter Piston, "is like watching a woman knit." Is it the moment for a powerful initial attack? Lennie will deliver a stroke that is worthy of a medieval headsman (in St. Louis once, he delivered an introductory downbeat so overwhelmingly spectacular that every man in the orchestra sat jaw-dropped in wonder, unable to make a sound. And best of all, as Reporter Paul Moor observed, "in the final rapturous climax of the Tchaikovsky Romeo and Juliet, he will scowl and thrash the orchestra up to the peroration, and then--while the men go on playing, of course--he will stand stricken for a few bars, his face turned toward the empyrean, his hands extended open to the stars, in a sort of ecstasy." After one of Bernstein's more dramatic evenings, an onlooker remarked slyly: "It was really a shame tonight. The composer was unable to carry out Bernstein's instructions." Yet Bernstein probably violates the composer's intentions far less often than his manner may suggest. His style is neither insincere nor imprecise. It is particularly effective with modern music, with which Bernstein has had consistent success, and whose complex rhythms he feels perhaps more deeply than he feels the serenities of the classics. Sullivan Sans Gilbert? As a composer, Bernstein has suffered one curious fate, his serious music, at least, is almost never played by others. If Conductor Bernstein did not come to the aid of Composer Bernstein, it might never get played at all. The main case that can be made against it is that it is eclectic--and Bernstein knows it. Sometimes, when he hears a piece of music he particularly likes, he will exclaim: "God, That's wonderful. I must write something like it." He can put on any musical mask he chooses; he has successfully written boogie-style pop tunes and a seven-minute piece of medieval polyphony for The Lark. His musical manner is modern, but it lacks the uncompromising dissonance, the agonized searching that characterizes so much contemporary music. It has been said that, like the proverbial blonde, his music is extremely well put together and has all the obvious points of attraction, but no heart. Bernstein has been dismissed as the cleverest musical carpenter of his time, a kind of Sullivan without Gilbert. Some of his critics think he's too facile and too indecently happy in his work; as usual, they prescribe a little suffering. And yet, if his compositions to date have no common voice, they have several common denominators. There is almost always a strong, healthy pulse of percussion. There is drama and wit. There is an invitation, even in solemn moments, to the dance. And there is a song. In his first symphony, Jeremiah, Bernstein offered, along with Biblical rumblings and stylized Semitic murmurs, some beautifully sad and soaring melodies for soprano. In his most recent serious work, Serenade for Violin Solo, String Orchestra and Percussion, the Bernstein song--immensely more mature now--has been transferred to the violin; it is a highly impressive piece, his best so far, in Bernstein's estimation. Still remembered is his brilliant musical, On the Town (1944), in which he fairly knocked the eyebrows off the highbrows by his combination of popular style and serious technique. Earlier attempts notwithstanding, Bernstein was the first to synthesize serious music and jazz with real ease. In his score for the movie On the Waterfront, some critics heard a new note in Bernstein's music, a curiously piercing purity that seemed to burst from a hot core of originality. Extravert Bernstein needs the outside inspiration of a theme, a script, a plot to be at his best--which suggests that he is at his best in the musical theater. "I am the logical man," Bernstein himself has said, "to write the great American opera." Time Is the Enemy. Lennie Bernstein's current agenda does not include the great American opera, but it is formidable nonetheless: -- A new musical show tentatively titled West Side Story--Playwright Arthur Laurents' resetting of the Romeo and Juliet theme among the Puerto Ricans of Manhattan. -- A third symphony, themes of which already go shooting around in his head like blobs of paint in search of a canvas. -- A new song for Harvard, asked for by President Nathan Pusey. -- A new Omnibus program due next month. Subject: Bach. -- Two more in a series of recorded music-appreciation lectures (on Schumann's Second Symphony and Brahms's Fourth), for the Book-of-the-Month Club. -- A new conducting stint in Israel, where this fall he will open in Tel Aviv's huge new concert hall before settling into his New York Philharmonic duties. Everybody still keeps telling him that he is doing too much, that he will have to choose between careers. Since nobody wants him for a competitor, the composers tell him he ought to be a full-time conductor, and the conductors tell him he ought to be a full-time composer. But he replies that he cannot choose between his loves, that he must remain an artistic polygamist. Says he: "I don't want to give in and settle for some specialty. I don't want to spend the rest of my life, as Toscanini did, studying and restudying, say, 50 pieces of music. It would bore me to death. I want to conduct, I want to play the piano, I want to write music for Broadway and Hollywood, I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can, and still do justice to them all. But I can't do them all at once. I have to learn to do one at a time, and to give it all my strength until I've done it right. Mozart, Mendelssohn, Bach, Haydn--they were all performers and conductors as well as composers, and they did a lot of other things too. Only then, there was time." </body> </article> </text>