A Talent for Genius
Kashner, Sam & Schoenberger, Nancy
A brilliant pianist, but not an immortal like his friend Vladimir Horowitz; a talented songwriter, but not a colossus like his friend George Gershwin; a creditable composer, but not a titan like his...
...Mom, not the most normal of people, either, was about half-right...
...With gangsters and showgirls as his mentors, Levant soon became the ultimate man about town, developing a reputation as a talented pianist but a bit of an imp...
...Bumping into Greta Garbo, he joked, "Sorry, I didn't catch the name...
...When a diner in a restaurant where he was playing a piece by Mozart requested "a livelier tune," Levant began playing Bach...
...Or Horowitz...
...What other musician .. . well, come to think of it, we can think of Lenny Bernstein, yet another Levant associate blessed with more talent than Oscar...
...Levant himself may have had the most interesting life of anyone who lived in this century...
...In A Talent for Genius, Sam Kashner, a TV writer and poet, and wife Nancy Schoenberger, also a poet, argue that Levant was cursed by an inability to decide whether to take the high road of Art (classical music) or the low road of Commerce (being a regular guest on radio quiz shows...
...An orphan," Levant replied...
...Asked about Lenny the Pedagogue, he commented, "Leonard Bernstein has been disclosing musical secrets that have been well-known for over 400 years...
...Chopin, Debussy, Bach, Liszt, Beethoven...
...What other musician can we imagine appearingin a whole series of inane Hollywood musicals—playing himself—while studying composition with Schoenberg, the father of atonal music...
...A mixture of Mozart's Salieri, Brahms's Schumann, Shakespeare's Marlowe, Mantle's Maris, and Borg's Gerulaitis, he was an utterly miserable human being: a hypochondriac, a drug addict, a philanderer, and a jerk...
...What did you want to be when you were a kid...
...What's more, America was a more interesting country in the twenties and thirties because there were more people like Gershwin and Levant and Schoenberg, and fewer people like Sting and Madonna and Philip Glass...
...A case can be made that Levant missed his real calling: as a satirist...
...Accordingly, our pity should be mixed with revulsion, as Levant in his own way helped midwife the careers of Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael...
...Asked about Bernstein's music, Levant said, "It reflects a great knowledge—of other composers' music...
...a creditable composer, but not a titan like his friend Arnold Schoenberg...
...But with the passage of time, Levant's fame has receded because everybody under the sun has recorded those two compositions, and because pianists do not achieve immortality by playing Gershwin, a far greater songwriter than a composer, but by playing Joe Queenan is most recently the author of If You're Talking to Me, Your Career Must Be in Trouble (Hyperion...
...he would have died sooner...
...He was promptly fired...
...Asked by Vernon Duke, composer of "April in Paris," what he thought of the serious compositions that Duke had penned under the name Vladimir Dukeisky, Levant replied, "For a man who's destined for obscurity, why do you need two names...
...Jack Paar once asked him on the "Tonight" show...
...Born to mildly affluent Russian Jewish immigrants in Pittsburgh in 1906, he was trained to be a classical pianist but dropped out of high school and started playing popular tunes in New York roadhouses and speakeasies...
...A Talent for Genius succeeds because it is at least as much a book about an age as it is a book about an individual...
...Of operetta composer Sigmund Romberg, he remarked: "He writes the kind of music you whistle on the way into the theater...
...That incident defines Levant's career: he was a slummer par excellence...
...Good thing he never saw her act...
...For even though he once commanded higher concert fees than Horowitz or Artur Rubinstein, Levant is not going to be remembered as a pianist, much less a composer or songwriter...
...a brilliant satirist, but not a legend like his friend Dorothy Parker—Oscar Levant spent his entire life being extremely good at things that his best friends were better at...
...You'll never be a Paderewski, but you'll never be lonely," his mother told him early in life...
...Despite the abuse he inflicted on his body, this remarkable jack-of-all-trades survived until his sixty-fifth year, passing away minutes before a visit by Candice Bergen, then an aspiring photojournalist...
...It is not surprising that in his lifetime he was most famous for his renditions of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F, written by the American composer who had the most success in fusing the demands of art and commerce...
...1 A TALENT FOR GENIUS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF OSCAR LEVANT Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger Villard Books /512 pages /$25 reviewed by JOE QUEENAN The American Spectator August 1994 69...
...But on the basis of the wisecracks for which he is famous, he could have been one of the funniest writers ever...
...What other musician can we imagine composing both a dirge performed by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and a song called "Tanned Legs...
...Levant, it should be noted, was the first entertainer to come on national television and talk about his assorted drug addictions...
...There were many other celebrated gags...
...Ask Schnabel...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
