The Promise of Leonard Bernstein
GOLDMAN, ALBERT
ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman The Promise of Leonard Bernstein Leonard Bernstein, in addition to being our leading nativeborn conductor, has long enjoyed the prestige of being "a...
...In fact, the musical climates of the two works are at times remarkably alike, the young people of the story prompting a return to an early style...
...Its power is essentially the blare of the big city...
...If Bernstein had been compelled to compete for long with the oldtime tune-smiths, he probably would have been driven back to serious composition...
...nobody went around whistling his tunes...
...he did not have an original style...
...And, despite its title, the dramatic design and sequacious development of symphonic composition were wanting, their place supplied by a restless stream of improvisatory ideas...
...ON MUSIC By Albert Goldman The Promise of Leonard Bernstein Leonard Bernstein, in addition to being our leading nativeborn conductor, has long enjoyed the prestige of being "a promising young American composer...
...Actually, Bernstein was very poorly equipped for Broadway competition...
...Like other early Bernstein stage pieces, Fancy Free exists today only as a theatergoer's memory...
...There can be no doubt, however, that Bernstein's growth as a serious composer was in fact stunted by his decision to play for the big stakes...
...Whereas in Candide Bernstein wrote light-hearted parodies of 19th century operetta styles, in West Side Story he soberly adapted, according to the dramatic circumstances, a variety of styles—classical, semiclassical and popular...
...Jeremiah is best regarded as a precocious endeavor to write a major symphonic work in a tone of high seriousness...
...One wonders whether he will find the courage to step across, or whether, as is more likely, he will continue to exploit opportunistically the muddled values of American cultural life...
...Even more curious, though, is the dual nature of Bernstein's limited output...
...Bernstein's Candide (1956) contributed to the new phase by establishing three wholly new requirements for a Broadway musical: First, the music had to be sophisticated, with real cultural uplift—no more Betty Compton and Adolph Green vulgarity...
...For the smirking, slithering street gangs, he took off on Be-bop...
...A cynic might argue that in pandering his talent to popular taste Bernstein was actually taking the more difficult path...
...And this he got with West Side Story, which is, the snobs notwithstanding, his best theater piece to date...
...He has been at work there ever since...
...he was able to hold his own...
...But the shift in popular taste that turned the musical comedy into the serious musical (really a revival of the operetta form) gave Bernstein a chance to display his real talents for dextrous manipulation of musical materials...
...However great the promise of such a work may have been in the '40s, the product was itself rather banal...
...Compare him with Kurt Weill and the difference between the showman and the artist is at once apparent...
...But I had the feeling that the music was jazzy, razzy and impudently American...
...One had the feeling that Bernstein's temperament was illsuited to musical comedy...
...For a short time Jeremiah, with its easily accessible content and derivative style, impressed a public eager to embrace the moderns but generally repelled by their obscure and intimidating styles...
...Its style was polyglot: terms and phrases from the late Romantics (particularly the Russians) spiced with bits of modern argot...
...Bernstein offers us a split view of beauty and horror so simplified that we cannot even take him seriously...
...The most impressive and revealing feature of the work was its orchestration—a bright, hard surface of professional competence which contrasted oddly with the piece's inchoate substance...
...Success with the middle-brows, after all, demands the same whole-hearted application as dedication to the highest ideals...
...Listening to the music and scanning the score again, I found little to justify my impression...
...the difference is simply one of seriousness...
...It would be naive, though, to attribute to a show like West Side Story a value as art...
...Second, the various numbers were to be treated compositionally in the manner of operetta—no more 32-bar show tunes...
...For the Puerto Rican numbers, he availed himself of Copland's style in El Salon Mexico...
...he wasn't even another Richard Rodgers...
...Weill contemplates his dehumanized world with a detachment that is both tender and ironic—a complex but unified vision...
...and he was weighed down with a heavy-duty technique that was useless in the world of pit bands and chorus girls...
...But he soon discovered that his partyimitations of Broadway musicals, though they made money, consistently fell short of the real thing...
...After belying the promise of his youth, Leonard Bernstein has gradually returned to the border that divides art from entertainment...
...that one risks a great deal on Broadway, while there is no risk at all in living off the foundations and competing for critical awards...
...Though ambitious, ingenious and vastly superior to the run-of-the-mill musical, Candide was a series of near misses...
...The orchestration had the same high-voltage aura as Jeremiah...
...Musically, West Side Story is a further development of the technique of stylistic adaptation Bernstein employed in Candide...
...In 1944, the ballet was performed an astonishing total of 250 times...
...He wasn't another Gershwin...
...But for something of substance one searches in vain...
...He did not have the lyric gift, the essential talent of the show composer...
...Bernstein's aim was off on all the elevated targets...
...Today the work is rarely performed...
...Perhaps its failure was deserved...
...A Bernstein musical of 10 years ago sounds like any other musical of 10 years ago: It sounds exactly 10 years out of date...
...Its timely plotsituation—three young sailors on the town—and the fresh, inventive choreography of Jerome Robbins were undoubtedly important reasons for the ballet's success...
...But Bernstein was a nervy young man and a facile imitator...
...So he has been considered, at any rate, since the mid-1940s, when in a single year he produced two popular compositions, the Jeremiah Symphony and the ballet Fancy Free...
...Third, there was now no need for an original and consistent style because the technique of musical parody would suit the text perfectly—take-offs on Offenbach, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Johann Strauss, a fine opportunity for a clever composer familiar with every standard style...
...its sentiment is the Angst of adolescence...
...There are pages and pages of sketchy rhythmicism, the three dimensions of music threatening at every moment to collapse into one, and there are some beguiling echos of George Gershwin and Aaron Copland, Bernstein's models for light-classical composition...
...Following the pattern of many another American artist and intellectual, Bernstein began his commercial career with the breezy assumption that he could pick up on the going thing and do it as well or better than the next guy...
...Its content was adolescent Weltschmerz, a mood soon dissipated by the cool, dry atmosphere of the modern world...
...For his youthful lovers, he adapted the most romantic of serious styles, the long, throbbing melodic line of Tschaikowsky...
...his one direct hit was scored on a Jewish mama...
...It is difficult to judge the moral significance of Bernstein's move...
...Taken on its own terms, West Side Story is an effective composition for the theater...
...Art demands integrity of vision, a quality that Bernstein has never attained...
...Unfortunately, Candide failed at the box office, though it registered, ironically, a succes d'estime with the upper middle-brows...
...what he required, it seems now, was musical tragedy...
...After the gravity of Jeremiah, Bernstein played truant to the tragic muse in Fancy Free...
...Once Bernstein had established himself as a serious composer, he crossed up the pundits, who were already hailing him as an American Mendelssohn, by lighting out for Broadway...
...Yet except for Age of Anxiety, musically a dreary void, Bernstein has written almost nothing of a serious nature for close to two decades...
...It is curious how reputations sometimes remain standing after their bases have long crumbled...
Vol. 45 • May 1962 • No. 11
