The Star of American Music

...That is why the triumph of his career is the show that unflinchingly takes innocence itself for its theme, without hiding behind Manhattan's facade...

...If Copland was one pole of musical influence, the other was George Gershwin...

...One might wish, too, for a little less schmaltz in Bernstein's delivery, a bit of picante to put on the table alongside the chicken fat...

...Its music, consequently, is Bernstein's most satisfying-self-mocking but confident, ironic but warm, humane but tough, romantic without being sentimental, light, spritely, deft, tuneful...

...Findings is the closest thing we are going to get lo a Bernstein autobiography until he writes (he memoirs he promises his readers in the Preface...

...In between are magazine articles, short stories, idle musings, letters, eulogies, TV scripts, speeches, poems, credos, and tributes of all kinds-to, among ot hers, John F. Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, Serge Koussevitzky, Marc Biitzstein, and Aaron Copland at 70,75, and again at 79...

...Time and hist ory may even show him to be the truest and most authentic of his time and place...

...After staking out a position as the successor both to Copland and to Gershwin, he proved to be neither...

...Bernstein's tastes place him firmly to the right of the avant garde...

...Bernstein's most personal volume, it offers a near-half century of the Maestro's writings, from a 1935 high school composition on his father to a commencement address delivered in May 1980 at Johns Hopkins University urging an end to the arms race...

...In his Introduction to a 1973 Gershwin biography, reprinted in Findings, he declared: "Gershwin was certainly one of the true, authentic geniuses American music has produced...

...He was talented, smart, strikingly goodlooking, mature beyond his years and, best of all, American in a field where a Central European accent had seemed to be the ticket of admission...

...c W^till, what future generations may find most interesting about Bernstein is not his value as a critic and teacher, not his achievement as a conductor, but his relative failure as a composer...

...More embarrassing to this classically trained musician who is too honest not to see the truth, none of his symphonies is likely to outlast Rhapsody in Blue or An American in Paris by the pop songwriter Gershwin...

...In the early writings one often learns as much from what is not said or is stated indirectly as from what is on the page...

...Those who appreciate him for what he has to offer, without expecting perfection, will get much pleasure from his sixth book, Findings (Simon and Schuster, 376 pp., $17.95), a remarkably handsome work generously illustrated with photos and documents extending over his long career...

...Nothing he has written for the concert hall is the equal of Copland's Appalachian Spring or Billy the Kid...

...Bernstein carried it off masterfully, leaving the stage a star...

...Instead of expressing the urbanity of New York, a la Gershwin, Bernstein's musicals communicate something comparatively naive, the encounter with the city by outsiders-sailors on leave, girls from Ohio, Puerto Ricans...

...Unlike the legions of critics who pretend there is no problem or prefer to blame the audience, he is a valuable voice to have around in a period of crisis...

...Somewhere between Harvard and fame Bernstein apparently lost his foppish arrogance, possibly at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where he did graduate work and was so disliked by his fellow students that one of them threatened to shoot him...

...When Copland himself turned in that direction, Bernstein felt practically betrayed: "Of all people, why you...

...His foolishness is the foolishness of good intentions...

...A concert review written for the Harvard Advocate, for example, reveals an assured, emotionally nuanced young man who is also very much the self-conscious esthete with a tendency toward preciousness (the pianist is described as having an earring depending from her left ear...

...won acclaim for his song cycle / Hate Music (first performed the evening before his conducting debut...

...The composer, in Bernstein's words, was a "surrogate father," ready to listen to the younger man's fears and complaints, to advise and reassure...

...Perhaps the change was the result of the relationship that developed between the aspiring musician and Copland after their first meeting in 1937...

...He says of this paper, with much justification, that it "seems to me as valid today as it was some four decades ago, in spite of the volcanic changes in our musical universe since then (and in spite of a certain gratuitous tone of collegiate smart-assery...

...He never fulfilled the promise of that triumphant 1943-44 season...

...During the 1943-44 season he also: received a New York Music Critics Circle award when his First Symphony was chosen the best new orchestral work of the year...

...Candide gave Bernstein a subject that allowed him to feel genuinely comfortable, wholly free...

...Having leapt to the center of America's musical life at the outset, he has remained a fixture, practically an institution, ever since...

...He burst upon the scene in 1943...

...I, for one, could have done without some of the " Juvenalia" from the '30s, and a number of the poems...

...Bernstein has made a stronger mark on Broadway...

...Bernstein, to his credit, has unceasingly championed the genius of Tin Pan Alley in the face of persistent dismissals by loftier sorts who seem to consider popularity the equivalent of vulgarity...

...As early as his dissertation, he was describing Gershwin as a "major composer" whose work "is highly significant and important in the history of American music...

...His initial appearance as a conductor was a schoolchild's fantasy, so cliche that it subsequently served as the script for a dozen Hollywood B-movies: An unknown 25-year-old assistant conductor for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, more a gopher, actually, than a musician, he had to take the podium for a nationally broadcast radio concert one Sunday afternoon with only a few hours' notice and no time for rehearsals...

...Also included is Bernstein's complete undergraduate dissertation, entitled "The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music...

...If I can write one real, moving American opera that any American can understand (and one that is, notwithstanding, a serious musical work), I shall be a happy man...

...Bernstein has insisted that music must be "fun" (a tricky word he once devoted an article to) and should communicate...

...Aaron became the closest thing to a composition teacher I ever had"—quite a coup for a struggling student scarcely out of his teens...

...Writing of the same compositions at about the same time, Paul Rosenfeld, the dean of highbrow music critics, sneered: "That these pieces are characteristic American productions is not to be doubted...

...Pointing out that the last great symphony in the classical tradition was Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements, composed 37 years ago, he has wondered aloud whether symphonic music is dead and orchestras merely museum pieces...

...A good deal of their time together was spent with Bernstein receiving bar-by-bar corrections to his music...

...Bernstein's Wunderjahr was not limited to his triumph at Carnegie Hall...

...enjoyed a success with his ballet Fancy Free...

...Their spirit unfortunately makes them so, since weakness of spirit, possibly as a consequence of the circumstance that the New World attracted the less stable human types, remains an American condition...

...We are all in his debt...

...Bruno Walter, the guest conductor, had turned up ill and Artur Rodzinski, the permanent musical director, was snowbound in Stockbridge, Massachusetts...

...During his astonishing 40 years in the public eye, he has enriched t he nation and the world with his contributions as conductor, composer, performer, teacher, critic, television personality, and goodwill ambassador...

...Bernstein's flaws, however, never derive from a presence of evil...

...Inevitably, the book is a mixed bag, by turns moving, irritating, instructive, egocentric...

...The program was a tough one, full of heavy Romantic furniture by Schumann, Wagner and R. Strauss...

...In seeking to perpetuate Gershwin's spirit, he has created works-on the Town, Wonderful Town, West Side Story?immersed in New York City, as if Manhattan itself were his subject, the inspiration for his music...

...and had a box-office smash with his Broadway musical On the Town...

...This lack of guile and of cynicism, this total sincerity with no hard edges, can drive fanatical sophisticates and other irony junkies up a wall...

...The years only fortified Bernstein's convictions...

...Every reader will discover something he or she would take an editor's pencil to...

...Certainly one of the finest pieces in the book is the 1970 magazine article, "Aaron Copland at 70: An Intimate Sketch...

...Because he is not immune to foolishness, the malicious Tom Wolfe may have succeeded in linking his name forever to the notion of "radical chic...

...And as the show's revivals over the last few years reveal, if there is one Bernstein work audiences will be enjoying for years to come, it is Candide...

...Despite some experiments of his own with 12-tone techniques, he has never hidden his distaste for the abandonment of tonality by so many of this century's composers nor his belief that the tonal system is in some sense inborn in man...

...No figure of comparable stature has fretted so openly about the gap that has developed between modern music and the concert-going public...

...He is a musical traditionalist who has declared that all lasting art is linked to the past...

...Bernstein has his faults, to be sure...

...Unfortunately, these shows rarely permit a listener to forget that the international concert hall, not Broadway, is Bernstein's first home, for the sophistication of their music clashes with the earthiness of their books, most notably in West Side Story-which might have been entitled, An Eastsider's Story of the West Side...

...In the Copland "Sketch," he recorded his unhappiness when younger musicians, after the War, deserted his mentor to follow the siren nonsong of Arnold Schoenberg...