Diabolus in Musica

...In the area of classical compositions, the loss was relatively small...

...As I write this, I have just played Bernstein's last classical composition, Concerto for Orchestra, and found it so much blaringly cacophonous posturing...

...He was named assistant conductor there in 1943-44, when the principal was the eccentric Artur Rodzinski...

...The pianist and conductor Christoph Eschenbach, after inviting Lenny to a house in the Canary Islands that he shared with another German musician, Justus Frantz (who holds the unique honor of having been the lover of both Lenny and his elder daughter), commented: "He opened himself always to the widest possible angle of the horizon, while embracing the center of heaven and the center of earth...

...a miracle," comments our terminal molester...

...With all due respect, that sounds perilously like Algernon's opening remark from the piano in The Importance of Being Earnest: "I don't play accurately??anyone can play accurately??but I play with wonderful expression...

...Meanwhile Lenny studied piano with ever more prestigious teachers in the Boston area, and at Harvard got both a musical and solid liberal-arts education...

...At the same time, he retained the name's Jewishness...

...His Harvard friend, the critic and composer Arthur Berger, wrote in the New York Sun that "the stamping of the foot should be avoided...

...and Janacek should not be spelled Janacek...

...The forms of this pathology??for such it seems to me??were many and monstrous...

...It seems she took time off from dying to recognize him...

...He is...

...reversed the time-honored playing order of Cav and Pag at the Met because he conducted only the former, but wanted to be the one taking the final bow...

...Reviewed by John Simon IT ISN'T EASY to write a biography of Leonard Bernstein, there having been so many Leonard Bernsteins...

...They are to the tone-deaf what Braille is to the blind...

...Burton calls this "an imperishable account...

...By this I don't merely mean the mostly destructive marriage to the actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn, during which he was having homosexual sex left and right while she remained pathetically faithful (he did not really start loving her until she lay painfully dying of cancer...

...Even in the context of his famous lampooning of radical chic, Tom Wolfe allowed Lenny to be "the man who more than any other has broken down the wall between elite music and popular tastes...

...He put on musicals starring his younger sister, Shirley, at the family summer house in Sharon, Massachusetts...

...That a great deal of Lenny's untidy private life is related in detail is surely consonant with what the later Bernstein was eager to parade before us...

...Where Bernstein shines??apart from his Young People's Concerts and TV talks ??is in his musical-comedy and ballet writing...

...Copland, for all their closeness, never recommended Bernstein to his publisher...

...the international goodwill ambassador...

...Burton] asks few hard questions...

...Lillian Libman, in her memoir of Stravinsky's last years, And Music at the Close, tells of Lenny kneeling at Stravinsky's feet after conducting The Rite of Spring, only to be told, "I do not agree with your tempi...

...And he gesticulated furiously in an imitation of Bernstein on the rostrum...

...Leonard Bernstein"??with the "stein" pronounced as in a beer mug??has a nice trochaic rhythm and progression, three short vowels debouching on a diphthong, not to mention the da Vincian overtone...

...That he was proficient at languages was no drawback either...

...A music without beginning or end," is all he gets out of the moribund musician: "She was already there, on the other side...

...Look how deeply I feel this music" his every conducting gesture and expression were saying, and when he couldn't say it with music, he said it in endless streams of words...

...A score is but an approximation, while intent is immutable...

...Earlier he studied with Serge Koussevitzky, whose assistant at the Berkshire Music Center he became in 1942...

...And Stravinsky's famous reference to Bernstein as "a musical department store" is only semi-dismissive: Department stores contain quality goods as well as gewgaws...

...No, his tragedy, or tragicomedy, was his narcissism combined with a nouveau riche, arriviste mentality that added up to an egomania more frenziedly appetitive, more tirelessly aggressive than most...

...Before that he met and almost certainly had an affair with Dimitri Mitropoulos, the conductor of the New York Philharmonic...

...Leonard was always very close to his sister, giving rise to widespread and persistent rumors about an incestuous relationship, the one thing Burton does not address in the book, possibly because Shirley is still alive...

...It is to Humphrey Burton's credit that he can record such incidents with a straight face...

...But Lenny was never lacking in the adulation of the obscure and the famous, the latter often fellow homosexuals as well as artists who needed his helping hand...

...It manifested itself early on in the need to call the great by their first names or nicknames...

...My cavils would be with the sometimes shaky grammar, a few misused words, and the so very British problem with foreign languages, including such absurdities as successo (supposedly Italian), cher (supposedly French), Sudbahnhof(mpposedly German), Deo Gracias (supposedly Latin...

...the party giver and social butterfly...

...What was Lenny like on the podium...

...He probably had affairs with the first two??as he probably did not with the attractive young women he also dated...

...why is it necessary to put on an exhibition of your insides...

...When a journalist rose and said "You're talking rubbish," the self-serving oratory continued undaunted...

...Bernard Holland correctly observed in the New York Times Book Review, however, that "hagiography is in the air...

...Bernstein always had to have the best suites in the best hotels...

...the radical sympathizer and capitalist pig...

...or even the alleged "tragedy that being endowed with so many talents, he was forced to neglect one part of his divided self in favor of another" (his Renaissance namesake managed to cope quite well with a similar predicament...

...Having just heard of Gershwin's death, he announced the news and played the Prelude #2...

...Logorrhea and rhetorical pantomime were his specialties...

...Some credit for the "Leonard" must go to the parents, Sam and Jennie, who began calling him Len, Lenny, or (as they pronounced it) "Lennuhtt...

...Sometimes these displays reached the height of obnoxiousness...

...Coming out of a theater, he and Shirley ended up sharing a scab cab with me and my date...

...Otherwise, this is a solid piece of research that avoids both facile moralizing and special pleading...

...In a 1977 missive (printed in The Letters of Paul Bowles), Bowles says, "I've always felt that Lenny B. would be all right if one could kidnap him and hold him prisoner, far from everything that could remind him of the concept of being successful...

...There was no time for a single rehearsal, only for going over the scores with Maestro Walter...

...The Boston critic Michael Steinberg speaks in another relevant context about Bernstein's "fatal gift of projecting himself rather than the topic at hand...

...She knew...

...When, as his student, he called Reiner "Fritz," the conductor responded with "Mr...

...Over the years Bernstein repeatedly confirmed his approach...

...But he implied that it had no business trying to be "serious," noting that "at its worst" it was "conductor's music??eclectic in style and facile in inspiration...

...the good Jew and would-be wasp...

...made his debut as a pianist with a professional orchestra in his junior year...

...What a relief it was to have his Spartan opposite, Pierre Boulez, take over at the Philharmonic...

...As the producer of many of Bernstein's later TV documentaries, he knew the man well in his three last decades...

...His second PR coup was resisting the urgings of Roy Harris and Serge Koussevitzky that he de-Semitize his last name...

...But he does require lots of slapping down...

...Bartok's first name was Bela, not Bela...

...Thus when the magnificent Nadia Boulanger??music teacher to almost all the great??lay on her deathbed, Lenny rushed over to interview her on how she was feeling...

...Then maybe you'll stop waving your arms about like this...

...Good,' replied the aging Austrian...

...the Israel Philharmonic...

...Roger Vaughan, in his book on Herbert von Karajan, relates the possibly apocryphal statement of Bernstein's chief rival that he spent 10 years trying to popularize Sibelius, and Bernstein undid all his work in one hour...

...the concert pianist and accompanist...

...Humphrey Carpenter, in his Benjamin Britten biography, quotes Bernstein when he conducted the American concert premiere of Peter Grimes at Tanglewood in 1945: "I strongly feel in some ways as though I had written it myself...

...in Chicago, Claudia Cassidy wrote that he "conducted the way Joe DiMaggio played baseball...

...The man was enamored of the sounds he made...

...Copland remained ambiguous about his friend's music...

...Bernstein's foibles and failures aren't skirted...

...and those who, like Bernstein, draw no line and imagine themselves creating what they are conducting...

...Bach, Stravinsky, Ravel...

...Sister was named Shirley Anne, he does tell us, "after the heroine of Jennie's favorite book, Anne of Green Gables'' In fact, though, it was after Anne Shirley, who played the lead in the movie version...

...Joan at the Stake, with a text by Paul Claudel, deserves better than the pejorative "melodramatic oratorio...

...Cher Lenny," she uttered...

...After Harvard he graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied piano with Isabelle Vengerova and conducting with Fritz Reiner...

...It included, Burton notes, leaps three feet high off the podium...

...the university music professor and Tanglewood conducting teacher...

...In an early letter (not quoted by Burton), Thomson wrote, "He has too real a talent and too good a mind [not to] come out all right eventually...

...the television music-popularizer...

...Burton aptly compares Bernstein to an internationally acclaimed jockey, jumping from one saddle into the next worldwide, as he conducted or toured with great orchestras...

...The traveling curtailed his composing...

...he asks, modestly omitting the last of the big Bs...

...There was the conductor...

...On the Town, Wonderful Town, West Side Story, and Candide are permanent contributions to our musical theater, as Fancy Free, and perhaps Facsimile...

...Humphrey Burton has written an always readable, engagingly outspoken and, in its way, encyclopedic biography...

...Was his stance sheer hubris or a justifiable modus operandi...

...A modest Britisher, he never mentions himself by name??proof that, in biography too, opposites attract...

...Yet Ned Rorem defends his friend Lenny in an essay in Settling the Score: "Since he too is a composer, he knows that the magic lies not in the communication of sound, but in the sound of communication...

...At its best, he thought it "of vibrant rhythmic invention and irresistible elan, often carrying with it a terrific dramatic punch...

...in the Soviet Union, the name was pronounced Baim-SHTAYN...

...Besides being a ham and egocentric, he was shrewd enough to know that his histrionics paid off...

...amber" in German??gave Leonard some foreign-sounding prestige...

...had the buttonholes of his suits redone to accommodate the American Academy rosette...

...Along with the rest of the world, Sam and Jennie Bernstein were convinced of their son's musical mission on November 13, 1943, the day he had to take over a New York Philharmonic concert from the sick Bruno Walter...

...I myself got a whiff of this stardom at the publication party at the Waldorf for the new edition of Grove's Dictionary, where Bernstein, lovingly playing with his white silk scarf, delivered a rambling, irrelevant, interminable speech...

...It would have been even more detailed (the original manuscript ran to 1,800 typed pages) if the editors hadn't done considerable pruning??but not bowdlerizing, for what is left is hardly unsensational...

...Consolation followed apace in Los Angeles, where "Cyndi Lauper, a hugely popular rock singer, went down on her knees to him [at] the 1985 Grammy ceremonies," where he received a lifetime achievement award on top of Miss Lauper's genuflection...

...All I remember of the pleasant conversation is Lenny's making fun of his friend Jerome Robbins for having staged Arthur Kopit's Oh Dad, Poor Dad, which he referred to as "Jerry's masturbation...

...Somewhat to his chagrin nobody recognized him...

...and managed, by hook or crook, to meet such composers as Aaron Copland, Marc Blitzstein, Roy Harris, and William Schuman...

...Bernstein's problem, the critic B.H...

...Bernstein," but such ironies were ignored...

...He might have included Paul Bowles and even, at a remove, Gershwin...

...When she affirms this, he presses for details: "Mozart...

...Near the end of his life, conducting Mozart's mass in Austria, Bernstein spoke of "this joy, the feeling of composing in performance...

...In her book on Bernstein, Joan Peyser is more outspoken...

...The answer is that Bernstein could never stop talking or miming...

...it was at Gene Kelly's house that you could find him in L. A., and it was his advice Barbra Streisand sought when looking for a piano teacher...

...asks the friendly bedside ghoul instead of "de la musique," but under the circumstances we may pardon his French...

...Even where one agreed with how Bernstein's conducting sounded, it was very hard to endure the way it looked, especially in his early days as what Virgil Thomson called "a bare-knuckles conductor...

...Humphrey Burton's new biography is the fullest account of Bernstein's activities, public and private, we are likely to get for a while, although another biography is already in the offing...

...and the Vienna Philharmonic, in part perhaps because Austrian audiences excelled at adulation...

...Along the way he managed to insult Sir Harold Macmillan (present in his capacity of publisher) with remarks about the Profumo scandal, and the audience for not remembering that this was the 17th anniversary of JFK's assassination...

...Shirley left no lasting impression...

...It all went splendidly??the concert was also broadcast...

...I myself stopped going to the Philharmonic, for I could no longer watch the shenanigans...

...The son of Ukrainian Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Bernstein (1918-1990) attended Boston Latin School and Harvard...

...At 19, Lenny took a job as music counselor at a summer camp and had to play the piano during lunch on Parents' Weekend...

...Franco Zeffirelli, in his autobiography, declares: "Lenny has got such energy, he gives so much, and talks...

...Bernstein had a vast talent for self-promotion...

...A queer compliment for a Harvard man, but otherwise typical...

...Haggin kept reminding us, was lack of discipline across the board...

...His is an example of the artist's life helping to louse up his work...

...the jack-of-all-trades and not quite master of one...

...Much later he was to declare, "With works by Mahler I seem to be playing some of my own...

...You have taught me how to conduct Mozart tonight,' he said...

...Significantly, neither Koussevitzky nor Mitropoulos was eager to program Bernstein's classical music, and, according to Burton, "jazz musicians never thought much of his gifts as an improviser...

...Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau called Lenny's piano accompaniment "something exceedingly intimate and yet extending far beyond the edge of the stage," but the equally great singer Sena Jurinac observed, "He is like a dervish in the pit...

...Not once did he mention the encyclopedia being honored...

...The one time I met Bernstein was during a taxi strike...

...It seemed to me part of Bernstein's personality, which was egomaniacal, megalomaniacal and just plain manic, and could lead to very cavalier musical interpretations...

...Conductors, I would say, come in three varieties: those who try to get as close as possible to the composer's intentions, and serve them selflessly...

...The baton didn't help much when he adopted it as an energy saver because he was plagued by back pain, and because the Israel Philharmonic presented him with one carved from an olive tree in the Holy Land...

...the ecumenical hugger and kisser, and garrulous self-promoter...

...But Bernstein never stopped...

...the famed Israeli soprano's name was Netania Davrath rather than Netanya Dovrat...

...Then he insisted that everyone stand in a two-minute Kennedy tribute...

...Bernstein felt an equal need to patronize and insult friends, assistants and even superiors??and, conversely, to display his affection by planting wet, sloppy kisses on everyone from the Chancellor of Austria to the Queen of England and an 80-year-old Rose Kennedy, whom he uprooted with his bear hug...

...Furthermore, the family threw open the Bernstein Archives to Burton, something they had never done before, and helped in other ways...

...The New Yorker once described Bernstein's platform style as "a Byzantine monk frantically shaking martinis...

...When at a 1963 memorial concert for Francis Poulenc he accompanied his beloved Jennie Tourel, I said in New York magazine: "Inverting the usual procedure, the ivories seemed to be tickling Leonard Bernstein, who was carrying on like a cockatoo in orgasm...

...And the book runs to 530-odd tall, too fully-packed pages...

...His favorite aggregations were the New York Philharmonic, whose sole director he was from 1959 to '69...

...Vous entendez la musique dans la tete...

...After attending Cost Fan Tutte [Washington, 1979] Bernstein," reports Burton, "went down on his knees to [Karl] Bohm in his dressing room...

...At the height of his career Bernstein could antagonize the BBC Symphony Orchestra by keeping them waiting, then condescending to them with a talk about "Eddie" Elgar...

...A French critic remarked, "Had Bernstein chosen the Ravel concerto for the left hand alone, he could have been conducting all the time as well as playing...

...Bernstein ventured onto the crowded Ipanema beach wearing nothing but a string bikini and his gold shekel necklace and Mitropoulos cross...

...Although he never became a movie star ??there had been talk, early on, of his portraying Tchaikovsky with Garbo as Madame von Meck??he was a friend of movie stars...

...seated himself in JFK's favorite armchair at the White House and wouldn't heed his wife's urging to make way for the President...

...In American Music Since 1910, Virgil Thomson wrote succinctly: "Bernstein's own music tends to be derivative??chief sources Milhaud, Stravinsky, Mahler...

...Burton may be right in claiming that "however loudly he asserted his heartache at not having enough time to compose, the suspicion grows that consciously or unconsciously he accepted alternative assignments in order to put off composing...

...liked dining off the golden plates that had once belonged to Hermann Goering...

...Yet the impact of Bernstein's proselytizing gift on the public??whether it was more durable than that of, say, the latest Washington sex scandal??remains an imponderable, albeit one well worth pondering...

...though not The Dybbuk??are to ballet...

...To a majority of laymen, who cannot follow the music in any other way, it is such gyrations, such facial expressions of rapt transfiguration that spell out the meaning of the music...

...Where the Leonard came from, Burton doesn't tell us...

...the literate intellectual and pop entertainer...

...Bernstein was no better when he appeared as a pianist, usually also conducting from the piano...

...When he tried for grander things, such as the disastrous theater piece Mass (describedby Samuel Lipmanas "azany Parsifal produced by The Living Theater") or the dubiously operatic A Quiet Place, the results were fairly pitiful...

...Then I tried one of the more unassuming pieces, Chichester Psalms, which Burton calls Bernstein's "most popular choral work...

...There are two reasons for Burton's ability to turn out a capacious and revelatory volume...

...Monteverdi...

...the composer of concert, opera, Broadway, and movie music...

...But we do read that when Lenny took Shirley and his kid brother, Burton, along on a European conducting tour, Burton had to fly back to college at Dartmouth, and Leonard and Shirley spent a few days in a rented house in Eze, then moved on to Majorca by way of Barcelona, where brother and sister's sleeping in the same room raised hackles at the Ritz Hotel...

...He recollected, "As I walked off, I felt I was Gershwin...

...There are also some musical slips: King Davidis by Honegger, not Milhaud...

...even his composing and conducting were extensions of his self-besotted loquacity...

...Bernstein made his mark conducting just about every major orchestra in the world...

...Yet when he speaks of Lenny's prefatory speech at a concert where he compared his coming out of the closet with Shostakovich's defiance of Soviet tyranny, Burton may be revealing his own feelings in reporting the shock of an audience member...

...faithful always to the composer's intent...

...All wrong...

...a day with him is like four years at Yale...

...He kept insisting, "I want to hear about your writing a song that has no Copland, no Hindemith, no Strav., no Bloch, no Milhaud and no Bartok in it...

...Bernstein was right to balk: This was the age of imported conductors, and sticking with "Bernstein...

...Honegger's St...

...the lyricist, indeed poet, of sorts...

...It was to become "the despair of many recording producers...

...listener Koussevitzky dashed off a congratulatory telegram??and the 25-year-old conductor's true career had begun...

...Flanked by Poulenc's Gloria and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms on the same CD, it cuts a pretty paltry figure...

...The basic facts are well enough known...

...The view in this book is always from within the Bernstein camp...

...No less imperishable is his account of 67-year-old Bernstein in Rio: "After watching a samba competition for 24 hours...

...those who, while not disrespectful of the composer, try to imbue the score with their own idiosyncratic conception...

...the married bisexual and single and widowed homosexual...

...or his "insatiable desire to seduce every willing young man in the world" ("bisexual" was seldom more of an exaggeration than as applied to Lenny...

...Thomson, who admired Bernstein as a conductor, nevertheless deplored his "choribantic [sic] ecstasies" and "the miming of facial expressions of uncontrollable states"??Lenny's "usual dance act...

...This served him in good stead not only in Israel, one of his most successful conducting venues, but also throughout Europe??particularly in Austria and Germany, where the postwar need was to de-Nazify oneself, and what better way than by embracing a Jewish-American conductor...

...His father, who tried to bribe him into joining the family hair-and-beauty-product business, was appalled at what he foresaw as a penurious life in music...

...At 16 he legally changed his name from Louis to Leonard Bernstein, scoring his first public-relations coup: "Louis Bernstein" would not have looked good on a poster or reverberated in the ear...

...From a Japanese tour, he wrote Felicia: "I had the Emperor's suite, mind you, and slept in his bed, and had his breakfast (about 17 courses) and it was coincidentally the Emperor's birthday, so Lennuhtt was the Emperor (which is Tenno in Japanese, so now you can call me Tennuhtt...

...Burton, incidentally, is wrong when he says the Ukrainian pronunciation was Bern STEEN...

...Still, this is not your official biography...

...That the musical analyses are sketchy is not a flaw in an already long book meant principally for the general reader...

...This much is certain: He was the greatest classical musician for people who don't care about classical music, and rather more than chopped liver for those who do...

...Even a reader unconvinced of Bernstein's greatness may shed a tear or two over the account of this life's pathetic diminuendo and grisly coda...