THE CONDUCT OF LIFE
FERGUSON, ANDREW
THE CONDUCT OF LIFE PBS Airs a Biography of Leonard Bernstein By Andrew Ferguson The PBS series American Masters opens its new season on Wednesday, October 28, with a biography of Leonard...
...More than once in his long career he fell off the podium, a casualty of his own enthusiasm...
...Classical music is an elite art form, it’s subtler and more sophisticated than most other kinds of music...
...A large number of critics felt the music was a casualty, too—though the documentary passes over the negative critical reception that often followed his performances...
...Okay, you’ve had your fun,” Koussevitsky told him after the premiere...
...and many people now in their forties and fifties fell permanently in his debt...
...He seemed to be impersonating the music...
...not so privately) to his omnivorous sexual appetite—an appetite fed by fame and wealth and a steady freshet of worshipful, young, and usually male acolytes...
...The dirge of the Seventh Symphony, taken from Bernstein’s last performance as a conductor, plays behind shots of the maestro’s funeral cortege as it wound its way to a Brooklyn cemetery in October 1990...
...But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised...
...This isn’t quite accurate...
...Who would have guessed...
...vate the audience...
...I want you to be a real music listener...
...But Bernstein was unconditioned for serenity...
...The brief excerpt in “Reaching for the Note” offers no more than a hint of their depth and charm...
...As a young student under Copland and Koussevitsky he composed art music exclusively, until his friend Jerome Robbins brought him an idea for a ballet—which quickly evolved into On the Town, a musical comedy that ran on Broadway for more than a year during the war...
...In all things he was a shameless exhibitionist, but never more so than when he took command of an orchestra...
...The debut was carried live on national radio and made the front page of the next day’s New York Times...
...The show’s title—“Reaching for the Note”—is suitably overripe, in the Bernstein manner, and just this side of pretentious...
...Listening to Jeremiah and The Age of Anxiety, his first and second symphonies, you feel as though you’re back in Eisenhower America, being pressured to do all kinds of enlightened things: vote for Adlai Stevenson, read Camus, believe Alger Hiss...
...His father was a well-to-do supplier of beauty products with little interest in the impractical fancies of music and actively discouraged his son...
...he wanted to eleYOU COULDN’T ESCAPE HIM IF YOU HAD ANY INTEREST IN CLASSICAL MUSIC—AND EVEN IF YOU DIDN’T...
...He must have recognized the irony and hated it...
...Previn puts it, “everyone’s idea of a classical musician...
...THE CONDUCT OF LIFE PBS Airs a Biography of Leonard Bernstein By Andrew Ferguson The PBS series American Masters opens its new season on Wednesday, October 28, with a biography of Leonard Bernstein...
...The shows are most striking in his absolute refusal to condescend...
...He would hunch his shoulders and twist his torso, arch his arms and shuffle his feet, leap skyward and sometimes even pantomime the instruments as he gave them a cue...
...But Bernstein was a composer, too, one who suffered painfully from that dreaded artistic affliction, the Masterpiece Complex...
...His program notes overflow with references to psychoanalysis, existential angst, the Loss of Faith, the consumer society—the small talk of the New School faculty lounge circa 1955...
...His music for the stage wasn’t immune to important-itis, either...
...no American even led a major American orchestra...
...It’s a lovely opening, casting the rest of the documentary in a melancholy glow and underscoring its unexpected theme: that for all his high spirits and dazzling attainments, Bernstein was tormented by his own unfulfilled ambitions and failed promise...
...As we watched him answer the question, our pleasure in music was immeasurably deepened...
...So the pictures are nice, with lots of rarely seen home movies and other unfamiliar footage...
...But in trying to reach a wide audience Bernstein made music that broke free of its literal subject matter, bubbling with a kinetic energy that seemed almost self-created...
...Because, after all, he was Leonard Bernstein the First, the only one we’ll ever have—not good enough for him, maybe, but more than good enough for the rest of us...
...He wanted to take away the notion that classical music was an elitist art form,” one critic says of the Young People’s Concerts...
...With a rueful shrug, a friend says in “Reach for the Note”: “He wanted to be Gustav Mahler the Second...
...But that’s what his viewers became: real listeners...
...Like all Bernstein biographies, “Reaching for the Note” locates the turning point in his professional life at November 14, 1943, when Lenny, then twenty-five, filled in for an ill Bruno Walter to conduct— without rehearsal, on four hours’ notice—the most prestigious symphony orchestra in the country, the New York Philharmonic...
...As a teacher Bernstein was emphatic that superior music expressed only itself...
...Wracked with self-doubt...
...His footwork was magnificent last night,” wrote his nemesis, Harold Schonberg of the New York Times, in a typically wry notice from the mid-1960s...
...Today his symphonies in particular sound hopelessly overblown, puffed up with a kind of midcult, postwar pretentiousness...
...But now his fellow musicians were attesting to Bernstein’s seriousness as an artist, even as he was undeniably, flamboyantly American...
...And he hungered to write the serious works that would overshadow the scores he did for the musical stage and upon which, to his undying frustration, his popular reputation rests: On the Town, Candide, and, preeminently, West Side Story...
...This isn’t a recipe for a serene life...
...But one did wish that there had been more music and less exhilaration...
...There was, to begin with, his style as a conductor...
...His celebrity was owing in large part to his appearances on television, in the more than fifty Young People’s Concerts he presented on CBS from 1958 to 1969...
...Overnight, Lenny was one of the most famous men in America,” says his brother...
...The first music we hear isn’t Bernstein’s but Beethoven’s...
...Privately he craved the comforts of family, but as he grew older he succumbed Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...What faith it must have taken to make that statement to millions of Americans, slumped in front of their TVs...
...With his good looks, his unruly hair, his contagious ardor, and the magnificent cut of his white tie and tails, he became, as Andr...
...The public, of course, lapped it up...
...Bernstein insecure...
...This is a very high achievement, enough by itself to validate any career...
...The sentiment dogged him throughout his life—this sharp division between his popular works and the works that he hoped would confirm him to the world as a great composer...
...I touched the keys,” Bernstein said later, with typical extravagance, “and I knew I’d touched God...
...Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitsky encouraged his composing, and Fritz Reiner and Dimitri Mitropoulos taught him to conduct...
...With all that ego,” says his friend Arthur Laurents, “he never thought he was good enough...
...As a composer, though, he freighted his scores with fashionable, derivative ideas about simply everything...
...His life was balanced precariously among opposing urges...
...Bernstein’s great gift was to make subtlety and sophistication accessible...
...All of which Bernstein did, of course, with great enthusiasm...
...His sometime collaborator Stephen Sondheim called it “important-itis...
...The family didn’t own a piano until Lenny was ten...
...Anybody can hum a tune or feel a rhythm,” Bernstein said in one of the early shows, “but I want you to do something else...
...These performances, which are still available on videotape, are in many respects his most indelible achievement, a marvel of popularization that roped thousands of newcomers, maybe millions, into the pleasure of classical music...
...At the time, conventional opinion held that serious musicians were by definition European...
...Candide, for example, was a thick-fingered satire of McCarthyism, and West Side Story an earnest plea for ethnic harmony, as high-minded as a pamphlet from the Good Government League...
...And so, inevitably, he was discontented to the end...
...And the music—well, the music’s pretty good, too...
...That’s not really true— exaggeration must run in the family— but “Reaching for the Note” does a good job conveying how important the moment was for American music...
...Bernstein didn’t want to lower the art form...
...He was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1918 and grew up in Boston, the son of Russian immigrants...
...You couldn’t escape Bernstein in the 1950s or ’60s, if you had the slightest interest in classical music, and even if you didn’t...
...Bernstein’s was one of the richest lives in twentieth-century music, but a two-hour documentary, satisfying as it is, can only skip across the surface...
...Now get back to serious work...
...Yet with a few exceptions his serious pieces have failed to last...
...Candide’s overture and choral pieces, the dance music from West Side Story, a dozen other tunes from that score and from On the Town: These, most likely, are the music that will last, destined to please audiences many generations removed from our own...
...his conflicting ambitions pushed him to a state of constant motion...
...As the most celebrated conductor of his day, he longed for the solitude and freedom from distraction that might have allowed him to become a great composer...
...The question he returned to again and again was, “Why does music give pleasure...
...This is television, after all...
...Yet during his composing sabbaticals he couldn’t wait to return to the concert hall...
...God responded favorably, and by twenty he was under the tutelage of the most famous musicians in pre-war America...
...Too bad, too bad...
Vol. 4 • November 1998 • No. 8
