Bushels of Bernstein

A MUSICAL GIANT’S CENTENNIAL

A musical giant’s centennial

ON Aug. 25, 1918 — a hundred years ago — Leonard Bernstein was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts, to Sam and Jennie Bernstein, first-generation immigrants from Jewish ghettos in Ukraine. Well, sort of. His birth certificate stated that the boy born that day was Louis Bernstein; his maternal grandparents were insistent that he should be so labeled, the name Louis being endemic in the family. But Sam and Jennie would have preferred that he be Leonard, and they persisted in calling him that — or Len, or Lenny — from the beginning. When the boy turned sixteen and got his driver’s license, he took that newly acquired document into the Lawrence town office and had his name changed officially to Leonard. His name was therefore in place as he completed his last year at Boston Latin School, headed off to Harvard, and started along the path to become one of the leading musical citizens of the world.

Listeners who came of age in the 1950s and ’60s are likely to cite Bernstein as a formative influence — often the formative influence — on their appreciation of serious music. It was he who first claimed the new medium of television to share his enthusiasm and wide-ranging curiosity about music. It began on Nov. 14, 1954, when Alistair Cooke hosted him on CBS’s

Omnibus, a weekly program that pointed in the enriching direction that television might have followed in the decades since and emphatically did not. The show featured America’s most gleaming talents from throughout the arts, humanities, and sciences, and Bernstein’s first appearance — which was also the first time Omnibus had flirted with classical music — became legendary. He explicated the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by comparing the composer’s discarded sketches with his ultimate choices and by having the orchestra’s members walk across a huge copy of the score, printed beneath them on the stage, to help render his musical points visible. It launched his career as America’s Music Educator in Chief. He continued to appear regularly on the small screen, exploring musical comedy, jazz, specific composers, specific instruments — not just for Omnibus, but also for the televised Young People’s Concerts of the New York Philharmonic, the orchestra he led as music director from 1958 through 1969.

Bernstein’s achievements went far beyond that, to be sure. His conducting engagements kept him flitting about the globe. In the 1970s and ’80s, he became particularly associated with the Vienna Philharmonic and the Israel Philharmonic — a mind-boggling achievement when you consider how politically incompatible Austria and Palestine were only a few decades earlier. His recorded legacy was immense, covering practically the entire symphonic repertoire and especially important for the role it played in consolidating the reputation of Gustav Mahler, whose music gained more sustained exposure thanks to his missionary work.

Then there was Bernstein the composer. He secured his place in the annals of American musical theatre through his Broadway shows On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), and West Side Story (1957), and produced a masterpiece of film music in his score for Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954). A few of his other pieces achieved repertoire status, such as the ballet Fancy Free (1944), the choral work Chichester Psalms (1965), and, in its complicated way, the operetta Candide (1956, revised repeatedly through 1989). He continued composing until his death in 1990, meeting with continual frustration that his works in more traditional concert-hall genres, such as his three symphonies, failed to gain concomitant acclaim from critics or audiences.

The centennial of his birth has occasioned a tsunami of Bernsteiniana. For much of his career, he recorded principally for the Columbia Masterworks label, which turned into CBS Masterworks and since 1990 has been in the possession of Sony. Last November, Sony released Leonard Bernstein Remastered, a 100-CD set that is said to cover about a third of what