A revealing look into Lenny’s mind
Bernstein’s thoughts on music, everything else
Brunch with Herbie: This does not suggest itself as a suitable title for a book documenting a lengthy interview with Herbert von Karajan.
Dinner with Lenny? Somehow, for Leonard Bernstein, this will do. More than 22 years after his death, the American composer and conductor remains royalty and peasantry at once, an international figure who never lost the common touch.
It says something about his paradoxical character that on Nov. 20, 1989, Bernstein opened his 10-room 18th-century Connecticut farmhouse to Jonathan Cott, a journalist he had never met, and granted his first interview in years. It would also be The Last Long Interview, as the subtitle of this brisk 165-page book (in essence, an expansion of the 8,000 words that originally appeared in Rolling Stone) denotes.
The casual, exuberant and occasionally profane discussion reflects Bernstein’s erudition and consuming interest in all aspects of the human condition. Which might not be such a good thing for those readers with a consuming interest in all aspects of concert music.
“But let me press the rewind button again,” Bernstein says after 32 tantalizing words about Mahler’s apparent migration toward atonality. “Let’s go back to my point about infants who are born with the craving to learn, having experienced the birth trauma.”
Well, Lenny, if you insist. There are reflections here on rebirthing therapy and the mystical importance of the number seven and the nature of space-time (“it’s the same thing”) that occupy interview inches that might have been, in my classical opinion, more profitably spent.
But there is also much beguiling trade talk, including the revelation that Karajan, generally perceived as Bernstein’s principal rival in the 1970s and ’80s, begged Bernstein to take over the Berlin Philharmonic after his death. “Lenny, they want you, they need you, you’re the only one!” is how Bernstein remembers the “deathbed” pleas of the AustroGerman autocrat.
Bernstein did become something like the de facto music director of the Vienna Philharmonic, and he has much to say about his curious but intense love affair with this redoubtably traditional and substantially Catholic orchestra. Is it true that the musicians “didn’t know what a Jew was”? Somehow I doubt it, but the relationship seems to have been intensified by its cultural and religious polarity.
The conductor’s testimony is somewhat contradictory concerning the sonic character of great orchestras. Bernstein says of Vienna, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic (ensembles Mahler himself led in performances of his symphonies) that they sound unalike but all like Mahler — “they cry and bite and caress and pray.”
Yet elsewhere he scorns the storied Philadelphia Sound as a generically velvety quality that Eugene Ormandy, as a competent conductor, could extract from any competent orchestra.
Conducting students will not be surprised to learn that emotion is more important than technique and that beating time is the last thing they should do. “I teach them not to make a diagonal downward sweep on the third beat … it’s like flogging a dead horse,” Bernstein says.
Canadians will discover that Bernstein’s admiration for Glenn Gould (“my angel”) was even more rapturous than commonly supposed. The conductor says he created a shrine for the pianist in his home when he died. Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations was clearly an object of veneration.
There are some revealing words about the notorious New York Philharmonic concert — or concerts — of April 1962, during which Bernstein issued an audience disclaimer concerning the slow tempo they would adopt in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1.
As the conductor makes clear, the truly slow performance was at the Thursday open rehearsal. At the Friday concert, which the critics at- tended and was preserved as a live recording, Bernstein conducted the six-eight metre as a slow two rather than an unbearably glacial six. Thus the apparent discrepancy (noted in these pages and others) between the fuss Bernstein made and the performance, which is slow, but not extravagantly so.
It does not take a PhD in psychology to detect an erotic element in Bernstein’s interest in Gould. Sex simmers below the surface of much of this book. One senses that Bernstein was inclined to keep his public guessing until the end.
Of his devotion to his wife, Felicia Montealegre, there can be no doubt, although she is not sketched in much detail. We get a vivid recollection of an (unsuccessful) attempt by the aged nymphomaniac Alma Mahler to seduce the young acolyte of her late husband’s music.
Bernstein appears to have been a fan of the German cabaret singer Ute Lemper. “I think that if I didn’t just have a new lover I’d follow her around on tour,” he says of a backstage meeting. This sentence will challenge translators working languages that make pesky distinctions in gender.
Bernstein asked Cott not to ask any boring “favourite” questions. As an all-embracing polymath, Bernstein was capable of making a favourite of everyone and everything. It is interesting, however, to discover his special affection for a recording he made with his beloved Vienna Philharmonic of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 131 in transcription.
“You have to hear a bit of it,” Bernstein says to Cott at 2:30 in the morning. “One more glass of wine, Jonathan, and we’ll listen to the fugue … and then it’s a night.”
Wish I had been there.