Music Richard Osborne
THE BERNSTEIN CENTENARY
Among the gifts that flooded in when Leonard Bernstein turned seventy in 1988 was a bitter-sweet remake by Stephen Sondheim, his old friend from West Side Story days, of Ira Gershwin’s song The Saga of Jenny.
The moral of Gershwin’s cautionary tale about a girl who spends a lifetime making disastrous decisions is ‘ Don’t make up your mind.’
In Sondheim’s rewrite, the plea is all the other way round. Jenny – sorry, Lenny – now that you’re seventy, isn’t it time you did make up your mind? Conductor or composer, priest or playboy, public intellectual or trendhopping celeb?
Since Bernstein was a Shakespeare addict – John Wells remembered him declaiming reams of King Lear on a beach in Florida that same summer – Lear’s line ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ can’t have been unfamiliar to him. All of which is a bit of a poser for promoters of the 2018 centennial. As Lenny himself would have said, cigarette in one hand, tumbler of whisky in the other, ‘Where the hell do you begin?’
Opera North began early by staging Trouble in Tahiti in its season of ‘Little Greats’. The fact that Tahiti occasionally played alongside Trial by Jury would have thrilled Bernstein beyond measure, Gilbert and Sullivan being another of his anglophilic obsessions.
There are echoes of G&S in just about every stage piece Bernstein wrote; which can be a problem, given that there are few things more likely to anger a certain kind of classical music lover than G&S, Viennese dance music or the American musical. Sadly, Bernstein was hooked on all three, which is why a small gem like Candide is a wonder to some, a no-no to others.
Trouble in Tahiti, the only stage piece for which Bernstein wrote both text and music, explores the dead-on-its-feet ten-year-old marriage of a middle-class couple in gadget-rich, 1950s, suburban New England. The husband is obsessed with work and the gym; the wife, housebound and memory-haunted, is addicted to the movies and celebrity culture. Ominously, Bernstein wrote the piece on honeymoon in 1951; though, if there’s an autobiographical aspect, it’s probably tied to his parents’ early years in 1920s Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Bernstein never entirely let Tahiti go. In 1984, it reappeared at La Scala, Milan, subsumed into his last major stage work, A Quiet Place, a chastening exploration of public and private alienation that’s never quite made it into the mainstream repertory. It would be perfect centennial material, though the only performance I’ve seen advertised this side of the Atlantic is in Budapest on 9th April.
The London Symphony, Bernstein’s favourite British orchestra, also got in early with a concert at the Barbican conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. The programme was divided between Bernstein’s Second Symphony – an essay in mid-1940s angst loosely based on Auden’s linguistically elaborate eclogue The Age of Anxiety about four drifters in a Third Avenue New York bar – and a cut-down concert version of an old Rattle favourite, Wonderful Town, the sparky 1953 vaudeville piece which Bernstein wrote at breakneck speed for the screen actress and comedienne Rosalind Russell.
Russell was a soaring talent with
barely three notes to her name; so it will be interesting to hear how this more musically correct performance sounds when it’s released on CD. Maureen Lipman had the right feel for the piece when the show came to London in 1986 but, like Miss Russell, Lipman is a bit of a one-off.
The LSO programme summed up the problems surrounding Bernstein the composer. As his friend Aaron Copland recognised early, Lenny possessed a vibrant rhythmic sense that worked well when writing for the stage. But his principal vocation was probably conducting. ‘One gets the impression,’ Copland wrote shortly after the appearance of The Age of Anxiety, ‘that the serious music isn’t always entirely necessary.’ Ironically, The Age of Anxiety may have found its ideal resting place in dance. The Royal Ballet revives Liam Scarlett’s staging on 15th March for a three-week run.
If the 2018 centenary is unlikely to change our view of Bernstein’s music, there is much it might achieve as we revisit the life of a man who was entitled to boast, in Walt Whitman’s phrase, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’
In an age when inspirational, noholds-barred talk about classical music to a mass audience is a vanished art, let some TV network re-broadcast Bernstein’s 1976 Norton Lectures, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard – music’s answer to Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation or Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man.
And what of Bernstein’s gamechanging role in a centenary that really did alter the musical landscape, the Mahler centenary of 1960? But more of that another time.