Leonard Bernstein at 100: Why the music world is making this the Year of Lenny
O n the first day of 2018, a dozen cities in Germany, from Augsburg to Wiesbaden, celebrated a new year with concerts that included music by Leonard Bernstein. No matter America’s fraught relationship with Iran, Bernstein’s piano music happened to be played in Tehran on Jan. 1. Thus has begun — with nearly 2,500 events around the globe — Anno Leonardo, or the Year of Lenny.
Aug. 25 is the 100th anniversary of Bernstein’s birth in Lawrence, Mass., 30 miles north of Boston. He was the son of Jewish emigres from Ukraine. His father ran a beauty supply business that Leonard was expected to take over. Instead, he became the most celebrated, most multitalented and most American musician of his time, and he managed to change pretty much everything he touched.
He was the first great American conductor. He became the first classical music television star. He proved an inspired educator and first-rate pianist. He was the first internationally esteemed conductor everyone, whether you knew him or not, called by the familiar, Lenny. For better and worse, Lenny was bigger than life — a shaman, even.
Above all, Bernstein was a conflicted composer. He planted one foot gleefully in the popular culture of Broadway; the other incautious and questing one sought footing in the slippery realm of classical. For a long while there was a debate about whether Bernstein’s neo-Romantic concert works were on the wrong side of progressive music history, let alone good taste. Nothing would have pleased him more when he died at 72 in 1990, prey of his fourpacks-a-day cigarette habit, to know that his lasting legacy would be as a composer.
If anything, Anno Leonardo might easily result in Bernstein burnout. Fall was already Lennified. The Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra played the 1950s violin concerto “Serenade.” The New York Philharmonic, Bernstein’s orchestra, traversed his three symphonies. The Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony and Boston Symphony began their seasons with Bernstein galas. The London Symphony ended the year with Bernstein’s Second Symphony (“Age of Anxiety”) and musical “Wonderful Town.”
That’s only the tip of the Lenny iceberg. Sony has released a glorious 100-CD set of remastered recordings mainly from the 1950s and ‘60s when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic. Deutsche Grammophon will follow suit next month with a set of 121 CDs and 36 DVDs of live performances from the last two decades of his life. Memoirs will be published by Bernstein’s eldest daughter, Jamie, and his assistant and editor Charlie Harmon.
I look forward to it all. Bernstein has been with me my entire musical life. While in elementary school, I faithfully watched his Young People’s Concerts on television. The first LPs I ever bought were Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The most recent recordings I bought have been hi-res downloads of some of those same early recordings and others, to delve ever more deeply in their nuances. I am among the generation for whom Bernstein became an incontrovertible musical father figure.
For all kinds of reasons, Bernstein seems more necessary than ever today. His centennial comes at exactly the right time. But that doesn’t mean we will necessarily be afforded the Bernstein we need.
What we are getting in spades is the glamorously irresistible Bernstein of the early and middle years when he could dash off a great show tune one minute, take over the New York Philharmonic the next, and wow the kids on TV and adults in his books.
There were, of course, critics and orchestra musicians who thought him too flashy. There were crises: He watched the avant-garde take music in a direction that worried him for the future of the symphony orchestra. He was regularly accused of spreading himself too thin. An outspoken leftie who would support just about anything he thought was a noble cause, he had a penchant for getting himself in trouble politically and wound up with an FBI dossier and was blacklisted for a couple of worrisome years in the early 1950s.
He struggled with his sexuality but settled into a loving marriage and raised a family. In the 1940s and ‘50s, he wrote spiritually probing concert works, spirited ballets, film music, “West Side Story” and “Candide.” This is the music that holds up especially well. In her Bernstein biography, Joan Peyser surmised this was thanks to his stable family life.
But what happened in the 1970s remains undervalued. At a time when entire artistic legacies are being questioned based on an artist’s behavior and when artistic life-and-death battles over musical style or high art versus low are all but forgotten, Bernstein’s later years — legendarily challenging, musically and personally — demand close and, I would suggest, sympathetic scrutiny. America’s greatest musician was who he was, and we are forced to accept that the more impossible he became, the greater he became as a conductor, composer and sage.