TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102990/1029548.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.9 KB | 121 lines

                                                                                MILESTONES, Page 113

The Best and the Brightest

Leonard Bernstein: 1918-1990


By MICHAEL WALSH


    "God knows, I should be dead by now," Leonard Bernstein
remarked a couple of years ago. "I smoke. I drink. I stay up
all night. I'm overcommitted on all fronts. I was told that if
I didn't stop smoking, I'd be dead at 35. Well, I beat the
rap." In fact, ever since Bernstein leaped to fame nearly five
decades ago, he lived his life the way he composed and
conducted: passionately and wholeheartedly, as an outsize,
outrageous combination of creative joie de vivre and destructive
self-indulgence. His death last week at 72 has left the music
world a quiet place.

    Just how seriously ill Bernstein was -- he was suffering
from emphysema and a pleural tumor -- became clear two weeks
ago, when he announced he was retiring from conducting;
conductors don't retire, they die. Even so, his death came as
a shock, for at times he did seem invulnerable to mortal wear
and tear and fearless of the consequences. When the gods have
so lavishly blessed you, why worry?

    Conductor, pianist, composer, teacher, television host and
celebrity, Bernstein was the signal musical figure of his age,
at once the best, the brightest and the most exasperating. Born
to Russian-Jewish immigrants in Lawrence, Mass., Lenny, as he
was universally known, attended the prestigious Boston Latin
School and Harvard. His formidable father Samuel ran a
profitable beauty-supply business and for many years bitterly
opposed his son's choice of career, although late in his life
he admitted, "You don't expect your child to be a Moses, a
Maimonides or a Leonard Bernstein."

    In 1943 conductor Artur Rodzinski named Bernstein his
assistant at the New York Philharmonic: "I finally asked God
whom I should take and God said, `Take Bernstein.'" God was
right. Three months later, Bernstein substituted at the last
minute for an ailing guest conductor, Bruno Walter. His debut,
broadcast live across the country on radio, was front-page news
in the New York Times and made him an overnight sensation.

    Throughout his career, the words first, American and
conductor seemed to be inextricably linked to his
accomplishments. He was the first American to conduct at La
Scala (1953). When he took over the New York Philharmonic in
1958, he was the first native-born American to be named music
director of a major American orchestra. He was the first
conductor to take the Philharmonic to South America, Israel,
Japan and the Soviet Union. During his tenure, which lasted
until 1969, the Philharmonic enjoyed a golden age, selling
millions of recordings and holding a status among American
ensembles it has never recaptured. A peerless spokesman for his
art, Bernstein also imaginatively entertained and instructed
a nation with his Omnibus and Young People's Concerts
television broadcasts in the 1950s and '60s.

    On the podium, Bernstein was a figure of uninhibited
emotional energy. Through exaggerated gestures that would have
done Barrymore proud, he cajoled his orchestra. He pleaded. He
commanded. He looked heavenward for inspiration. At times he
would even levitate, jumping into the air as if to transcend
the forces that kept him earthbound. When such dramatics
worked, the results were stunning: Haydn that crackled, Mahler
that mourned, Beethoven that shouted in triumph. But when they
didn't, which was almost as often, his performances were vulgar
and mannered, seeming to reflect the man portrayed in Joan
Peyser's controversial 1987 tell-all biography.

    Many of Bernstein's admirers believed his real vocation was
composer, not conductor. Yet the brilliant scores on which his
reputation will rest predate his ascendancy to the
Philharmonic: the ballet Fancy Free, choreographed by Jerome
Robbins, which later evolved into the Comden and Green musical
On the Town; the Symphony No. 2, subtitled "The Age of
Anxiety"; the one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti; Candide, a kind
of Broadway operetta; and his masterpiece, West Side Story
(with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), completed in 1957 and still
the greatest music-theater piece written by an American.

    Thereafter, as Bernstein became more immersed in conducting,
his compositions suffered. It seemed to embarrass him that his
best works were in a popular idiom, and he sought to burnish
his "serious" credentials with such efforts as the earnest but
awkward "Kaddish" Symphony of 1963, the bathetic Mass, which
opened the Kennedy Center in 1971 and, most disastrously, the
opera A Quiet Place (1983), which was intended as a sequel to
Trouble in Tahiti but succeeded only in spoiling its memory.
(A Quiet Place was, however, the first American opera  performed
at La Scala.) Bernstein even lost his touch on Broadway when
his 1976 musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue closed after just
seven performances.

    With Bernstein, it was always hard to separate the man from
the showman. His commitment to liberal causes was neatly
skewered by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic. Yet when the Berlin Wall
fell, Bernstein was on the scene quickly, leading heroic
performances of Beethoven's Ninth and characteristically
substituting the word Freiheit (freedom) for Freude (joy) in
the choral finale. He reveled in his private life as a
homosexual, yet his marriage to Felicia Montealegre Cohn lasted
until her death in 1978 and produced three children.

    "The talent that was once a genius," went an oft-repeated
verdict on Richard Strauss, alluding to his long creative
decline later in life. The same might well be said of
Bernstein. His tragedy was that he had too many talents and not
quite enough genius. He wanted to be not Moses or Maimonides
but Mahler; he had to settle in the end for being Leonard
Bernstein. But that in itself was a dazzling achievement.