117 The “theme” of Serenade referred to in the letters between Cain and Bernstein needs some explanation. In the original novel, the opera singer John Howard Sharp loses his voice, ostensibly as a consequence of the trauma of his gay relationship with a famous conductor. His voice is restored when he falls in love with a young Mexican prostitute. Cain explained his premise in a letter to his old friend (and erstwhile colleague on the Baltimore Sun), H. L. Mencken: “The lamentable sounds that issue from a homo's throat when he sings are a matter of personal observation. … But the theme demanded the next step, the unwarranted corollary that heavy workouts with a woman would bring out the stud horse high notes” (see Paul Skenazy, James M. Cain, New York: Continuum, 1989, p. 54). In the end, Bernstein abandoned his Serenade project, but a few years later plans were made for a Broadway musical based on the same story. Louis Calta reported in The New York Times on 11 November 1954 that “The musical stage rights to Serenade, James M. Cain's earthy and highly successful novel of 1937, have been purchased […] Arthur Laurents […] has agreed to do the adaptation. Shortly the producers hope to announce the composer and lyricist for the musical venture.” Stephen Sondheim was auditioned as a potential lyric writer, and Bernstein was asked whether he wanted to compose the score (see his letter of 6 May 1955 to Felicia, Letter 353). This project, too, came to nothing. The 1956 film adaptation of Serenade, starring Mario Lanza, differs wildly from Cain's novel.
118 Cain's new wife, Florence Macbeth, was an opera singer.
119 Cain attached a formal agreement, reserving for Bernstein the dramatic rights to Serenade until 31 December 1948.
120 Burr was Vice-President of the United States under Thomas Jefferson. In 1804, he challenged Alexander Hamilton (former Secretary to the Treasury) to a duel in which Hamilton was mortally wounded.
121 A report of the concert appeared in The New York Times on 11 May 1948: “at the close of the performance, the audience stood on its feet and applauded [Bernstein] for more than ten minutes in repeated curtain calls, amid a storm of ‘bravos’. After the first half dozen bows, Bernstein returned to the podium and with the orchestra, repeated the final portion of the [Ravel] concerto.”
122 Bruno Walter conducted Mahler's Resurrection Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic in the Musikverein on 15 May 1948. It's extraordinary to think that this legendary – and marvelous – performance (with Maria Cebotari and Rosette Anday as the soloists) was given to a half-full house. A recording of it has been issued on CD by Sony Japan (SICC 92–3) and others.
123 “All Vienna in one go,” but Bernstein's Viennese debut was also his one and only concert with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. The program consisted of Schumann's Second Symphony, the Dvořák Violin Concerto (with Gerhard Taschner), and the Ravel G major Piano Concerto with Bernstein directing from the piano. Bernstein's report of an enthusiastic audience may be true, but the concert wasn't a critical success: according to Burton (1994, p. 178), “several Viennese critics disliked Bernstein's conducting style intensely […] he did not work again with the Vienna Symphony and it was nearly twenty years before he overcame his prejudice and accepted another Viennese conducting engagement.”
124 Koussevitzky sent a telegram on 9 November 1948: “Deeply moved your letter authorize you select outstanding student conductor. Heartiest greetings to all and orchestra. Love Serge Koussevitzky.”
125 Bernstein was never afraid to make cuts in recent pieces, even ones as substantial and significant as Copland's Third Symphony.
126 This latest love may well have been Yossi Stern, the Hungarian-born Israeli artist (1923–92), who illustrated Letter 276.
127 This letter, describing Bernstein's experiences in Israel, is illustrated on every page by Yossi Stern.
128 Yardena Cohen (1910–2012), Israeli dancer, choreographer, and teacher. In the 1940s this legendary figure in the dance history of Israel created dance dramas and pageants for kibbutzim. Many of these featured female characters in the Old Testament as the central roles. Cohen opened her Haifa dance studio in 1933 and ran it for the next seventy years. She died on 23 January 2012, at the age of 101.
129 The “Furtwängler & Gieseking business” is a reference to the banning of Walter Gieseking from a concert tour of the United States at the time Bernstein sent this letter, and of Wilhelm Furtwängler from returning to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic the same month, both because of concerns about their Nazi past. The “echt Fascism” that so enraged Bernstein was taking place in Detroit. According to a report in The New York Times on 21 January 1949, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra “had been warned by Mr. [Henry] Reichhold that every man would be fired if that were necessary to weed out disloyalty to the conductor [Karl Krueger].” Reichhold, the orchestra's president added: “I think a shake-up and good housecleaning is just what the Detroit orchestra needs.” Georges Miquelle, the orchestra's principal cellist (married to Renée Longy Miquelle in 1919; they later divorced) was fired in public by Reichhold during a rehearsal on the grounds that he had apologized to the violinist Erica Morini about the orchestra's poor accompaniment for her – an apology that both Miquelle and Morini denied was ever made.
130 Renée Nell (1910–94) was a Jungian psychoanalyst. In 1938 she escaped from Berlin to Switzerland where she studied with Carl Jung at the University of Zurich, before moving to the United States and setting up her practice in New York City. A pioneer in work with young offenders, she later established The Country Place in Litchfield, CT, describing it as “a residential community for the psychologically disturbed adult who has more insight than he or she can use, who knows how he or she should act but withdraws from action.” Humphrey Burton identifies her as the “Frau” (Burton 1994, p. 108), but the letter from Bernstein to David Oppenheim on 22 October 1943 confirms that the “Frau” was in fact Marketa Morris. Bernstein later became disenchanted with Nell's analysis, writing to his sister Shirley on 26 April 1950: “My feeling is one totally apart from analysis: I want only to cope, and through my own powers, without aid – especially of the indulgent, personal sort that was forthcoming from Miss Nell.”
131 Howard Hoyt was a theatrical agent and manager who had previously worked as Eastern story editor for MGM.
132 The only known use in Bernstein's papers of Operation Capulet as an early title for what became West Side Story. Jerome Robbins first put the idea of the show to Bernstein on 6 January 1949. Robbins, Bernstein, and Arthur Laurents met for the first time to discuss the project on 10 January, and a month later Bernstein signed this agreement with Howard Hoyt.
133 Hans Heinsheimer (1900–93) was a legendary figure in the world of music publishing. He first worked in the opera department of Universal Edition in Vienna (1923–38), then went to New York to take up a position at Boosey & Hawkes, promoting new works by Copland, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Britten. He was fired by Ralph Hawkes in 1947 for writing his memoirs (Menagerie in F Sharp), since Hawkes wanted a worker rather than an author. Heinsheimer was immediately hired by Schirmer, where he worked closely with Bernstein, Samuel Barber, and others.
134 The first performance was on 8 April 1949.
135 Bernstein was working on his Second Symphony, The Age of Anxiety.
136 The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, with whom Bernstein was conducting a series of concerts. Reiner left as Music Director in 1948.
137 J. Fred Lissfelt, music critic of the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph.
138 Izler Solomon (1910–87), American conductor. He was Music Director of the Columbus Philharmonic Orchestra (1941–9) and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra (1956–76).
139 Tossy Spivakovsky (1906–98), Russian-born violinist whose performances of modern concertos such as those of Bartók, Menotti, and Sessions were particularly admired.
140 Arthur Laurents (1917–2011), American playwright, screenwriter, and stage director. His Broadway credits included the books for West Side Story, Gypsy, and Anyone Can Whistle, and he directed the original production of La Cage aux Folles.
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br /> 141 This letter is undated, but the evidence points to some time in April 1949, when Bernstein began to have doubts about the viability of the project that would eventually become West Side Story. In Bernstein's “Excerpts from a West Side Log” (Bernstein 1957, p. 47), he included an entry on 15 April 1949, while conducting in Columbus, Ohio: “Just received the draft of first four scenes. Much good stuff. But this is no way to work. Me on this long conducting tour, Arthur between New York and Hollywood. Maybe we'd better wait until I can find a continuous hunk of time to devote to the project. Obviously this show can't depend on stars, being about kids; and so it will have to live or die by the success of its collaborations; and this remote-control collaboration isn't right. Maybe they can find the right composer who isn't always skipping off to conduct somewhere. It's not fair to them or to the work.” Bernstein was plainly uneasy about committing himself and was quoted by Craig Zadan as saying: “I remember receiving about a dozen pages and saying to myself that this is never going to work. […] I had a strong feeling of staleness of the East Side situation and I didn't like the too-angry, too-bitchy, too-vulgar tone of it” (Zadan 1974, p. 15).
142 Ellen Adler (b. 1927) is the daughter of fabled acting teacher Stella Adler. Ellen's close friends included Marlon Brando and René Leibowitz as well as Bernstein. In 1957 she married David Oppenheim (they divorced in 1976). Ned Rorem was bewitched by her “dizzying black-tiger beauty” (Ned Rorem, Knowing When To Stop: A Memoir, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994, p. 578).
143 Harold Clurman, Ellen Adler's stepfather.
144 161 West 54th Street is an imposing apartment building near the intersection with Seventh Avenue in Manhattan.
145 François Valéry, son of the poet Paul Valéry.
146 Adler – delightfully – likens Nadia Boulanger's austere appearance to the stern faces in paintings such as Grant Wood's American Gothic.
147 Marie-Blanche de Polignac (1897–1958) was a soprano, pianist, patron of the arts, and heiress to the Lanvin fashion fortune founded by her mother, Jeanne Lanvin. She was an intimate friend of Francis Poulenc, who dedicated several works to her.
148 Otis Bigelow (1920–2007), actor, dancer, writer, and later theatrical agent, who spent a year in Paris in 1948–9.
149 Burton Bernstein (b. 1932) is the younger brother of Leonard and Shirley. He studied at Dartmouth College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and from 1957 to 1992 he was a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of a biography of James Thurber as well as books about the Bernstein family (Family Matters: Sam, Jennie, and the Kids) and about his elder brother (Leonard Bernstein: American Original, with Barbara B. Haws).
150 Peter Gradenwitz (1910–2001), German-born Israeli musicologist and music critic, and an astute commentator on Bernstein's music and his use of jazz idioms. The two became friends when Bernstein visited Israel in 1948 to conduct the Israel Philharmonic. Gradenwitz wrote extensively on Bernstein and his music, from contemporary reports of Bernstein's Israeli concerts for The New York Times to the book Leonard Bernstein: unendliche Vielfalt eines Musikers (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1984), published in an English edition in 1987.
151 Gradenwitz's The Music of Israel: Its Rise and Growth Through 5000 Years was published by Norton in 1949 and dedicated “To Leonard Bernstein as a token of friendship and sincere appreciation”.
152 Bernstein worked on his new symphony while in Israel, and the first performance of any part of The Age of Anxiety was given there. The “Dirge” was played at a Gala Soirée in aid of the Israel Philharmonic Pension Fund on 28 November 1948 in Tel Aviv. In his notes for this concert, Peter Gradenwitz wrote of “the first performance anywhere of a Dirge for piano and orchestra composed by Leonard Bernstein during the few leisure hours left to him on his crowded Tel-Aviv days and completed in full score just in time for tonight's concert – this is a most expressive song of lament showing the composer's style developed on distinctly novel lines.”
153 The world premiere of The Age of Anxiety took place in Boston on 8 April 1949, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky, and Bernstein himself playing the solo piano part.
154 Probably a reference to Side Street (released in 1950), a thriller set in New York. Granger's most celebrated film role came the following year when he played Guy Haines in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train.
155 Take Me Out to the Ball Game was a 1949 MGM musical starring Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and Esther Williams.
156 William Schuman (1910–92), American composer. He formed a dance band while still in high school and was soon collaborating with Frank Loesser, a neighbor who was also at the start of his career (Loesser's first publication, In Love With A Memory of You, has music by William Schuman. With typical modesty Schuman later said “Frank Loesser has written hits with Hoagy Carmichael, Burton Lane, Jule Styne and other Hollywood grand dukes, but I have the distinction of having written a flop with him.”). Schuman's subsequent career was as one of America's most distinguished symphonists, president of the Juilliard School and Lincoln Center.
157 A story in The New York Times on Wednesday, 20 July 1949 reported that Alan Jay Lerner and Fredrick Loewe were “at work on a new musical […] that is set in the United States in the nineteenth century” (the show that became Paint Your Wagon). From Bernstein's angry reaction in this letter, it seems Lerner must have suggested a collaboration. A quarter of a century later these two Harvard graduates did work together on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
158 Michael Dreyfuss (1928–60), American actor and director.
159 The pianist Menahem Pressler (b. 1923) fled Nazi Germany to Palestine. He made his American debut with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1947. Olin Downes reviewed their Carnegie Hall performance of the Schumann Concerto in The New York Times, describing Pressler as “one of the few of the young pianists who consider his instrument the agent of glamorous song and not merely a contraption of wires and keys. This, indeed, was the playing of a free artist.” Pressler later achieved renown as pianist of the Beaux Arts Trio. Regarding his relationship with Bernstein, Pressler has written: “I always had a fine relation with Mr. Bernstein. Although he invited me to play with him and the City Center Orchestra to make my debut coming from Israel, Mr. Judson, my manager, insisted that I do it with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Ormandy. But I played his pieces and met him many times in different places, even here in Bloomington. Recently I played his Clarinet Sonata with [Richard] Stoltzman” (email from Menahem Pressler, 12 January 2013).
160 Olivier Messiaen (1908–92), French composer. His first major international commission was from Koussevitzky, for the Turangalîla-Symphonie.
161 Bernstein conducted the world premiere of Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on 2 December 1949.
162 Yvonne Loriod (1924–2010), French pianist. A pupil of Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire, she went on to give the first performances of all his major works featuring the piano. In 1961 she became Messiaen's second wife.
163 Written in French; English translation by the editor.
164 Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957), Italian conductor, and one of the most celebrated performing musicians of the twentieth century. This letter was sent after Bernstein had visited him and asked about the different speeds in Toscanini's broadcast and studio recordings of Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet (see Burton 1994, p. 196).
165 Irwin Edman (1896–1954), American philosopher.
166 A reference to the “Imaginary Conversation” subtitled “Why Beethoven?” that was published in Bernstein's The Joy of Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1959), pp. 21–39, in which “L.B.”, “L.P.” (“Lyric Poet,” described as a “poet's poet from Britain” – Stephen Spender), and “Y.B.” (“Younger Brother”) converse (see B. Bernstein 1982, pp. 179–80).
167 A letter to Shirley Bernstein (“Hi-Lee”), presumably a “North Country Epic” since it had been sent from Dartmouth College in Hanover, Ne
w Hampshire, where Burton was a student.
168 Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie.
169 Regina is an opera by Marc Blitzstein based on Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes. It opened at the 46th Street Theatre on Broadway on 31 October 1949, the day before Bernstein wrote this letter.
170 Written in French; English translation by the editor.
171 Robert Fryer (1921–2000), theatrical producer whose first Broadway show was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. He later had a string of successes including Wonderful Town, Sweet Charity, Chicago, and Sweeney Todd.
172 Betty Smith (1896–1972) was the author of the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. She collaborated with George Abbott on the stage adaptation.
173 According to a note in Helen Coates' hand, Bernstein replied to Abbott by phone on 12 December, turning down the project. The score for A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (which ran for 257 performances in 1951) was composed by Arthur Schwartz, with lyrics by Dorothy Fields. Robbins was involved informally (uncredited show-doctoring); the musical director was Max Goberman, whose greatest Broadway successes were On the Town and West Side Story.
4
Marriage, Passport Problems, and Italy
1950–55
By 1950, Bernstein had decided that he needed Felicia in his life – though he seemed unable to tell her directly: two letters sent from Israel to his sister Shirley suggest that he wanted her to be a kind of intermediary – wooing her back by proxy. Strange as this may seem, it worked, and they were married (after the shortest of second engagements) in September 1951. Extended trips abroad meant that it wasn't only his personal life that was being run by remote control. The production of Peter Pan, for which Bernstein wrote delightful incidental music, was in rehearsal while he was in Israel, and Marc Blitzstein took on responsibility for overseeing things – describing them in lively detail to the absentee composer. The now-familiar tensions were building: Bernstein the composer was being sent ideas for a new musical by Betty Comden, while Bernstein the conductor was meeting Wilhelm Furtwängler at the Holland Festival before setting off to other European destinations with his brother and sister. The result is a charming series of letters to Bernstein's parents in August–September 1950. That relationship took an odd turn the following year when “Sam” and “Jennie” became the dysfunctional principals in the one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti: writing to Shirley from Mexico in 1951, Bernstein wrote that “the two characters, by the way, have gotten themselves called Sam and Jennie, and I think you'll see why.” That same letter raises a serious issue for Bernstein – and many of his friends – in the early 1950s: the “Red Scare” and the witch-hunting activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy and others. Aware that others were already coming under scrutiny, Bernstein says it's time to prepare “our blazing orations now,” adding that “I hope I'm as brave as I sound from this distance when it catches up with me.”
The Leonard Bernstein Letters Page 38