36 Foss' Psalms (for chorus and orchestra) were first performed in May 1957 at the New York Philharmonic in a concert conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos that also included Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus, Walton's Belshazzar's Feast, and the premiere of Nils Viggo Bentzon's Variazioni brevi.
37 Stephen Sondheim (b. 1930), American composer and lyricist. He first met Bernstein in October 1955: according to Bernstein's datebook, Laurents and Sondheim had their first meeting with him on 18 October. Sondheim adds some interesting details: he heard about West Side Story from Arthur Laurents at the opening-night party for Ugo Betti's Isle of Goats on 4 October, and played for Bernstein the following day, on 5 October: “I auditioned for him without Arthur, and it was the day after the Isle of Goats opening. Remember, Lenny and Arthur had to wait for a week till Betty and Adolph knew whether they could get out of Winter Wonderland (I think that was the title). I was put on hold for that week, which is when I went to consult Oscar [Hammerstein]. My first official meeting after accepting the job was with Arthur alone, the next with both of them” (Sondheim, personal communication). Bernstein and Sondheim had more than forty meetings between November 1955 and February 1956, and by the time Sondheim celebrated his 26th birthday on 22 March 1956, the score of Act I was starting to take shape – with Romeo still as the working title.
38 Seventeen years later, Sondheim provided more than just help: for the 1973 revival of Candide, he wrote several new lyrics including “Life is Happiness Indeed” (a replacement for Bernstein and Parker's “The Venice Gavotte”), “This World,” “The Sheep Song,” and half of “Auto Da Fe.”
39 Gunther Schuller (b. 1925), American composer, conductor, writer on music, and jazz historian. Two works by Schuller were performed by Mitropoulos in the 1956–7 New York Philharmonic season, and his father Arthur Schuller was a violinist in the orchestra for more than forty years. Bernstein relished the kind of discussion prompted by this letter, and Schuller's enthusiasm may well have encouraged him to program Webern's music. In January 1958, Bernstein included Webern's Six Pieces Op. 6 in his Philharmonic concerts, and in December 1965 he conducted Webern's Symphony on the same program as Mahler's Seventh. In 1964 Schuller and Bernstein collaborated on Schuller's Journey Into Jazz, composed specially for the Young People's Concerts, where it was conducted by the composer and narrated by Bernstein. The following is part of Bernstein's spoken introduction to the performance: “These days […] there is a new movement in American music actually called the ‘third stream’ which mixes the rivers of jazz with the other rivers that flow down from the high-brow far-out mountain peaks of twelve-tone, or atonal music. Now the leading navigator of this third stream – in fact the man who made up the phrase – is a young man named Gunther Schuller. He is one of those total musicians, like Paul Hindemith […] only he's American. Mr. Schuller writes music – all kinds of music – conducts it, lectures on it, and plays it. Certainly he owes some of his great talent to his father, a wonderful musician who happens to play in our orchestra. We are very proud of Arthur Schuller. But young Gunther Schuller – still in his thirties – is now the center of a whole group of young composers who look to him as their leader, and champion. And so I thought that the perfect way to begin today's program about jazz in the concert hall would be to play a piece by Gunther Schuller – especially this one particular piece which is an introduction to jazz for young people.”
40 Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), British author of Point Counter Point and Brave New World who settled in the United States in 1937. One of Huxley's warmest and most enduring friendships in Los Angeles was with Stravinsky.
41 He had already proposed the idea to Stravinsky who rejected it, as did Bernstein. See Joseph 2001, p. 31.
42 Igor Markevitch (1912–83), Ukrainian-born conductor and composer.
43 Icare was originally conceived as a ballet for Serge Lifar in 1932, but it was not staged and Markevitch subsequently reworked it as a concert piece.
44 Bernstein conducted Icare with the New York Philharmonic on 10, 11, 12, and 13 April 1958. The performance from 13 April has been released on CD in Bernstein Live (New York Philharmonic NYP 2003).
45 A Spanish colloquialism for “annoying things”.
46 Probably a reference to the actress Canta Maya, who appeared in the 1946 film Bailando en las nubes (Dancing in the Clouds).
47 Abe Miller, born Abraham Malamud, was Sam Bernstein's cousin and he was eventually employed by the Samuel Bernstein Hair Company. Miller and Sam Bernstein “had corresponded over the years, Sam convincing [Abe] that his future lay in the New World” (Burton Bernstein 1982, p. 62). In 1921 he escaped from Korets (Ukraine) via Warsaw, Danzig, and Cuba (where he survived for a year hawking his wares from a wooden box), before eventually arriving in the United States.
48 Dexamyl was a drug introduced in 1950. It contained amphetamine to elevate mood, and barbiturate to counteract the side effects of the amphetamine.
49 West Side Story opened at the National Theatre in Washington D.C. on 19 August 1957.
50 Carol Lawrence (b. 1932) created the role of Maria in West Side Story; 19 August was the date of the opening night in Washington, D.C.
51 Felicia's letter reacting to the very enthusiastic reception of West Side Story in Washington, D.C., was written the day after it had opened at the National Theatre.
52 Studio One was a long-running television drama series. Felicia appeared in eleven episodes between 1949 and 1956.
53 Sherman Adams (1899–1986), White House Chief of Staff for President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
54 Cole Porter (1891–1964), American composer and lyricist. After studying at both Yale and Harvard, Porter went to Paris where he took orchestration lessons from Charles Koechlin. On his return to America, Porter became hugely successful on Broadway with shows such as Anything Goes (1934), Kiss Me, Kate (1948), and Can-Can (1953).
55 West Side Story.
56 Spanish for “gifts” or “treats”.
57 Vera Zorina (1917–2003) was the stage name of Brigitta Lieberson, wife of Goddard Lieberson. From 1938 to 1946 she had been married to George Balanchine. Zorina was a dancer and actress who specialized in playing the title role in Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher.
58 Goddard Lieberson (1911–77), English-born record producer who became president of Columbia Records (1956–71 and 1973–5). After studying composition at the Eastman School, he joined the classical division of Columbia Records. He took a leading role in the introduction of the long-playing record. As well as overseeing important classical recording projects (such as Stravinsky's recordings of his own work), Lieberson also produced many of the most successful Broadway cast recordings, including West Side Story, which was recorded a month after this letter, on 29 September 1957 at Columbia's 30th Street Studio.
59 A stage adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank, by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, opened on Broadway on 5 October 1955 and ran for 717 performances.
60 Albert Sirmay (1880–1967; originally Szirmai), Hungarian operetta composer who moved to New York in 1926 where he took a job with Chappell & Co., becoming music editor for the likes of Gershwin, Porter, and Jerome Kern. He is credited as the editor of the piano-vocal scores of Rodgers and Hammerstein's musicals: Allegro, Carousel, Flower Drum Song, The King and I, Me and Juliet, Oklahoma!, Pipe Dream, The Sound of Music, and South Pacific; and he also edited the piano-vocal score of Weill's Lady in the Dark. He later became a great Bernstein enthusiast, particularly West Side Story in which he invested $500 as one of the show's original backers (see Simeone 2009, pp. 30 and 113).
61 West Side Story opened for try-outs in Washington on 19 August 1957, then in Philadelphia on 10 September, before the Broadway opening on 26 September.
62 Dame Margot Fonteyn de Arias (1919–91), ballet dancer who became prima ballerina assoluta of the Royal Ballet, London. She married the Panamanian diplomat Dr. Roberto Arias in 1955, and was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 1956.
63 Lauren
Bacall (b. 1924, as Betty Joan Perske), American actress. Her idol was Bette Davis and both were friends with Bernstein. Bacall married Humphrey Bogart in 1945. When Bogart became ill in 1956, she wrote a touching letter to Bernstein. (“So sweet of you to take time out to write, and so lovely to hear from you as always. Bogie is coming along, still terribly weak from the treatments and still twenty-five pounds under weight. But in about three weeks it will all be over, thank God, and we can start fattening him up and getting him really well. He's had a time of it but has been saintly throughout.”) Bogart died on 14 January 1957. In 1988, Bacall made a memorable appearance at Bernstein's 70th birthday gala at Tanglewood, singing “The Saga of Lenny” (Stephen Sondheim's witty parody of “The Saga of Jenny” by Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin).
64 Sondheim wrote this letter on the day of the Broadway opening of West Side Story.
65 Roger L. Stevens (1910–98), American theater producer and real-estate magnate. Stevens remained loyal to the production of West Side Story when Cheryl Crawford withdrew – the “dark days” to which he refers. He later became Chairman of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Stevens was a larger-than-life figure. He was a property developer by profession and someone who relished the big gesture – none bigger than in 1951, when he led a syndicate to buy the Empire State Building. Stevens gave enthusiastic support to West Side Story, and this extended to organizing the opening-night party in New York. His continued involvement resulted in rather a convoluted formula for the original production credits: “Robert E. Griffith and Harold S. Prince (by arrangement with Roger L. Stevens).”
66 Sondheim's detailed and amusing account of West Side Story early in its Broadway run is a mine of information, as is his discussion of the one-day recording session for the Columbia Records cast recording made on Sunday, 29 September 1957. Bernstein was unable to be at the recording as he had flown to Israel for the inaugural concerts in the Frederick Mann auditorium straight after the opening night of West Side Story.
67 The original cast members of West Side Story mentioned in this letter played the characters shown in parentheses: Stephanie Augustine (standby for Maria); Lee Becker (Anybodys); Mickey Calin (Riff); Martin Charnin (Big Deal); Grover Dale (Snowboy); Al De Sio (Luis); Larry Kert (Tony); Carol Lawrence (Maria); Eddie Roll (Action); Lynn Ross (Estella).
68 Stephanie Augustine was married to Joseph Hyman.
69 Frank Lewis compiled the cryptic crosswords in The Nation. “Ground rules” was the example given by Lewis in a note at the bottom of the puzzle as a potential clue for “lures”. Sondheim and Bernstein shared an enthusiasm for fiendish cryptic crosswords.
70 Harold Clurman's review of West Side Story (The Nation, 12 October 1957) was a rather bitter attack on the show and its authors, and Sondheim's quotations from the review are exactly as they appear in Clurman's original. The only number he seemed to enjoy was “Gee, Officer Krupke”.
71 Irwin Kostal and Sid Ramin, the orchestrators of West Side Story.
72 This is a phrase that crops up occasionally in Bernstein's correspondence. Traditionally, a “groaning board” was a table weighed down by an abundance of food.
73 Paul Tortelier (1914–90), French cellist. He played in Koussevitzky's Boston Symphony Orchestra (1937–40) before embarking on a very successful solo career. Though not a Jew, he was very sympathetic to the State of Israel, and he stayed regularly with his family on a kibbutz.
74 Joshua Logan (1908–88), American theater and film director. Logan's Broadway credits included Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific, for which he also co-wrote the book and shared a Pulitzer Prize with Rodgers and Hammerstein. Logan had known Bernstein for several years by the time of West Side Story. A telegram from Logan dated 17 November 1955 reads: “Dear Leonard, I know this will be an exciting evening and the more so because of you. Josh Logan” (sent on the opening night of Lillian Hellman's adaptation of Jean Anouilh's The Lark, for which Bernstein wrote the incidental music).
6
The New York Philharmonic Years
1958–69
In 1940, Aaron Copland had joked with Bernstein about the time “forty years from now when you are conductor of the Philharmonic.” In fact it was just eighteen years later that Bernstein became Music Director of the orchestra, and over the next decade he was to take it on tour all over the world, to make hundreds of recordings, and to give a staggering number of concerts: in 1971 he conducted his 1,000th concert with the Philharmonic, and plenty more followed (his last concerts with the orchestra were in October 1988). In 1958, the press, particularly the New York Times, was often critical of playing standards in the orchestra, but Bernstein soon lifted both the morale of the musicians and the quality of their performance. Howard Taubman was chief music critic of the Times from 1955 to 1960 and wrote enthusiastically about Bernstein: he warmly welcomed his appointment and was generally positive about his concerts. Taubman's place was taken by Harold Schonberg, who grumbled for years about Bernstein's showmanship and often questioned the value of his musical interpretations. It is sometimes true that a hostile critic can ruin the career of a music director, but Bernstein's popularity was such that even Schonberg's most acidic notices made little impact.
This was the decade where Bernstein had the most regular contact with other composers: commissioning a great deal of new music (something for which he doesn't always get the credit he deserves), arranging events like the celebrations for Aaron Copland's sixtieth birthday at the Philharmonic, encouraging Stravinsky to come and conduct the orchestra, and corresponding with a startling range of composers about their work: the likes of Stockhausen, Xenakis, Feldman, Cage, and Carter, alongside Poulenc, Messiaen, and friends such as Copland, Foss, Diamond, and Bernstein's erstwhile orchestration teacher Randall Thompson.
Tours with the Philharmonic resulted in some remarkable personal encounters, and one of the most memorable came early in Bernstein's tenure, when the orchestra traveled to the Soviet Union in 1959. During this visit he met Boris Pasternak, at a time when the author had been publicly denounced by the Soviet authorities for Doctor Zhivago, and a year before his death. For the rest of his life Bernstein would treasure Pasternak's letters – and their meetings at the author's dacha and in the green room at one of the concerts. When Bernstein took the orchestra to Japan, Felicia stayed at home, and a long letter he wrote to her is a wonderfully evocative description of the sights and sounds of that country.
Back in the United States, Bernstein was becoming an ever more public figure. Euphoric about the election of President Kennedy in November 1960, he was involved in the ball for Kennedy's Inauguration the following January, and was quite a regular visitor to the White House during the Kennedy years. When the president was assassinated in November 1963, Bernstein was quick to pay tribute to the death of a leader who had become a friend, conducting a televised performance of Mahler's “Resurrection” Symphony. Five years later, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated, it was Jacqueline Kennedy who took care of the funeral arrangements, and she asked Bernstein to be in charge of the music. Her moving letter of thanks is eloquent testimony to the warm friendship between the two of them.
In the 1964–5 season, Bernstein took a sabbatical year in order to compose. He conducted just one concert (of his own music) right at the end of the season, and otherwise limited his activities to four Young People's Concerts. The largest project that presented itself at the start of this year was a new musical based on Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth, a collaboration with two of Bernstein's best friends, Betty Comden and Adolph Green. By January 1965, this had foundered, and Bernstein wrote to David Diamond about “a dreadful experience, the wounds still smarting. I am suddenly a composer without a project, with half of that golden sabbatical down the drain.” The friendship with Comden and Green survived this unhappy episode, but the “golden sabbatical” threatened to produce no new music whatsoever. What saved the day was a commission from Rev. Walter Hussey of Chichester Cathedra
l on England's south coast for a set of Psalms. Some of the music originally composed for The Skin of Our Teeth was quickly recycled in the Chichester Psalms (the opening movement and the lyrical theme of the second). The correspondence with Hussey contains no mention of this, but it does show Bernstein laying out his preliminary thoughts about the work in some detail, the decisive moment when he decided that setting the Psalms in Hebrew was something that excited him, and the circumstances of the first British performance on 31 July 1965 – seemingly a rather idyllic visit, at least by Bernstein's standards, with all the family able to travel with him to England. Two weeks before the Chichester performance, these same Chichester Psalms had featured as the new work in his only New York Philharmonic concert of the season – a programme that also included the Serenade and The Age of Anxiety. In short, the sabbatical didn't produce the new Broadway show that was hoped for, but it did result in one of Bernstein's most popular concert works. The Chichester Psalms was one of just two substantial pieces to be composed during his years at the Philharmonic – the other was the Kaddish Symphony, finished in time for its premiere in Israel in December 1963, but not without a struggle. As the most searching and musically advanced expression of Bernstein's Jewish faith, the work required of him a large emotional investment. The dedication to the memory of President Kennedy was, of course, only added at the last moment, and by the time the symphony was first played in the United States (by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Munch), Bernstein's friend Marc Blitzstein had also been murdered in Martinique. Bernstein's use of the word “Kaddish” refers to its specific meaning as a prayer of mourning: praising God in spite of personal loss. Thus, Bernstein wrote ruefully to his sister Shirley in January 1964 that “It's an open season on Kaddish, all right. The President. Marc.”
Both works from the 1960s were described by Bernstein during his interviews with John Gruen in 1967: “I've written two works in the last 10 years, can you imagine, since I took the Philharmonic, which was at the point when I finished West Side Story. Since then I've written two works, neither of them for the theatre […] one was Kaddish and one is the Chichester Psalms – they're both biblical in a way. So obviously something keeps making me go back to that book.”1
The Leonard Bernstein Letters Page 56