22 Larch Road, Cambridge, MA
27 October 1968
Dear Lenny,
I felt grateful to you when I heard that you and the Philharmonic were to play my Second Symphony – ”our symphony”.174 Now that you have done so and I have heard the way you did it, I have no words worthy to express my gratitude and admiration. At a rough guess this must have been about the six-hundredth performance. I have never heard a more beautiful one, or one that expressed so fully and so lovingly what I wanted to say. My hearty congratulations and thanks to each and everyone concerned. You have given me a joyous experience.
Gratefully & devotedly, your old friend
Randall
543. Leonard Bernstein to Alan Fluck
17 September 1969
Dear Alan,
I have just listened to young Overbury175 playing the Anniversaries.
Reactions:
a) You are an angel to have sent the tape. A perfect birthday present.
b) The boy is marvelous. A natural. One reservation: a feeling of dynamic sameness, lack of contrast. But this may well be due to tape difficulties. The whole tape came over very distantly on my machine, necessitating full volume turn-up.
c) I am moved to write a hundred more Anniversaries.
d) I love you for being so good to Helen.
Summation: Thank you, bless you, more power to you.
Always,
Lenny B
544. Elliott Carter176 to Leonard Bernstein
Mead Street, Waccabuc, NY
24 October 1969
Dear Lennie,
Here is a great deal of the Concerto for Orchestra we spoke about.177 I appreciate your interest and am sending a copy which is still somewhat in the state of a sketch: i.e. the percussion part throughout will probably be revised somewhat in order to scale it up or down in the light of the entire work – the third movement – 287–419 – may be slightly revised, and the fourth movement I am still in the state of writing out in score having about 100 measures more to do, which I hope to finish in the next two weeks.
The score you are receiving is not to be used for conducting (if it could with its crazy binding) because a number of details (mistakes and changes) will be different in the final score.
The work was originally suggested to me by St. John Perse's long poem about America Vents which has a rather large Whitmanesque vision of winds blowing over our continent, changing everything, wiping away the old world, bringing in the new, and of the poet stating:
O vous que rafraîchit l'orage … Fraîcheur et gage de fraîcheur.
… Et vous avez si peu de temps pour naître à cet instant.
Such lines as the opening of the poem:
C'étaient de très grands vents sur toutes faces de ce monde
De très grands vents en liesse par le monde, qui n'avaient ni d'aire ni de gîte,
Qui n'avaient garde ni mesure, et nous laissaient, hommes de paille
En l'an de paille sur leur erre … Ah oui, de très grands
vents sur toutes faces de vivants!
Or
(Ces grands vents)
Sur toutes choses périssables, sur toutes choses saisissables, parmi le monde entier des choses …
Et d'éventer l'usure et la sécheresse au coeur des hommes investis,
Car tout un siècle s'ébruitait dans la sécheresse de sa paille, parmi d'étranges désinences: à bout de cosses, de siliques, à bout de choses frémissantes.
[…]
(The poem ends:)
Quand la violence eut renouvelé le lit des hommes sur la terre,
Un très vieil arbre, à sec de feuilles, reprit le fil de ses maximes …
Et un autre arbre de haut rang montait déjà des grandes Indes souterraines,
Avec sa feuille magnétique et son chargement de fruits nouveaux.178
As soon as the piece began to take shape, however, I forgot about the poem and find its false epic tone a little too bombastic for my taste. I have quoted it at length because [it] gave me the overall mood of an idea of the work, which was finally reformulated into my own, human and musical terms.
Technically this is a work built on four main strata of chords, with different interval structures. The normal state of these are five note chords and their complementary seven note chords (of which pairs there are 38, all of which are used).
The five note chords are associated with the four movements of the work […] Each of the movements is embedded in the others – movement I contains elements of II, III, IV etc. as on page 1 of analysis, and emerges and disappears throughout the work.
The opening and some of the important climaxes (138–140, 285–6 and the coda) combine elements of all four movements simultaneously, as indicated at the top of p. 1 of the analysis.
Each of the movements has a characteristic tessitura, as the analysis shows, and a characteristic temporal behavior. Movement II appears in a fast version at the beginning, and during its long statement gradually slows down, a pattern it continues at each secondary appearance. The reverse is true of mvt IV. Movements I and III combine ritardation and acceleration: mvt 1 tends to start each successive pattern of ritardation at a faster point, and mvt III starts each successive pattern of acceleration at a slower point. All of this is not carried out too schematically.
As for the many “metrical modulations” which occur in the work: the tempi of this work should be somewhat flexible since it deals primarily in written out rubati, but the carry-over of note values from one tempo to another should be quite exact so as not to break the continuity. For instance, from 26–27 the septuplet of 8th notes of the piano should be exactly the same speeds as the regular 8th notes in 27; in 40 to 41, the piano's triplets in 40 should flow evenly into the septuplet under the triplet, the beats in the piano's left hand in 40 state the tempo of 41, as I have indicated in red pencil […] The same applies to all other “metric modulations” which I think are clearly marked.
These changes should be fairly accurate as the whole pacing of the work depends on progressive reappearances of materials coming in at different tempi, i.e. mvt IV material comes in bit by bit faster over the entire work, and this will not come out if the tempo changes are not reasonably accurate.
As you can see, while the work has an underlying structure of chords and tempi, it should be played in a way that gives the impression [of] freedom almost abandon.
If I can clarify anything please feel free to call on me – we shall be returning to 31 W 12th St, WA-9-1618, in a week or so, and hope to get in touch with you and see you quite soon after.
With kindest regards to Felicia,
Elliott
1 Bernstein, taped interview with John Gruen, Italy, 1967, transcription online at http://www.leonardbernstein.com/kaddish_commentary.htm (accessed 19 March 2013).
2 Jule Styne (1905–94), British-born American composer whose Broadway successes included Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bells Are Ringing, and Gypsy.
3 This telegram was sent the day of Bernstein's Carnegie Hall concert with the New York Philharmonic which included Schumann's Manfred Overture, Strauss' Don Quixote, the American premiere of Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 2 (with Bernstein as soloist), and Ravel's La Valse.
4 The only New York Philharmonic programme in which Bernstein conducted both Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and a work by Webern (the Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6) was at Carnegie Hall on 16, 17, and 19 January 1958.
5 Robbins' idea for a theater piece based on the Beat Generation was sparked off by the interviews he enclosed with the letter. The first can be identified from Robbins' quotations: it was given by Jack Kerouac to Mike Wallace and published in the New York Post on 21 January 1958, soon after the publication of Kerouac's On The Road (Wallace's first question was: “What is the Beat Generation?”); the second was almost certainly another Wallace interview with Beat poet Philip Lamantia. See “Interview with Jack Kerouac: Lowell Author Gives His Version of the Beat Generation,” New York Post, 21 Ja
nuary 1958, reprinted in Kevin J. Hayes, ed. (2005), Interviews with Jack Kerouac. University Press of Mississippi, pp. 3–6.
6 The planned program mentioned in this letter took place a year later, in Carnegie Hall on 9, 10, and 11 April 1959. The concerts included Handel's Harpsichord Concerto in F, Mozart's Piano Concerto in C, K467, the first New York performance of Symphony of Chorales by Lukas Foss, and Wagner's Tannhäuser Overture. Reviewing the concert in The New York Times (11 April 1959), Howard Taubman praised Foss' “finely balanced” interpretation of the Handel, in which he played the harpsichord, and enjoyed his stylish Mozart playing that had “elegance, but not at the sacrifice of virility.” Foss' Symphony of Chorales was a commission by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation. Taubman was largely unimpressed: “The first movement has some brilliance, the second some appealing serenity of mood and the third an attractive pastoral quality. But all of it goes on and on with a meandering garrulity. Agreeable ideas are worried and turned ponderous. It is all reminiscent of a diluted Mahler.”
7 See Letter 416, describing the same evening.
8 The Firstborn by Christopher Fry opened at the Coronet Theatre on 30 April 1958. It included incidental music by Bernstein. The cast was led by Anthony Quayle; it also included Michael Wager, a friend of the Bernsteins.
9 The Aula Magna of Caracas University, built in 1952–3. The architect was Carlos Raúl Villanueva. Alexander Calder's magnificent “flying saucers” are memorable visually and useful acoustically.
10 The new President of Venezuela was Wolfgang Larrazábal, who was in office for less than a year, from 23 January to 14 November 1958.
11 Vice-President Nixon's trip to South America (27 April–15 May) revealed to the US government just how bad relations were with Latin America, and reached its low point on 13 May when he was attacked by an angry mob in Caracas.
12 Felicia had played Joan of Arc in Bernstein's New York Philharmonic performances of Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher on 24, 25, and 27 April 1958.
13 Time (5 May 1958) described the occasion as “a family triumph”.
14 Brigitta Lieberson, the wife of Goddard Lieberson, who performed as Vera Zorina. She played Joan in the first American performance of the work, given by the New York Philharmonic under Charles Munch on 1 January 1948.
15 La Belle Hélène was the Bernsteins' nickname for Helen Coates.
16 Between 29 April and 14 June 1958, Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic undertook an extensive tour of Central and South America, giving concerts in Panama, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Mexico.
17 Ellen Adler became Oppenheim's second wife in 1957.
18 Van Cliburn had just won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
19 Schuman's Sixth Symphony (composed in 1948) was played in Caracas on 2 May, then on 13 May in Lima, the day before Bernstein wrote this letter.
20 Rosamond Lehmann (1901–90), British novelist. Her friends included many of the Bloomsbury Group, among them Lytton Strachey and his wife Dora Carrington, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf. In the 1940s she had a ten-year affair with the poet Cecil Day Lewis. This warmly appreciative letter about West Side Story was written less than a month before the death of Lehmann's daughter Sally – a tragedy that virtually put an end to Lehmann's writing career and led her into Spiritualism.
21 Martha Gellhorn (1908–98), American journalist and author. Gellhorn's work as a war correspondent started with the Spanish Civil War, which she witnessed with Ernest Hemingway (he dedicated For Whom the Bell Tolls to her, and they married in 1940). She covered Hitler's rise to power, and was one of the first journalists to report on the concentration camp at Dachau. She later covered the war in Vietnam, the Six-Day War in 1967, and numerous other international conflicts. She divorced Hemingway in 1945, and in 1954 she married Tom Matthews, editor of Time magazine. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was established in her memory. Her friendship with Bernstein was a curious one. Though both were politically liberal, there were few other obvious connections between the two of them aside from being tennis partners when they were both at Cuernavaca in Mexico; Gellhorn was not musical, but she clearly liked Bernstein. For Gellhorn's remarks on Hemingway, see Letter 427.
22 “Omi” was Martha Gellhorn's mother, Edna Gellhorn, née Fischel.
23 Gellhorn had already written to Bernstein about hearing the cast recording at Klosters, Switzerland, earlier in the year. In a letter dated 18 March 1958, Gellhorn told Bernstein that she “wept at parts, and roared with laughter at others. It is almost tangible music.”
24 Tom Matthews, former editor of Time Magazine and Martha Gellhorn's second husband. They married in 1954.
25 Bernstein's broadcast performance of Arcana was released on CD in Bernstein Live (NYP 2003).
26 Diamond's The World of Paul Klee for orchestra.
27 Diamond was working on a musical comedy based on Mirandolina by Carlo Goldoni.
28 Bernstein had been to see the Broadway run of Robbins' Ballets USA, which included New York Export: Opus Jazz (music by Robert Prince and sets by Ben Shahn), Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun, 3x3 (with a score by Georges Auric), and The Concert, the first of Robbins' ballets to music by Chopin. New York Export: Opus Jazz was performed again at President Kennedy's 45th birthday party in the old Madison Square Garden – the occasion when Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”
29 These rehearsals were for the cast that was about to take the show to England (including George Chakiris as Riff, Marlys Watters as Maria, Don McKay as Tony, and Chita Rivera as Anita), and the “European conductor,” Lawrence Leonard. It was first seen at Manchester Opera House on 14 November 1958, before heading to London where it opened at Her Majesty's Theatre on 12 December and ran for 1,039 performances.
30 The paragraph about Dybbuk is a reminder of how long Robbins and Bernstein spent contemplating this project. The ballet was completed in 1974, but they had first considered the story soon after collaborating on Fancy Free, three decades earlier, and Robbins was eager to make progress straight after West Side Story. The proposed collaboration with the artist Ben Shahn never came about because he died in 1969. (When Dybbuk was presented by New York City Ballet in 1974, the designs were by Rouben Ter-Arutunian.)
31 Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), American playwright and novelist, author of two of the most celebrated plays written for the American stage – Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth – and the novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey. All three won Pulitzer Prizes for Wilder.
32 Alma Mahler (née Schindler, 1879–1964) was married in turn to Gustav Mahler, Walter Gropius, and Franz Werfel. Her memoirs were published in 1958 with the title And the Bridge is Love, a quotation from Thornton Wilder's 1927 novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey (“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning”). The sculptor Anna Mahler (1904–88) was the second daughter of Mahler and Alma. Like her mother she married several times, including the composer Ernst Krenek, the publisher Paul Zsolnay, and the conductor Anatole Fistoulari.
33 Larry Adler (1914–2001), American harmonica player for whom Vaughan Williams and Milhaud composed pieces. Adler was blacklisted in Hollywood and moved to London in 1949.
34 Adler's name was not credited because of his blacklisting; instead the arranger and conductor Muir Mathieson was named as the composer of the score for Genevieve – an error that was only rectified officially in 1986. The nominations for Best Music Score at the 27th Academy Awards were: The Caine Mutiny (Max Steiner); Genevieve (Larry Adler); The High and the Mighty (Dimitri Tiomkin); On the Waterfront (Leonard Bernstein); and The Silver Chalice (Franz Waxman).
35 Louis Armstrong (1901–71), jazz trumpeter and singer. In 1956, he appeared on Bernstein's album What is Jazz?
36 Swiss Kriss was a herbal laxative that Armstrong used and promoted.
37 A reference to
the early years of the Space Race, starting with the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957.
38 Gellhorn was married to Hemingway from 1940 to 1945. See Letter 427.
39 Clearly Milhaud had heard the performance by the time he wrote to Bernstein again three weeks later, on 29 January 1959.
40 Mary Rodgers (b. 1931), American composer and author. She is the daughter of Richard Rodgers. A graduate of Wellesley College, where she majored in music, Rodgers had a Broadway hit in 1959 with Once Upon a Mattress. She worked as assistant to the producer of Bernstein's Young People's Concerts. In 1972 she published her first children's book, Freaky Friday.
41 Joe (Joseph) Roddy (1920–2002), American journalist. He worked on the staff of Look magazine and Life magazine as well as writing for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper's magazine. A friend of Bernstein for many years, he was a passionate music-lover who regularly attended rehearsals at the New York Philharmonic.
42 In The Infinite Variety of Music, broadcast on 22 February 1959, Bernstein took the four notes of Irving Berlin's “How Dry I Am” (G-C-D-E), showing how they were used by composers from Handel (Water Music) to Shostakovich (Fifth Symphony). The script was printed in Bernstein 1966, pp. 29–46.
43 The show was First Impressions, a musical based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, with music and lyrics by Robert Goldman, Glenn Paxton, and George Weiss, and a libretto by Abe Burrows (of Guys and Dolls fame), who also directed. First Impressions opened on 19 March 1959 and closed on 30 May, after just 92 performances. The production was under the overall supervision of the Jule Styne Organization, hence Styne's interest in it.
44 Bernstein didn't write to The New York Times about Atkinson's acidic review. He wrote to Styne that he “would love to help out and did enjoy the show,” but that he “makes it a rule not to do this kind of thing as so many people ask for it” (from the draft reply in Helen Coates' hand on Styne's letter).
45 The Joy of Music.
46 Oliver Daniel (1911–90) was an energetic promoter of new music. In 1954 he created the Concert Music Department at Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), a rival to ASCAP. Daniel also helped to establish Composers' Recordings Inc. (CRI).
The Leonard Bernstein Letters Page 68