The Leonard Bernstein Letters

by Leonard Bernstein

  Bernstein quickly took his colleague's advice to heart. According to Humphrey Burton (1994, p. 354), Bernstein “brushed aside [Wobisch's] past: he would refer to him openly as ‘his SS man’.” Wobisch's well-documented past was catalogued in detail in a letter to Joseph Wechsberg from Simon Wiesenthal on 3 February 1967 (a copy of which was sent by Wechsberg to Bernstein) confirming Wobisch's membership not only of the Nazi Party and the SS, but also of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the intelligence agency of the SS and the party. Despite these grim associations, both Solti and Bernstein found Wobisch friendly and supportive, and Bernstein was to spend much of the latter part of his career performing and recording the symphonic repertoire with the Vienna Philharmonic (including Mozart's late symphonies, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Mahler, and Sibelius). Solti's letter was a timely and characteristic intervention, encouraging Bernstein to take a conciliatory approach.

  152 John Culshaw (1924–1980) was a producer for Decca. He is best remembered for producing the Solti Ring and for numerous recordings conducted by Benjamin Britten.

  153 Janis Ian (b. 1951), American songwriter, singer, and author. The CBS News Special, Inside Pop –the Rock Revolution, was broadcast on 27 April 1967, presented by Bernstein and produced by David Oppenheim. In this program, Janis Ian performed “Society's Child,” which Bernstein discussed as a social protest song.

  154 Foss' “Philharmonic tragedy” was the cancellation at the last minute of the first performance of Foss' Variations. According to The New York Times (9 July 1967), this was because “the materials needed to perform the new work were not ready.” The other work on the program was Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake, conducted by Seiji Ozawa, with Vera Zorina (whose real name, Brigitta, Bernstein uses) playing Joan. The New York Times review suggests that it was indeed the triumph Bernstein suggested: “Her diction was beautiful, her voice was musical, and her intensity was compelling.”

  155 John Gruen's The Private World of Leonard Bernstein was published in 1968.

  156 The musical Bernstein hopes is “ship-shape” is Follies (information from Stephen Sondheim). Ted Chapin explains that: “In June of 1967 The Girls Upstairs [the original title for Follies] was scheduled for the coming Broadway season, to be produced by David Merrick and Leland Hayward. The plan ultimately fell through” (Chapin 2005, p. xxii). Follies eventually opened in 1971.

  157 Bernstein has written a draft reply at the foot of this letter: “Dear Janis, I'd love to come but I can't and I'm flattered you asked me & thought of me. I wish you a howling success. LB”

  158 The 9 January 1968 edition of Look magazine (pp. 74–7) included an article by Joe Roddy entitled “How to Think about Leonard Bernstein,” mostly about his tenure at the New York Philharmonic and his relationship with the orchestra.

  159 Richard Rodney Bennett (1936–2012), English composer and pianist.

  160 Bennett's Symphony No. 2 was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary and first performed on 18 January 1968, conducted by Bernstein.

  161 Sondheim's “Dedicated Dodecahedron” puzzle was published in New York Magazine on 15 April 1968.

  162 “The Funke literary effort” refers to an article by Lewis B. Funke published in The New York Times on 8 April 1968, under the headline “West Side Story Collaborators Plan Musical of Brecht Play”.

  163 Derived in part from comments made by Bernstein “speaking from Vienna,” Funke ends with what seems like an unduly brusque comment: “Mr. Sondheim, who will do the lyrics, will have to wait until Mr. Bernstein completes some of the score.” Understandably, Bernstein was keen to clear up any misunderstanding this remark might have caused.

  164 Bernstein's desire “get back and dig in” refers to the planned musical based on Brecht's The Exception and the Rule that he was working on with Sondheim and Jerome Robbins. Though several songs were written and there are a number of sketches in the Leonard Bernstein Collection, the project was abandoned.

  165 Jacqueline Kennedy (1929–94), First Lady of the United States during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, from 1961 until his assassination in 1963. She had come to know and like Bernstein during his frequent visits to the Kennedy White House.

  166 Shortly after midnight on the morning of 6 June 1968, Jacqueline Kennedy's brother-in-law, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated in Los Angeles. The younger brother of President Kennedy, Robert had served in his brother's administration as Attorney General, then as Senator from New York. He had just won the California Democratic primary in the 1968 presidential campaign, running on a radical platform of social justice and racial equality. Jacqueline Kennedy phoned Bernstein later on the same day (6 June) to ask him to oversee the musical aspects of the funeral Mass at St Patrick's Cathedral, New York. The funeral took place on 8 June; Bernstein conducted the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony with thirty members of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and part of the last movement of Verdi's Requiem. As reported in The New York Times (9 June 1968), “Mr. Bernstein's role in the Mass was specifically requested by the Kennedy family, with whom he has been friendly for several years.” As Jacqueline Kennedy wrote in her letter, the Mahler was played at a particularly touching moment in the Mass, during the Offertory procession. The New York Times described this “procession by eight Kennedy children who marched in twos up the sanctuary behind two candle bearers to present the hosts and the wine used in the consecration of the Mass.”

  167 Presumably one of the suggestions was Fauré's Requiem.

  168 This undated letter was sent on the occasion of Bernstein's 50th birthday in August 1968. It is particularly valuable for Green's recollections of their first meeting at Camp Onota in 1937. Bernstein and Green were near contemporaries, though not quite as near as Bernstein imagined when he responded a few months later (2 December 1968), with a poem to celebrate “Adolph, on his 50th(?) Birthday,” actually his 54th.

  169 Harold Byrns (1903–77), German-born conductor (born Hans Bernstein) who studied with Erich Kleiber and Walter Gieseking at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and became Kleiber's assistant. After moving to the United States, Byrns became known as a specialist in contemporary music. In October 1949, he conducted a concert for Schoenberg's 75th birthday in Los Angeles (attended by both Schoenberg and Stravinsky), including the First Chamber Symphony; the same year he made the first recording of Bartók's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and gave one of the earliest performances of Stravinsky's Mass. Byrns was particularly devoted to Mahler's music, and was a friend of Alma Mahler.

  170 Hebrew greetings, meaning “a good year” and “see you soon.”

  171 Bernstein has added two exclamation marks beside this paragraph: the remarkable coincidence of two conductors called Bernstein, both of whom Koussevitzky attempted to persuade to change their names. Byrns took his advice, whereas Bernstein didn't.

  172 In fact, Adolph Green's 54th birthday.

  173 Alan Fluck (1928–97) was Director of Music at Farnham Grammar School and the moving force of the Farnham Festival with its numerous commissions of pieces for young musicians. Fluck had a warm friendship with Bernstein. He commented on this letter that for Bernstein's 50th birthday he “made a gigantic crossword puzzle, 50 words across and down. Clues and answers were all based on the life and works of LB. I sent it to him in Brussels and received this [letter] a month later.”

  174 “Our symphony” given Bernstein's long history conducting the work, as well as the enduring friendship between the two men. Bernstein conducted Thompson's Second Symphony at Tanglewood in 1940, and later with the New York Philharmonic in 1959 and 1968 (followed by the recording praised in Thompson's letter of 16 January 1970, Letter 545).

  175 Michael Overbury (b. 1953), English organist. After his youthful success as a pianist, he was organ scholar at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and subsequently held positions at New College, Oxford, St. Alban's Cathedral, and Newark Parish Church, before being appointed Director of Music at Worksop Priory in 1999.<
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  176 Elliott Carter (1908–2012), American composer. He studied with Walter Piston at Harvard and later with Nadia Boulanger. Stravinsky called Carter's Double Concerto (1961) “the first American masterpiece.”

  177 Carter's Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Bernstein conducted the world premiere performances at Lincoln Center on 5, 6, 8, and 9 February 1970, and recorded it on 11 February.

  178 The following is an English version of the quoted passages, in the translation by Hugh Chisholm:

  These were very great winds over all the faces of this world, great winds rejoicing over the world, having neither eyrie nor resting-place,

  Having neither care nor caution, and leaving us, in their wake,

  Men of straw in the year of straw … Ah, yes, very great winds over all the faces of the living!

  Over all things perishable, over all things graspable, throughout the entire world of things. …

  And airing out the attrition and drought in the heart of men in office,

  For a whole century was rustling in the dry sound of its straw, amid strange terminations at the tips of husks of pods, at the tips of trembling things.

  When violence had remade the bed of men on the earth,

  A very old tree, barren of leaves, resumed the thread of its maxims …

  And another tree of high degree was already rising from the great subterranean Indies,

  With its magnetic leaf and its burden of new fruits.

  7

  Triumphs, Controversies, Catastrophe

  1970–78

  Bernstein relinquished his post as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic in 1969, but he remained firmly in the public gaze. Two events stirred up controversy – both of them for questionable reasons. When Felicia hosted a reception (at the behest of the American Civil Liberties Union) to raise funds for the legal costs of thirteen members of the Black Panthers, this was seized upon gleefully by the press and widely misreported. Declassified files reveal that it gave the FBI yet another excuse to take an interest in Bernstein's allegedly suspicious activities. “Radical chic,” the phrase coined by Tom Wolfe to describe the event, is a resonant one, and doubtless contributed to sustaining the widely reported but largely mythical version of the story – that Bernstein gave a party for the Black Panthers. As Bernstein told Jonathan Cott in 1989, “It's a legend and it dies hard. It wasn't a party and I didn't give it. […] So what am I to do? You can't beat the legends … except by telling the truth. And ultimately, maybe, legends die.”

  In 1971, Bernstein caused controversy again, this time at the highest levels of government – in this case the paranoid and criminal administration of Richard Nixon. The problem was a rumor, investigated by the FBI, that Bernstein's newly finished Mass was intended to embarrass the President by promoting an agenda of peace. Nixon detested Bernstein, and when the FBI passed the investigation back to the White House, what ensued was something close to black comedy. So convinced were Nixon's aides that Bernstein was out to cause trouble that they lost any kind of grip on common sense. Pat Buchanan – then an advisor to Nixon, later a conservative pundit – wrote this memorandum on 28 July 1971:

  My view is that we ought to find someone who can definitely translate that Latin Mass Bernstein is working on – to make sure this is accurate. Then, we might want to sand-bag him; i.e. wait until it is too late for him to change his format – and then unload on him. Another course would be to have this released to front-page and force him to back down. However, we should be able to get a copy of what he is preparing – as there will have to be rehearsals – and once we get that, get us a good Jesuit to translate, maybe Father McLaughlin will do and once translated – leak the thing. But we ought to move rapidly lest the President be tied into attending and forced to back down.1

  Mass was Bernstein's first work to be written in the 1970s, much of it conceived during a stay at the MacDowell Colony. It was followed by three other large-scale pieces. The ballet Dybbuk – which Jerome Robbins had been urging him to write since the 1940s – finally saw the light of day at New York City Ballet in 1974: it turned out to be the last of their collaborations. It is a very demanding score, making use of some twelve-tone techniques, about which Oliver Knussen wrote as follows: “After the militant anti-atonal statements which abounded in his Norton Lectures at Harvard, it is surprising to find Bernstein making use of numerical formulas derived from the Kabbalah […] and producing his most austerely contemporary-sounding score to date.”2

  The Norton Lectures, given on six consecutive Tuesday evenings in October and November 1973 and published as The Unanswered Question, were the most fully developed expression of Bernstein's thoughts on music, and his attempt to apply Noam Chomsky's theories of linguistics to it. Bernstein's work was criticized by some academics as unsystematic – but surely the important point is that his conclusions are so often inherently musical. Virgil Thomson and Bernstein had known each other for thirty years, and Thomson was sometimes a harsh critic of Bernstein's music; but he was impressed by the lectures. He praised Bernstein's “skill in explaining music” and went on: “Myself I find nothing reprehensible about your bringing in linguistics. You needed an authority to support an ‘innate musical grammar’ and Chomsky's heavy artillery is surely that.”

  The musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue turned out to be an unhappy experience. It was overlong when it was tried out in Philadelphia, but the score includes a great deal of music that is beautiful (some of the best numbers were later salvaged by Charles Harmon and Sid Ramin for A White House Cantata). Written by Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner as a celebration of the United States Bicentennial, by the time the show opened on Broadway it was doomed – especially as it had been cut to shreds, against Bernstein's wishes. Friends were well aware of the trials and tribulations, and rallied round: during the try-out in Philadelphia, Robbins did his best to encourage his old friend (“Take care of your house. You can do it. Come on kid, get the spirit up again. No limp cocks!”), while Sondheim sent a telegram saying “you're still the only artist writing musicals with one exception that is.” The great photographer Richard Avedon was (understandably) overcome by the beauty of the music. But it was to no avail. Despite the wonderful score, and clever lyrics by Lerner, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was a failure. Another commission intended for the Bicentennial (finished a year too late) was Songfest, an anthology of thirteen poems for solo voices and orchestra. Completed in 1977, it was much admired by Bernstein's old friend and collaborator Oliver Smith, and was praised by others: Oliver Knussen pointed out the lessons Bernstein appeared to have learned from Britten, especially the Spring Symphony (which Bernstein knew well, having conducted it in 1963), but he also valued the originality of the score: “I can't think of another living composer who could approach Bernstein's complete involvement with and response to such varied texts.”3 Despite the quality of the music (and the sensitivity of Bernstein's settings), Songfest is hardly ever performed. It deserves better.

  From a creative point of view, the 1970s must have been rather disheartening for Bernstein: of four major works, only Mass could be counted a success, and even that was the focus of some very hostile criticism. But the musical disappointments were as nothing to the turmoil in Bernstein's personal life. In 1974, Felicia was diagnosed with cancer – Bernstein's letter to her from New Zealand is full of reminders to see her doctor. But things quickly got even worse. By 1976 their marriage was in tatters: Newsweek announced a “trial separation” – Felicia was increasingly disturbed by what Humphrey Burton has described as “intimations that her husband was abandoning the discretion that was part of their unspoken covenant” (Burton 1994, p. 414). Burton's evidence is pretty damning: Bernstein was having affairs with at least two men, one of them Tom Cothran, a young musician Bernstein had met in 1973. Felicia was not prepared to see their family life put in peril and gave him an ultimatum: either he must stop seeing Cothran alone, or he need not come hom
e. Bernstein's daughter Nina – who was 13 at the time – recalled some difficult family scenes in an interview with Ginny Dougary in 2010: “My mother was a fairly conventional lady and so she expected to be treated like one. The deal was that he would be discreet and that she would maintain her dignity. And then he was not discreet, and so that was that.”4 Bernstein and Cothran set up in a new apartment for a few months, but then Felicia was diagnosed with lung cancer, and Bernstein begged to be allowed back. Nina recalls that “The whole thing was terribly awkward and painful,” and, of course, matters were made worse by the intrusive glare of publicity. When Felicia died on 16 June 1978, Bernstein blamed himself. Humphrey Burton writes about this with harrowing honesty: “The crushing impact on Leonard Bernstein was that he believed himself responsible for his wife's death, and his sense of guilt never left him. Felicia was the greatest love of his life. He never recovered from her loss, and he never forgot the curse she uttered when he told her he was leaving her for Cothran. She had pointed her finger at him in fury and predicted, in a harsh whisper: ‘You're going to die a bitter and lonely old man.’”5

  545. Randall Thompson to Leonard Bernstein

  22 Larch Road, Cambridge, MA

  16 January 1970

  Dear Leonard,

  What a glorious recording of my Second Symphony!6 What can I say to express my appreciation and my happiness? The whole interpretation is perfect – and inspired. The orchestra is superb and seems to be breathing with you all the way through. The engineering is both sensitive and powerful, refined in solo passages and rich in the tutti. And throughout, the rhythm is so vital that the whole work throbs with life. I wrote it exactly forty years ago, in this very village, for Koussy. It's yours now, and I see him smiling.