16 Cryptic crossword puzzles.
17 Bernstein consulted the psychiatrist Willard Gaylin regularly in the early 1970s.
18 Jamie Bernstein (b. 1952), the eldest child of Leonard and Felicia Bernstein.
19 Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007), the first woman in modern history to lead a Muslim state, attended Harvard (Radcliffe College) from 1969 to 1973. Her nickname at Harvard was “Pinkie”.
20 Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.
21 8 September was the opening night of Mass at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
22 Oliver Smith designed the sets for Mass.
23 Christa Ludwig (b. 1928), German mezzo-soprano with whom Bernstein collaborated on numerous occasions from the late 1960s onwards, notably in Mahler (Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, Das Lied von der Erde, Des Knaben Wunderhorn), Brahms (lieder), and in Bernstein's own work: the Jeremiah and Kaddish symphonies, and, in December 1989, as the Old Lady in Candide.
24 David Charles Abell (b. 1958) is now a successful conductor. At the time of writing this letter, he was a member of the Berkshire Boy Choir and had performed in the original production of Bernstein's Mass. At the time he conducted Stephen Sondheim's 80th birthday concert at the 2010 BBC Proms, he wrote: “None of that would probably have happened if I hadn't been in Mass at age 13” (David Charles Abell, personal communication).
25 Marcus Dods (1918–84), British conductor. He was music director for all of Richard Rodney Bennett's major film scores: Billion Dollar Brain (1967), Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), Lady Caroline Lamb (1972), and Murder on the Orient Express (1974).
26 Bernstein played his own arrangement of Rodgers' “Nobody's Heart Belongs to Me” from By Jupiter as part of the “Celebration of Richard Rodgers” held at the Imperial Theatre on 26 March 1972 in honour of Rodgers' forthcoming 70th birthday (28 June 1972).
27 On 15 and 16 April 1971, Bernstein conducted performances of Mahler's Fifth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic. A few weeks later (6 and 7 May) he conducted Mahler's Fourth Symphony.
28 Luciano Berio (1925–2003), Italian composer. Bernstein commissioned Berio's Sinfonia, which was first performed by the New York Philharmonic on 10 October 1968.
29 This innovative television series, presented by Berio and broadcast in 1972, included an episode entitled “Nuovo mondo” in which Bernstein appeared.
30 “October's Bright Blue Weather” by Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–85) was first published in her Verses (Boston, 1870). Her poetry was admired by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and she was a lifelong friend of Emily Dickinson. As well as poetry, Jackson also wrote a popular novel (Ramona) about the government's mistreatment of Native Americans.
31 Dybbuk was slowly taking shape when Robbins wrote this letter, but there was still much to be done. The New York Times reported (12 July 1972) that Bernstein was planning to take “nearly a year off from public performing to give his undivided attention to writing music” and as a result he did get the score finished. The ballet was first performed by New York City Ballet at Lincoln Center, New York, on 16 May 1974.
32 Interplay was Robbins' second ballet (after Fancy Free). It was set to a score by Morton Gould and first performed at Billy Rose's Concert Varieties on 1 June 1945. It was subsequently taken into the repertoire of the New York City Ballet. In October 1972, the Joffrey Ballet gave a successful revival, the one referred to in this letter.
33 Owen Wingrave was originally composed as an opera for television, first broadcast on 16 May 1971. In this letter Britten is referring to the work's stage premiere, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 10 May 1973.
34 The world premiere of Death in Venice was given at Snape Maltings on 16 June 1973.
35 Undated, written inside a Christmas card from Britten and Pears.
36 Virgil Thomson (1896–1989), American composer and critic. Thomson had known Bernstein since the 1940s, when he encouraged Bernstein, Paul Bowles, and others to develop as tonal composers. As a critic, he always took Bernstein's music seriously. In John Rockwell's obituary of Thomson in The New York Times (1 October 1989), Bernstein was quoted as follows: “The death of Virgil T is like the death of an American city: it is intolerable. Virgil was loving and harsh, generous and mordant, simple but cynical, son of the hymnal yet highly sophisticated. He will always remain brightly alive in the history of music, if only for the extraordinary influence his witty and simplistic music had on his colleagues. I know that I am one twig on that tree, and I will always cherish and revere Virgil, the source.”
37 The 1974 Broadway revival of Candide opened at the Broadway Theatre on 10 March and ran for 740 performances.
38 Alan Jay Lerner (1918–86), American lyricist and librettist who was a contemporary of Bernstein's at Harvard. A plan to work together on a show in 1949 came to nothing (see Letter 288), but in 1957 Lerner and Bernstein wrote two choruses for the Harvard Glee Club. In 1976 they collaborated on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue – a work that has, alas, become more famous for its catastrophic failure on Broadway than for the beauty of Bernstein's score and the brilliance of Lerner's lyrics (both heard to advantage in A White House Cantata, arranged from the show by Charlie Harmon and Sid Ramin after Bernstein's death). Lerner's most productive collaborations were with Frederick Loewe: Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, Gigi, and Camelot; he also worked with Kurt Weill (Love Life) and Burton Lane (On A Clear Day You Can See Forever).
39 The first performance of Dybbuk took place the day after this letter was written.
40 Presumably the second act of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
41 Maurice Abravanel (1903–93), Greek-born American conductor. He was a pupil and friend of Kurt Weill and conducted the original productions of several of Weill's Broadway shows, including Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, The Firebrand of Florence, and Street Scene. In 1949 he was conductor for the Broadway run of Blitzstein's Regina. Abravanel was Music Director of the Utah Symphony Orchestra from 1947 to 1979, leaving an extensive legacy of recordings. The orchestra's home was renamed Abravanel Hall in 1993.
42 In August–September 1974, Bernstein was on tour with the New York Philharmonic to New Zealand, Australia, and Japan. Bernstein's concerts began in Auckland on 16 August, and ended in Nagoya, Japan, on 6 September. In Wellington (17 August) and Christchurch (18 August) the programme was Mozart's Piano Concerto K503 (with Bernstein as the soloist) and Mahler's Fifth Symphony.
43 Alexander, their son.
44 In June 1974, Felicia had mastectomy surgery.
45 A “British-style” cryptic crossword.
46 This article appeared in The New York Times on 25 August 1974. Written by Raymond Ericson and headed “The Pick of Modern American Music,” it included no work by Bernstein. According to the report, Igor Buketoff collated the list in The New York Times from the responses of a jury of nine experts. Foss (like Diamond) was one of the American composers who actively supported Bernstein's music from the 1940s onwards. Foss was understandably hurt that his choice of Bernstein's Age of Anxiety had been ignored by The New York Times.
47 Thornton Wilder died in December 1975, a few months after writing this letter, but the story of Bernstein's attempt to set The Skin of Our Teeth went back more than a dozen years (see note to letter 500). Why was Bernstein in contact with Wilder about this project as late as 1975? Perhaps it was because the revue By Bernstein that opened on 23 November 1975 at the Chelsea Theater Center, New York, included “Here Comes the Sun” and “Spring Will Come Again,” both originally written for The Skin of Our Teeth in 1964, before being recycled in the Chichester Psalms the following year. Perhaps Bernstein also contemplated including Sabina's opening aria (“Oh! Oh! Oh!”), described by Wilder in unflattering terms in this letter. Sketches for this survive in the Leonard Bernstein Collection.
48 “Kanagawa” is a reference to Pacific Overtures. Tryouts for this show started at the Shubert Theatre, Boston (8–29 November 1975), and then the Kennedy Center Opera
House, Washington, D.C. (4–27 December 1975), before opening on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theatre on 11 January 1976.
49 The reviews for the Boston tryout of Pacific Overtures.
50 The “button problem” refers to finding the most effective way to end a song.
51 The tryouts of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were in Philadelphia: it was proving to be an exceptionally troublesome show. Jerome Robbins was not only Bernstein's most regular theatrical collaborator and a trusted friend, but he was also a brilliant “show doctor.” Despite a score that is often very beautiful, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue failed when it moved to Broadway.
52 4 May 1976 was the opening night of the troubled 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Broadway, where it ran for just seven performances.
53 Fine and Schapiro is a famous Kosher restaurant and delicatessen in New York.
54 Ramin (and Hershy Kay) orchestrated 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
55 Richard Avedon (1923–2004), American photographer who helped to “define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century,” according to his obituary in The New York Times (1 October 2004). Avedon and his wife Evelyn were close friends of the Bernsteins, and he loved Bernstein's music (a few years earlier, on 3 January 1972, he had written to Bernstein and Felicia about Mass: “I play it over and over (not while I'm photographing), and when I'm not listening, I sing ‘I Go On’ and cry a lot. How can I thank you?”).
56 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
57 One of the very few allusions in Bernstein's correspondence to his separation from Felicia in 1976–7. The story of this traumatic episode is eloquently told by Humphrey Burton (1994, pp. 426–41). Felicia and Leonard were reconciled by the summer of 1977, but she was already suffering from the lung cancer that would kill her a year later.
58 Irwin Kostal (1911–94), American orchestrator and arranger. One of the original orchestrators of West Side Story with Sid Ramin. His Hollywood credits included West Side Story (again with Sid Ramin) and The Sound of Music (conductor and music supervisor), winning Oscars for both. He also conducted the 1982 digital re-recording of the soundtrack to Disney's Fantasia.
59 The album Music from Mass – Overture to Candide by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra was issued by Deutsche Grammophon. It included nine movements from Mass arranged for orchestra by Irwin Kostal.
60 The first complete performance of Songfest took place in Washington, D.C., on 11 October 1977.
61 The live performance of Fidelio from the Vienna State Opera on 29 January 1978 was released on DVD (Deutsche Grammophon 073 4159) in 2006. It's a magnificent performance that has been widely praised, not least by John Steane in Gramophone who said that it constituted “one of the great artistic experiences of a lifetime.”
62 Felicia Bernstein died on 16 June 1978, having been ill with cancer for several years.
63 André Previn (b. 1930), German-born American conductor, pianist, and composer. Previn was the piano soloist in Beethoven's Triple Concerto (with Yehudi Menuhin and Mstislav Rostropovich) in the gala concert conducted by Bernstein on 25 August 1978. This was a celebration of his 60th birthday with the National Symphony Orchestra, at its summer home, Wolf Trap in Virginia.
64 Copland conducted the Lamentation from Bernstein's Jeremiah Symphony (with Christa Ludwig as the soloist) at the gala concert for Bernstein's 60th birthday at Wolf Trap, on 25 August 1978.
65 Often given as Shemini Atzeret, the “Eighth Day of Assembly,” a Jewish holiday sometimes combined with Simchat Torah.
8
Final Years
1979–90
There was no lack of glory in the last decade of Bernstein's life – nor any shortage of love – but Felicia's furious prediction doesn't feel too wide of the mark either. In terms of composition, the last ten years are difficult to assess: there are some fine pieces, of which Halil for flute and orchestra is certainly among the best. Typically for Bernstein the inveterate self-borrower, the fast section of Halil (starting at p. 15 of the published full score) was derived from an occasional piece: the music he wrote in October 1979 for the 50th Anniversary of CBS in 1978 (the main notes of the theme, C–B flat–E flat, spell out C–B–Es [S] in German). But with the opera A Quiet Place, there's an inevitable sense of declining powers – made manifest by its integration of Trouble in Tahiti, which emerges as much the strongest part of the work. Bernstein longed to write the Great American Opera, and had done for decades, but while he made some glorious contributions to American musical theater – On the Town and West Side Story are unquestionably two of the greatest scores ever written for Broadway – Bernstein felt he should push himself further, and in a more “serious” direction. But this was not something he could do by himself. Perhaps if Jerome Robbins had wanted to write an opera, it might have happened, since Robbins was one of the very few people from whom Bernstein took criticism and who had superb theatrical instincts. John McClure, Bernstein's long-time record producer, surely put his finger on the problem of the late years: “Felicia was vital to his stability as was Jerry Robbins, the only two people who could make Lenny sweat.”1 It's very hard to escape the feeling that he was right.
The letters from the 1980s are less substantial – above all because Bernstein no longer had Felicia to confide in when he was away, but also because of an increasing reliance on phone calls and faxes. Even so, there were still faithful letter-writers, Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins among them, and there are interesting – often touching – letters to and from other musicians, especially conductors. Bernstein's profound admiration for Karl Böhm is apparent from the letter that he sent in 1981 to his ailing colleague on his deathbed. There are delightful letters from Carlos Kleiber (requesting an autograph for his son, but in a way that is full of humor and charm), from Yehudi Menuhin praising Bernstein's controversial performance with the BBC Symphony Orchestra of Elgar's Enigma Variations, and from Marin Alsop early in her conducting career. She wrote to send heartfelt thanks to Bernstein for his inspiration, and for the opportunity to work with him in Japan. It's well known how warmly Alsop admires her mentor, but Jonathan Cott's 1989 interview reveals just how highly Bernstein also thought of her: “There's a young woman named Marin Alsop. She was a student of mine at Tanglewood – she did Hindemith's Mathis der Maler and Roy Harris' Third Symphony under me, and she's fabulous, she is simply wonderful” (Cott 2013, p. 125).
Bernstein's 70th birthday brought tributes from friends, celebrities, and even politicians. Ronald Reagan wrote to congratulate him, as did Frank Sinatra (an old friend – they'd worked together in nightclubs in the early 1940s), Miles Davis, and Claudio Arrau, who recalled fondly the first meeting of Bernstein and Felicia at his party in 1946. But there's a feeling of nostalgia about many of these greetings – celebrating great times that have, to a large extent, been and gone. In terms of Bernstein's compositions, it certainly seemed to be the case: A Quiet Place (1983, revised in 1984 and 1986) was his last large-scale work.
And yet in the concert hall he continued to give triumphant performances with orchestras in New York, Vienna, Amsterdam, Munich, London, and elsewhere: these were not just huge public successes, but inspiring accounts of Schubert and Schumann, or of Copland, Harris, and Ives. There were extraordinary and daring concerts of Tchaikovsky in New York and Sibelius in Vienna, and Mahler performances that it seems too easy to describe as “revelatory” – but Bernstein's understanding of Mahler grew ever deeper, and his interpretations evolved as a consequence: the thrilling drive and drama of his earlier Mahler gave way to a kind of visionary splendor. It's as if Bernstein's frustration about his inability to compose with any consistency over these last few years found a more positive counterpart in his conducting of music by others. After Felicia, he didn't – indeed, he couldn't – find any lasting personal relationships. There were some passionate affairs, there was infinite love poured out on his children, but there was a certain loneliness: as a musician, Bernstein's interpretative insights grew deeper and r
icher, and yet at the same time his extreme celebrity carried with it the inevitable problems of having less time to spend with people he loved and cared about, or even to be alone. He fell out with David Diamond in a viscious exchange of letters, after half a century of friendship – and the publication of Joan Peyser's tell-all biography hurt him (even though he claimed never to have read it). What disturbed him was probably not so much what it said, but the people who said it: friends and colleagues who Bernstein felt had been disloyal by sharing secrets that should have remained private. But there were still faithful friends, and Bernstein took great pleasure in their company, as they did in his – for instance, he took Sid and Gloria Ramin to Israel in 1986. His devoted secretary Helen Coates died in 1989, and by the start of 1990 concerns about his own health started to preoccupy him. A malignant tumor was diagnosed and in great secrecy he was given a course of radiation therapy. Still, he managed a trip to Prague to conduct Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (and to spend time talking with President Václav Havel). After a few days delayed convalescence, he set off for the first Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan (where Marin Alsop worked as his assistant), but it quickly became apparent that his condition was worsening. He struggled through the concerts there and in Tokyo. Humphrey Burton quotes an anguished diary entry made by Craig Urquhart2 about Bernstein's dependency on massive doses of painkillers: “The real question is why he bothers at all. Here is a very sick man who knows he is doing his danse macabre” (Burton 1994, p. 519). Bernstein had to withdraw at very short notice from his last engagement in Japan – a big outdoor concert – earning some criticism in the Japanese press, who were unaware of the seriousness of his condition. He returned to New York and was soon on the road again, for concerts at Tanglewood. The major event was the 50th anniversary concert of Tanglewood and – on a more personal note – the 50th anniversary of Bernstein first conducting there. The Bernstein family was out in force for the occasion, including his mother, Jennie. Heavily medicated and fighting for breath, he conducted the “Four Sea Interludes” from Britten's Peter Grimes, and the concert ended with Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Listening to the published recording of this concert, it's immediately apparent that Bernstein was uncomfortable, but in the Scherzo third movement he succumbed to a coughing fit that prevented him conducting for several minutes. The Boston Symphony Orchestra kept playing, and Bernstein was able to resume conducting for the last movement, but only with the greatest difficulty. It was his last concert – and he knew it. Back in New York he told Craig Urquhart: “You know it's incredible how I did my first concert at Tanglewood and I did my last concert at Tanglewood. There's a real sense of closure” (Burton 1994, p. 524). On 5 September his mother Jennie, then in her nineties, wrote: “You are surrounded by a beautiful family, your children and grandchildren. That in itself should be good medicine for you.” But by then it was far too late. His apartment in the Dakota began to resemble a hospital ward, and on 9 October a statement was issued announcing his retirement from conducting. Five days later, at 6:15 p.m. on 14 October in his apartment at the Dakota, Leonard Bernstein died.
The Leonard Bernstein Letters Page 75