Warmest wishes,
Yo-Yo Ma
644. Carlos Kleiber58 to Leonard Bernstein
The Carlyle, New York, NY
[October 1989]
Dear Maestro, Dear Lennie!
“Non per me, ma per altri”, “che voi dire, per altri”?59 It's my son: he has become a fan of yours. (This is an understatement.) He is working at Unitel in Munich, translating your Salzau Romeo und Julia tapes–commentaries into German. He “schwärms” about you on the phone and I hear about Romeo sitting in the garden, the triangle that shouldn't sound like a doorbell – in short (he is 24) you seem to have revived his interest in music (something I haven't managed to do) and he is pestering me for the following:
Here is a CD of West Side Story. Do you by any means think it possible for you to sign the first CD of the set (on the label-side with an indelible thingamajig) with a “dedication” to Marko (with a K) Kleiber? and leave it (have it left) at the Met or the Carlyle?60
This would make him the happiest person in the world, renew his respect for me (cause I know you personally) and generally improve the morale all round.
Kindest greetings and best wishes from your old
Carlos
645. Stephen Sondheim to Leonard Bernstein
6 November 1989
Dear Lenny,
I was playing over my “Anniversary”61 and noticed an error, which you might want to correct in future (let's hope) editions: namely: in the third bar of the fifth system, the soprano note on the second beat should be a G, not an A. And why did you change the final cadence from a G major chord to an E major chord? Is there a runic significance I missed?62
Love,
Steve
646. Lukas Foss to Leonard Bernstein
19 November 1989
Hi Lenny,
Must write to you because these San Francisco Symphony days you are with me: 2nd half of program: “Masque”63 and [On the] Waterfront. 4 evenings in a row at Davies Hall. It's great. 1st half is [Copland's] Billy the Kid and Time Cycle.64 Practicising “Masque” again is always a revelation; every note so right, so inventive (what I used to love in Stravinsky). Have to practice a lot to get my fingers to do it and my brain to memorize it all, but it worked. 2 evenings behind me, 2 more to go.
Doing Waterfront without cuts (there is a cut suggested in print[ed score] from 32 to 33 which I really thinks makes for a lot less drama). Enough! Don't want to bore you.
Hope you are doing what I should be doing – composing.
Love,
Lukas
647. Stephen Sondheim to Leonard Bernstein
20 December 1989
Dear Lenny,
What a terrific letter – thank you! You'll be interested to know that the rhyme you particularly liked (“He goes …, etc.”)65 was the rhyme that Cole Porter liked when Jule [Styne] and I played a few songs for him. I always detected his influence on your work.
And thanks for the advance birthday present. It's indeed tempting to set – maybe for your 75th. I'm still a slow writer.
If you have the time and inclination when you get back from tanning yourself, give me a call and let's have our semi-annual evening alone.*
Love,
Steve
*I'll even play you the new score66 SS
648. Marin Alsop to Leonard Bernstein
14 July 1990
Dearest Maestro,
I wanted to telephone you, but didn't want to disturb your rest.
Thank you for introducing me to Japan – and vice versa!
The greatest enticement (if it can be called that) to come on this trip was the opportunity to work with you once again.67
And, once again, it was an inspiration. You haven't ever let me down since I first wanted to become a conductor when I was 11 and saw one of your NY Phil concerts! But more than that, you've been a constant source of energy and integrity and leadership and innovation to our world.
I hope only that I can make a small contribution and always make you proud of me.
I love you – and thank you for helping all of us.
Marin
649. Jennie Bernstein to Leonard Bernstein
5 September 1990
Dearest Son,
I have confidence in you, that you are on the right track. I know you are watching out for yourself. No one can do it for you, but you and you alone.
I feel a lot better now because I am looking towards your quick recovery. As you know dear, if you stay well, I will stay well.68 You are surrounded by a beautiful family, your children and grandchildren. That in itself should be good medicine for you.
Looking forward to a Happy (Jewish) New Year for you, and your dear family.
I want to wish you happy composing and so much love.
Your one and only
Mother xxx
650. Georg Solti to Leonard Bernstein
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 220 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL
10 October 1990
My dear Lenny,
I was more than sorry to learn of the announcement you have made yesterday and I would just like to send these few lines, to let you have my warmest thoughts and support, both now and in the future.
It is wonderful that you will continue to write and teach; do keep in touch and let me know if we can meet when I am in New York next, in April.69
As ever,
Georg
1 John McClure, personal communication, 20 February 2013.
2 Craig Urquhart was Bernstein's assistant from January 1986 until 1990. He is a vice-president of the Leonard Bernstein Office, and founded the Bernstein newsletter Prelude, Fugue & Riffs.
3 The program on 22 July consisted of Haydn's Thereisenmesse and Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony.
4 This important (and acclaimed) revival of West Side Story opened at Broadway's Minskoff Theatre in February 1980 and ran for 333 performances. It was directed by Robbins – his first work on Broadway for sixteen years – with the close involvement of several people involved in the original 1957 production, including sets by Oliver Smith, costumes by Irene Sharaff, and lighting by Jean Rosenthal. The Musical Director was John DeMain, who went on to conduct the world premiere of Bernstein's A Quiet Place at Houston in 1983.
5 Bernstein conducted Mahler's Ninth Symphony at Tanglewood a week later, on 29 July.
6 Bernstein delivered this speech at the second annual Kennedy Center Honors gala on 2 December 1979. Copland, Henry Fonda, Martha Graham, Tennessee Williams, and Ella Fitzgerald were the five artists honored with lifetime achievement awards. The Washington Post (9 December) described Bernstein's tribute to Copland as “a piece of magic.”
7 Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Carter and First Lady.
8 Francis Ford Coppola (b. 1939), film director whose screen credits include The Godfather and Apocalypse Now.
9 Coppola's Tucker: The Man and his Dream was eventually released in 1988, but as a biographical film rather than the “musical–opera–film” outlined to Bernstein in this letter. The genesis and tribulations of this project are described in detail by Gene D. Phillips in Godfather: The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola (Lexington: Kentucky University Press), pp. 261–78.
10 “Es” (E flat) is normal German spelling for “S,” while “La” is solfège for A and can be used to spell “L”; by a neat coincidence these musical spellings for Stephen and Leonard form a tritone (augmented fourth) – an interval that is of particular significance in West Side Story. Sondheim was born on 22 March 1930 and started working with Bernstein on West Side Story in October 1955.
11 A reference to the piano pieces that Bernstein often sent Sondheim as birthday gifts (Stephen Sondheim, personal communication).
12 An inscription written inside a birthday card.
13 The Divertimento for Orchestra first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa on 25 September 1980. Bernstein has written a note at the top of this letter outlining ideas (perhaps the result of a discussion
with Robbins) for a ballet treatment:
Fanfare 1 – Tutti
Waltz 2 – Diminished corps (girls?)
Mazurka 3 – Pas de 6
Samba 4 – Pas de 4: Kay Thompson & Boys
Turkey 5 – Pas de 2 (Castles)
Sphinxes 6 – Solo: joke on [Martha] Graham vs. ballet on cadences
Blues 7 – Solo blues
[March] 8 – a) Adding company gradually during flutes
b) Tutti march.
14 Doriot Anthony Dwyer (b. 1922) was principal flute of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1952 until 1990. She gave the American premiere of Halil with the Boston Symphony conducted by Bernstein in a Fourth of July concert of Bernstein's music given at Tanglewood. Bernstein inscribed her copy: “For my beautiful colleague Doriot, with all the old affection and a brand new admiration, Lenny – 4 July '81”.
15 Bernstein received word on 13 August that Karl Böhm was gravely ill, and immediately wrote to him. It is unlikely Böhm ever saw this letter as he died in Salzburg the next day, 14 August.
16 Richard Horowitz (b. 1924), American percussionist and baton maker. He joined the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in 1946 and played with it for 66 years, retiring as principal timpanist in 2012. He made his first baton in 1964 for Karl Böhm and subsequently made batons for many of the world's leading conductors, including Riccardo Chailly, Carlos Kleiber, James Levine, Charles Mackerras, and Klaus Tennstedt, among others. In 2008 he was interviewed in The New York Times: “I made Bernstein's batons. He's buried with one of my batons. I think he gave them away more than anything else, gave them to his students. […] Bernstein's, I made out of corks from Champagne bottles.”
17 Built in 1935 for the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, the Deutschlandhalle has a seating capacity for concerts of about 10,000.
18 Bernstein's arithmetic is shaky here: he first met Helen Coates in October 1932, almost fifty-one years before writing this letter. If he was counting back to his New York Philharmonic debut, that had taken place almost forty years earlier, in November 1943. Miss Coates began working as Bernstein's secretary in 1944.
19 Kristin Braly (b. 1948), was a violist in the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra until 2005. She wrote this letter two days after playing in the performance of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony given in aid of Musicians Against Nuclear Arms that Bernstein conducted in the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, with an orchestra drawn from members of the National Symphony and the Baltimore Symphony.
20 The first Washington performance of A Quiet Place was given at the Kennedy Center Opera House on 22 July 1984.
21 The stage version of Gigi, directed by John Dexter, opened at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, on 17 September 1985.
22 Possibly Robert Whitehead, one of the producers of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
23 Liz Robertson married Alan Jay Lerner in 1981.
24 The “Jets Quatrain” refers to the passage beginning “Oh, when the Jets fall in at the cornball dance” in the “Jet Song,” included on Bernstein's recording of West Side Story made in September 1984. This passage is not in the first piano-vocal score, nor on the original cast recording. It is printed in the 1994 full score (pp. 43–4) and the revised 2000 piano-vocal score, marked in both editions with an optional cut.
25 Sunday in the Park with George won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Sondheim and James Lapine.
26 The performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony given in Tel Aviv on 25 August 1985 (Bernstein's 67th birthday) has been released on CD by Helicon Classics (HEL029656).
27 On 5, 6, and 10 December 1985, Bernstein conducted an unusual program comprising the Third Symphonies of Roy Harris, William Schuman, and Aaron Copland.
28 Yevgeny Yevtushenko (b. 1933), Russian poet. This was a project that clearly excited Bernstein (see Letter 619), but nothing came of it. Among Yevtushenko's earlier poems, the most famous – and the one that caused controversy with the Soviet authorities – was Babi Yar which provided the inspiration for Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13.
29 In Autumn 1986, Bernstein conducted a series of concerts with the Israel Philharmonic to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The first performance of Jubilee Games was given in Avery Fisher Hall, New York, on 13 September, and Bernstein then went to Israel to conduct the work in the opening concerts of the 1986–7 season. Sid Ramin (who had helped with the orchestration of Jubilee Games) and his wife Gloria went with Bernstein on this trip – their first visit to Israel.
30 These are Bernstein's letters to Ramin printed in Chapter I.
31 Harry Kraut (1933–2007) was Bernstein's business manager from 1971, and became a valued confidant.
32 Aaron Stern was a close friend of Bernstein's in the 1980s. He believed that the arts could be used as a way to greater self-knowledge and cultural transformation. With Bernstein's support he established an institution, the Academy for the Love of Learning.
33 Probably Patrick K. Porter, who founded Positive Changes in 1987 to help people bring about lifestyle changes through hypnosis and counseling.
34 Maureen Lipman (b. 1946), English actress and writer.
35 The London revival of Wonderful Town opened at the Queen's Theatre in August 1986 and ran until April 1987, with Maureen Lipman as Ruth and Emily Morgan as Eileen. She recalled the occasion of her meeting with Bernstein: “The memory lingers of our meeting: him in tan leather trousers and a bright turquoise macramé pullover, hugging me and telling me I was a wonderful Ruth and my brain saying ‘take a mental picture of this moment! It'll never come again!’” (Maureen Lipman, personal communication).
36 Leonard Marcus, a Harvard music graduate, was appointed editor-in-chief of High Fidelity and Musical America in 1968, a post he held until 1980. Before then he had worked in Minneapolis, had studied conducting with Bernstein and composition with Copland, and was assistant manager of the classical department of London Records from 1959 to 1961. He subsequently worked at Columbia Records and as editor of the Carnegie Hall programs. He became conductor of the Stockbridge Chamber Orchestra (later the Stockbridge Sinfonia) in 1975 and later became the orchestra's conductor emeritus.
37 Claudio Arrau (1903–91), Chilean pianist.
38 Written for a published tribute to Arrau on his 85th birthday on 6 February 1988.
39 For the forthcoming Jerome Robbins' Broadway.
40 Like Robbins' letter of 19 April, this concerns the preparations for Jerome Robbins' Broadway which opened in February 1989. The show included sequences from On the Town and West Side Story, and early versions of the extracts from On the Town were filmed at piano rehearsals in April and May 1988. This, or something very similar, must be the tape that Robbins describes (copies of these rehearsal tapes are in the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts).
41 Miles Davis (1926–91), jazz musician.
42 The Léonie Sonning Music Prize is Denmark's highest musical honour. The first recipient, in 1959, was Stravinsky, and the second was Bernstein (1965). Other winners included Lutosławski (1967), Britten (1968), Shostakovich (1973), Messiaen (1977), Stern (1982), Boulez (1985), and Miles Davis himself (1984).
43 Frances Elizabeth Taylor married Miles Davis in 1958; they divorced in 1968. In the original production of West Side Story she played Francisca (credited as Elizabeth Taylor).
44 Gerald Levinson (b. 1951), American composer, a pupil of George Crumb, George Rochberg, and Olivier Messiaen. Levinson met Bernstein on a few occasions, notably at Tanglewood in 1987 when Levinson's first symphony, Anāhata, was performed. Levinson recalls: “In '87 when Oliver Knussen conducted a spectacular orchestra concert which concluded with my Anāhata (and included Peter Serkin playing Stravinsky's Movements), Lenny and Seiji Ozawa followed my piece with the score, and both – but Lenny in particular – were very enthusiastic. Backstage afterward he said it brought him to tears (‘That bad, eh?’ I stupidly responded). I asked if he'd like to keep the score (my publisher, standing beside me, nodded vigorously); he said, ‘I don't think
I'd ever conduct it, but I'd love to possess it’” (Gerald Levinson, personal communication, 23 March 2013).
45 The lower stave is written using Messiaen's langage communicable, an alphabetical code for musical spelling (the decoded message is “Mazel Tov and Gesundheit on your Seventieth”). The upper stave includes a Bernstein-ish version of “Happy Birthday,” followed by references to several Bernstein tunes, described by Levinson as follows: “Once Happy Birthday is done it keeps on going through a medley of bits of Bernstein tunes: ‘Maria,’ ‘New York New York,’ and ‘Trouble in Tahiti.’ And the durations of the rests, carefully counted out in numbers in parentheses, add up to 70” (Gerald Levinson, personal communication, 23 March 2013).
46 Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), fortieth President of the United States. Reagan was not known for his interest in music, and his conservative political outlook was diametrically opposed to Bernstein's. One of Bernstein's kinder assessments of Reagan's presidency is to be found in his November 1989 interview with Jonathan Cott: “The last time I went to the White House was during the last days of Jimmy Carter's administration. […] I love the White House more than any other house in the world – after all, I'm a musician and a citizen of my country – but since 1980 I haven't gone back there because it's had such sloppy housekeepers and caretakers. […] We had eight lovely, passive, on-our-backs, status quo, don't-make-waves years with Ronald Reagan. The fights I had with my mother! ‘Don't you dare say a word against our president!’ she'd say to me.” (Cott 2013, pp. 81, 82, and 83).
47 The real source of Bernstein's rage was almost certainly Diamond's contribution to Joan Peyser's book, in which, among other things, he was quoted as saying that Bernstein “often hurt him very much.” Diamond replied to Bernstein's furious letter on 26 August 1988 with a long, 12-page diatribe in which he challenged Bernstein's claims, made some harsh comments about the effect of fame on his old friend, defended his own cooperation with Peyser, and ended with a plea: “Lenny – don't make our friendship a poisoned one. Make it instead as rich as it once was. Take me out of this horrible depression your letter has caused me. No matter what I will be at your concerts this fall.” After returning from concerts in Europe, Bernstein replied on 24 October (see Letter 637). But it was too late: after almost fifty years, their friendship was over.
The Leonard Bernstein Letters Page 79