But not everyone perceived the Moscow event in such hopeful terms. Rather than highlighting the possibility of international cooperation, some emphasized the national advantage the Texan’s nimble fingers had provided for his country. A New York Herald Tribune editorial assessed Cliburn’s “impressive propaganda triumph,” even while acknowledging the crassness of framing a cultural event in this way. Nevertheless, the editors observed, Cliburn had shown the entire world that “Americans need defer to none in the field of serious music.”96
Readers of the Saturday Review encountered a gloomier perspective, as music critic Irving Kolodin rejected the idea that substantive benefits might flow from Cliburn’s victory. After taking Shostakovich to task for his disingenuous observation that the Soviets were the first to discern the pianist’s talent, Kolodin rebuked those who believed cultural exchange would “improve, materially” US-Soviet relations. Although he supported such exchange, Kolodin proclaimed it a “fallacy” to imagine that cultural interconnections would benefit East-West relations. “Policies are made by officials, not by peoples.”97
Beyond this less optimistic prognosis, an intriguing discourse emerged on the place of the arts and the artist in America. Even as many writers celebrated Cliburn’s achievement, they questioned American values, a crucial subject in an era of ideological conflict. In the Musical Courier, editor Gideon Waldrop observed that American artists often had to perform overseas in order to be “appreciated . . . at home.” Arguing that this had been Cliburn’s fate, Waldrop claimed the country’s superb artists frequently disappeared “down an American cultural drain.” We rewarded an Elvis Presley with vast sums of money, Waldrop snorted, but had trouble “supporting a ‘serious’ artist.” This left him to wonder when the United States would address the idea embraced by many foreigners that “we are cultural barbarians.”98 Equally pointed, the Baltimore Sun asserted that Cliburn had gained national attention not because the country respected art, but because it was suffering from “cold war jitters.” Cliburn’s grand American welcome did not rest on a “love of music,” but on the “cultural one-upmanship” unleashed by the Cold War.99 The observation was not without merit.
• • •
One year after Cliburn achieved his historic victory, the New York Philharmonic began a lengthy journey that would garner enormous attention. Sponsored by the US government, the 1959 tour was the ensemble’s second overseas trip with Leonard Bernstein on the podium, the first having been an eventful visit to Latin America the year before.100
Born in Massachusetts in 1918 to parents who had emigrated from Czarist Russia, Bernstein was a gifted child who began piano study at age ten; he was educated at the prestigious Boston Latin School, and then went to Harvard from which he graduated in 1939. Continuing his education at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, one of the country’s foremost conservatories, Bernstein pursued piano study and was a conducting pupil of the demanding Fritz Reiner. In 1940, he began working at the Berkshire Music Center with the Boston Symphony’s Serge Koussevitzky. After graduating from Curtis, Bernstein moved to New York in 1942; the following year he was appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic by Artur Rodzinski. That same year, Bernstein made his debut with the orchestra, filling in on short notice for Bruno Walter, an event that remains a storied episode in the ensemble’s history. Soon he was conducting many of the country’s finest orchestras, and in 1946, he performed in Europe for the first time. In the next decade, Bernstein became joint principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic, sharing the duties with Dimitri Mitropoulos, and in the 1958–1959 season, he became the group’s principal conductor, which made him one of the leading figures in the world of American classical music.101
As a young man, Bernstein began to identify with left-wing causes, and by 1939, the FBI had established a file on him, which reflected the bureau’s distress over his “questionable” politics. Over time the file grew thicker, as Bernstein’s involvement in leftist causes led the FBI to keep close tabs on his activities and associations. Within the bureau, there was a sense that he was either a Communist or a supporter of the party’s agenda, concerns that intensified during the Cold War. In the early 1950s, as political scientist Barry Seldes has superbly documented, Bernstein would be identified as a “security risk” and would be blacklisted by CBS, which sponsored the broadcasts and produced the New York Philharmonic’s recordings, a development that jeopardized his career. Despite this setback, by the second half of the decade, as the intensity of the anti-Communist purge diminished, Bernstein’s career gathered momentum. By the late 1950s, he was chosen to represent the United States overseas as the leader of the New York Philharmonic, a role he embraced with enormous energy, and one that added luster to a growing list of accomplishments.102
Leonard Bernstein
As chief conductor, in 1959, Bernstein would lead the Philharmonic on the longest tour in its history: a ten-week trip across Europe, including performances in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. It was an arduous journey: fifty concerts, twenty-nine cities, seventeen countries. The tour remains the most dramatic in the Philharmonic’s history, and over many weeks, in addition to demonstrating his signature idealism, Bernstein would display his extraordinary gifts as a conductor, educator, and cultural ambassador. As before, the tour was funded by ANTA and the foreign policy aims were clear.103 The American government hoped that wherever the orchestra performed, whether in London, Paris, Warsaw, or Moscow, the artistry of Leonard Bernstein and his American ensemble would advance the national interest of the United States in an anxious era.
Revealing a great deal about the nature of the Cold War was a twenty-eight-page brochure, “So You’re Going to Russia.” It was given to all members of the Philharmonic and instructed American travelers on how to prepare for a trip to the Soviet Union and, once there, how to behave and interact with the people. The document, which included a six-page bibliography, made clear that Americans visiting the Soviet Union were on no leisurely jaunt but were participants in a national mission. The material suggested that tourists learn relevant facts and figures about the United States (e.g., average incomes; the costs and sizes of American homes; the number of American telephones, televisions, and college degrees) and bring along a glossy magazine—to make Soviet women envious. The brochure went on to say that while Americans almost certainly had more money and better houses than their Russian hosts, they should not assume people from the United States were more intelligent. It was important to have facts and statistics on hand to support the points the Americans wished to make. “Read your newspaper carefully” before leaving home, and consider things you might take for granted, which could be desirable to someone living “under a different system.” Those who did their homework before traveling to the Soviet Union would have the satisfaction of knowing they had done their best to spread “the American message of good-will.”104 Clearly, whatever the document claimed, the visitor’s mission had less to do with spreading “good will” and promoting understanding than with demonstrating the superiority of liberal capitalism and the American way of life.
After leaving New York in early August and performing for more than two weeks across Europe to wonderful reviews, the New Yorkers reached the Soviet Union, the high point of their trip, on August 21, 1959, with the opening concerts to be given in Moscow. They spent three weeks in the Soviet Union, offering performances in Leningrad and Kiev, finishing with three concerts, again in Moscow. The orchestra’s visit, covered extensively in the American press, overlapped with the American National Exhibition, which had opened in July at Moscow’s Sokolniki Park, a wooded area a few minutes by subway from the center of the city. An enormous demonstration of the material wealth created by consumer capitalism, the six-week extravaganza was a key piece of the US-Soviet cultural exchange initiative that had gathered momentum in these years. In late July, the exhibition was the site of the famed “Kitchen Debate” between Vice President Nixon and Premier Nikita Khrushc
hev, at which the two leaders sparred over the merits of their respective systems. It was here that the vice president spoke of American washing machines and color televisions, that Khrushchev boasted about the productivity of the Soviet economy, that thousands of Russians sipped their first Pepsi, and that Soviet women were astonished to encounter four types of Birds-Eye frozen potatoes that took just minutes to prepare.105
Besides Pepsi and potatoes, the Americans offered their Soviet hosts classical music that season, and the response, wrote columnist Art Buchwald, was “one of the greatest receptions any body of musicians has had in Russia since Rasputin was a pup.”106 While the performances in the Soviet Union were as passionately received as any the Philharmonic had experienced, the opening leg of the Moscow visit was not without controversy. Bernstein got into a scuffle in the press with Soviet music critic Alexsandr Medvedev, who called the conductor “immodest” because he had turned to the audience to explain the modern idiom in Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question, which the orchestra was poised to perform. Worse still, Medvedev asserted, Bernstein decided to play the piece a second time, even though the audience had been unmoved by it. How dare Bernstein lecture on music to a Soviet audience? And what possessed him to force listeners to endure again something they had clearly disliked? “Some kind of show is being played under the title ‘Bernstein Raises the Iron Curtain in Music,’ ” Medvedev acidly observed.107
Bernstein fumed. Firing back, he called the review “an unforgivable lie and in the worst possible taste.” The audience had demanded an encore of the Ives with their rhythmic clapping, he declared. He had simply obliged and would continue to speak to Russian audiences when he thought an explanation was necessary. Assuming the posture of a cold warrior, Bernstein was miffed, he said, because critics in the United States expressed their own opinions, but since in Russia “every word printed is official one way or another, I take this as very important.”108 The tempest soon faded, the other reviews were superb, and the orchestra continued its travels around the Soviet Union, returning to Moscow a few weeks later for its final performances.
On the night of September 11, a day filled with music, Bernstein would conduct the orchestra’s farewell concert in the Soviet Union at the Great Hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Earlier that day, he led a program recorded for American television. In that daytime performance, before an audience of Muscovites that included Shostakovich, the Philharmonic played the first movement of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, the work that had created such a stir in wartime America in 1942. The orchestra’s riveting performance was preceded by a thirty-minute lecture in which Bernstein explored the similarities between American and Russian music. A tour de force for orchestra and conductor, the lecture-performance saw Bernstein illustrate his comments with excerpts from the music of Copland and Shostakovich, supplied by the Philharmonic. Bernstein’s musical universalism was on display, as the idealistic artist discussed all manner of things, especially the orchestra’s “mission of friendship.” Overflowing with optimism, the young conductor claimed the likenesses between the two peoples were more important than their differences, and predicted those similarities would prevail.
Bernstein used the podium as a pulpit, combining musical analysis, history, and contemporary politics; his aim was to demonstrate that the Russian and American people, though fearful of one another, were really quite similar. This stunning assertion was offered not just to his Russian audience, but also to millions of Americans, for the Philharmonic’s hour-long program would be aired a few weeks later on CBS television in the United States. Bernstein proposed that Russian and American music reflected a similar attitude toward the wide open spaces of the Siberian frontier and the American West; that both cultures were “gigantic melting pots” able to absorb all kinds of cultural differences; and that Russians and Americans laughed at the same kinds of jokes. The United States and Russia had “come a long way toward being close together,” he insisted, and it was imperative that they continue to strengthen their relationship, not just because “we two giant nations cannot afford to be unfriendly, but also because it is so natural a thing for us to be close.”
Before launching into the Shostakovich Seventh, Bernstein shared his reflections on the composer’s work: “An important part of our mission of friendship is to play for you a great deal of American music.” To accomplish “real friendship,” however, this mission must “work both ways,” which meant the orchestra would now play the opening movement of the Shostakovich. But first, he wished to acknowledge the composer. “I would like most humbly and respectfully” to welcome “Mr. Shostakovich himself, and I would like to thank him personally, and in the name of my country, for the wonderful music he has given us.” The American gestured to the Russian, and the composer stood, haltingly at first, but as the applause grew, Shostakovich left his seat and walked to the front of the stage where he reached up to the American who warmly shook his hand. And with that, the New Yorkers tore into the Seventh Symphony, the weight and gravity of its solemn opening establishing the significance of the occasion.109
In watching a video of the CBS television program today, one is struck by the attentiveness and enthusiasm etched on the Russian faces in the audience. Despite the language barrier, those in attendance appear genuinely moved by the conductor’s heartfelt effort to convey through music a message of cooperation between the two countries.
That night, the Philharmonic’s farewell concert was still more remarkable, as the orchestra played the Beethoven Seventh and Shostakovich Fifth symphonies with blazing intensity. What made the nighttime concert especially memorable was the presence of two giants of Soviet culture, Shostakovich (again) and the writer Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago, whom the Soviet government had recently reviled for his work.
While the evening performance of September 11 was compelling musically and politically, an equally remarkable story had unfolded behind the scenes in the days preceding the concert. The disgraced Pasternak was living in seclusion outside Moscow, a pitiful consequence of having been awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize for literature. After joyously accepting the award, he was vilified in the Soviet press and expelled from the Soviet Writers’ Union, which branded him a “pig.”110 Shortly thereafter, a repentant Pasternak announced that he had made a grave mistake and would not accept the prize. Responding to the anti-Communist character of Dr. Zhivago, Soviet authorities had forced him to reject the award.
Hoping to meet the author during the tour, Bernstein had invited him to the concert on the night of September 11. In early September, the novelist wrote to Bernstein, accepting his invitation and offering one of his own. Would Mr. and Mrs. Bernstein come to his dacha for a meal? The exchange of messages had been difficult, and the arrangements necessitated an almost cinematic, spur-of-the-moment visit by Mrs. Bernstein, who managed to track down the writer as he walked near his rural residence.111 But her encounter would pay a handsome dividend.
For the Bernsteins, the visit to Pasternak’s home was unforgettable. “We hit it off right away,” the conductor recalled. “We talked for hours about art and the artist’s view of history.”112 Especially impressive was the Russian’s knowledge of music and its centrality in his life. “Very often, authors talk rot about music,” Bernstein said, “but Pasternak talks with a musician and has something to say.”113 The American cherished hearing Pasternak expound upon “aesthetic matters,” and the Philharmonic’s performance a few days later allowed Bernstein to share his own aesthetic sensibility with the distinguished writer.
During the intermission on the night of September 11, Pasternak made his way to Bernstein’s dressing room to express his appreciation for the conductor’s interpretation of the Beethoven. “I have never felt so close to the aesthetic truth,” he said. “When I hear you, I know why you were born.”114 Bernstein was overcome. The sixty-nine-year-old author, struggling under the weight of an oppressive regime, called the slow movement of the Beethoven “a tragic expression of t
he tragedy of existence.”115 Bernstein, his wife at his side, remained silent. “I only want to listen, not speak.116
Later that night, at the triumphant conclusion of the Shostakovich Fifth, as the crowd stood and roared, the Russian composer, who had endured considerable persecution at the hands of the Soviet regime, rushed to the stage to embrace Bernstein. The two men bowed repeatedly, as a dozen girls handed flowers to the performers. In the conductor’s dressing room, Pasternak again conveyed his appreciation to Bernstein and the orchestra. “Thank you. You have taken us up to heaven,” he said, as the two embraced. “Now we must return to earth.”117
The Philharmonic’s visit to the Soviet Union was a dramatic moment in the history of Cold War musical diplomacy. What is striking about the orchestra’s performances and Leonard Bernstein’s actions are the extent to which the conductor seized the opportunity to interweave art and politics, conveying to people in the United States and the Soviet Union his belief in the power of classical music to help reshape international relations. Complicating the story was Bernstein’s embrace, literal and figurative, of Pasternak, which was perhaps an unexpected gesture on the part of the American conductor. If Bernstein’s message to the Soviet people and his fellow citizens about transcending differences and working to achieve cooperation was consistent with the universalism articulated by many artists, the Pasternak episode points to something less predictable. In this instance, Bernstein, an internationally celebrated artist, had offered public support for another artist, a man oppressed by the brutal regime against which the United States was competing. And the invitation Bernstein extended to Pasternak, along with the Bernsteins’ visit to his dacha and Pasternak’s public appearance at the Philharmonic’s performance, was surely a propaganda coup for the United States—even though the Soviet government had permitted it to happen. What better way to highlight the difference between the two systems than by showing the world the fate of an artist who had run afoul of Soviet authorities? And who had “rescued” the exiled writer, if only for a short time? America’s celebrated maestro, an artist who had come to the Soviet Union with his virtuoso ensemble. The contrast between one system and the other was stark, and there is every reason to believe that the Soviet people perceived the difference.
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