The New Yorkers’ reception in Berlin was extraordinary, especially when one recalls that the city was home to a superb ensemble of its own, the Berlin Philharmonic, led by Herbert von Karajan. The US orchestra played music by Bartók, Beethoven, Rossini, Stravinsky, and Tchaikovsky, along with three American works that were intended to showcase the artistic vitality of the United States. Thus, Berliners would hear Copland’s El Salón México, Harris’s Third Symphony, and Bernstein’s overture to Candide. According to an American press account, as the orchestra concluded one of its concerts in the “divided city” with Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, two thousand Berliners stood and applauded wildly. “They stamped their feet. They shouted. And they kept it up for ten minutes.” Such ardor, the American reporter noted, was partly an expression of the residents’ appreciation for America’s commitment to support “them against Soviet pressures to take over their city.”6
An array of local critics was unsparing in their praise. Describing the orchestra and its music director as “noble American guest[s],” Die Welt claimed the trip represented a heartfelt “sign of friendly ties with Berlin and its inhabitants.” It was unusual, the review observed, to see music used as an “artistic ambassador” on such “a timely cultural-political mission.”7 According to Der Telegraf, Leonard Bernstein had become the object of breathless acclaim. Extolled for his many talents—“conductor, composer, pianist, teacher, author, all in one person”—Bernstein possessed the skill of a “magician.” Beyond this, the reviewer found riveting his podium acrobatics: “Rocking, dancing, ready to leap and tense with energy, [he was] permeated with rhythm to his fingertips.”8
The most striking assessment of the Philharmonic’s achievement was offered by the Berliner Morgenpost : While politicians would prefer not to hear it, “the best diplomats are often the great musicians. When they step before a foreign public, there is no mistrust, no prejudice, no mudslinging. One finds then a straight road from people to people and a speech which all understand.”9
That musicians communicated directly with all peoples was an idea Bernstein had articulated repeatedly before 1960. Once again, the Berlin visit permitted him to deploy music’s extramusical power. If the two evening concerts aimed to accomplish the work of diplomacy by touching the purely musical sensibilities of a receptive audience, the lecture-performance, which permitted Bernstein to speak directly to Germans and Americans, enabled him to “conduct” diplomacy with both music and language. The hour-long event provided another opportunity for the youthful idealist to display his myriad talents, as he played and conducted a Beethoven piano concerto, served as a thought-provoking pedagogue, ruminated upon world affairs, and shared a Hebrew prayer. In one of the world’s most volatile settings, Bernstein and his orchestra offered a musical gift to West Berliners and received, in return, their adulation.
Watching a video of the program today, one is struck by Bernstein’s universalistic agenda, a perspective not entirely harmonious with the one he was meant to offer the beleaguered Berliners. But there was nothing surprising in the message he delivered in Berlin, which was consonant with the way he had approached such opportunities in the past. For unlike government officials, Bernstein did not perceive the visit, as Henry Ford had stated, as a “weapon” in the East-West struggle. Instead, he was committed to international cooperation and shared values, along with an irrepressible desire to use music to transcend the competitive character of the Cold War.
Bernstein rejected the idea that music should be used to enhance the strategic position of the United States in a zero-sum game. Instead, music could unify and inspire, with symphonic performances helping to vanquish the forces that divided humanity. What, then, did the American tell his young German listeners? And as Americans watched the documentary several weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day 1960, how would they have understood his inspirational language?
The CBS-TV documentary, which was widely publicized and enthusiastically discussed in newspapers across the country,10 began with a sonorous voice declaring that the “maker of the Ford Family of fine cars” was presenting a program featuring Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic. The opening camera shot moved viewers down a mainly empty boulevard, the Unter den Linden, toward the imposing Brandenburg Gate, passing along the way, of all things, a solitary Volkswagen Beetle. Viewers saw the youthful conductor, smiling and waving as he stepped from a Pan Am plane, after which Bernstein’s voice is heard: “Tempelhof Airport. We have just flown four thousand miles to participate in the Berlin Festival. . . . We’re curious to meet these Berliners, those of the older generation and those of the new. Those who remember the war and those who have only heard about it.” Such language reminded Americans about the centrality of World War II in the lives of Berliners, Germans, and, more broadly, all Europeans, thus linking the epochal events of the twentieth century to the mission undertaken by Bernstein and his musicians.11
Bernstein’s voice is heard as American viewers watch modern-day Berliners, or at least their legs and feet, moving along the street in drab clothes and shoes, images that might have evoked memories of war-weary peoples trudging along the byways of a war-torn continent. Breaking the monotony of this gloomy tableau, a dog is seen walking along briskly. Inevitably, the pup is a dachshund, lending the shot a dash of Teutonic flavor, reminding viewers of the setting in which America’s mission is to unfold.
Here again is Bernstein, conveying the idea that contemporary West Berlin is different from the wartime (Nazi) city, as images of the Reichstag flash across the screen, followed by a view of a modern concert hall. “Today West Berlin is a city of immense gaiety and activity,” the conductor observes, as a brilliantly lighted amusement park appears, its rides twirling, the obligatory Ferris wheel turning gaily. He reminds the American viewer that the orchestra’s visit has been scheduled to coincide with Oktoberfest (a word the cosmopolitan New Yorker pronounces as if he is a native German), which leaves the city “aglow with the carnival spirit” of that annual rite. Viewers even glimpse the Berlin Hilton, where the musicians will stay, the building serving, quite literally, as a concrete symbol of the expansion of America’s commercial and cultural influence, a crucial characteristic of the post-1945 world. A modernist totem of postwar America’s economic and cultural power, the Hilton serves as a sentinel watching over a divided city in a divided world.12
The conductor, playing both artist and ambassador, informs his American audience that the task he and his orchestra have before them this day is to “give a special performance for students in the concert hall of the Senders Freies Berlin.” He will speak in English, he says, “since all high school students here are taught English.” Bernstein then offers a clarification, noting, while he will speak to the West Berliners in his “own tongue,” he and his associates have arrived prepared with printed German translations, “just in case, and lucky we did, because somehow a number of students from East Berlin have managed to join us.” In highlighting this difference between West and East Berliners, Bernstein notes, “They are not taught English in East Berlin,” a point American viewers might have taken to mean that young East Berliners were ruled by a backward regime inclined to shortchange its citizens. Such a realization might have suggested to American viewers that those confined to Berlin’s eastern section (and all of Eastern Europe) occupied a place on the margins of civilization.
A line of clean-cut, well-dressed students file into the concert hall in orderly fashion, their faces aglow. If this group is meant to represent the postwar generation in a democratic Germany, or, more pertinently, the youthful cohort comprising America’s democratic ally and bulwark against Communist expansion, the American public should feel reassured at seeing a mix of appealing teenagers and young adults. In the film, they represented just the sort of friends Americans would want to protect from the Soviet Union. Neither Nazis nor Communists, the young Berliners appeared well-mannered and cultured.
Bernstein began by repudiating the notion that musicia
ns’ national backgrounds determined whether they were suited to play particular pieces of music. In his student days, he told the audience, “I used to think, along with so many other people, that all music was somehow quarantined within its own national borders.” Such words, offered to an audience for whom the notion of confinement was real, surely captured the attention of his youthful listeners and those in America, most of whom would have been familiar with the division of Europe. He had learned it was false to claim that only a Frenchman could play Debussy, or that only Germans could perform Beethoven, or that “the true Verdi” could only be sung by an Italian. This was no longer the case, he asserted, for the world had grown smaller, thus allowing musicians everywhere to hear “all styles by great performers of all nationalities.”13
Offering his version of musical universalism, in which differences among people were yielding to mutual understanding, Bernstein pointed out that he was in Germany with “one hundred New Yorkers” to play Beethoven, “the chief jewel in the German crown.” Could non-Germans perform the master’s First Piano Concerto in a way that would ring true to this audience of Germans? With a hint of playfulness, though with a purpose, Bernstein examined the now-obsolete notion that only a German could play Beethoven, by playing the opening statement of the Beethoven concerto as a Frenchman might: “light . . . delicate and superficial”; and then as a Russian: “passionate and virtuosic”; and finally, as an American, which led him to transform Beethoven’s opening statement into a jazzy riff, which, he observed, as the audience laughed, “stretched” the idea of nationalistic essentialism to “absurdity.” He articulated his pluralistic point, declaring, “Of course I don’t have to tell you that all this is nonsense.” Musicians today have become “stylistically sophisticated.” Then he drove home the core idea: “We become more international every day.”14
The musician’s capacity to interpret music could no longer be confined within the walls of the nation, Bernstein contended, for such barriers were increasingly porous. As musicians interacted with one another and encountered musical styles and traditions from across the world, it was foolish to imagine that a Frenchman could not play Beethoven, that a Russian was incapable of performing Brahms, or that an American could not interpret Tchaikovsky. The growing interconnectedness among people and the increasing permeability of national boundaries, as suggested by Bernstein, might have led an American viewer to consider the extent to which a similar idea should apply to the movement of ordinary Europeans; or a young Berliner to ponder whether quarantining people was similarly unenlightened. Addressed to an audience of young Germans, this message undermined the idea of innate national and ethnic differences and was a bold assertion. It brought to mind that fifteen years earlier, when those attending that day’s concert were small children, a version of such thinking had swept Jewish performers and “Jewish music” from the concert halls of the Third Reich and much of Europe.
But Bernstein was not done propounding his distinctive view. He proceeded to argue that Beethoven, the most German of composers, had created music that was “meaningful to all nationalities” because his compositions came closer than any “to the widely held ideal . . . of a universal language.” Beethoven’s music was preeminent among German composers, and had become “the common property of the whole world.”15 He then turned to the “universal” character of German music, which could not be “quarantined” because it had “transcend[ed] its national borders” to become “a universal communication.” This was so because of one distinctive attribute: “the idea of development,” which was “the fountainhead of everything we call ‘symphonic,’ ” a point Bernstein demonstrated by playing excerpts from the concerto he was about to perform. Musical development was related to the analytical nature of the German mind, he observed—engaging in some essentialism of his own—which gave German music its universal character.16
To illustrate the point, he offered a highly political—indeed, a geopolitical—metaphor, which no doubt touched his German listeners, while resonating with American viewers. “Let me give you an example of how this analytical development moves toward universality,” he began:
If you tell me that here in your city of West Berlin, certain areas are terribly noisy, you’re telling me a purely local fact. The noise neither bothers nor interests anybody except a Berliner. . . . But the moment we begin to develop this fact by probing, the magic begins to happen. Why is Berlin noisy? Because of the airplanes that are constantly landing and taking off at Tempelhof Airport, which is right in the middle of the city. Well, why does it have to be right in the middle of the city? Because this city is a political island. Now, we have already made a leap from a local fact to one of national and international interest. And the moment we seek further into the causes of this abnormal isolation—into ways and means of overcoming it—of making a peaceful world in which men can live freely and harmoniously, then we have come all the way from a little fact about an airport to a universal search for truth that is of interest to all mankind.
The conductor concluded this extraordinary flight of geographic, political, and musical fancy with the assertion that in music, the process in which he had just engaged, that of “deliberative inquiry,” was central to the entire “German symphonic idea.”17
The American had powerfully illustrated his musical point, whether one was sitting in a Berlin concert hall or was watching television in one’s living room in the United States on Thanksgiving Day. The conductor seized the opportunity, in making a musical point, to expound on the importance of constructing a more peaceful world, where everyone could “live freely and harmoniously.” Bernstein’s “local fact,” which might have been limited to the location of an airport, generated larger questions, which, upon reflection, revealed “a universal search for truth.” For a Berliner, the reality described was one they experienced daily, while for an American, Berlin’s status was integrally connected to the geopolitical competition in which their country was engaged. Beyond that, Bernstein suggested it was possible that a peaceful international order could be hewn from the cold, hard stone of the Soviet-American relationship.
After speaking in purely musical terms about Beethoven and the concerto he was about to perform, Bernstein turned, near the end of his lecture, to matters which he thought listening to music allowed one to contemplate. Such matters were embedded in great music, he believed, which helped explain why he and his ensemble had come to Berlin. The conductor asserted that everyone now had “at least a glimmer of what makes Beethoven’s music go so deep in human experience,” which explained why performers from every country “feel close to it.” The artist’s task, he insisted, is to “make manifest the basic truths that live in this music.”18
Bernstein then waxed even more idealistic, expanding upon why his ensemble had crossed the Atlantic. “We hundred New Yorkers” have come to Berlin “to take one more step, through this kind of cultural exchange, along those paths of international understanding that lead to peace.” Bernstein spoke about the emergence of a more cooperative age, the dawn of which music might help bring about. “After all, the heyday of narrow nationalism is, or should be, over by now. And what we must cultivate,” he insisted, “is the real understanding that exists on a level as deep as musical communication—a direct, heart-to-heart, mind-to-mind contact. Only this kind of rapport can bring us peace.” Bernstein then added what was the most arresting part of his presentation. After explaining that he and the orchestra were dedicating their performance of the Beethoven concerto to the goal of achieving peace, he told the audience of young Germans that he and his fellow Americans were offering the concert “with special reverence on this sacred day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, when, at this moment, all over our small world, the words of that ancient benediction are being pronounced.” He recited a Hebrew prayer, which he translated for his German audience: “May the Lord lift up His face to you, and give you peace.”19 After a moment, the young Berliners applauded enthusiastically. And with
that, Bernstein sat down to play Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, while conducting from the keyboard.
After the concert, which met with energetic applause, Bernstein rested backstage. A student whom he had met on a group outing the previous night interrupted the musician’s repose to ask if he would write out the Hebrew prayer he had recited earlier. Bernstein smiled and carefully inscribed the prayer in Hebrew. The American musician and the young German shook hands. When the student left, Bernstein lamented some of the rough spots in his playing.20 Despite a few problematic passages, the passion and commitment Bernstein and his orchestra brought to Berlin were more meaningful than any small imperfections in the performance. The New Yorkers’ artistry had exemplified an ideal to which the conductor was profoundly committed. In a fractured world, he believed music had the power to deepen human understanding.
The Berliners’ ardent response to Bernstein’s performance was matched several weeks later across the United States in American press reviews of the New Yorkers’ Thanksgiving Day broadcast. A host of columnists lauded Bernstein for his efforts as artist and communicator, with some pointing to his ambassadorial skill. A piece in the Cleveland Plain Dealer spoke of the German students’ “admiration and affection” for Bernstein, which the columnist George Condon found encouraging “in a land which only a few years ago tried to destroy all the Bernsteins of the world.” Moreover, Condon noted, the West Berliners had understood Bernstein “without help,” a result of “their general scholastic routine,” as opposed to the unlucky youngsters from the East.21
Even before the exultant reviews of the broadcast appeared, the New York advertising agency Kenyon and Eckhardt had provided a pre-broadcast media blitz, which blanketed the country in an effort to garner the largest possible audience for the Thanksgiving Day program. The ad campaign targeted more than six hundred newspapers in small towns, large cities, and hundreds of places in between.22 Among the campaign’s more notable elements was a promotional letter describing the Berlin trip, which had been sent to the press to supply context for potential stories touting the upcoming broadcast. Included in the November 7 letter was a description of East Berlin, which members of the orchestra had visited while on tour. “It’s a most depressing sight. Few people on the street and those shabbily dressed and dour. Very few cars and those old and decrepit. The stores were almost empty, and what merchandise you saw (you’re not allowed to buy, but who’d want to?) was miserable.” Describing the war-scarred eastern section of the city, the promotional statement spoke of “magnificent churches” that remained “piles of rubble,” and noted that many government buildings from the Nazi era stood untouched, “blasted to pieces.”23 In learning about Berlin, Americans would hear that the city’s eastern section, where the adversary reigned, was backward, crumbling, and sad.
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