Artist in Conflict
Bernstein: A Biography.
by Joan Peyser.
Beech Tree Books/William Morrow. 481 pp. $22.95.
In the brief time since its publication, Joan Peyser’s new biography of Leonard Bernstein has been frequently and vigorously attacked in the press. The attacks center on the fact that it is, apparently, the first of the several books on Bernstein to speak frankly and in detail about his homosexuality—or, more accurately, about the promiscuously homosexual side of the bisexual life he has led ever since adolescence.
I must say that this strikes me as a non-issue. Miss Peyser is not a very clear or thoughtful writer, and it is finally impossible to make out just what she thinks of her famous subject. But her book is neither meanspirited nor sensationalistic. It is, rather, an honest, though not altogether successful, attempt to understand an extremely complex man and artist. Bernstein has led a willfully flamboyant life, and his homosexuality has been common knowledge for decades; neither he nor his public could reasonably have expected a responsible biographer to ignore it.
Anyway, the fact of homosexuality (or bisexuality) is not, in itself, very interesting. What is interesting, and is illuminatingly explored by Miss Peyser, is the fact that Bernstein’s indecision about his sexual identity is deeply connected to other, more publicly relevant sorts of radical indecision or ambivalence: about whether to become a composer or a conductor, and whether to compose “serious” concert works or “popular,” jazz-derived theatrical pieces.
Bernstein’s phenomenal gifts were obvious early and were soon recognized by important people. As a Harvard undergraduate he composed music for a production of Aristophanes’s The Birds, organized a performance of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, and attracted the attention of the composer Aaron Copland and of Dimitri Mitropoulos, then conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony. Both Copland and Mitropoulos were homosexual, and the example of Mitropoulos was especially valuable to Bernstein since it proved that a homosexual could succeed in the very public role of orchestral conductor. He started showing his scores to Copland, and Mitropoulos pronounced him a genius and promised to make him his assistant at Minneapolis after Bernstein’s graduation from Harvard in June 1939.
Yet Bernstein spent the next four years scuffling. Mitropoulos reneged on his offer of an assistantship, extended it again the following year, and once again reneged. Copland was not particularly encouraging about Bernstein’s compositions, and recommended, as Mitropoulos had done, that he become a conductor. So in the fall of 1939 Bernstein enrolled at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute as a conducting student of Fritz Reiner. Though he hated Curtis, which (probably with some justice) he called “a virtuoso factory,” he stuck it out for two years, graduating with a double major in conducting and piano in June 1941. His summers were spent at Tanglewood, studying conducting with the Boston Symphony’s Serge Koussevitzky, who, along with Mitropoulous, was to be one of the two major influences on Bernstein’s life.
All this time he was composing seriously. Shortly after his graduation from Harvard he had begun sketching what was to become Jeremiah, his first symphony, and other works soon followed. The astonishing thing is that he took no courses in composition, either at Curtis or at Tanglewood, where he could have studied with Paul Hindemith. “It never occurred to me to study composition,” he said in 1985. “Whatever I wrote I took to Aaron. Aaron was my guide.” Nor did Bernstein follow the example of his Harvard teacher Walter Piston, of Copland, and of many other American composers and go to France to study with Nadia Boulanger.
Miss Peyser explains this failure by saying that Bernstein “resisted all discipline.” But I find that unconvincing. Bernstein did, after all, submit to a good deal of discipline in his conducting studies. It seems to me, rather, that the idea of committing himself to a career as a serious composer frightened (and still frightens) him—even though it obviously means more to him than anything else in the world. Miss Peyser notes that although Bernstein is always complaining that he has no time to compose, whenever he does take the time he becomes deeply depressed. And she also points out while he has never accepted criticism of his conducting, and has often ridiculed and publicly humiliated his fellow conductors, he has always “invited and accepted criticism when it came to his compositions.” Bernstein himself has said: “I showed what I did to people I was in awe of. That seemed to be as much a study of composition as I could take.” In those words I hear not resistance to discipline or defiance of authority but rather diffidence and fear of failure.
On the other hand, Miss Peyser is quite right in saying that the early 1940’s were an unpromising time for American composers, and that conducting provided Bernstein with the “immediate gratification,” the “applause and adoring crowds,” that he so obviously needs. But these did not come at once. In the fall of 1941, he worked briefly as Koussevitzky’s assistant, but he never got to conduct a concert. The only real job he could land during this period was an insignificant one at Harms, the New York music publishers, making arrangements and doing odd jobs.
Finally, at the end of the summer of 1943, Artur Rodzinski, who had just been appointed conductor of the New York Philharmonic, asked Bernstein to be his assistant. But so far as anyone could remember, no Philharmonic assistant had ever actually been called upon to conduct a concert. The real break came that November 14, when Bruno Walter, who was scheduled to conduct, lay sick with the flu and Rodzinski was stuck in the snow up at his Stockbridge farm. Bernstein stepped in at the last minute and conducted a difficult program to rave reviews. The rest, as they say, is history.
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Suddenly he found himself famous and sought after, with Koussevitzky, Rodzinski, and Reiner each clamoring to be known as his one true mentor. Moreover, Jeremiah, which had been completed in 1942 but had failed to win a New England Conservatory competition that year, was finally given its premiere, at Pittsburgh in January 1944, with Bernstein conducting. This time it won the Music Critics’ Circle Award, and further performances followed.
Koussevitzky, who was nearing retirement, had set his heart on Bernstein’s being his successor. But Bernstein, during his slack periods, had been hanging out with his friends Betty Comden and Adolph Green on the fringes of the New York theatrical world, and composing for the musical theater had come to appeal strongly to him. The ballet Fancy Free, choreographed by Jerome Robbins, opened in the spring of 1944, and its success prompted its expansion into the musical On the Town, on which Comden and Green collaborated. On the Town had a run of 483 performances on Broadway, and this unsavory success, combined perhaps with the fact of Bernstein’s Jewishness and his homosexuality, was enough to put him out of the running for the Boston Symphony job. But Koussevitzky, who also disapproved of Bernstein’s Broadway activities, persisted, going so far as to offer his resignation if Bernstein were not appointed to succeed him. Much to Koussevitzky’s surprise, his resignation was accepted, and in 1949 the dreary reign of Charles Munch set in at the Boston Symphony.
Apparently, Koussevitzky lectured Bernstein not only about his fatal attraction to Broadway but also about his homosexuality, and tried to fix up his protégé with his wife’s niece. But she married the Boston Symphony’s principal violist instead. In 1946, however, the actress Felicia Montealegre met Bernstein and instantly decided that she would marry him. They became engaged in January 1947, and Bernstein worked away at his serious composition, completing his second symphony, Age of Anxiety, which Koussevitzky premiered, with Bernstein playing the solo piano part, in April 1949. In the meantime, however, the engagement to Felicia had been broken off, owing to Bernstein’s continuing homosexual involvements. But Koussevitzky died in June 1951, and his influence, felt from beyond the grave, triumphed—with an assist from the iron-willed, self-destructive Felicia. She and Bernstein were married the following September; he wore a suit and shoes that had belonged to Koussevitzky.
Over the last thirty-five years, Bernstein has become a world figure. But the three major conflicts established during his formative years have persisted. He and Felicia had three children, but his homosexual escapades continually embarrassed her and led to a separation shortly before her death from lung cancer in 1978. His sexual conflict, at least, seems now to have been resolved in favor of homosexuality. But the other two conflicts—between composing and conducting, and between serious and popular composition—have, according to Miss Peyser, made him miserable. His tenure at the New York Philharmonic, of which he became conductor in 1958, was marked by such grand successes as the 1959-60 Mahler festival, but also by radical (and critically noted) unevenness of performance. His greatest triumphs have been his theater scores: for Wonderful Town (1953), the film On the Waterfront (1954), the brilliant box-office failure Candide (1956), and, most splendid of all, West Side Story (1957). But his only major theatrical venture since West Side Story, 1976’s 1600 Pennslyvania Avenue, was a dismal flop. His serious compositions, on the other hand, have been a wash-out: the opera Trouble in Tahiti (1950); his third symphony, Kaddish (1963); Mass (1971); and his second opera A Quiet Place (1983), a sequel to Trouble in Tahiti. How, one wonders, can so gifted and intelligent a man as Bernstein have been led to foist on the world these imitative, embarrassing, maudlin travesties of musical creation?
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Miss Peyser, who appears to have read a little psychology, attributes Bernstein’s failure as a serious composer—and, indeed, all the other failures of what she sees as his failed life—to his troubled relation with his father. And she convincingly shows how he has used his serious works to dramatize this central conflict. The husband of the unhappy couple in Trouble in Tahiti is, like Bernstein senior, named Sam; in Kaddish the main character wrestles with God in a way that all too clearly projects adolescent father-son struggles; Mass, which managed to offend Roman Catholics as much as Kaddish had offended Jews, is a mishmash of anti-authority sentiment. Indeed, the nakedness and crudeness with which these issues are dramatized account in large part for the tawdriness of the works.
But Miss Peyser wisely begins her book by exposing Bernstein’s tendency to create myths about his early life—most of which concern his imagined heroic triumphs over imagined deprivations. Sam Bernstein, quite understandably, did not want his elder son to become a musician—to wind up playing the piano (as he put it) “under a palm tree in some cocktail lounge.” But he does not seem, on Miss Peyser’s showing, to have been such a bad sort. He grumbled aplenty but acknowledged his son’s talent, accepted his choice of career, was very proud of him, and was even capable of treating their relation with a certain panache. “Every genius had a handicap,” he told a reporter in the mid-1950’s; “Lenny had a father.” As Miss Peyser immediately points out, “Sam Bernstein was wrong. He was no handicap.” Yet when she shifts into her psychological-generalizing mode, she seems to buy the myths wholesale; too much of her book is spent unearthing father-figures and conflicts with authority.
The really interesting thing about Bernstein’s childhood is his extraordinarily close relation to his sister Shirley and to their much younger brother Burton, who for a while he and Shirley pretended was their child. (In A Quiet Place Bernstein drops loud hints that his relation to Shirley may actually have been incestuous.) With the help of a friend named Eddie Ryack, the Bernstein siblings even invented a private language, called Rybernian, which they still speak among themselves. One is reminded of the Brontës. Granted that Sam and Jennie Bernstein had an unhappy marriage, there are many children of unhappy marriages who do not go to such lengths in banding together to create a private, hermetically-sealed world.
Since I am not a psychologist, I will not venture to guess what might have caused this highly unusual situation. But I do think that it may well be one cause not only of Bernstein’s failure as a serious composer but also of his success as a theatrical composer and of the “anguish” that Miss Peyser says he now suffers because he “is most renowned for West Side Story” rather than for his symphonies and operas.
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Though he has so often (and so compulsively) presented himself to the public as an overgrown, exhibitionistic, oversexed adolescent, Bernstein wants desperately to be serious, to be a real grown-up artist. And for him this means being a composer rather than a conductor and composing not Broadway shows but great works in the accredited genres, symphonies and operas that deal memorably with the big issues. Yet his very eagerness, precisely because it is born of desperation, ensures his failure. In his composing as in his public persona, it is the child in him that has real vitality. What he is good at is being playful, frivolous, high-spirited, showy. Thus we have the matchless Overture to Candide and such fine songs as “Glitter and Be Gay,” “America,” and “Officer Krupke”—which will be heard in the land long after Kaddish, Mass, and the other serious works are forgotten. As they constrain him by forcing him to deny his true gift, so his theater scores set him free. He once said, in a moment of candor: “Every work I write, for whatever medium, is really theater music.”
Now to have kept alive the child in oneself is ordinarily taken as a sign of health, and to have done so as productively as Bernstein has done is an achievement that most people would feel proud of. But the precocious self-enclosedness of Bernstein’s childhood world, I would venture to suggest, has left him with an abnormally heightened sense of the gap between childhood and adulthood, with a powerful yearning to grow up and an equally powerful conviction that to grow up would mean betraying one’s truest self and is, in any case, impossible—that the gap can never really be bridged. Pain, not pride, has been the result. It is, as Miss Peyser remarks, most significant that in the spring of 1950, just when Bernstein was struggling with the idea of marriage, he was drawn to write songs for a Broadway production of Peter Pan.
The pain, one hopes, has been eased somewhat by Bernstein’s great success as a conductor. But it is perhaps the conflict that produced the pain that has also been responsible for the striking unevenness, over the years, of his performances. Since he has never been one of my favorite conductors, I have not followed his career as closely as I have many others. But he has always seemed to me bewilderingly unpredictable, given the magnitude of his gifts. Where there is any temptation to emotional extravagance, he often succumbs disastrously—though usually to thunderous applause. I recall performances of Berlioz, Tchaikowsky, and Mahler in which his dwelling on particular effects distorted the music almost beyond recognition. Yet in his 1961 recording of the Mahler Third Symphony, while the earlier movements are marred by such distortions, the long, slow finale—where one might most have expected them—is flawless: sublime, restrained, perfectly shaped. (The performance is available only on CBS compact disc M2K 42196.)
Sometimes the distortions can result from Bernstein’s intellectual pretensions rather than from his emotional extravagance. The album booklet accompanying his 1981 recording of Tristan und Isolde (LP: Philips 6769 091; CD: Philips 410.447-2) informs us that Bernstein, in preparing the performance, had “seemed to live in Wagner’s world of love and friendship and in the twilight of the Schopenhauer that had inspired the text.” The result is that Acts I and II, which were recorded in January and April, are unvaryingly slow and dreamlike, with every phrase caressed and crooned almost out of existence. But by November, when Bernstein recorded Act III, he had evidently forgotten all about the Schopenhauerian twilight, and the performance has force, conviction, and variety.
Bernstein has been more consistently successful with Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—I think particularly of his 1962-67 recordings of the Haydn “Paris” Symphonies (Nos. 82-87), which are unfortunately not available just now. And he has also done well by Stravinsky and Copland. But his performances of Gershwin, with whom, for obvious reasons, he has long felt an affectionate identification, are among the worst I have ever heard. Listen, for example, to his vapid, listless 1958 An American in Paris and his grotesquely sentimental 1959 Rhapsody in Blue. Both performances are available on CBS M 31804 (LP) and CBS MK 42264 (CD).
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One lays down Joan Peyser’s Bernstein: A Biography feeling more sympathetic toward this often repellent man than I for one should have thought possible. And that is enough to make it an important and indispensable book. Yet Miss Peyser writes clumsily and often vulgarly, and her mode of exposition, especially in her later chapters, is so loose and freely associative that the most earnest reader has a tough time molding the details she provides into a coherent picture.
Also, she makes so many factual errors that one is not sure how far to trust her. On one page she has Toscanini leaving the New York Philharmonic in 1937 (rather than 1936), while on another she gets the date right but says that he was “dismissed”—which, as she ought to know, he was not. She also says that Stravinsky’s first appearance with the Philharmonic was during the 1944-45 season, whereas he had conducted the orchestra in 1925, 1937, and 1940, and on the latter two occasions had made important recordings with it. An incident she reports from Peter Gradenwitz’s 1984 biography of Bernstein did not take place, as she says it did, “at a dinner party in London” but rather in what Gradenwitz calls “my modest private apartment” in Tel Aviv. I suppose it is less important (though very odd) that she thinks that On the Waterfront was Marlon Brando’s “first film role.”
Though Miss Peyser is a music critic, she never discusses any particular Bernstein performance in detail. And though she edited the Musical Quarterly from 1977 to 1984, she sometimes writes about music in a curiously illiterate way. At an all-Mozart concert, Bernstein, she tells us, “played the piano solos in the G major concerto.” And she says that Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau “sang a solo” in Bernstein’s recording of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde—rather than that he sang the three songs the score allotted to him. Even her spelling is eccentric. The conductors Charles Munch and Karl Böhm become, for no discernible reason, Munch and Boehm.
In the end she leaves us with a Bernstein now nearing seventy, rich in honors and royalties but awash in Scotch and self-pity. I sincerely hope that it isn’t as dire as that. With all his failings and failures, Bernstein is a very considerable figure and—as she shows us, albeit perhaps unwittingly—a rather endearing one. He deserves a still better biography.
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