In a typical breathless whistle-stop visit, Leonard Bernstein drops by the studios of New York classical music station WQXR to promote his 1948 recording of Gershwin's An American in Paris, celebrating that quintessentially American composer on the 50th anniversary of his birth and discussing his own future plans. The interviewer, taking the subject of Gershwin's piece literally, asks Bernstein if the last time he was in Paris he found the same things Gershwin did. Bernstein deftly turns the subject to music rather than autobiography, suggesting An American in Paris has to do "not with the city of Paris so much as the decade of the Twenties." The interviewer stubbornly persists, pointing out the orchestral imitations of French taxi horns, etc. Bernstein allows that there is a "champagne bubble atmosphere" to the music.
The conversation then turns to Bernstein's imminent departure for Israel, where he is to take up his position of Musical Director of the Israel Philharmonic and lead the orchestra for two months. Mention is made of "the Troubles" taking place at that time in Palestine. Bernstein concludes by giving a picture of his typically frenetic schedule. Immediately following his stint in Israel he has a concert in Paris on the 5th of December and one in Boston on the 9th. We are left with a fleeting glimpse of the then thirty-year-old musical phenom just as his career was reaching the stratospheric heights it would maintain for the next five decades.
Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) occupies a solitary and commanding perch not only in American music but American culture. Rarely have the elements of myth and legitimate, recognized accomplishment been so inextricably combined. Alex Ross, writing in The New Yorker, points out how:
…The story of Bernstein plays like a modern American fable. A prodigious boy from Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of Ukrainian shtetl immigrants, one day sits down at his aunt’s upright and begins plinking out notes. Within months, he is outplaying his first piano teacher; within a couple of years, he has mastered “Rhapsody in Blue.” While enrolled at Harvard, he impresses the conductors Dimitri Mitropoulos and Serge Koussevitzky, wins a lifelong friend in Aaron Copland, and, on the side, writes a senior thesis on African-American themes in classical music which is still worth reading. He moves to New York…and in a little more than two years pulls off an extraordinary triple feat: he wins national notice as a conductor when he substitutes for Bruno Walter at the New York Philharmonic; he establishes himself as a concert-hall composer with the rock-solid, formidably eloquent First Symphony, “Jeremiah”; and, with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, he knocks out a hit musical, “On the Town.”
Bernstein's talents as composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, and increasingly as a cultural icon, made him one of the most sought after performers of his era. The New York Times, in its obituary, recounts how:
…it sometimes seemed that Mr. Bernstein could not possibly squeeze in one more engagement, one more social appearance. During one particularly busy stretch, he conducted 25 concerts in 28 days. His conducting style accurately reflected his breathless race through life.
The adventure Bernstein is about to embark on following this interview proved to be one of the most dramatic and personally memorable of his entire career. The website leonardbernstein.com relates how:
Bernstein, as "musical adviser" of what had been the Palestine Symphony Orchestra when he conducted it the year before, had been touring the war-ravaged country with the ensemble for two months, performing for long-time citizens, new settlers and soldiers alike, a grueling schedule of forty concerts in sixty days. It was not unusual to experience nearby artillery fire mid-concert, and at one performance at Rehovoth, he was called offstage mid-Beethoven piano concerto and told of a possible air raid. According to the Palestine Post, "he returned to the piano as if nothing had happened." The outwardly unflappable Bernstein said: "I never played such an Adagio. I thought it was my swan song."
In a time when "classical" music seems far removed from the chaos and violence of the world; when conductors are, to the uninitiated, as indistinguishable from one another as the absurdly antiquated attire they sport, Bernstein's life and art serve as an illustration that neither of these conditions is a given, should the right man once again appear.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection.
WNYC archives id: 150202
Municipal archives id: LT5551