by Grant Llewellyn
It was in the middle of Brahms's Seventh Variation that I first noticed Leonard Bernstein. I turned towards the cellos and basses, just where they have the countermelody. He was standing in the wings, watching me conducting, conspicuous in a silver lamé bomber jacket. Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn were all but forgotten in the split second I recognised Bernstein. But Brahms waits for no one, and I still had the elusive Eighth Variation plus the finale to navigate.
It was August 1985, and I was conducting a concert with the Tanglewood Music Centre Orchestra at the Boston Symphony’s summer home in the Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. I came off stage into the embrace of Leonard Bernstein. He proceeded to tell me how much he could have taught me, and started to demonstrate.
Meanwhile, the audience were applauding, and I wanted some of it, besides which I had to acknowledge the principal flute, the horns and the violas, all of whom played a big role in the Brahms. One curtain call was all he allowed me.
'Bernstein needed the oxygen of public adoration'
Lenny had come to town and he expected one’s attention. By ‘one’s’, I mean ‘everyone’s’. I soon saw that there was an enormous entourage accompanying him, including at least two film crews. He held court, and performed for them, but quickly got back to the subject in hand - that Seventh Variation. 'Llewellyn,' (he’d already got my surname down, pronouncing the double ‘L’ in perfect Welsh) 'you should beat it like this'. He proceeded to sing and beat time, to everyone’s delight, and further applause.
This, I was going to learn, was typical of the dichotomy that was Leonard Bernstein. The personal, private teacher, who needed the oxygen of public adoration to function.
As for my beloved Seventh Variation, I actually disagreed with him! His beat pattern, I thought, was too busy and clunky. Plus, it slowed down the gently lilting siciliano, which is Brahms’ most heavenly variation. I had the sense to hold my tongue.
Flights of fancy: Bernstein in rehearsal
The next day I was due to conduct Brahms’s 4th Symphony at the seminar for Bernstein.
A group of the usual 200 or so aspiring young conductors, plus the film crews, and sundry paparazzi were gathered for his arrival, which he accomplished in some style. At the wheel of his gold Mercedes convertible, number plate MAESTRO 1, he casually cruised up the drive, with an almost royal wave.
It was the nearest thing to movie stardom behaviour that I would ever witness. I thought I knew Brahms's Fourth, having played it as a cellist many times, and studied it thoroughly. I could probably have written most of the score from memory. Little did I know.
We spent the next hour and a half, never getting beyond the opening 16 bars of the first movement. With the music as his source Bernstein digressed. His flight of fancy took us to 17th-century French dance, (he demonstrated various moves) and to Shakespeare’s Henry V (Llewellyn is a peripheral character).
'He was captivating, absorbing, inspiring and entertaining'
There was talk of Vienna (he’d just returned from the Vienna Philharmonic, whom he apparently had to teach how to play Waltzes), Yin (the descending opening third interval in the Brahms) and Yang (the answering rising sixth).
It was totally brilliant, captivating, absorbing, inspiring and entertaining. I had just been in a room with Leonard Bernstein and 200 other people, cameras rolling and clicking, and I felt that he was only there for me. How to reconcile the showman with just the extraordinary human was going to be a struggle for me.
He met my wife Charlotte. 'Do you belong to him?', he asked. 'No, he belongs to me,' she mischievously answered, and he laughed uproariously.
Bernstein's friendship with Copland
The conducting seminar took place at Seranak, the former home of Serge Koussevitsky, the legendary Boston Symphony Music Director, and mentor of the young Leonard Bernstein. Another founding member of Tanglewood, and dear friend and colleague of Bernstein was the composer Aaron Copland.
And so it was that the reception committee greeted the arrival of MAESTRO 1 one day containing the 85-year-old Copland in the passenger seat. As one of the few conducting Fellows I was introduced by Bernstein to Copland. When it comes to name-dropping, this a great line I have used often and shamelessly.
Copland was by then suffering from early dementia, and did not recognise or recall many of his old friends. Despite this, he knew Lenny, and his musical memory was impressively sharp. A weekend of Copland’s music was being prepared to celebrate his 85th birthday year and it was wonderful to see him come alive in rehearsals.
'It was an emotional occasion'
His Third Symphony (which I had conducted earlier in the year at the Royal College of Music, stepping in for a sick Norman Del Mar) was conducted by Bernstein. I was encouraged to observe that all the same pitfalls for a conductor and orchestra existed on the other side of the Atlantic too. It was an emotional occasion though. Bernstein led Copland through it all with a care and attention which were utterly sincere and touching.
Back in the UK I went to a London Symphony Orchestra concert conducted by him with a mutual friend of Bernstein’s, Alan Fluck. Lenny greeted us with “Alan, have you still got your redundant "L"? And Grant, you’ve got four of the bloody things,' in his best Queen’s English accent. Incorrigible but so clever.
He had commented back in the US on my baton case, and because his was on its last legs asked where he could get one. I told him it was nothing special, and that I could easily pick one up for him when he was next in town.
'He conducted with his whole persona'
Shortly after he died I was contacted by his PA Charlie, who said that the family wondered if I would like the baton case which I had bought for Lenny. I used it for over 25 years, until it too fell apart on a BBC National Orchestra of Wales tour to Patagonia. I don’t use a baton anymore – it seems increasingly superfluous to the act of music-making.
Certainly in the hands of Leonard Bernstein it was an unnecessary tool, as he conducted with his whole persona. That ‘persona’ eclipsed everything, and to appreciate the man required total commitment, and dedication to the Bernstein cause. It transcended any petty preoccupation with crotchets and quavers, British sensibilities, decorum, refinement and good taste, and required oodles of artistic licence backed up by surely one of the most brilliant minds ever to have played a C major scale.
I have known many Maestri over the years at Tanglewood, and as Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony. Ozawa, Previn, Masur, Tilson Thomas, Dutoit, Rattle, Gardiner, Norrington, Eschenbach, Abbado, Haitink, Leinsdorf and many others, but none come close to matching the all-embracing genius that was Leonard Bernstein.
Leonard Bernstein: a musical appreciation
by Humphrey Burton
Every self-respecting symphony orchestra can dash off the Candide Overture in the time it takes to boil an egg. Tunes like ‘Maria’ and ‘Tonight’ are evergreens. So it may seem perverse to describe Leonard Bernstein as an unknown composer.
Who was Leonard Bernstein?
The truth is that Bernstein was a musical Jekyll and Hyde. There was never any question about the quality of his musicals: with the exception of the bicentennial disaster, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, they were instant successes and have remained firm favourites.
The mould-breaking West Side Story is often revived on Broadway and in the West End – and also mounted by school amateurs at one end of the spectrum and prestigious opera houses at the other, among them La Scala and Bregenz.
The first production of Candide, his satirical operetta, was a flop and took 30 years to shake into shape. However, it now works equally well on stage or in the concert version that Bernstein himself trail-blazed at the Barbican in what proved to be his last London appearance before his death in 1990, aged 72. Since then, Bernstein’s lighter shows – On the Town and Wonderful Town – have, too, been frequently revived.
What did Leonard Bernstein compose?
While he was alive and a superstar of the rostrum, other conductors steered clear of Bernstein’s concert hall compositions so that recordings and performances, other than his own, were rare. His output was substantial, including two operas, three symphonies, three ballets, three song cycles, a song symphony (Songfest), a Mass and what in effect are concertos for violin (Serenade), flute (Halil) and cello (Meditations).
But is this body of work any good? At the height of his fame as a conductor, his reputation was often under fire. In 1966 the New York critic Alan Rich wrote that listening to the Serenade was like ‘sucking on a sugar-free lollipop’; the score, which many now see as his most beautiful abstract work, was dismissed as ‘drab, tawdry and derivative’.
Bernstein was proud of his eclecticism
As Sibelius once observed tartly, whoever heard of a statue being erected in honour of a critic? Whereas the street outside New York’s Lincoln Center has been re-named Leonard Bernstein Place and, yes, his music definitely does cut the mustard.
Conductors of the calibre of Previn and Tilson Thomas were the first to champion him (while he was still alive) and in the 1980s the London Symphony Orchestra, with whom he’d already been working for 20 years, elected Bernstein their life president and mounted a festival in his honour. Since then his compositions have appeared in concert programmes played and broadcast all over the world.
Maybe Jekyll and Hyde, suggesting a split personality, is the wrong analogy. In his passport, Leonard Bernstein described himself simply as ‘musician’ – pianist, conductor, teacher as well as composer – and he made no distinction between Broadway and Carnegie Hall. He was proud of his eclecticism and unashamed of writing melodies in recognisable keys – even if they sometimes followed hard on the heels of brutally aggressive atonal passages, as in his ‘Kaddish’ Symphony No. 3.
What is Bernstein's music like?
At heart, Bernstein was a traditionalist who believed in the natural supremacy of good old-fashioned tonality, yet each of his three symphonies brings something new, such as the despairing mezzo voice that sings the Old Testament lamentation in his Symphony No. 1, or the variation techniques in No. 2 which precisely mirrors the form of WH Auden’s The Age of Anxiety. ‘All my music is theatrical,’ Bernstein said later of the ‘Kaddish’; much of it, too, is concerned with man’s loss of faith in a barren age.
Bernstein’s need to write music that is about something external to the notes laid him open to charges of histrionics, even of sentimentality. However, when it is performed with conviction, and with strict attention to the composer’s instructions, his music rarely fails to deliver the ‘tingle’ factor.
One thinks of the unfolding majesty of the grand G major tune in the last of the Chichester Psalms (originally composed for a Broadway show with lyrics by Comden and Green) or the love music from On The Waterfront or perhaps best of all the uplifting closing chorus in Candide, ‘Make Our Garden Grow’.
What were Leonard Bernstein's later works?
As he grew older, composing became more difficult and he gave up his New York conducting post at 50, intending to devote more time to composition. But the critical drubbing he received after Mass made him wary and happier when working as a teacher and conductor, where almost everybody appreciated his talents.
He was lured back to Broadway by a collaboration with the lyricist Allan J Lerner on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. To examine the first 100 years of the US presidency seemed a good idea but it was muddied by a sub-plot concerning the place of black people in the nation and at the White House. The show died on Broadway, closing after five days, delivering an even worse blow to Bernstein’s reputation than his fundraising cocktail party for the Black Panthers, which was pilloried by Tom Wolfe in Radical Chic.
Memories of his Boston childhood
But once again Bernstein pulled something out of the ruins. This time, it was a belated bicentennial tribute, Songfest, for which he selected a dozen poems by four centuries of American poets. Bernstein’s long-running love affair with the voice continued in several other late compositions, most importantly in the autobiographical opera A Quiet Place (1983) which revisits, 30 years on, the suburban family Bernstein created for Trouble in Tahiti.
The less ambitious Arias and Barcarolles was conceived for two voices and two pianists; the Concerto for Orchestra ends with a baritone soloist. At the time of his death he was struggling to find a form for an opera he longed to write about the Holocaust. His need to create work of significance was sometimes like a millstone round his neck: arguably the happiest of his late compositions is the 1980 Divertimento, evoking memories of his Boston childhood.
Who was Leonard Bernstein's wife?
Bernstein married the actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn on 9 September, 1951. They had three children, Jamie, Alexander, and Nina. The Bernstein family lived in New York City and in Fairfield, Connecticut.
When did Leonard Bernstein die?
Leonard Bernstein announced his retirement from conducting on 9 October, 1990. He died just five days later in his New York apartment, aged 72.
Where is he buried?
Bernstein is buried at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, next to his wife and with a copy of Mahler's Fifth Symphony left open at the famous Adagietto.
Where can I watch Maestro, the Leonard Bernstein biopic?
Starring Bradley Cooper (who also directs) and Carey Mulligan, the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro made its debut on Netflix on 20 December 2023.