TLS 9.10.23: (Lenny) Stephen Brown: Welike to be in...
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Barry Seldes
LEONARD BERNSTEIN
The political life of an American musician
276pp. University of California Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by
Wiley. £16.99.
978 0 520 25764 1
In 1968, Leonard Bernstein got together with his former collaborators on
West Side Story--Arthur Laurents, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim--to
write a new musical called The Race to Urga, to be based on Bertolt Brecht's
teaching play The Exception and the Rule. The members of that high-powered
quartet could no doubt have made a musical out of the phone book, but there
is a reason why The Exception and the Rule is not as famous as, say, Mother
Courage. (Set in a mythical desert, it is effective at conveying dryness.)
Part of the explanation for the odd choice of vehicle was Bernstein's
frustrated desire to create both the great American opera and a work that
would communicate the depth of his political concerns. His engagement with
political issues maps the trajectory of progressive politics through fifty
years or more of American life: aligned with the majority for the FDR years,
especially during the wartime alliance with the Soviets; desperately hopeful
and then disappointed over Henry Wallace's candidacy in 1948; in the
wilderness, if not suffering actual persecution, during the Truman and
Eisenhower years; then surprised from behind by a new wave of radical
politics during the 1960s, the twin surges of the Civil Rights and the
anti-war movements uniting behind Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; and
then those leaders' assassinations in the annus horribilis of 1968, leading
to the ascendancy of Richard Nixon; Nixon's fall; and the period of relative
stagnation that succeeded it. Throughout, Bernstein showed his commitment in
the ways a public intellectual can: writing, signing, speaking, simply being
present at moments like the arrival in Birmingham, Alabama, of King and the
marchers from Selma. But he wanted, in addition, to translate his political
commitment into music, and the struggle to do so furnishes the central
drama--but by no means all of the interest--of Barry Seldes's rich,
thoroughly researched and immensely readable study.
Bernstein's political activity did not go unnoticed. Seldes has been able to
look at the FBI files, and tells us that on April 16, 1946, Bernstein was in
Detroit, "where 'Detroit Informant' [whose name is blacked out in the FBI
dossier], reporting on 'technical surveillance' of the American Youth for
Democracy Headquarters, 'advised that Phil Schatz... had arranged for an
interracial reception for Leonard Bernstein following the latter's direction
of the Detroit Symphonic Orchestra'".
The word that leaps out from that statement, once one has accommodated
oneself to the idea that the FBI was devoting resources to spying on a
twenty-eight-year-old conductor, is "interracial". Was it un-American for a
white person to associate with black people? Or, worse, a sign of Communist
tendencies? And why was the FBI keeping a dossier on Bernstein? What's the
worst he could have done? Written a string quartet dedicated to Stalin? Who
would have noticed or cared? This is the paradox of repression: artists'
dreams of importance, rarely shared by an unappreciative public, find a
match in their persecutors' paranoia.
In April 1949, Life magazine published an article attractively titled "Dupes
and Fellow Travelers Dress Up Communist Front", containing mug shots of
fifty people, including Aaron Copland and Bernstein and, among others,
Albert Einstein; a kind of helpful do-it-yourself blacklist. More serious
was the list published by the right-wing journal Red Channels, which had
ties to the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, and whose
listing did in fact lead to Bernstein being blacklisted by CBS, the same
organization which "seven years before... had carried the fabled
Philharmonic broadcast that had catapulted him into fame". He narrowly
escaped being called to testify before the HUAC. He had his passport
revoked. It was given back to him after he was forced to write an affidavit
in which he disavowed his previous associations and reaffirmed his loyalty
to America.
But a curious thing happened. In more sophisticated corners of the American
governmental apparatus, there was a growing realization that to gain friends
among the future movers and shakers of the world the United States had to
promote art with bite and substance. People like Bernstein were not just not
dangers to the republic, they were potential assets. So the United States
Information Agency found itself promoting a Russian tour for Bernstein at
the same time as the Passport Office under J. Edgar Hoover's sway was
attempting to deny him the passport he would need to get there. In the
event, Hoover lost, though the FBI "for years hoped to find evidence of his
membership in the Communist Party to have him indicted for perjury".
The moment I remember from my lunch with Bernstein (I was a college freshman
who benefited from a scholarship programme he had set up; I and another
student were treated to a room-service lunch at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston;
martinis were served) was his mentioning that he had just been to see a
revival of West Side Story. "It holds up well", he said smugly. But even he
underestimated both the musical and the political strength of the piece. It
is a genuinely subversive work, exactly the picture of America that Cold
Warriors didn't want to get out: a New York City riven with ethnic-driven
gang violence against which authority is helpless; a melting pot that
doesn't melt. Bernstein uses raucous vaudeville to mock liberal pieties in
"Officer Krupke". A cheerful musical zaniness edges into abrasive sarcasm
about "America".
Tony and Maria live in an America where love that crosses ethnic lines makes
you a misfit; in "Somewhere", the music's migration to a foreign, untenable
key signals the fragility of the fantasy of thinking "there's a place for
us". (This underlying message--an outsider's longing for an assured place in
society--is a theme running through Bernstein's work.
From a sweet moment in On the Town--"The world's an empty place and every
town's a lonely town"--to the late opera A Quiet Place, it is a dream that
can't be realized.) The dance music exalts youth, energy, and
violence--scary, but life with the insulation ripped off, the kind of thing
that other great 1950s misfit, Holden Caulfield, knew he was missing. The
ending avoids the symmetry and reconciliation of Romeo and Juliet; the last
words of the stage directions read: "The adults... are left bowed, alone,
useless".
In West Side Story, Bernstein wrote the great American opera. True, it lacks
recitative. (In that way it is superior to most modern American operas,
which are nothing but recitative.) What it does have are the same things
that La Traviata and Carmen have: comic and tragic drama, dance, and most of
all song, and characters who are genuinely operatic, as Nicholas Cage's
character defines them in Moonstruck: "here to ruin ourselves and to break
our hearts and love the wrong people and die", which is what operatic
characters do. West Side Story is how to write an American opera. Sadly, it
had no children, by Bernstein or anyone else.
Seldes could usefully have explored the political climate of Bernstein's
childhood. I don't know about the Russian Jews of the Roxbury neighbourhood
of Boston where Bernstein grew up, but surely they could not have been so
very different from the Russian Jews of the Bensonhurst neighbourhood of
Brooklyn, who, my father told me, ran the political gamut from Left to
Further Left--the Socialist paper was seen as the voice of the right wing.
And while it may be true that Bernstein's father tried to discourage his son
from a musical career, to say that "music making was a craft held in low
esteem by Eastern European Orthodox Jews" seems odd, given that group's
nearly legendary dedication to European art music, as exemplified by the
composers Seldes goes on to discuss in the ensuing pages: Gershwin, Copland,
Blitzstein, and Diamond, all of Eastern European Jewish descent. (The
stipulation "Orthodox" does not rescue the statement: I doubt their parents
knew much about the Reform movement.) Seldes makes clear that he will not
delve into the particulars of sexual relationships, which discretion is
welcome, although one might legitimately ask to know more about Bernstein's
relationships with his gay mentors, given the meteoric rise that marked his
early career. Still, the main thing is that when he was lucky, he was ready.
I'm sure that Aaron Copland ran into many talented teenagers along the way,
but none like Bernstein, who found himself sitting next to Copland at a
concert; invited to a party that evening, he played the composer's thorny
Piano Variations from memory.
Although Seldes does not make it explicit, I gather from his emphasis that
he believes that the American focus on its racial divide has obscured
underlying and more important divisions along lines of class and economic
wellbeing. But class has been mistaken for race so consistently in America
that the mistake has acquired a reality of its own. Racial issues, from
Bernstein's senior college thesis "The Absorption of Race Elements into
American Music", to that early FBI report, to Bernstein's own music's
absorption of "race elements", to the Selma march, to the infamous "radical
chic" party, deserve to be marked as a consistent thread in Bernstein's
political life.
I seem to have been arguing with Bernstein, or his ghost, to convince him
that he was not the failure he felt himself to be towards the end of his
life. The fact is that if he had never written a note he would still have
been a great musician. Seldes gives due honour to his conducting, especially
of Mahler. It reminded me that when I used to have a little black-and-white
television propped on the windowsill above the sink to look at while I
washed the dishes, I once started watching Bernstein conducting the Symphony
of a Thousand, and ended up leaning on the sink enthralled for the entire
hour-and-a-half performance. At the end of the evening my back was a little
stiff, and my understanding of Mahler transformed.
Peter T. Daniels
> TLS 9.10.23: Stephen Brown: Welike to be in...
>
> Barry Seldes
> LEONARD BERNSTEIN
> The political life of an American musician
> 276pp. University of California Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by
> Wiley. £16.99.
> 978 0 520 25764 1
I don't know who Stephen Brown is, but he was singularly inappropriate
as a reviewer of this book. He seems never to have heard of HUAC, red-
baiting, or J. Edgar Hoover.
And if Lenny took to lunch a student he'd helped put into college, it
likely wasn't because he was interested in indoctrinating him
politically.