The Man Who Built Bridges

If you're a dead white male composer, you probably envy Leonard Bernstein. It used to be that full-career retrospectives were reserved for major anniversaries, but New York City's cultural institutions stage one every 10 years in Bernstein's honor. In 1998, the Lincoln Center Festival produced one. This fall, in honor of the 90th anniversary of the musician's birth, and the 50th of his appointment as music director of the New York Philharmonic, the orchestra and Carnegie Hall are collaborating on another traversal of Bernstein's compositional achievement. This week in Davies Symphony Hall, the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas preview the program they will take to New York as part of the celebration.

I do love Bernstein's work as a composer. But he was extremely successful at the job, and his work doesn't need to be treated like the Olympics or the World Cup. A festival can serve a consciousness-raising purpose for a less frequently programmed composer, or one who is represented in the concert hall by only a work or two. But that's not Bernstein. Samuel Barber and William Schuman have 100th anniversaries coming up in 2010. We could honor Bernstein equally well by doing a complete retrospective of their works, which he was indefatigable in championing. (He even wrote an occasional piece in Schuman's honor, the Seven Anniversaries for Piano.) And if you want to delve deeply into Bernstein's simultaneously haunting and playful Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, you might counterpoint it with a retrospective on W.H. Auden, the poet whose 100th birthday anniversary passed in 2007. The point is, it doesn't make sense to honor Bernstein as if he were outside a historical context. That's what often happens when we celebrate composers and works we already know well and love. We treat them as abstractions, as blazing comets of individuality, and we forget that there's a place for all of us in the wider human history. On one level, we already know this from Bernstein himself. His curiosity and his ability to assimilate influences within a recognizable style made him a superb composer. His music is openly a guide to his times, especially in the theater works that are featured on the San Francisco Symphony program. (Tilson-Thomas has, however, chosen a more interesting and varied approach than the standard "Bernstein on Broadway" concert.) All of them are admixtures of popular song forms, jazz and Latin pop styles, Romantic longing for (and visions of) escape to peace and quiet, and surging, symphonic-scale music powered by contemporary dance rhythms.

People Power

Yet, dig a level deeper and there's the Bernstein who grew up in the populist–left wing atmosphere of the 1930s and early '40s, which fed into an overt, optimistic musical style to which we tend to allot fewer performances these days (with the exception of Aaron Copland's popular scores). Not just admiration for George Gershwin animated Bernstein's embrace of a variety of jazz. Like his close friend Marc Blitzstein, he was reaching out to "the masses" and trying to tell them something. You can see this in Candide (1956). Bernstein's love letter to European operetta is also a well-known denunciation of McCarthyism. ("These days, you have to be/In the majority," sings the Old Lady, a lyric Bernstein wrote himself.) Lillian Hellman's original book for the musical ends with furious despair at human nature, but the music and lyrics of "Make Our Garden Grow" sound a restorative note. As Candide begins it, with the wide-sweeping, Copland-esque interval of the "Cunegonde" motif, he invites first Cunegonde, and then everyone else, into a new communal endeavor, perhaps a little more tempered with real expectations. ("But come, and be my wife/And let us try, before we die/To make some sense of life.")

Photo by Jack Mitchell

Naturally, Bernstein's old Left orientation occasionally became a little embarrassing later on. Yet the musical stamp of that era is clear in his scores. If we want new perspectives on the composer, we could begin here ... oh, well, maybe at the next festival. Already the subject of multiple biographies, "Bernstein the man" seems to have captured the public imagination. Obviously, his personality is intertwined with his art. The search for human contact and love, and the reality of missed connections, the tragedy of loss, and relationships falling apart — these are the basic themes of all of Bernstein's theater music, as they were in his life. Famous though he is for big, romantic tunes, they almost all appear through the gauze of dreams of faraway places. The "Subway Ride and Imaginary Coney Island" ballet from the composer's first hit musical, On The Town (1944), stands at the head of these moments. A lonely sailor on a subway train at 3 a.m. imagines a dream date, which is balanced by the horseplay and comic deflation of "The Real Coney Island."

Finding a Quiet Place

The same theme lies at the heart of the intimate sorrow of Dinah and Sam in Trouble in Tahiti (1952). Although "What a Movie!" is the most commonly excerpted number from the opera, the climax of the piece (and the end of its first half) is Dinah's dream narrative ("I was standing in a garden"), in which her longing empties into a gorgeous melody to the words "There love will teach us harmony and grace/Then love will lead us to a quiet place." Nested within that number is Sam awkwardly instructing his secretary to forget about his passes at her. At the end of the opera, as the pair try to rediscover the threads of feeling in their marriage, their duet is intertwined with a caustically smooth-jazz trio that mocks the facade of success and well-being surrounding the couple ("Suburbia," sung to the famous motif of "New York, New York" from On the Town). West Side Story (1957) offers the same juxtaposition, with continual tragic irony. The "Somewhere" ballet music yields to the hard-bitten satire and street comedy of "Gee, Officer Krupke" (or, if you prefer the 1961 movie version, to the nervous bravado of "Cool"). Maria's aria "I Have a Love" triumphs, oh so briefly, over Anita's "A Boy Like That," though the vision of love is again shattered by violence in the Taunting Scene. Bernstein's embrace of so many musical currents is validated by the way in which they integrate into the larger artworks. The juxtapositions serve dramatic purposes, portraying poles of human emotions, while giving another musical voice to New York City in the 1940s and 1950s.

But in a larger context, that theatrical achievement was a collaboration of many hands. The Broadway musical is a tribute to specialization all along the line. Even Bernstein's orchestrations for West Side Story were fleshed out and finished by Sid Ramin and Irwin Kostal, two top pros at the time. As the show's lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, has related, in Steve Swayne's book How Sondheim Found His Sound, Bernstein was always ready to learn from his collaborators. In writing "Something's Comin,'" Sondheim explained a bit of technical showbiz speak, showing him the standard songwriting method of adding a legato thumbline to a piano vamp.

So what I did was: I took Lenny's tune from the verse and turned it into the chorus ["Could it be? Yes, it could"]. And that's my contribution to the music.

Certainly Bernstein arrived with an idea of how music went together with drama, but he thrived in musical theater because he was a bridge-builder and loved the theater's fast-paced give-and-take. The view of the composer as demigod is simply at odds with this reality of Broadway. And it's at odds with reality everywhere else, too. Still, festivals are about mythmaking — and who am I to stand in the way? I merely suggest that, if we're going to be doing a Bernstein festival every five or 10 years, we devote some time in between to honoring a few of his buddies and contemporaries, as well.