6月4日 俄裔美籍庫塞維茲基去世
俄裔指揮家庫塞維茲基S. A. Koussevitzky在1951年6月4日去世,想到伯恩斯坦在《創見集》裡頭多次提到這位影響他很深的導師,便從書架上取了下來,幾乎是二十年前編的書。伯恩斯坦在1959年年底寫信給庫塞維茲基的遺孀,摘抄數段如下:
「今天的一切都異常清晰地喚起對S. A. K的回憶:地方、時間、沙漠的空氣,還有沙漠中那蒼涼、多石的山丘。就像這樣的一個日子,就像這樣的一個背景,我們坐著,凝望著一座類似的山丘。他只剩幾個月的壽命,雖然他和我當時都不知道。不過,他知道有東西將要完結;他以溫和的達觀說起時間和永恆,這是他從那乾乾的山丘體認到的;並不悲傷,而是超越了悲傷。他知道有東西將要完結,因為他悄悄地、婉轉地交代任務給我--待實現的夢想、待肩負的責任,以及待維護的標準。」
伯恩斯坦提到1943年,他臨危受命,代替生病的布魯諾華爾特登台,指揮紐約愛樂,當時庫塞維茲基還不知道這件事,自然也沒有給伯恩斯坦任何指點,但是,「他每個音,每個小節都在我身邊,提供我所需要的權威感、驅策我的想像力、引導並克制我的熱情。我還聽得見他說:『當你站在你的樂團面前,要站得筆直,像太陽下的一顆大樹。用正眼打量樂團的每一個人,每一個人,直到你掌握了他們,很慢很慢地,舉起指揮棒,然後就開始。你在樂團面前就等於是魔術師,準備揭開作曲家的奧祕。』」
「落日幾乎依禿山而盡;寒意乍起,而我也得回屋裡去做點研究。下星期我又要指揮;桌上的巴爾扥克《為管絃樂團所寫的協奏曲》攤開等著我。這是庫塞維茲基委託創作的作品。一脈相傳,至今未絕。」
庫塞維茲基在俄國的時候,也兼營樂譜出版,或許是這種出版的思維根植在庫塞維茲基的想法中,他對於刺激創作活動、保存作品也比很多音樂家更為熱衷。
他的事蹟和留下的遺產,在出版業艱困求存的年代,是一則勵志故事。
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2JanKszFoQ
伯恩斯坦提到1943年,他臨危受命,代替生病的布魯諾華爾特登台,指揮紐約愛樂,當時庫塞維茲基還不知道這件事,自然也沒有給伯恩斯坦任何指點,但是,「他每個音,每個小節都在我身邊,提供我所需要的權威感、驅策我的想像力、引導並克制我的熱情。我還聽得見他說:『當你站在你的樂團面前,要站得筆直,像太陽下的一顆大樹。用正眼打量樂團的每一個人,每一個人,直到你掌握了他們,很慢很慢地,舉起指揮棒,然後就開始。你在樂團面前就等於是魔術師,準備揭開作曲家的奧祕。』」
「落日幾乎依禿山而盡;寒意乍起,而我也得回屋裡去做點研究。下星期我又要指揮;桌上的巴爾扥克《為管絃樂團所寫的協奏曲》攤開等著我。這是庫塞維茲基委託創作的作品。一脈相傳,至今未絕。」
庫塞維茲基在俄國的時候,也兼營樂譜出版,或許是這種出版的思維根植在庫塞維茲基的想法中,他對於刺激創作活動、保存作品也比很多音樂家更為熱衷。
他的事蹟和留下的遺產,在出版業艱困求存的年代,是一則勵志故事。
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2JanKszFoQ
"The gift of the imagination is by no means an exclusive property of an artist; it is a gift we all share; to some degree or other all of us, all of you, are endowed with the powers of fantasy. The dullest of dullards among us has the gift of dreams at night – visions and yearnings and hopes. Everyone can also think; it is the quality of thought that makes the difference – not just the quality of logical thinking, but of imaginative thinking."
-Leonard Bernstein, Commencement Speech at Johns Hopkins University, May 30, 1980
-Leonard Bernstein, Commencement Speech at Johns Hopkins University, May 30, 1980
(Photo credit James Lightner)
On this day in 1971, Leonard Bernstein conducted his one-thousandth New York Philharmonic concert--a historic milestone. For this occasion, Bernstein conducted #Mahler's "Resurrection" Symphony No. 2.
Bernstein dedicated the concert “with affection and gratitude to all my Philharmonic colleagues, onstage and off, with whom I have shared three decades of joyful #music-making."
The New York Times critic James R. Oestreich wrote: "As the two timpanists whaled away in the clamor of the finale, the head of a timpani stick flew off and sailed into the audience. That added bit of fireworks seemed wholly of a piece with the choral and orchestral tumult conjured by a master, and this remains, of the many candidates, my favorite moment from the #Bernstein years."
We share this photo of Maestro Bernstein rehearsing the New York Philharmonic:
*****
http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16368/
The Mountain Disappears
Leonard Bernstein - New York, New York
Broadcast during the 1950s
I believe in people. I feel, love, need and respect people above all else, including the arts, natural scenery, organized piety, or nationalistic superstructures. One human figure on the slope of a mountain can make the whole mountain disappear for me. One person fighting for the truth can disqualify for me the platitudes of centuries. And one human being who meets with injustice can render invalid the entire system which has dispensed it.
I believe that man’s noblest endowment is his capacity to change. Armed with reason, he can see two sides and choose: he can be divinely wrong. I believe in man’s right to be wrong. Out of this right he has built, laboriously and lovingly, something we reverently call democracy. He has done it the hard way and continues to do it the hard way–by reason, by choosing, by error and rectification, by the difficult, slow method in which the dignity of A is acknowledged by B, without impairing the dignity of C. Man cannot have dignity without loving the dignity of his fellow.
I believe in the potential of people. I cannot rest passively with those who give up in the name of “human nature.” Human nature is only animal nature if it is obliged to remain static. Without growth, without metamorphosis, there is no godhead. If we believe that man can never achieve a society without wars, then we are condemned to wars forever. This is the easy way. But the laborious, loving way, the way of dignity and divinity, presupposes a belief in people and in their capacity to change, grow, communicate, and love.
I believe in man’s unconscious mind, the deep spring from which comes his power to communicate and to love. For me, all art is a combination of these powers; for if love is the way we have of communicating personally in the deepest way, they what art can do is to extend this communication, magnify it, and carry it to vastly greater numbers of people. Therefore art is valid for the warmth and love it carries within it, even if it be the lightest entertainment, or the bitterest satire, or the most shattering tragedy.
I believe that my country is the place where all these things I have been speaking of are happening in the most manifest way. American is at the beginning of her greatest period in history–a period of leadership in science, art, and human progress toward the democratic ideal. I believe that she is at a critical point in this moment, and that she needs us to believe more strongly than ever before, in her and in one another, in our ability to grow and change, in our mutual dignity, in our democratic method. We must encourage thought, free and creative. We must respect privacy. We must observe taste by not exploiting our sorrows, successes, or passions. We must learn to know ourselves better through art. We must rely more on the unconscious, inspirational side of man. We must not enslave ourselves to dogma. We must believe in the attainability of good. We must believe, without fear, in people.
Composer, conductor, pianist and educator Leonard Bernstein was longtime music director of the New York Philharmonic, where he led the highly successfuly Young People`s Concerts series. Bernstein forged a new relationship between classical and popular music with his compositions "West Side Story," "On the Town." "Candide" and others.
2013.10.18上周同學小聚。吳國維兄還在談他搜集的許多Leonard Bernstein"演奏".....
今天在紐約時報看到他的訃聞, 才發現還沒為他集些資料。
90年代台灣有些他的訪談譯書, 我讀過。
我有這本傳記:Leonard Bernstein - Humphrey Burton - Google Books
books.google.com › ... › Composers & Musicians
The
definitive biography of one of the most influential, flamboyant, and
multifaceted musical talents of the 20th century, a man whose concert
hall performances ...Leonard Bernstein, 72, Music's Monarch, Dies
By DONAL HENAHAN
Published: October 15, 1990
LEAD: Leonard Bernstein, one of the most prodigally
talented and successful musicians in American history, died yesterday
evening at his apartment at the Dakota on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan. He was 72 years old.
Leonard Bernstein, one of the most prodigally
talented and successful musicians in American history, died yesterday
evening at his apartment at the Dakota on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan. He was 72 years old.
Mr. Bernstein's spokeswoman, Margaret Carson, said
he died of a heart attack caused by progressive lung failure.
His death followed by five days the announcement
that Mr. Bernstein would retire from performing because of health
problems. A heavy smoker for most of his life, he had been suffering
from emphysema, pulmonary infections and a pleural tumor.
In recent months, Mr. Bernstein had canceled
concerts in Japan and in Charleston, S.C., and a tour of Europe. He
conducted his final performance at Tanglewood on Aug. 19, when he led
the Boston Symphony in Britten's ''Four Sea Interludes'' and the
Beethoven Seventh Symphony.
'Fated for Success'
'Fated for Success'
Long before Mr. Bernstein became, at the age of 40,
the youngest music director ever engaged by the New York Philharmonic,
the drama critic Harold Clurman sized up the flamboyant musician's
future: ''Lenny is hopelessly fated for success.''
It was Mr. Bernstein's fate to be far more than
routinely successful, however. His fast-burning energies, his
bewildering versatility and his profuse gifts for both music and theater
coalesced to make him a high-profile figure in a dozen fields, among
them symphonic music, Broadway musicals, the ballet, films and
television.
Still, his hydra-headed success did not please all
his critics. While he was music director of the Philharmonic from 1959
to 1969, some friends and critics urged him to quit and compose theater
music full time. Many regarded him as potentially the savior of the
American musical, to which he contributed scores for ''On the Town,''
''Wonderful Town,'' ''Candide'' and ''West Side Story.''
Determining His Focus
Determining His Focus
At the same time, others were deploring his
continued activity in such fields, contending that to be a successful
leader of a major orchestra he would have to focus on conducting.
Still other observers of the Bernstein phenomenon
wished he would concentrate on the ballet, for which he had shown an
affinity (''Fancy Free,'' ''Facsimile''), or on opera and operetta
(''Trouble in Tahiti,'' ''Candide'').
Or on musical education. His television programs on
such subjects as conducting, symphonic music and jazz fascinated
millions when he appeared on ''Omnibus,'' the cultural series, and later
as star of the Philharmonic's televised Young People's Concerts.
And still others, a loyal few, counseled Mr.
Bernstein to throw it all over and compose more serious symphonic
scores. His gifts along this line were apparent in such works as his
Symphony No. 1 (''Jeremiah'') of 1942, Symphony No. 2 (''The Age of
Anxiety'') of 1949 and Symphony No. 3 (''Kaddish'') of 1963. He played
the piano well enough to have made a separate career as a virtuoso. He
was a facile poet. He wrote several books, including the popular ''The
Joy of Music'' (1959). He was a teacher of rare communicative talent, as
television audiences discovered.
But Mr. Bernstein resolutely resisted pressure to
restrict his activities. During his decade as the Philharmonic's musical
director, he grew steadily as an interpreter and as a technician.
His performances of Mahler's symphonies were almost
universally conceded to be of the highest quality, and his recordings
for Columbia Records of the complete set not only constituted the first
such integral collection but also continue to be regarded as among the
most idiomatic Mahler performances available. His obsession with that
composer, in fact, has been credited with generating the Mahler boom in
America.
His conducting of works by Classical composers like
Mozart and Haydn, often derided in his earlier days, attracted more and
more praise as his career unfolded and he could relax a little. ''There
is nothing Lenny can't do supremely well,'' an acquaintance remarked
several years ago, ''if he doesn't try too hard.''
The future Renaissance man of American music was
born in Lawrence, Mass., on Aug. 25, 1918, the son of Samuel and Jennie
Resnick Bernstein. His father, a beauty-supplies jobber who had come to
the United States from Russia as a boy, wanted Leonard to take over the
business when he grew up. For many years the father resisted his son's
intention to be a musician.
The stories of how he discovered music became
encrusted with legend over the years, but all sources agree he was a
prodigy. Mr. Bernstein's own version was that when he was 10 years old
his Aunt Clara, who was in the middle of divorce proceedings, sent her
upright piano to the Bernstein home to be stored. The child looked at
it, hit the keys and cried: ''Ma, I want lessons!''
Until he was 16, by his own testimony, he had never
heard a live symphony orchestra, a late start for any musician, let
alone a future musical director of the Philharmonic. Virgil Thomson,
while music critic of The New York Herald Tribune in the 1940's,
commented on this:
''Whether Bernstein will become in time a
traditional conductor or a highly personal one is not easy to prophesy.
He is a consecrated character, and his culture is considerable. It might
just come about, though, that, having to learn the classic repertory
the hard way, which is to say after 15, he would throw his cultural
beginnings away and build toward success on a sheer talent for animation
and personal projection. I must say he worries us all a little bit.''
These themes - the concern over Mr. Bernstein's ''talent for animation''
and over his penchant for ''personal projection'' - were to haunt the
musician through much of his career.
Economy of Motion Not His Virtue
Economy of Motion Not His Virtue
As for ''animation,'' that theme tended to dominate
much of the criticism of Mr. Bernstein as a conductor, particularly in
his youthful days. Although he studied conducting in Philadelphia at the
Curtis Institute with Fritz Reiner, whose precise but tiny beat was a
trademark of his work, Mr. Bernstein's own exuberant podium style seemed
modeled more on that of Serge Koussevitzky, the Boston Symphony's music
director. The neophyte maestro churned his arms about in accordance
with some inner message, largely ignoring the clear semaphoric
techniques described in textbooks. Often, in moments of excitement, he
would leave the podium entirely, rising like a rocket, arms flung aloft
in indication of triumphal climax.
So animated, in fact, was Mr. Bernstein's conducting
style at this point in his career that it could cause problems. At his
first rehearsal for a guest appearance with the St. Louis Symphony, his
initial downbeat so startled the musicians that they simply looked in
amazement and made no sound.
Like another prodigally gifted American artist,
George Gershwin, Mr. Bernstein divided his affections between the
''serious'' European tradition of concert music and the ''popular''
American brand. Like Gershwin, he was at home in jazz, boogie-woogie and
the cliches of Tin Pan Alley, but he far outstripped his predecessor in
general musical culture.
In many aspects of his life and career, Mr.
Bernstein was an embracer of diversity. The son of Jewish immigrants, he
retained a lifelong respect for Hebrew and Jewish culture. His
''Jeremiah'' and ''Kaddish'' symphonies and several other works were
founded on the Old Testament. But he also acquired a deep respect for
Roman Catholicism, which was reflected in his ''Mass,'' the 1971 work he
wrote for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts in Washington.
A similar catholicity was reflected throughout his
music. His choral compositions include not only songs in Hebrew but also
''Harvard Songs: Dedication and Lonely Men of Harvard.'' He was
graduated in 1939 from Harvard, where he had studied composition with
Walter Piston and Edward Burlingame Hill.
A sense of his origins, however, remained strong.
Koussevitzky proclaimed him a genius and probable future musical
director of the Boston Symphony - ''The boy is a new Koussevitzky, a
reincarnation!'' - but the older conductor urged Mr. Bernstein to
improve his chances for success by changing his name. The young musician
replied: ''I'll do it as Bernstein or not at all!''
He pronounced the name in the German way, as
BERN-stine, and could no more abide the pronounciation BERN-steen than
he could enjoy being called ''Lenny'' by casual acquaintances.
In a sense, he was in lifelong flight from Lenny
Bernstein, from being treated as the raffish ''ordinary guy'' that the
nickname seemed to suggest. Although some elder members of the New York
Philharmonic never stopped calling him Lenny, Mr. Bernstein lived down
the nickname, and in his late years heard himself addressed almost
reverentially as ''Maestro'' in the world's music capitals. The man who
had been patronized in print for many years as ''Glamourpuss'' or
''Wunderkind of the Western World'' became a favorite of Vienna both as
conductor and as accompanist for such lieder specialists as Dietrich
Fischer-Dieskau and Christa Ludwig.
Fame brought the usual honorary degrees, and honors
far beyond the usual. He not only conducted at La Scala in Milan, at the
Metropolitan Opera and at the Staatsoper in Vienna, but he was also
invited by Harvard in 1973 to lecture, as Charles Eliot Norton Professor
of History, on linguistics as applied to musical analysis. The
distinction had previously been conferred on Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot,
Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith. Typically, Mr.
Bernstein's Harvard performance was greeted with a mingling of critical
raves and boos.
Harvard played an important part in Mr. Bernstein's
rise, providing a pinch of Brahminism. The boy whose bar mitzvah was at
Temple Mishkan Tefila had gone on to the elite Boston Latin School, and
graduated cum laude from Harvard with a B.A.
During his last semester at Harvard, he organized
and led a performance of Marc Blitzstein's ''Cradle Will Rock,'' a
left-wing musical that had been banned in Massachusetts, but that could
not be proscribed within the academic walls. It was not his first fling
as a producer. At age 16 he had starred in his own production of
''Carmen'' at a summer camp, playing the title role alluringly in wig
and black gown.
It was as a result of another schoolboy production,
at Camp Onota in the Berkshires, that he met Adolph Green, with whom he
later collaborated in several Broadway musicals. Mr. Bernstein was a
camp counselor and theater director and Mr. Green was in ''The Pirates
of Penzance.''
An Unlikely Start For a Conductor
An Unlikely Start For a Conductor
Subsequently, when Mr. Bernstein was out of a job in
New York City, he looked up Mr. Green, moved in with him in his East
Ninth Street apartment in Greenwich Village, and began playing the piano
at the Village Vanguard for a group called the Revuers. The ensemble
included, besides Mr. Green, his musical comedy collaborator Betty
Comden and the actress Judy Holliday.
Mr. Bernstein met Aaron Copland at Harvard in 1937,
and through him came to know two other aspiring composers, Roy Harris
and William Schuman. Admiring his intuitive grasp of modern music and
his phenomenal skill at playing complex orchestral scores on the piano,
the composers agreed that Mr. Bernstein should become a conductor.
Dimitri Mitropoulos, the New York Philharmonic's music director, met Mr.
Bernstein in 1938 and added to the consensus.
At that point, Mr. Bernstein ''didn't know a baton from a tree trunk,'' as he later put it.
Nevertheless, he had made up his mind. Because he
had applied at the wrong time of the year and was turned down by the
Juilliard School, he went to Philadelphia to audition for Reiner's
conducting class at the Curtis Institute. The Hungarian maestro opened a
score in the middle, put it on the piano and told Mr. Bernstein to play
until he could recognize the piece.
The aspiring conductor, who was having difficulty
seeing the music because he was suffering from an allergic reaction to
Copland's cat, nevertheless discerned that the work was the ''Academic
Festival'' Overture of Brahms. He was accepted.
At Curtis, he studied conducting with Reiner and
piano with Isabella Vengerova. His earlier piano teachers included a
neighbor, Freida Karp, Helen Coates and Heinrich Gebhard. In 1940 he
went to Tanglewood, where he studied at the Berkshire Music Center with
Koussevitzky, who quickly adopted Mr. Bernstein and called him
Lenyushka.
In later years, Mr. Bernstein prided himself on
having retained the respect and friendship of both Koussevitzky and
Reiner, who held virtually opposing ideas about what a conductor should
do and how he should do it. But the story as the famously irascible
Reiner told it to acquaintances was different: ''He didn't leave me for
Koussevitzky - I threw him out.''
In truth, not all of Mr. Bernstein's associations
with elder colleagues were warm and collegial. In John Gruen's
biographical ''The Private World of Leonard Bernstein,'' published in
1968, Mr. Bernstein asserted that Artur Rodzinski had once pinned him
against the wall of a dressing room, trying to choke him because of
jealousy over the young assistant's flair for publicity. But according
to Mr. Bernstein, Rodzinski had by this time become somewhat peculiar:
he always carried a gun in his back pocket, for instance, for
psychological support when he faced the orchestra.
A Boycott Causes Stumble at the Start
A Boycott Causes Stumble at the Start
It was Rodzinski, however, who gave Mr. Bernstein
his chance at conducting the New York Philharmonic at a lean time when
the young man was scraping along as a musician in New York. When he was
22, Mr. Bernstein had been offered a guest-conducting engagement with
the Boston Symphony by Koussevitzky but had been forced to refuse. The
American Federation of Musicians, to which Mr. Bernstein belonged,
advised its members to boycott the Boston Symphony, the last of the
major orchestras remaining unorganized. Mr. Bernstein tried to mark time
by opening a teaching studio in Boston, he later recalled, but ''nobody
came.''
That fall, he moved to New York, where he fared hardly better.
Eventually he got a $25-a-week job at Harms-Remick, a
music-publishing house, where his duties included listening to Coleman
Hawkins and Earl (Fatha) Hines, and getting their jazz down on paper. He
also wrote popular arrangements under the name of Lenny Amber
(Bernstein in English).
The Philharmonic offer by Rodzinski came without
warning. Rodzinski had heard Mr. Bernstein conduct a rehearsal at
Tanglewood, remembered the young man, and after an hour's discussion,
had hired him as an assistant for the 1943-44 season.
Assistant conductors by tradition do a great deal of
assisting, but not much conducting. Destiny had other plans for Leonard
Bernstein, however, and when opportunity knocked one Sunday afternoon
in 1943, he was ready to open the door. On Nov. 14, Bruno Walter fell
ill and could not conduct the Philharmonic. The young assistant took
over his program (works by Schumann, Rosza, Strauss and Wagner) and
achieved a sensational success. Because the concert was broadcast over
radio and a review appeared on page 1 of The New York Times the next
day, the name of Leonard Bernstein suddenly became known throughout the
country.
''Typical Lenny luck,'' some longtime Bernstein
observers said. But Mr. Bernstein had given luck a hand: Knowing that
Walter was not feeling well, he had studied the program's scores
especially hard, just in case. At 25, he had become a somebody in the
symphonic world.
After that break, though he was still more then a
decade away from becoming music director of the Philharmonic, Mr.
Bernstein began to consolidate his gains. He put in three exciting but
financially unproductive seasons (1945-48) as conductor of the New York
City Symphony. He received no fee, and neither did the soloists.
In 40's, Celebrity And Back Muscles
In 40's, Celebrity And Back Muscles
In the late 1940's Mr. Bernstein bloomed as a public
figure. He came to be a familiar sight at the Russian Tea Room, at
Lindy's and at Reuben's. Columnists reported that he liked
boogie-woogie, the rumba and the conga, and that female admirers swooned
when he stepped on the podium.
Tallulah Bankhead once watched Mr. Bernstein conduct
a Tanglewood rehearsal and said to him in her husky baritone:
''Darling, I have gone mad over your back muscles. You must come and
have dinner with me.''
Just about everyone in those years wanted Mr.
Bernstein. The United States Chamber of Commerce named him as one of the
outstanding men of the year, along with Nelson A. Rockefeller and John
Hersey. His fans, it was reported, ripped at his clothes and attacked
him in his car. Paramount tested him for the title part in a film about
Tchaikovsky, but he was turned down, according to the conductor, because
''my ears were too big.''
Mr. Bernstein, in fact, looked the part of a pop idol with his strong profile and wavy black hair.
Musically, his career was on the upswing, too. In
1947 he conducted a complete Boston Symphony concert as a guest, the
first time in Koussevitzky's 22-year reign that any other conductor had
been permitted to do that in Carnegie Hall. He served as musical adviser
of the Israel Philharmonic Symphonic Orchestra for the 1948-49 season.
He was a member of the Berkshire Music Center from 1948 and head of its
conducting department from 1951. He served as professor of music at
Brandeis University from 1951 to 1956.
In 1953 Mr. Bernstein became the first American-born
conductor to be engaged by La Scala in Milan, Italy's foremost opera
house, leading a performance of Cherubini's ''Medea'' with Maria Callas
in the title role.
During the six-year tenure of Mitropoulos as music
director of the Philharmonic, beginning in the 1951-52 season, Mr.
Bernstein was a frequent guest conductor. In 1957-58, the two worked
jointly as principal conductors of the orchestra. A year later, Mr.
Bernstein was named music director.
The New York appointment would have been a severe
test of any conductor. The orchestra's quality had gone downhill, its
repertory had stagnated and audiences had fallen off. Orchestra morale
was low and still sinking. Mr. Bernstein leaped in with his customary
brio and showmanship and his willingness to try new ideas.
He designated the Thursday evening concerts as
''Previews,'' at which he spoke informally to the audience about the
music. He built his season around themes like ''Schumann and the
Romantic Movement'' and ''Keys to the 20th Century.'' Strange-sounding
works by avant-garde composers like Elliott Carter, Milton Babbitt,
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gunther Schuller and John Cage began to
infiltrate the Philharmonic's programs. He took the orchestra on tours
to Latin America, Europe, Japan, Alaska and Canada.
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. Although in later years he toned down his choreographic
manner, he remained one of the more consistently elevating conductors of
his time. That irrepressible buoyancy sometimes led to trouble: in 1982
he fell off the stand in Houston while conducting Tchaikovsky and two
years later encored that frightening stunt while leading the Vienna
Philharmonic in Chicago. The worst injury he suffered, however, was a
bruise from a medallion he wore around his neck.
Throughout his Philharmonic years, he kept his ties
with Broadway and the show-business friends he had made before he became
an internationally adulated maestro. He had already written music for
the musical version of ''Peter Pan'' (1950) and ''The Lark,'' a play
starring Julie Harris (1955). For Hollywood, he wrote the score to ''On
the Waterfront'' (1954). Musical successes on the stage followed: ''On
the Town'' (1944), ''Wonderful Town'' (1953), ''Candide'' (1956) and
''West Side Story'' (1957). Several of the stage works continue to
thrive: in 1985 Mr. Bernstein conducted a quasi-operatic version of
''West Side Story'' (the cast included Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras)
that pleased him immensely and introduced the work to a new generation
of listeners.
Then there were the ballets ''Fancy Free'' (1944)
and ''Facsimile'' (1946); the song cycles ''I Hate Music'' and ''La
Bonne Cuisine''; the ''Jeremiah'' and ''Age of Anxiety'' symphonies; the
one-act opera ''Trouble in Tahiti''; Serenade for violin and string
orchestra with percussion; the Symphony No. 3 (''Kaddish''), and the
''Chichester Psalms.''
In the years after he had left the music
directorship of the Philharmonic to become the orchestra's laureate
conductor, he returned to the theater. He created the ecumenical and
controversial ''Mass'' and, with Jerome Robbins, the ballet ''Dybbuk,''
staged by the New York City Ballet in 1974.
Mr. Bernstein's life took a turn toward greater
stability in 1951 when he married the actress Felicia Montealegre Cohn.
Her American father had been head of the American Smelting and Refining
Company in Chile and she had been sent to New York City to study the
piano. After several years of off-and-on romance, they were married in
Boston. They had three children: a daughter, Jamie, a son, Alexander
Serge (named for Serge Koussevitzky) and a second daughter, Nina.
In addition to his children, who all live in New
York City, and his mother, of Brookline, Mass., Mr. Bernstein is
survived by a sister, Shirley Bernstein of New York City, and a brother,
Burton, of Bridgewater, Conn.
Mr. Bernstein and his wife began a ''trial
separation'' after 25 years of marriage. They continued, however, to
appear together in concerts, one such occasion being a program in
tribute to Alice Tully at Alice Tully Hall, where Mr. Bernstein
conducted Sir William Walton's ''Facade'' with his wife as one of the
two narrators. Mrs. Bernstein died in 1978 after a long illness.
After leaving the music director's post with the
Philharmonic in 1969, Mr. Bernstein hardly curtailed his frantic
activities. He continued to guest-conduct, to record for Columbia
Records, to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera and to play the piano for
lieder recitalists. His company, Amberson Productions, which he had
formed with his friend Schuyler G. Chapin to handle his diverse
interests, expanded into the new field of videocassettes.
Mr. Bernstein, a longtime Democrat and liberal, took
a deep interest in politics and was a friend of the Kennedys. His
''Mass'' was dedicated to John F. Kennedy. Among guests at fund-raising
parties in his apartment during the late 1960's, one could find some of
the leading civil-rights advocates of the period, a form of hospitality
that inspired the writer Tom Wolfe to coin the term ''radical chic.'' In
his book ''Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers,'' Mr. Wolfe
described a fund-raising party that Mr. Bernstein gave for the Black
Panthers.
During Mr. Bernstein's Philharmonic decade, the
orchestra engaged its first black member, the violinist Sanford Allen.
He continued composing, if only in spurts. Late
works included ''Jubilee Games,'' ''Arias and Barcarolles,'' ''Halil''
and a sequel to his opera ''Trouble in Tahiti'' entitled ''A Quiet
Place.'' After its premiere in Houston in 1983, ''A Quiet Place'' was
produced at the Vienna State Opera, La Scala and the Kennedy Center in
Washington.
Almost to the time of his death, Mr. Bernstein
carried on a bewildering variety of activities, rushing about the world
with the same tireless abandon that had characterized his life in the
days when he was churning out a hit a season on Broadway.
But Broadway had changed by the time Mr. Bernstein's
final theatrical score reached the Mark Hellinger Theater in March
1976. The long-awaited work that he and Alan Jay Lerner had composed,
''1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,'' closed after seven performances.
He turned up in Israel, where the Israel
Philharmonic was putting on a Leonard Bernstein retrospective festival
to celebrate the 30th anniversary of his debut on an Israeli podium.
During a two-week period, his music was heard in concert halls,
theaters, movie houses and other auditoriums all over the country. In
1988, when he was 70 years old, Mr. Bernstein was named laureate
conductor of the Israeli orchestra. That birthday year brought honors
from all directions, but none seemed to gratify him more than the
celebration staged for him at the Tanglewood Festival, scene of so many
triumphs early in his career. On Nov. 14, 1988, to mark the 45th
anniversary of his Philharmonic conducting debut, he led the orchestra
in an all-Bernstein concert.
Laurel wreaths continued to shower on him in his
last decades. Elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters in 1982, he was awarded the Academy's Gold Medal three years
later. The city of Milan, home of La Scala, also gave him its Gold
Medal.
A discordant note sounded in 1989 when he refused to
accept a medal from the Bush Administration, apparently as a protest
against what he regarded as censorship of an AIDS exhibition by the
National Endowment for the Arts. Like many other artists and public
figures, he contributed his services at concerts to benefit the fight
against AIDS.
Mr. Bernstein's private life, long the subject of
rumors in the musical world, became an open book in 1987 when his
homosexuality was brought to wide public attention by Joan Peyser's
''Bernstein: A Biography.''
As Age Advances, The Pace Does Too
As Age Advances, The Pace Does Too
Far from slowing down as age encroached, Mr.
Bernstein seemed to accelerate. Last Christmas he led a performance of
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in Berlin to celebrate the crumbling of the
wall between East and West Germany. With typical flair, he substituted
the word ''Freiheit'' (''Freedom'') for the poet's ''Freude'' (''Joy'')
in the choral finale. The East German Government bestowed on him its
Star of People's Friendship Medal.
Although he had reportedly refused an offer to
return to the New York Philharmonic as music director, he was scheduled
to conduct six weeks of concerts for the next few seasons. Before
collapsing from exhaustion this year in Japan, Mr. Bernstein had taken
part in the Pacific Music Festival.
Late in his extraordinarily restless and fruitful
life, Mr. Bernstein defended his early decision to spread himself over
as many fields of endeavor as he could master. ''I don't want to spend
my life, as Toscanini did, studying and restudying the same 50 pieces of
music,'' he wrote in The Times.
''It would,'' he continued, ''bore me to death. I
want to conduct. I want to play the piano. I want to write for
Hollywood. I want to write symphonic music. I want to keep on trying to
be, in the full sense of that wonderful word, a musician. I also want to
teach. I want to write books and poetry. And I think I can still do
justice to them all.''
Photos: Leonard Bernstein (Steve J. Sherman, 1988)
(pg. A1); Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic during
his farewell concert as he retired as music director in 1969. (Michael
Evans/The New York Times); Mr. Bernstein at the keyboard in 1945.
(Graphic House); Leonard Bernstein instructing singers from the cast of
''West Side Story'' in 1957. At the piano was Stephen Sondheim, who was
co-lyricist. (Friedman-Abeles) (pg. B6)
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