Leonard Bernstein on musical metaphor

A group of musicians are presenting something called “To Lenny With Love” at the Kerr Cultural Center tonight (Friday, Jan. 22).

I’ve never heard of the musicians performing, but I plan to be there, because the “Lenny” of the title is Lenny Bernstein, and I don’t miss opportunities to celebrate that man.

Yeah, I know all the negatives. He was self-important. Years of praise had gone to his head and made him less than humble. His appetites were limitless and often out of control. His energies were so scattered among composing, conducting, lecturing, etc. that he failed to accomplish in any one of his disciplines what he might have accomplished had he only stuck to one.

And your point is…?

The greater a gift someone brings you, the more you forgive. Right? Lenny’s gift was enormous: He loved music with unlimited passion and wanted everyone else to love it like he did.  I can live with the unfettered appetite thing and the big head and all, if that’s what I get in return.

I’ve written so much about Lenny for so many publications that I’m not quite sure when or for what the following was written. I searched “Bernstein” on my Mac and found it. It seems to be a review of the CD “Leonard Bernstein’s New York,” a Nonesuch compilation of Bernstein’s Broadway and other Manhattan-related music.

Here ’tis:

There are inexplicable times when musical energy settles on a single human being in such concentration that it defies explanation. So it was with Leonard Bernstein.

He was the first great American-born conductor. He was the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic. He was a sensitive pianist, a passionate teacher, and a writer of insightful commentary.

I was blessed to experience that power several times in person.  In 1985 I took a job writing press releases for The New York Philharmonic, and as I sat at my desk on the fourth floor of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, music from the auditorium was piped in. This was so I would know when breaks came and could run downstairs to get musicians’ permissions for photographs and press release texts.

One day, the music being rehearsed below was Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, a short, simple piece known forward and backward by most lovers of American music. Zubin Mehta, the Philharmonic’s music director of the time, was leading the rehearsal. I sat concentrating on a press release, vaguely aware that the rehearsal had come to a stop, when all of a sudden it started up again. And when it did, I literally jumped out of my seat. It was still the Copland Fanfare, but transformed. The same pages of music had suddenly taken on new energy, new meaning, a fresh sense of importance.

Leonard Bernstein had taken over the rehearsal.

That’s why he was the best-regarded American conductor of his time. And yet, Bernstein was primarily a composer. By ”primarily” I mean that the center of his musical life was composing. Even when conducting, Bernstein thought like a composer — one key to his strength on the podium. His output was slim – he was busy doing all those other things – and toward the end of his years the energy dissipated, producing works that were simply not up to the level of his early years. As a mature man, he was perhaps more than a little self-conscious of his place, his persona, his celebrity; the music showed it. Ah, but as a young man….

”Leonard Bernstein’s New York” is the name of a CD from Nonesuch containing selections from Bernstein’s three musicals set in New York, plus bits from his New York ballet Fancy Free and the sole film he scored, On the Waterfront, also set in New York. All the music was composed before Bernstein turned 40 and took over the artistic helm of the Philharmonic. He would never again compose a successful musical or any music to equal for sheer popularity his youthful output (with the sole exception of Chichester Psalms, 1965).

There are songs from On the Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953) and West Side Story (1957), divided roughly into the bewitching (”A Little Bit in Love,” “One Hand, One Heart,” the Danzon from Fancy Free) and the frantic (”Come up to My Place,” “Wrong Note Rag”), and what’s clear in all of them is this easy sense of inventive melody, at slow tempo or fast.

”There is no more beguiling melodist,” Ned Rorem wrote of him on the occasion of Bernstein’s 70th birthday.

I believe that Bernstein’s uniquely enchanting gift for melody owed largely to the congruence of his talent with the mood and musical language of New York in the 1940s and ’50s. Bernstein was not a native New Yorker, and he reveled toward the end in being associated with the Vienna Philharmonic. He seemed to distance himself from identification with New York, even downplaying what he called the ”Broadway Lenny” image many people had of him.

Yet it was not only New York energy that fueled the best of his early music, but specifically Broadway’s musical theater language. Before the 1960s, when the current pop language blew into place and blew everything else away, the Broadway musical was the lingua franca that made popular-Classical cross-pollination possible. Like Gershwin before him, Bernstein wrote for the commercial stage and the concert hall, without any great change from one to the other.

Want evidence? Consider the middle movement of Chichester Psalms. The main melody was originally set to a completely different text for an abandoned musical, with lyrics by Comden and Green. In Leonard Bernstein’s New York, there is a song called “Ain’t Got No Tears Left,” an aching ballad cut from On the Town and recorded here for the first time. I listened to it and experienced a weird sense of hearing something familiar, but in a dream. Then I recognized the tune. Bernstein had salvaged the cut song, increased the tempo and used it as a theme in the scherzo to his Symphony No. 2, Age of Anxiety.

This easy back-and-forth of Classical and pop is now vanished. After the sea-change of the ’60s, popular music took on a different feel, and the musical language of the Broadway theater transmogrified into Phantom of the Opera, et al. The result is that a great source of American musical energy and invention has been squashed.

By virtue of one of the stranger twists of fate in my life, I was the drummer for what might have been Bernstein’s last musical. The never-to-be -produced Race to Urga was a show Bernstein started in the mid-’60s with Stephen Sondheim as lyricist. The script was based on a Brecht play somewhat predictably about greed, capitalism, etc.

Jerome Robbins was enamored enough of its partially completed score to mount a workshop production at Lincoln Center in 1987. As a friend to the music director, I was volunteered as drummer when the first one quit.

It was a joyous couple of weeks for me, watching Robbins work with playwright John Guare and a young cast to mount a production intended to persuade Bernstein to come back to Broadway for one more show.

The score was the familiar enchantment, a typically Bernsteinian blend of arching ballad and rhythmical kick. At the end of to weeks, we did the show for an invited audience including Bernstein, who attended with his sister on his arm, and Sondheim, who sat through it bent over puzzles in a newspaper. We awaited word from The Man himself, but ultimately his decision was not to return to the project. He never again wrote for the theater.

So, instead of more Bernstein shows, we have “Leonard Bernstein’s New York.” I’ll take of Lenny whatever I can get.