I'm sure there are many articles out there, but I'll just highlight "Life With Leonard Bernstein/The composer's daughter talks frankly about her new memoir" (NPR)(which kind of goes along with our discussion yesterday of the new memoir by Steve Jobs's daughter):
You talk about how it was hard not to buy into the "Bernstein family mythos." But you also say, "I was, above all, obnoxious like my father." How was your father obnoxious?ADDED: I made a "Leonard Bernstein" tag and applied it retrospectively to the archive. There were 5 old posts, and 3 of them involved the great Tom Wolfe article, "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s." It begins with a Leonard Bernstein birthday, his 48th:
He was exuberant, and he just sort of took over in spite of himself; he couldn't help himself. Plus, he was a know-it-all and he had answers for everything, and liked talking at great length and was bossy. So he was a big handful, and I think I wound up inheriting a few of those qualities.
Maybe this is a good time to talk about this made-up word — "elf's thread" — that slips through the book, almost like a curse.
My father's great anagram of "self-hatred," a brilliant one. Self-loathing is a feeling that so many of us have a lot of the time, and each person on this planet has their own little recipe for it, I'm sure. But my father suffered from it tremendously. He struggled with elf's thread, as all artists do.
My personal recipe was that I insisted on trying to be a musician; that just made me feel disgusted with myself. It's really the phenomenon of just having the sinking feeling that you're making a complete ass of yourself, and that was a feeling that would come over me repeatedly and it's what has subsided as I got older. Every now and then I can still have that stupid idiot, elf's thread feeling....
At 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., somewhere along in there, on August 25, 1966, his 48th birthday, in fact, Leonard Bernstein woke up in the dark in a state of wild alarm. That had happened before. It was one of the forms his insomnia took. So he did the usual. He got up and walked around a bit. He felt groggy. Suddenly he had a vision, an inspiration. He could see himself, Leonard Bernstein, the egregio maestro, walking out on stage in white tie and tails in front of a full orchestra. On one side of the conductor’s podium is a piano. On the other is a chair with a guitar leaning against it. He sits in the chair and picks up the guitar. A guitar! One of those half-witted instruments, like the accordion, that are made for the Learn-To-Play-in-Eight-Days E-Z-Diagram 110-IQ 14-year-olds of Levittown! But there’s a reason. He has an anti-war message to deliver to this great starched white-throated audience in the symphony hall. He announces to them: “I love.” Just that. The effect is mortifying. All at once a Negro rises up from out of the curve of the grand piano and starts saying things like, “The audience is curiously embarrassed.” Lenny tries to start again, plays some quick numbers on the piano, says, “I love. Amo, ergo sum.” The Negro rises again and says, “The audience thinks he ought to get up and walk out. The audience thinks, ‘I am ashamed even to nudge my neighbor.’ ” Finally, Lenny gets off a heartfelt anti-war speech and exits....
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42 comments:
#BanBossy
I do love her phrase that everyone has their own little recipe for self-hatred.
The father of radical chic.
I imagine that Leonard would have prefered that he was around to celebrate it.
Sirius Radio's Symphony channel has been playing Bernstein, both pieces he conducted and pieces he wrote, for the past few weeks.
Some good choral pieces and songs in there I'd never heard.
Google's cartoon Bernstein looks more like Sam Waterston.
An anagram for “fake orgasm” is “forge a mask”.
There were 5 old posts, and 3 of them involved the great Tom Wolfe article, "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s."
Yes, it’s the genius of Tom Wolfe that I cannot read “Leonard Bernstein” without thinking of “Radical Chic.”
West Side Story is a masterpiece.
And I want to add that IMAO Leonard Bernstein was badly overrated. Closer in talent to Andre Rieu than to Herbert von Karajan.
You need a tag for “not to be read memoirs of famous men’s daughters”
FWBuff,
If you like the lyrics, thank Sondheim.
having the sinking feeling that you're making a complete ass of yourself
I still get that decades after the act.
A good memory can be bad.
CWJ interposes: If you like the lyrics, thank Sondheim.
Yes! The greater genius of the two, IMO. The lyrics to Sweeney Todd just blow me away. Greatest lyricist of our time. And maybe all time.
Radical Chic, Baby!
Greatest book of all time!
Refined, urbane, wealthy, white, Manhattanites -- Lenny Bernstein and crew -- hangin' with the poor oppressed brothers from Oakland (The Black Panthers).
Rich, white, liberal guilt -- we feel better about ourselves by giving the brothers some shekels!
Here. Have some shekels with that brie and croissant! Have our daughters, too!
Please pass the Grey Poupon. But, ahem, please, Sir, don't stick your dick in the Grey Poupon!
And, Please don't rob us - we are on YOUR side. We hate Nixon too! But, er, we'd rather not take a stroll with you thru Central Park at this late hour. It's quite breezy outside.
Yes, we do have Negro peers and colleagues, Eldridge. Indeed, some of our best staff, have been of the Negro persuasion. Benson, chop chop, would you please provide Mr. Cleaver with another glass of chilled Ripple?
If you are not keen on him this will be a bad symphony season for you. No Program is complete without Lenny.
KUSC radio has been marking this centenary for a while now, but celebrating only the man’s music and times and ignoring his politics. That’s what I like about that station: It’s public radio without the political nonsense.
"My father's great anagram of "self-hatred," a brilliant one"
He had a lot to hate himself about.
But mostly, the sense that he was a genius but not a big enough genius.
He had a daughter? I thought he was gay.
Bernstein was a Commie in the 30s and 40s. So, no surprise he was Black Panther supporter.
A big friend of Martha Gellhorn (Hemingway).
He was super talented. I wish he didn't smoke cigarettes, and lived to be a hundred. Nowadays, I see people "vaping," and making lots of smoke in the process. What's vaping, and how harmful is it? Frankly, I can't answer my own question.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_cigarette
Trumpit wrote: “He was super talented. I wish he didn't smoke cigarettes, and lived to be a hundred.”
Cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger!
When I showed my kids West Side Story, they couldn't stop laughing at the dancing gangs.
Great music, though.
And as a conductor, he really did have a special genius. Listen to his Mahler symphonies.
If you like the lyrics, thank Sondheim.
Yeah, Daddy-O. I dig it the most.
I saw that it was Leonard's birthday via Google Doodle.
My next thought? "Oh he probably pinched some woman's ass and we'll be reading about that soon and there goes Leonard Bernstein....wiped from history."
Bernstein had some enduring accomplishments, but radical chic is an inextricable part of his legacy. Bad luck for him. Kathleen Cleaver seems to have extricated Eldridge Cleaver from her legacy, though.
So far as I know, Eugene O'Neil is the only writer whose takedown of a famous parent was in itself a greater achievement than anything accomplished by the famous parent.......There's a whole genre of "Mommy Dearest" memoirs. I haven't read any of them. I avoid them like presidential memoirs. Can someone knowledgeable on the subject point to any that are any good.........I saw a documentary about Ingrid Bergman that was pretty good. It was made with the cooperation of her children who all claimed they loved her despite the fact that she periodically abandoned them. If your rich and famous and celebrated, the best thing you can do for your children is to hire a steady, reliable nanny. Ingrid Bergman's kids had a good nanny who stayed their friend for life. But don't marry the nanny. I'm sure that screws up the heads of your kids.
Lenny's Radical Chic sins were, for me, atoned for when he played at the Berlin Wall and substituted "Freedom" for "Joy" in Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
KUSC says that the 100th anniversary is right now at this precise minute (see time stamp).
@cwj I’m a big fan of Sondheim’s as well. West Side Story was one of those genius collaborations of music, lyrics,
and dance (Bernstein, Sondheim, Balanchine) like Oklahoma! (Rodgers, Hammerstein, DeMille) except the former group didn’t keep collaborating. Sondheim did great on his own, but I still think West Side Story is hard to top.
The 1944 "On The Town" was a collaboration of Bernstein, Comden and Green, and Jerome Robbins. It was considerably better than the 1949 film of the same name.
West Side Story was the best movie musical ever made. That opening scene!
FWBuff,
Balanchine? Not Robbins?
@tcrosse You are right! And I was wrong about Balanchine. Jerome Robbins was the choreographer for West Side Story, too.
@cwj ^^^
I remember reading something ages ago about LB, don't remember where or whether it was in an interview or what, that he always knew he was attracted to men and that as a young man made a conscious decision to present himself to the public as a heterosexual man. #1 to protect his career prospects, and #2 because he wanted a family life. Surely he loved his wife as a person and a close friend, and as her letter indicated she knew his sexual orientation before she married him, but the arrangement was deeply damaging to her over time. File this under: bisexuals are fakes.
bisexuals are fakes
I believe that Buwaya would agree with me that he was worthily seizing at least a chance at life, at immortality, at passing his gifts onwards beyond himself and his brief spell on this sad rock we all share.
Of course there was all the social opprobrium to avoid. But of course that age is past. It would be the bold homosexual today who tempered his impulses in any way to serve the greater good. Of course you may deprecate posterity and prefer good works or good work in this life, but the thing is, after you're dead, Who will care? Who will *really* care?
It'd be interesting to consider, whether Steve Jobs NEEDED to be a dysfunctional person in real and in personal life, in order to achieve an he did.
Could a Salvador Dali who did not run as a child to kick his sister's head like a football, have drawn The Persistence of Memory?
Would Ed Gein's painting have been improved or degraded had he been observed, detected, analyzed, shrieked, drugged, put down, rescued by public health, redeemed by divinity, or had some embryonic or genetic defect corrected, and not gone on to atrocity in the flesh?
Do deviant artists quench or fan the flames, by doing, having, being depravity? Which flames, of genius or madness? How to Flame the genius and quench the madness?
It would be the bold homosexual today who tempered his impulses in any way to serve the greater good.
Not that there are not bold homosexuals.
No one has mentioned what a great teacher Lenny was. If you have some time to kill, watch one of his "Young People's Concerts." Several are on YouTube. The one on Debussy is very enlightening.
I grew up watching the Saturday afternoon concerts for kids. Recently I saw this wonderful Bernstein documentary at a special showing at the Walker Theater in Weston, VT: https://youtu.be/j3SEW63LsaM
Oh shoot...I forgot to add the documentary is about West Side Story. A 1984 backstage look about making a recording using mostly opera singers and conducted by Bernstein!
Oh, man, that 1984 WSS recording is terrible. I mean, it's full of great instrumental stuff and great chorus stuff, but the star opera singers are drastically out of their element, to the point it's really hard to listen to. In college I made a cassette which was that recording, except it switched to the original Broadway cast album whenever Tony or Maria sang; listened to it so often the cassette worn out and broke.
Originally came here to complain about "A guitar! One of those half-witted instruments, like the accordion, that are made for the Learn-To-Play-in-Eight-Days E-Z-Diagram 110-IQ 14-year-olds of Levittown!" Dunno from context whether that's Wolfe's idea or Bernstein's, but it's such a stupid take. Yeah, both instruments make it relatively easy to learn to make a fairly full sound, which is why they were popular. But both instruments are also capable of being incredibly musical in the right hands. Plus they're much more portable than the classical polyphonic instruments with a big range (like piano).
""It would be the bold homosexual today who tempered his impulses in any way to serve the greater good.
Not that there are not bold homosexuals."
The point is that now it's not necessary for homosexuals to hide their identity in order to serve the greater good, but it was when Leonard Bernstein was a young man. That's why he can't be faulted for his choice. He wouldn't have to make that choice today.
The whole purpose and benefit of the LGBTQ etc. movement was not just getting equal legal rights and the right to live out of the closet. Homosexuals being out, benefits everyone.
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