Birthday: For Leonard Bernstein, every day was his birthday

(Louis) Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990)

Musical polymath

We mourn artists who died too soon. Others, perhaps, we should mourn for living too long. Leonard Bernstein, the American rock star of classical music, died at 72, a burned-out self-parody (To composer Ned Rorem, he remarked, “The trouble with us is, we want to be loved by everybody. But you can’t meet everybody.”). Prodigiously gifted, he wanted more. He wanted everything, and nearly succeeded in gaining it.

His grandmother- like his parents, a Ukrainian Jewish immigrant- insisted the baby be named Louis. The parents complied, but called him Leonard. Indue course the boy legally changed his name. He studied music at Harvard, producing a dissertation on “The Absorption of Race Elements in American Music.” He went on to be bored for a year at the Curtis Institute, then moved to New York. At 25 he was already writing Broadway musical scores, and becoming a national phenomenon for conducting a nationally-broadcast Philharmonic program when the conductor fell ill. By 27 he was being considered to play opposite Grabo in a Tchaikovsky biopic. At 33 he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. By 40 he was atop conducting’s greasy pole, the first American principal at the New York Philharmonic.

He loved men, but married a sympathetic woman to save his career, which he also nearly grounded over politics (he was blacklisted in the 1950s, and had to execute a humiliating affidavit denouncing his enthusiasms to save his Philharmonic appointment and profitable Columbia recording contract).They had three children. At 58- to new scandal- he left her to live with a male writer in California, then returned to care for her as she died of cancer. When the writer died in 1981 he gathered his lilies on the fly in an increasingly exotic social life.

Bernstein embraced television early on, and between 1958 and 1969 produced 53 “Young People’s Concerts for the CBS television network. His Beethoven bicentennial celebration was a worldwide hit and showcased his talents as a concert pianist. He won nine Grammys and two Tonys for works that spanned ballet, chamber music, symphonies, religious works, operas, theater music and film scores.

Having learned little from the scrapes of the 50s, Bernstein left the Philharmonic in 1969 to became a full-time guest conductor, composer and celebrity. The following year he nearly sank himself again, this time holding a cocktail party fundraiser for the Black Panthers that Tom Wolfe eviscerated in his article “Radical Chic.” Excoriated for being either a revolutionary or a sap, Bernstein also suffered from being seen as the court composer to the Kennedy family, producing several patronage works of middling heft and critical reception (his 1971 Mass includes the couplet,“God said sex should repulse / Unless it leads to results”). Bernstein restored some of his luster with his 1972-73 lectures as Harvard’s Norton Professor of Poetry, “The Unanswered Question,” and with a busy and lucrative publishing, recording and conducting schedule.

Afflicted by emphysema in his 50s, Bernstein spent his last decade puffing and wheezing to outrace death. His recordings- especially Mahler, whose works he brought into the mainstream- became known for his increasingly dervish-like conducting style and elongated tempos. But he still had an eye for the main chance, and snagged a gig to conduct Beethoven’s Ninth at the Berlin Wall in December, 1989. A revival of Candide the same year was a triumph. He announced his retirement in April, 1990, and died five days later.

In the 25 years since, Bernstein’s work has undergone several periods of reappraisal, freed of his tendency to show up in the middle, wanting to give interviews. More of his works- which he felt- peevishly, people thought at the time- deserved higher marks have been given well-rehearsed performances. Whether his later works can rise out of the miasma of his 1930s intellectuals-and-workers-marching-hand-in-hand-to-a-rumba-beat politics remains to be seen. His musicals are still standards of the Broadway scene. No one may ever equal him as a promoter and proselytizer for culture.

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