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GUIDE | The Ludwig Van Guide To Summer Reading Part 1

By Robin Roger on June 16, 2018

Famous Father Girl:  A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein by Jamie Bernstein, Harper Collins Publishers, 2018  Hardcover, $35.99; and Critical Lives:  Leonard Bernstein by Paul R. Laird, Reaktion Books Limited 2018  $25.00
Summer Reading:  Books About Leonard Bernstein: Famous Father Girl:  A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein by Jamie Bernstein, Harper Collins Publishers, 2018  Hardcover, $35.99; and Critical Lives:  Leonard Bernstein by Paul R. Laird, Reaktion Books Limited 2018  $25.00

Summer Reading:  Books About Bernstein

This summer, being the middle of a two-year global celebration of the 100th-anniversary of the birth of Leonard Bernstein (on August 25, 1918), it’s the ideal time to read newly released and previously published books about the charismatic conductor and composer.  This will give you lots of background for when you hear his works performed here, there and everywhere.

This year, I’ve already enjoyed two different versions of Candide, and this week the TSO performed Three Dances from Fancy Free.  In July I‘m looking forward to the performance of Bernstein’s first published composition, the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, at the Toronto Summer Music Festival.

Before conducting Fancy Free last week, Peter Oundjian recounted his experience performing “New York New York” for Leonard Bernstein when he was a Julliard student in Manhattan.  Shortly after, he received a hand-written note from the Maestro, who has remained an inspiration to Oundjian ever since.  This anecdote echoed nicely with the stories shared by Bernstein’s daughter Jamie, in her highly readable memoir Famous Father Girl:  A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein, released a day before the concert.

Bernstein fille  (henceforth Jamie) offers vivid memories of her father’s mega-talented friends and collaborators Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who helped transform Fancy Free, a ballet about three soldiers on leave in New York City into a Broadway musical called On The Town.  “Adolph knew everything — by heart and all by ear — and could sing anything (including) a virtuosic, tongue-twisting rendition of “Flight of the Bumblebee” […] Lenny and Adolph became friends at that deep, mysterious level where humour, intellect, and aesthetic instinct all meet […] From my listening post in bed at night, I could hear how often Betty’s voice generated gales of grownup laughter.  She could play word games with Steve Sondheim, and not quaver […] quote Shakespeare and Ibsen and Bugs Bunny…”

These colourful vignettes about Bernstein family life at the epicentre of the mid-Century culture provide juicy back-stories to the Centenary events and are particularly appealing to Baby Boomers whose formative musical experiences included West Side Story and Young People’s Concerts.  As an account of being a child of this complex, insatiable, prodigious man, it provides minimal insight.  It was the lot of this father and daughter to live through the dramatic period when homosexual men who had once been in the closet were able to emerge; putting both of them in an explosive situation that Bernstein pere (henceforth Lenny) did not handle sensitively.  When Jamie reported unsettling stories of her father’s homosexual liaisons to him, he attributed them to envious people who had “made up wicked stories to jeopardize his career” even though he knew them to be both true and common knowledge.  This left Jamie in a complete reality warp as Lenny’s homosexual behaviour became increasingly public.   When he arrived at Harvard to give the Norton Lectures, (about which I’ll write more in Part Two) during her junior year there, he brought with him a young male assistant with whom he was clearly besotted.  Jamie was plunged into a state she “couldn’t begin to figure out, or even dare to wonder, how I myself felt about any of it. “

Jamie Bernstein (Photo: Steve J. Sherman)

Jamie frankly describes her strategies to avoid concluding that her father had lied to her — intense unsuitable romances, copious amounts of pot — and the prolonged wreckage of the young adulthood that unfolded in the aftermath, but offers no reflection on how or when she restored her equilibrium.   As the book ends, it seems as if her view of her father has changed little since his death in 1990.  What makes a memoir about a problematic childhood compelling is a powerful sense of hard-won resolution.  (An outstanding example is Louise Kehoe’s In This Dark House about her father, the prominent architect Berthold Lubetkin.)  Famous Father Girl does not deliver this.

Bernstein’s descriptions of her family’s response to her father’s compositions to as they were premiered, suggests how deeply involved they were with his musical process.  Other books that provide more detailed and critical appraisal of Bernstein’s oeuvre, in biographical and compositional context have come out in time for the Centenary.  Musicologist Paul R Laird of the University of Kansas School of Music has contributed Leonard Bernstein to the Critical Lives Series from Reaktion Books.  Following Bernstein from the beginning of his musical life in childhood until his death, Laird’s knowledgeable descriptions and appraisals of the musical features of each composition are particularly useful, and a helpful expansion on Jamie Bernstein’s personal takes on the same works.  Laird deals with every manner of Bernstein’s diverse output, from film scores to symphonies.  For example, his assessment of the score for On the Waterfront, draws attention to details that many film viewers might have missed:  “He wrote 27 cues that total 42 minutes of music…of the first rank, from the soaring love theme to wild cues underscoring the violence encouraged by corrupt leaders of the longshoremen’s union […] The main title is a Coplandesque melody for solo horn with a delicious blue note on a c’, a line that embodies the sadness (of) the main character.”

The explanations of the musical influence of Bernstein’s key mentors, especially Aaron Copland and Serge Koussevitzky are quite enlightening.  It’s mildly off-putting, however, that Laird avoids making critical statements or being precise by using the convenient word “perhaps”.  Of Mass, he writes: “The piece perhaps never should have worked […] mocking what is perhaps the rote nature of such creeds […] the work’s conclusion then comes perhaps too quickly.” (Italics mine). Tiresome as this is when applied to Bernstein’s oeuvre, it’s even more puzzling when Laird is evasive about his own feelings towards the maestro.  The book culminates with Laird’s most personal speculation  about his private encounter with Bernstein in a hotel suite when he was a young man: “It might have been an attempted seduction…” Laird’s revelation, on the very last page of his book, that his three-decade “obsession” with Bernstein stems from that event is unsettling, especially in today’s  #metoo climate.

In addition to these and other new books that have been released for the Centenary, there is a wealth of previously published material that will keep you absorbed all summer long.  I’ll touch on some of those works in part two of this feature. Stay tuned.

Robin Roger
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