(b Lawrence, MA, 25 Aug 1918; d New York, 14 Oct 1990). American composerconductor and pianist. He was the most famous and successful native-born figure in the history of classical music in the USA. As a composer, conductor, pianist and pedagogue he bridged the worlds of the concert hall and musical theatre, creating a rich legacy of recordings, compositions, writings and educational institutions.
2. Early works and influences.
3. ‘Facsimile’ to ‘West Side Story’.
6. Television programmes and writings.
DAVID SCHIFF
His parents, Samuel Bernstein and Jennie Resnick, emigrated from Russia. His father was descended from a line of rabbis and remained a student of the Talmud, but the family managed to rise into the American middle class as a result of success in the supply of beauty products. The first of three children, Bernstein grew up in suburban comfort, but close to his immigrant roots. His family acquired a piano when he was ten, and, despite his father’s objections, he immediately began lessons; his early teachers included Helen Coates, who later became his assistant, and Gebhard. He attended the Boston Latin School, and then went on to Harvard where he studied with Ballantine, Edward Burlingame Hill, A. Tillman Merritt and Piston. During his time at Harvard he composed incidental music for a production of The Birds and directed and performed in a production of Blitzstein’s agitprop opera The Cradle will Rock. His thesis entitled The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music (reprinted in Findings, New York, 1982/R) already demonstrates a broad knowledge of contemporary music and a dedication to creating music with a distinctively American flavour. At Harvard, too, he met Copland, proving his devotion to the older composer by performing the Piano Variations at a birthday party for him. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship – Bernstein performed and recorded almost all of Copland’s works and commissioned Connotations for the opening of Philharmonic Hall in New York in 1962 – while Copland’s style, particularly that of El salón México, for which Bernstein made a piano reduction, forms much of the basis of his music.
After receiving the BA in 1939 Bernstein attended the Curtis Institute where his teachers were Vengerova (piano), Renee Longy (score reading), Thomson (orchestration) and Reiner (conducting). During the summers of 1940 and 1941 he studied conducting with Koussevitzky at Tanglewood, becoming Koussevitzky’s assistant in 1942. In these years he also worked with a group of cabaret entertainers called The Revuers, which included his future collaborators Betty Comden and Adolph Green as well as the comedienne Judy Holliday. In 1943 Rodzinski appointed Bernstein assistant conductor of the New York PO, and on 14 November 1943 he replaced Walter, who was indisposed, at short notice. The dramatic début of a young American conductor on a nationally broadcast concert brought him instant fame. He immediately followed that success with three others. His Symphony no.1 ‘Jeremiah’ was given its première by the Pittsburgh SO in January 1944, and it won the New York Music Critics’ Circle award as the best American work of the year. In April 1944 the ballet Fancy Free, choreographed by Jerome Robbins, was first performed at the Metropolitan Opera House. In December of the same year On the Town, with book and lyrics by Comden and Green, opened on Broadway.
Over the next decade Bernstein pursued a highly diversified career. His conducting included many appearances with the Israel PO and, in 1953, a Medea at La Scala with Callas – the first time an American had conducted there. He composed a series of theatrical works – Facsimile, Peter Pan, Trouble in Tahiti, Wonderful Town, The Lark, Candide, West Side Story; concert hall music (including the Symphony no.2 ‘The Age of Anxiety’, Prelude, Fugue and Riffs and the Serenade); and a film score, for example, On the Waterfront. He also taught as professor of music at Brandeis University (where his chamber opera Trouble in Tahiti had its first performance in 1952) and, on Koussevitzky’s death in 1951, as head of the orchestra and conducting departments at Tanglewood. In the same year he married the Chilean actress Felicia Montealegre, with whom he had three children, while three years later he made his first appearance on television with ‘Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’, as part of the programme Omnibus.
In 1958 Bernstein became music director of the New York PO, the first American-born conductor to hold the position. He introduced thematic programming, and the televised Young People’s Concerts, and at one concert every week he addressed the audience before playing each work; he launched a survey of Mahler’s symphonies, and inaugurated the new Philharmonic Hall (now Avery Fisher Hall) at the Lincoln Center. The years at the orchestra made Bernstein internationally famous but were not free of rancour; Harold Schonberg, the chief music critic of the New York Times, regularly vented his contempt for Bernstein's extravagant gestures, for example. As a celebrity, too, Bernstein’s private life came under greater scrutiny: his leftist political sympathies became the object of derision when the writer Tom Wolfe ridiculed a fund-raising party given by the Bernsteins for the Black Panthers as an example of ‘radical chic’.
Bernstein remained musical director of the New York PO until 1969 (he was given the lifetime position of laureate conductor); his international reputation as a conductor soared but his composing became more sporadic and controversial although ever more ambitious, as in the multimedia theatre piece Mass (1971), the failed musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (1976) and the opera A Quiet Place (1983). In 1973 Bernstein gave the Norton Professor of Poetry lectures at Harvard (filmed for TV and published as The Unanswered Question). In them he used a controversial reading of Chomsky’s theory of linguistics to argue, much against the wisdom of the time, for the universal nature of tonality in music. He continued to conduct up until his death, in his latter years forming a close association with the Vienna PO. On the occasion of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 he conducted an orchestra drawn from German musicians and those of the former occupying powers in a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Bernstein won almost every award the American music world had to offer – only the Pulitzer Prize eluded him. Among his honours were the Kennedy Center Honor for Lifetime of Contributions to American Culture Through the Performing Arts, election to the Academy of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and the Academy’s Gold Medal for Music, the Sonning Prize and the Siemens Prize. He won 11 Emmy Awards and the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Besides his influential teaching of young conductors at Tanglewood, Bernstein helped to found the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, helped to create a training orchestra at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival and founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan.
Although he had little formal study of composition, with the Symphony no.1 (‘Jeremiah’), Fancy Free and On the Town Bernstein revealed a full mastery of symphonic, ballet and musical theatre idioms, and a distinctive style that would change little for the rest of his life. His abiding influences were Copland and Blitzstein, with secondary echoes of Schuman and Hindemith and occasionally Gershwin – but he created a personal synthesis. Most importantly Bernstein took up the Judaic and jazz elements from 1920s Copland, which Copland had mostly abandoned, bringing the jazz up to date in a manner derived from Woody Herman, and giving the prophetic, cantorial elements of early Copland a less austere, more lyrical treatment; throughout his career Bernstein returned to Jewish subject matter for inspiration.
The ‘Jeremiah’ Symphony, despite its obvious debts to Copland and Schuman, was an astonishing début. Its form, which already points to Bernstein’s interest in Mahler, is an original three-movement structure: a brooding first movement, ‘Prophecy’, based on cantorial chant motifs; a manic scherzo, ‘Profanation’, derived from a chant used for synagogal reading from the prophets, and a concluding ‘Lamentation’, a setting in Hebrew for mezzo-soprano of verses from Jeremiah. The outer movements evoke the anxiety of the Jewish people during the war years, while the second movement, which represents a questioning of belief, gives a traditional liturgical melody the jagged rhythmic development of a Copland hoedown, with a contrasting section that already forecasts the melody of ‘Maria’ from West Side Story.
Fancy Free was written for a Jerome Robbins ballet about three sailors on shore leave in wartime Manhattan. From its very opening, the symphonic treatment of jazz is clearly taken beyond Gershwin and Copland. The changing metres and cross accents look Stravinskian on paper, but, without using jazz structures or improvisation, the aural impression is one of the sounds of the big band era and the nervous energy of jazz. In the Three Dance Episodes Bernstein anticipates later works: a parody polka hints at the style of Candide (and also shows the influence of Shostakovich) while the Coplandesque ‘Danzon’ forecasts the dance at the gym in West Side Story. Oliver Smith, who designed the set for Fancy Free, suggested turning it into a musical. However, the only feature that the ballet has in common with On the Town is the presence of three sailors on leave in New York; the story and the music were new, as were the lyrics by Comden and Green and Robbins’s choreography. Bernstein’s symphonic score and the extended ballet sequences were innovatory and contributed to the originality of the show. For a conductor who spent most of his time interpreting the classics, his lifelong devotion to musical comedy is the defining oddity of his career, even if it made him a fortune; yet he rightly insisted that he was always a theatre composer, born to bring the theatre and the concert hall together. In On the Town, Bernstein seems more comfortable with the extended dance numbers than with simple songs; he moves back and forth between cleverly topical review skits, like the comic ‘I Can Cook, Too’, and more operatic and symphonic passages. Though a success, the show failed to produce a hit song; nevertheless ‘New York, New York’ became the unofficial anthem of Bernstein’s adopted city. Of the often performed Three Dance Episodes, the second is one of the few examples of an overt Gershwin influence; it sounds like an echo of the slow movement of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto.
The works of the immediate postwar years show Bernstein still to be exploring. The ballet Facsimile, one of his few early failures, depicts a complicated psychological triangle; by turns touching and humorous, it demonstrates how his personality could emerge even without constant recourse to jazz colours. By contrast Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, written for Herman, is an American response to Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto, while in his Symphony no.2 (‘The Age of Anxiety’), based on Auden’s poem, Bernstein reveals a surprising debt to Hindemith, especially his Theme and Variations ‘The Four Temperaments’ (1940). Like the Hindemith work, which Balanchine choreographed in 1947, ‘The Age of Anxiety’ combines the genre of the piano concerto with theme and variations form, beginning with 14 variations derived from the poem’s account of ‘seven ages and seven stages’. However, the double influence of Hindemith’s classicism and Auden’s neo-Baroque portrait of four people who meet in a New York bar during the war makes for a strained impression. Compared to the ‘Jeremiah’ Symphony, the mood of ‘The Age of Anxiety’ remains unevocative of the text, its rhythms surprisingly Germanic; only the jazzy ‘Masque’ movement, scored for piano, harp, celesta and percussion, exhibits Bernstein’s usual manner.
He continued his Broadway work with songs for a production of Peter Pan (not to be confused with the later Jule Styne, Comden and Green musical) and Wonderful Town, based on the popular book My Sister Eileen by Ruth McKenney, subsequently dramatized by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov. This lively show, built around the talents of Rosalind Russell and his last collaboration with Comden and Green, was the closest Bernstein ever came to a traditional musical entertainment; it won a Tony as best musical of 1952–3. But he had already begun to think in more operatic terms – even if the model was Blitzstein, not Verdi - writing two years earlier Trouble in Tahiti, an exposé of suburban malaise framed by a Greek chorus singing in the style of radio commercials, and reminiscent of the parodies of popular music in Blitzstein’s The Cradle will Rock. Though the music for this updated Zeitoper begins with a satirical edge, its portrayal of the struggles of Sam and Dinah, based on his own parents’ unhappy marriage, quickly turns serious; Dinah’s anthem ‘There is a garden’ is a non-ironic prayer for inner peace, a genre that was to return in many of his later works.
Bernstein’s next two compositions, Candide and West Side Story, are his greatest achievements, though Candide, a cross between Blitzstein and Offenbach, has survived on the wit and brilliance of the music alone, its numerous versions not having solved the flaws in the dramatic structure. West Side Story, equally indebted to Blitzstein in such numbers as ‘Maria’ and ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’, reveals, too, how much Bernstein had come under the sway of the Rodgers and Hammerstein ‘book’ musical, which at the time he described as the true American form of opera. With its stylistic swings between the operatic and jazz, dramatic integration of dance (the show was originally held together by the power of Robbins’s choreography), use of song to reveal character and social consciousness, it is modelled – despite being set dramatically and musically in a gritty Manhattan – on South Pacific. In its mixture of 1930s Bowery Boys clichés, 1940s bebop and Latin jazz, and typical 1950s pop sociology about juvenile delinqency and alienation, it may be as much of a Broadway confection as the contemporary Rodgers and Hammerstein Flower Drum Song. Yet it is that very eclecticism – together with the freshness of Bernstein and Sondheim’s lyrics, and its range of melodic invention, from the intimately romantic ‘One Hand, One Heart’ to the brash, irreverent ‘America’ – that gives West Side Story its enduring strength.
Outside the theatre, Bernstein also achieved a distinctive manner, evident from works such as the Serenade, a violin concerto with an original formal structure based on Plato’s Symposium, and his bleak yet Romantic music for the film On the Waterfront. Of all his works the Serenade departs furthest from popular music, only erupting at the end as a representation of drunken high spirits; it shows what a fine neo-classicist Bernstein might have been. The raucous, urban score for On the Waterfront, on the other hand, had served as a preparation for West Side Story, and it was also to serve as a model for future film scores, especially those in the ‘noir’ mode, set in New York.
When Bernstein accepted the leadership of the New York PO in 1958, Brooks Atkinson, the New York Times theatre critic, accused him of ‘capitulating to respectability’, fearing that the orchestra’s gain would be Broadway’s loss, a prediction that turned out to be true, for Bernstein never had a Broadway success after West Side Story. Composing now became a secondary activity, while it was his shorter, less grandiose works, like the Chichester Psalms and Songfest, rather than such extravagantly dramatic compositions as the Symphony no.3 (‘Kaddish’) and Mass, which were best received. The ‘Kaddish’ Symphony, dedicated to the memory of President Kennedy, was conceived as a vehicle for Bernstein’s wife, who had previously narrated Debussy’s Martyr de Saint Sébastien; like the Debussy, it stands somewhere between concert music and musical theatre. Its other sources include Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher and Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony, but the text – the traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead placed within a melodramatic expression of doubt – restates the spiritual journeys of his previous symphonies. Anticipating the argument of his Norton lectures, Bernstein represented here the struggle between faith and doubt as between atonality and tonality in which the latter finally prevails.
Mass, a multimedia piece of music theatre, not a liturgical work, is an American equivalent to Britten’s War Requiem. Commissioned by the Kennedy Center in Washington and written during the Vietnam War and just after Woodstock, it gave rise to a pastoral warning from the Catholic Archbishop of Cincinnati for its irreverent treatment of religious ritual and for its vulgar language. It is very much a product of its times making use of electronic tapes, amplified guitars and keyboards, rock singers and a chorus of ‘street people’. The text, by Bernstein himself and Stephen Schwartz (who had previously written the rock musical Godspell), combines elements from Marat/Sade, Hair, the Swingle Singers, the Living Theater and Jesus Christ Superstar; the theme of faith, profanation and rebirth is one Bernstein had presented earlier in all three of his symphonies, though never before in such a vernacular idiom. Most typical of its era is the hallucinogenic explosion in which the celebrant desecrates the altar, though the most popular number from the work, ‘A Simple Song’, is a piece of true Bernstein sentiment that might have appeared in Candide or even On the Town. If the text of Mass is potentially offensive, the music reveals the composer to be in full command of his musical and theatrical powers, moving between styles and moods effortlessly and to great effect.
Of his later works, two song cycles, Songfest and Arias and Barcarolles, have achieved the broadest acceptance; but the two largest projects of these years remain controversial. For the American bicentennial celebrations, Bernstein collaborated with Lerner in the musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The premise of the show was a history of the first hundred years of the White House, including a conflict between white presidential families and their black servants. Despite large claims for the political significance of the work, it emerged as the biggest fiasco in the careers of both of its creators. (In 1997 Charles Harmon and Sid Ramin refashioned the score as a 90-minute White House Cantata.) The opera A Quiet Place was commissioned jointly by the Kennedy Center, the Houston Grand Opera and La Scala. Written to a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, it surrounds the entire unchanged text of Trouble in Tahiti with a more contemporary soap opera that takes place 30 years later, thereby placing the audience in a strange time warp. Exhibiting something of the immediacy of a Sondheim musical or Robert Altman film in the context of the opera house, the new plot nevertheless remains somewhat opaque; and in contrast to the fragmented psychological drama of the added sections, the world of Trouble in Tahiti now appears as a 1950s idyll. Its treatment of autobiographical elements, including homosexuality and incest, and its mixture of musical styles are at the same time provocative and path-breaking. The piece is experimental in its flashback form (which Bernstein and Wadsworth revised significantly after its Houston première), while the new sections are strikingly different in idiom from Trouble in Tahiti, indeed from most of the earlier works. They are written as dissonant recitative without sustained lyricism, a kind of operatic modernism that until then he had always avoided. What little of the old Bernstein emerges in occasional arias and orchestral interludes often sounds like deliberate self-parody. Despite these novelties, the opera once more restated the theme of spiritual disintegration and hope which Bernstein had clung to over the previous 40 years. He considered it a summation of all his work.
Bernstein’s mentors, Mitropoulos, Reiner and Koussevitzky, were all modernists, and much of his early conducting and recording was devoted to contemporary music such as Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat, Milhaud’s La création du monde, Copland’s Billy the Kid and Britten’s Peter Grimes, the American première of which the 27-year-old Bernstein conducted. Once at the New York PO, he began to record almost all the standard repertory; his huge recorded output shows that he was a modern Romantic, less interested in sound than Stokowski, less interested in structure than Boulez, but concentrating instead on revealing the narrative of the music in fervidly energized readings. Bernstein may not have made the New York PO the world’s leading orchestra – he was never a disciplinarian – but he did succeed, as no one had done before, in putting it at the centre of the city’s cultural life.
Bernstein’s stylistic range was vast; only Schoenberg and his latter-day followers remained alien to his sympathies. His particular strengths were in American music (especially Copland, Harris and Ives) and in Haydn, Schumann, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and, above all, Mahler. Although Bernstein has been given too much credit for the Mahler revival (Klemperer, Walter, Mitropoulos and Barbirolli had all kept Mahler’s music alive), his recordings placed all of Mahler’s symphonies, which had been regarded as provincially Viennese, at the core of the orchestral repertory. The fact that, unlike Klemperer or Walter, Bernstein did not come from Mahler’s world served to enliven his interpretations, which are often far more observant of Mahler’s indications than those of other conductors. He recorded the complete cycle three times.
True to his rabbinic roots, Bernstein was always a teacher, but he was also an innovator in using television to educate the audience. He produced programmes for both adults and children, though those for children were so sophisticated and uncondescending in their approach that they delighted adults as well. Despite the technical crudeness of early television Bernstein exploited all the possibilities of the medium, its intimacy and immediacy, and its ability to create cultural icons for a wide audience – which is what he himself, by turns academic and familiar, became. Whether the subject was Beethoven’s compositional process, or the evolution of jazz, or Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex, Bernstein stressed musical values which he illuminated by a careful exposition of ideas and striking juxtapositions of musical examples, and without the facile anecdotes and programmatic interpretations that had passed for music appreciation. Moreover, the medium of television directly served Bernstein’s belief in a cultural continuum, ranging from homespun blues to late Beethoven with the American musical theatre at the vital centre. As this vision splintered in the 1960s Bernstein’s programmes, like his compositions, lost their way; but he attempted to re-establish his views with the Norton lectures, the first time the series had been specifically designed for television. They were widely criticized at the time, partly because Bernstein used Chomsky’s ideas in a rather simplistic and apparently self-serving manner, and partly because the production was surprisingly clumsy and unvisual. Nevertheless, the lectures are a fascinating potpourri of Bernstein’s obsessions and insights, which reach their climax in a grand sermon on Mahler as the central figure in 20th-century music; here Bernstein’s theatrical and educational instincts come together in a passionate statement of the beliefs that sustained his remarkable career.
all published unless otherwise stated
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The Birds (incid music, Aristophanes), 1938, unpubd; Cambridge, MA, 21 April 1939 |
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The Peace (incid music, Aristophanes), 1940, unpubd; Cambridge, MA, 23 May 1941 |
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Fancy Free (ballet, choreog. J. Robbins), 1944; New York, 18 April 1944 |
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On the Town (musical, B. Comden, A. Green, Bernstein), orchd H. Kay, Bernstein, 1944; Boston, 13 Dec 1944 |
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Facsimile (ballet, choreog. Robbins), 1946; New York, 24 Oct 1946, cond. Bernstein |
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Peter Pan (incid music, Bernstein, after J.M. Barrie), orchd Kay, 1950; New York, 24 April 1950, cond. B. Steinberg |
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Trouble in Tahiti (op, 1, Bernstein), 1951; Waltham, MA, 12 June 1952, cond. Bernstein |
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Wonderful Town (musical, Comden and Green, after J.A. Fields and J. Chodorov: My Sister Eileen), orchd D. Walker, 1953; New Haven, CT, 19 Jan 1953 |
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On the Waterfront (film score, dir. E. Kazan), 1954 |
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The Lark (incid music, L. Hellman, after J. Anouilh), 1955; Boston, 28 Oct 1955 |
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Salome (incid music, O. Wilde), 1955, unpubd |
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Candide (comic operetta, Hellman, R. Wilbur, J. La Touche, D. Parker, Bernstein, after Voltaire), orchd Kay, Bernstein, 1956; Boston, 29 Oct 1956; rev. 1973 (Wilbur, La Touche, S. Sondheim, Bernstein, after H. Wheeler after Voltaire), Brooklyn, NY, 20 Dec 1973, cond. J. Mauceri |
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West Side Story (musical, Bernstein and Sondheim, after A. Laurents), orchd S. Ramin, I. Kostal, Bernstein, choreog. Robbins, 1957; Washington DC, 19 Aug 1957 |
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The Firstborn (incid music, C. Fry), 1958, unpubd; New York, 20 April 1958 |
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Mass (music theatre piece, S. Schwartz and Bernstein), orchd J. Tunick, Kay, Bernstein, 1971, Washington DC, 8 Sept 1971, cond. M. Peress; arr. Ramin for chbr orch, Los Angeles, 26 Dec 1972, cond. Peress |
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Dybbuk (ballet), 1974; New York, 16 May 1974, cond. Bernstein |
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By Bernstein (revue), 1975, withdrawn [based on unpubd and withdrawn theatre songs]; New York, 23 Nov 1975 |
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1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (musical, A.J. Lerner), orchd Ramin, Kay, 1976; Philadelphia, 24 Feb 1976; reworked as vocal-orch work White House Cant., 1997 |
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A Quiet Place (op, 1, S. Wadsworth), 1983; Houston, 17 June 1983, cond. J. De Main; rev. 1984 in 3 acts, incl. Trouble in Tahiti |
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Fancy Free, suite, 1944 [based on ballet]; On the Town, 3 dance episodes, 1945 [based on musical], transcr. concert band; Facsimile, choreographic essay, 1946 [based on ballet]; Sym. no.2 ‘The Age of Anxiety’, after W.H. Auden, pf, orch, 1949, rev. 1965; Prelude, Fugue and Riffs, cl, jazz ens, 1949; Serenade, vn, str, hp, perc, 1954 [after Plato: Symposium]; On the Waterfront, sym. suite, 1955 [based on film score]; West Side Story, sym. dances, 1960 [based on musical]; Fanfare I, 1961 [for inauguration of J.F. Kennedy]; Fanfare II, 1961 [for 25th anniversary of the High School of Music and Art]; 2 Meditations from Mass, 1971; Meditation III from Mass, 1972, withdrawn; Dybbuk Suite nos. 1–2 (Dybbuk Variations), 1974 [based on ballet]; 3 Meditations from Mass, vc, orch, 1977, arr. vc, pf, 1978; Slava!, ov., 1977; CBS Music, 1977; Divertimento, 1980; A Musical Toast, 1980; Halil, nocturne, fl, str, perc, 1981; Conc. for Orch, 1989; Suite, arr. Ramin, M.T. Thomas, 1991 [based on op A Quiet Place, 1983] |
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Sym. no.1 ‘Jeremiah’ (Bible), Mez, orch, 1942; Hashkivenu (Heb. liturgy), T, chorus, org, 1945; Arr. of Reena (Heb. folksong), chorus, orch, 1947, unpubd; Sym. no.3 ‘Kaddish’ (Heb. liturgy, Bernstein), S, spkr, chorus, boys’ chorus, orch, 1963; Chichester Psalms (Bible), Tr, chorus, orch, 1965; Songfest, 6 solo vv, orch, 1977: To the Poem (F. O’Hara), The Pennycandy Store beyond the El (L. Ferlinghetti), A Julia de Burgos (J. de Burgos), To What you Said (W. Whitman), I, too, Sing America (L. Hughes), Okay ‘Negroes’ (J. Jordan), To my Dear and Loving Husband (A. Bradstreet), Storyette H.M. (G. Stein), If you can’t eat you got to (Cummings), Music I Heard with You (C. Aiken), Zizi’s Lament (G. Corso), What Lips my Lips have Kissed (Millay), Israfel (E.A. Poe); Olympic Hymn (G. Kunert), chorus, orch, 1981; White House Cant., arr. C. Harmon, Ramin, 1997 [based on musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 1976] |
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Choral: Arr. of Simch Na (Heb. folksong), SATB, pf, 1947; Yidgal (Heb. liturgy), chorus, pf, 1950; Harvard Choruses (Lerner), 1957; Dedication, Lonely Men of Harvard; Warm-Up, mixed chorus, 1970, incorporated into music theatre piece Mass, 1971; A Little Norton Lecture (e.e. cummings), male vv, 1973, unpubd, arr. as Storyette H.M. in Songfest, 1977 [See vocal-orchestral]; Missa brevis (Ct, mixed chorus)/(7 sol vv), perc, 1988 [based on incid music The Lark, 1988] |
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Solo vocal (1 v, pf, unless otherwise stated): Psalm cxlviii, 1932; I Hate Music (Bernstein), song cycle, 1943; My Name is Barbara, Jupiter has Seven Moons, I Hate Music, A Big Indian and a Little Indian, I’m a Person Too; Lamentation, Mez, orch, 1943 [arr. of 3rd movt of Sym. no.1 ‘Jeremiah’]; Afterthought (Bernstein), 1945, withdrawn; La bonne cuisine (4 recipes, Bernstein), 1947; 2 Love Songs (R.M. Rilke), 1949 : Extinguish my eyes, When my soul touches yours; Silhouette (Galilee) (Bernstein), 1951; On the Waterfront (La Touche), 1954, withdrawn; Get Hep! (Bernstein), 1955, withdrawn; So Pretty (Comden, Green), 1968; The Madwoman of Central Park West (Bernstein): My New Friends, Up!Up!Up!, 1979; Piccola serenata, 1979; Arias and Barcarolles (L. Bernstein, J. Barnstein, Y.Y. Segal), Mez, Bar, pf 4 hands, 1988 |
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Pf Trio, 1937, unpubd; Music for 2 Pf, 1937, unpubd [incl. in musical On the Town, 1944]; Pf Sonata, 1938, unpubd; Music for the Dance, nos. 1 and 2, 1938, unpubd [incl. in musical On the Town, 1944]; Scenes from the City of Sin, pf 4 hands, 1939, unpubd; Sonata, vn, pf, 1940, unpubd; 4 Studies, 2 cl, 2 bn, pf c1940, unpubd; Arr. of Copland: El salón Mexico, pf/2 pf, 1941; Sonata, cl, pf, 1941–2; 7 Anniversaries, pf, 1943; 4 Anniversaries, pf, 1948; Brass Music, tpt, hn, trbn, tuba, pf, 1948; 5 Anniversaries, pf, 1954; Shivaree, brass, perc, 1969, incorporated into theatre piece Mass, 1971; Touches, pf, 1981; Dance Suite, brass qnt, opt. perc, 1990 |
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Recorded interviews in US-NHoh |
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Principal publishers: Amberson, Harms, Jalni |
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P. Gradenwitz: ‘Leonard Bernstein’, MR, x (1949), 191–202
W. Hamilton: ‘On the Waterfront’, Film Music, xiv/1 (1954), 3–14
D. Drew: ‘Leonard Bernstein: Wonderful Town’, The Score, no.12 (1955), 77–80
H. Keller: ‘On the Waterfront’, The Score, no.12 (1955), 81–4
H.C. Schonberg: ‘New Job for the Protean Mr. Bernstein’, New York Times Magazine (22 Dec 1957)
H. Stoddard: Symphony Conductors of the U.S.A. (New York, 1957)
D. Gow: ‘Leonard Bernstein, Musician of Many Talents’, MT, ci (1960), 427–9
J. Briggs: Leonard Bernstein, the Man, his Work, and his World (Cleveland, 1961)
A. Holde: Leonard Bernstein (Berlin, 1961)
J. Gottlieb: The Music of Leonard Bernstein: a Study of Melodic Manipulations (diss., U. of Illinois, 1964)
J. Gottlieb: ‘The Choral Music of Leonard Bernstein, Reflections of Theater and Liturgy’, American Choral Review, x/2 (1967–8), 156–77
J. Gruen: The Private World of Leonard Bernstein (New York, 1968)
W.W. Tromble: The American Intellectual and Music: an Analysis of the Writings of Suzanne K. Langer, Paul Henry Lang, Jacques Barzun, John Dewey and Leonard Bernstein – with Implications for Music Education (diss., U. of Michigan, 1968)
E. Ames: A Wind from the West: Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Abroad (Boston, 1970)
M. Cone: Leonard Bernstein (New York, 1970)
G. Jackson: ‘West Side Story: Thema, Grundhalrung und Aussage’, Maske und Kothum, xvi (1970), 97–101
D. Wooldridge: Conductor’s World (New York, 1970), 310
H. Berlinski: ‘Bernstein’s Mass’, Sacred Music, xcix/1 (1972), 3–8
J. Gruen: ‘In Love with the Stage’, Opera News, xxxvii/3 (1972), 16–23
E. Salzman: ‘Quo vadis Leonard Bernstein?’, Stereo Review, xxviii/5 (1972), 56–9
N. Goemanne: ‘Open Forum: the Controversial Bernstein Mass: Another Point of View’, Sacred Music, c/1 (1973), 33–6
A. Pearlmutter: ‘Bernstein’s Mass Revisited: a Guide to using a Contemporary Work to Teach Music Concepts’, Music Educators Journal, lxi/1 (1974–5), 34–9
J.W. Weber: Leonard Bernstein (Utica, NY, 1975) [discography]
R. Chesterman: ‘Leonard Bernstein in Conversation with Robert Chesterman’, Conversations with Conductors (Totowa, NJ, 1976), 53–60, 69–72
G. Gottwald: ‘Leonard Bernstein’s Messe oder der Konstruktion der Blasphemie’, Melos/NZM, ii (1976), 281–4
J. Ardoin: ‘Leonard Bernstein at Sixty’, High Fidelity Musical America, xxviii/8 (1978), 53–8
P. Davis: ‘Bernstein as Symphonist’, New York Times (26 Nov 1978)
J. Gottlieb: Leonard Bernstein: a Complete Catalogue of his Works (New York, 1978, enlarged 2/1988)
A. Keiler: ‘Bernstein’s The Unanswered Question and Problems of Musical Competence’, MQ, lxiv (1978), 195–222
J. Gottlieb: ‘Symbols of Faith in the Music of Leonard Bernstein’, MQ, lxvi (1980), 287–95
J. Hiemenz: ‘Bernstein on Television: Pros and Cons’, High Fidelity Musical America, cx/4 (1980), 14–15
B. Bernstein: ‘Personal History: Family Matters’, New Yorker (22–29 March 1982); repr. as Family Matters (New York, 1982)
H. Matheopoulos: Maestro: Encounters with Conductors of Today (London, 1982), 3
P. Robinson: Bernstein (New York, 1982)
U. Schneider: ‘Die Wiedergeburr der Musik aus dem Geist des Dreiklangs – Leonard Bernstein als verbaler Musikdeurer’, Hi-Fi-Stereo-Phonie, xxi/1 (1982), 56–62
L. Botstein: ‘The Tragedy of Leonard Bernstein’, Harper’s, cclxvi/May (1983), 38–40, 57–62
J. Peyser: Bernstein: a Biography (New York, 1983)
S. Lipman: ‘Lenny on our Minds’, New Criterion, iii/10 (1985), 1
M. Freedland: Leonard Bernstein (London, 1987)
P. Gradenwitz: Leonard Bernstein (London, 1987)
J. Fluegel, ed.: Bernstein Remembered (New York, 1991)
S. Chapin: Leonard Bernstein: Notes for a Friend (New York, 1992)
H. Pollack: Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and his Students from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski (Metuchen, NJ, 1992)
D. Schiff: ‘Re-hearing Bernstein’, Atlantic, cclxxi/6 (1993), 55–8ff
H. Burton: Leonard Bernstein (New York, 1994)
M. Secrest: Leonard Bernstein: Life (New York, 1994)
W. Burton: Conversations about Bernstein (New York, 1995)
D. Wilkins: Leonard Bernstein (Watford, 1995)
G. Block: ‘West Side Story: the Very Model of a Major Musical’, Enchanted Evenings: the Broadway Musical from ‘Snow Boat’ to Sondheim (New York, 1997), 245–73, 341–2