Performance notes

The high-intensity life and career of the multi-talented composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein—born 1918, died 1990—were not merely almost coterminous with the “short 20th century” that began with the first world war and ended with the fall of communism. They were also organically connected with that era’s artistic, political and intellectual currents to a quite exceptional degree. Any judgement on Bernstein is also inextricably a judgement on his times.

Since his death, some of Bernstein’s music has continued to be performed. West Side Story, in particular, retains much of its status as the great American musical of the postwar era. While the music of other recently deceased composers often goes through a period of neglect—think of the once revered but now forgotten Michael Tippett—that of Bernstein himself has not. Twenty years on, he still remains a figure to conjure with.

Nevertheless, this is a good moment to take proper stock, as The Bernstein Project, a season of events at London’s Southbank Centre (20th September to 11th July 2010) will attempt to do over the coming months. For one thing, Bernstein’s influence as a performer, so important in his lifetime, has receded into history. A generation of concertgoers has grown up with no memory of him on the podium or as a pianist. His many recordings have often been supplanted by others, a seemingly irresistible process for all dead artists except Maria Callas, it seems.



That said, Bernstein’s performances remain burned in the memory of those who did hear him. For concertgoers of my generation those performances often centred on Mahler. It was Bernstein whose Mahler Eighth, broadcast live by the BBC from the Albert Hall in 1966, introduced many of us to a legendary but rarely heard work. And Bernstein’s 1987 Proms performance of the Mahler Fifth—a symphony of which he was so fond that he was buried with a copy of the score—still seems to me to be one of the most wonderful concerts I have attended.

Bernstein’s role as an educator is becoming hard to recapture, too. Much of this work was done at his Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic (of which he was music director in the 1960s) and in his Norton lectures at Harvard. But Bernstein’s charisma and ability as a communicator meant that he played this role here, too. His televised rehearsals with the London Symphony Orchestra were national events. Later he made many documentaries. The 1984 film about the making of his recording of West Side Story was a bestseller.

All of these films are well worth watching, in spite of and sometimes because of Bernstein’s larger than life personality. Yet there is a widening gulf between their time and ours. The problem is not just that all films from the 1970s and 1980s appear technically dated. It is also that the philosophy of public musical education which underpins them—and which was central to much that Bernstein did—is now itself an anachronism.

Our age no longer shares the belief of Bernstein’s generation that they had a mission to popularise classical music. Bernstein was driven by many angels and demons, yet few of them were as potent as the political belief, shared with many on both sides of the Atlantic, that he could and should illuminate the great symphonic tradition for the common listener.

Which leaves the music. In his lifetime, Bernstein was looked down upon as a composer, especially in Europe. He was seen as a pastiche merchant, too easily seduced by the popular and the trendy, too much taken with a good tune, insufficiently rigorous and spending too much time conducting to be taken seriously. The fact that much of that European modernist tradition long ago marched itself into a dead end does not, of itself, validate his music. But it does entitle it to be listened to afresh.

The two works of which this is most famously true are his Mass of 1971 and his heavily revised opera A Quiet Place (1983-84). Both were panned at their first performances for their supposed pretentiousness and lack of discipline. Each rapidly disappeared from view. The most important events of the project and must-go concerts, will be two performances of Mass in July 2010 under Marin Alsop, who is curator of the season.

Leonard Bernstein belongs to that populist tradition in 20th-century American life in which talented artists looked for ways to bring art music and popular music together and so appeal to a wider audience. They were often mocked for their efforts by reactionary snobs, European snobs and avant-garde snobs. That does not make Bernstein an enduring composer of genius. But he was surely on to something. This retrospective could hardly be more timely.