Letters by Leonard Bernstein © Amberson Holdings LLC. Used by permission of The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc.
All other letters are the copyright of their respective owners. All rights, including the right of further reproduction or transmission, are reserved.
Introductory and editorial material copyright © 2013 Nigel Simeone
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-publication Data
Bernstein, Leonard, 1918–1990.
[Correspondence. Selections]
The Leonard Bernstein letters / edited by Nigel Simeone.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–300–17909–5 (hardback)
1. Bernstein, Leonard, 1918–1990—Correspondence. 2. Musicians—United States—Correspondence. 3. Composers—United States—Correspondence. 4. Conductors (Music)—United States—Correspondence. I. Simeone, Nigel, 1956– editor. II. Title.
ML410.B566A4 2013
780.92—dc23
[B]
2013033122
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For
Mark Horowitz,
Lauren Doughty,
and
Jasmine Simeone
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction and Acknowledgments
1 Early Years, 1932–41 (Letters 1–89)
2 First Successes: From Tanglewood to On the Town, 1941–4 (Letters 90–185)
3 Conquering Europe and Israel, 1945–9 (Letters 186–294)
4 Marriage, Passport Problems, and Italy, 1950–55 (Letters 295–358)
5 West Side Story, 1955–7 (Letters 359–409)
6 The New York Philharmonic Years, 1958–69 (Letters 410–544)
7 Triumphs, Controversies, Catastrophe, 1970–78 (Letters 545–591)
8 Final Years, 1979–90 (Letters 592–650)
Appendix One: Arthur Laurents (with Leonard Bernstein): Outline for Romeo sent to Jerome Robbins
Appendix Two: Bernstein's Letters and Postcards to Mildred Spiegel
Bibliography
Index of Compositions by Leonard Bernstein
General Index
Illustrations
Endpapers. Letter from Bernstein to his mother, Israel, November 1948, illustrated by Yossi Stern.
1. Leonard Bernstein at the piano, 1936.
2. Leonard Bernstein conducting Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale at Tanglewood, 1940. Photo: Berkshire Eagle.
3. The Revuers, 1940s.
4. Leonard Bernstein, 24 May 1944. Photo: Carl van Vechten.
5. Leonard Bernstein in Hollywood, 1944, with his portable typewriter.
6. Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss, 1944.
7. Leonard Bernstein with Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adolph Green working on On the Town, 1944.
8. Leonard Bernstein with Aaron Copland at Bernardsville, NJ, August 1945.
9. Leonard Bernstein studying the vocal score of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. Photo: William P. Gottlieb.
10. Two photographs of Leonard Bernstein in his West 10th Street apartment, c. 1946. Photo: William P. Gottlieb.
11. A series of photographs of Bernstein conducting in Carnegie Hall, c. 1946. Photo: William P. Gottlieb.
12. Bette Davis, c. 1940s.
13. David Diamond, c. 1945.
14. James M. Cain.
15. Serge Koussevitzky with Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss, 1949. Photo: Whitestone Photo, Heinz-H. Wasserstein.
16. Leonard Bernstein with David Oppenheim.
17. Leonard Bernstein at a kibbutz in Israel, festival of Shavuot, 22 May 1950. Photo: Behr, Tel-Aviv.
18. Martha Gellhorn with Ernest Hemingway at the Stork Club, New York, 1941.
19. Leonard Bernstein with Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins working on West Side Story. Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt, published in Life, 7 January 1957.
20. Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins being presented with the Key to Washington D.C. by Commissioner Robert E. McLaughlin, 31 August 1957. Photo: Nate Fine.
21. Leonard and Burton Bernstein skiing, 1958.
22. Felicia Bernstein as Joan in Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake, 1958. Photo: Carl van Vechten.
23. Lukas Foss.
24. Sid Ramin, on the back cover of his LP Love is a Swinging Word. RCA Victor, released in 1959.
25. Leonard and Felicia Bernstein with Boris Pasternak, Moscow, 1959.
26. Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland with the score of El Salón México, c. 1960.
27. Leonard Bernstein at the MacDowell Colony, working on Kaddish, 1962. Photo: Bernice Perry.
28. Leonard Bernstein: canon written for Humphrey Burton and Erik Smith, 25 March 1977. Humphrey Burton, private collection.
29. Jacqueline Kennedy with Leonard and Felicia Bernstein and their children Alexander and Jamie at the Theatre De Lys, New York, 28 June 1965. Photo: Bettmann/Corbis.
1 Leonard Bernstein at the piano in 1936.
2 Leonard Bernstein conducting Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale at Tanglewood in 1940 in a version with Bernstein's own words (see Letter 57). Serge Koussevitzky and his wife Natalie are looking down from the balcony. The inscription reads “For Helen [Coates]: Le commencement de ‘L'Histoire d'un élève’ – with much love. Lenny, Aug. 1940”.
3 The Revuers (left to right): Adolph Green, John Frank, Betty Comden, Alvin Hammer, Judy Holliday, 1940s.
4 Leonard Bernstein, 24 May 1944.
5 Leonard Bernstein in Hollywood with his portable typewriter in 1944.
6 Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss in 1944.
7 Leonard Bernstein with Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden and Adolph Green working on On the Town in 1944.
8 Leonard Bernstein with Aaron Copland at Bernardsville, NJ, in August 1945.
9 Leonard Bernstein studying the vocal score of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, a work he conducted with the New York City Symphony in November 1946.
10 Two photographs of Leonard Bernstein in his West 10th Street apartment, c. 1946. The signed photograph on the grand piano is inscribed “To my very dear Lenushka with all my faith, hope and love, Serge Koussevitzky”.
11 A series of photographs of Bernstein conducting in Carnegie Hall, c. 1946.
12 Bette Davis in the 1940s.
13 David Diamond c. 1945.
14 James M. Cain, with whom Bernstein corresponded about a proposed setting of Cain's novel Serenade in 1947.
15 Serge Koussevitzkywith Leonard Bernstein and Lukas Foss, celebrating Koussevitzky's 74th birthday in 1949.
16 Leonard Bernstein with David Oppenheim.
17 Leonard Bernstein at a kibbutz in Israel1 festival of Shavuot1 22 May 1950.
18 Martha Gellhorn with Ernest Hemingway at the Stork Club, New York, in 1941.
19 Leonard Bernstein with Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins working on West Side Story.
20 Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Jerome Robbins being presented with the Key to Washington D.C. by Commissioner Robert E.
McLaughlin, 31 August 1957.
21 Leonard and Burton Bernstein skiing in 1958.
22 Felicia Bernstein as Joan in Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake, 1958.
23 Lukas Foss
24 Sid Ramin, on the back cover of his LP Love is a Swinging Word (RCA Victor, released in 1959). To the right of Ramin's photo is an endorsement by Bernstein: “I have known Sid Ramin since we were both thirteen. I was impressed with his great musicality then, and have continued to be more and more impressed ever since. His work with me (and Irv Kostal) on West Side Story was invaluable – sensitive, strong, and facile. Long may he wave!”
25 Leonard and Felicia Bernstein with Boris Pasternak, Moscow, 1959.
26 Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland with the score of El Salón México, c. 1960.
27 Leonard Bernstein at the MacDowell Colony in 1962, working on Kaddish.
28 Leonard Bernstein: canon written for Humphrey Burton and Erik Smith, 25 March 1977. The text reads: “Humphrey Burton is forty-six, so is Erik Smith. Erik Smith is forty-six, so is Humphrey Burton.” Burton recalls the occasion on which it was written: “We dined with LB at the Garrick Club, which is where he produced his composition and we all lustily joined in an impromptu performance, so far as I am aware never repeated”.
29 Jacqueline Kennedy with Leonard and Felicia Bernstein and their children Alexander and Jamie at the Theatre De Lys, New York, on 28 June 1965. The occasion was the opening night of Leonard Bernstein's Theatre Songs, a revue featuring songs from shows for which Bernstein composed the music.
Introduction and Acknowledgments
The Beginning of the Project
In early 2010, just after finishing a book about West Side Story, I was in the Performing Arts Reading Room at the Library of Congress, talking to Mark Horowitz about possible future projects. Mark's position as a Senior Music Specialist in the Music Division includes responsibility for the Leonard Bernstein Collection – so he knows this enormous archive better than anyone. In the course of one of our frequent chats, Mark made an apparently straightforward suggestion: “Why don't you do a book of the correspondence?” Those words lodged in my mind and the idea quickly began to take root.
One reason not to do the letters was their sheer bulk: many tens of thousands of them, grouped in different series: Personal Correspondence, Writings (which include few but wonderful letters), Fan Mail, and Business Papers – taking up hundreds of linear feet. But the temptation of working with Bernstein's correspondence was far too exciting a challenge to let these statistics – however daunting – get in the way. Betty Comden wrote to Bernstein back in 1950 about how he saved “every scrap of correspondence […] from Koussevitzky's pages on life, music, and your career – to Auntie Clara's hot denunciations of meat” (Letter 301). How right she was. I already knew some of the letters from earlier research, and a trawl through the general correspondence was enough to demonstrate what an engrossing project this could be.
But how best to approach the task? The Bernstein Collection, used in conjunction with others in the Library of Congress, offered an enticing option: to present correspondence both to and from Bernstein. This was also made possible thanks to the efforts of Charlie Harmon at the Leonard Bernstein Office: after Bernstein's death in 1990, Harmon contacted significant people in Bernstein's life requesting photocopies of the letters they had received from him, and these copies were integrated into the folders in the Bernstein Collection. The Library of Congress already had Aaron Copland's and Serge Koussevitzky's papers, and it acquired David Diamond's in the course of my research. I drew up a preliminary selection of letters in early 2010 and set to work on the process of transcription and annotation. By the end of that year, the selection needed major revision – for the best of reasons. At the end of 2010, the Bernstein estate decided that a substantial group of letters sealed after his death should be made available, and added to the Bernstein Collection in the Library of Congress. Many of these “new” letters turned out to be enthralling: personal, funny, and revealing. As work progressed, still more letters came to light (thanks to the generosity of the recipients, or their heirs), and I was in a position to make a final selection – acutely aware, of course, that more Bernstein letters will emerge in the future.
The selection of correspondence in The Leonard Bernstein Letters is necessarily a personal choice: there were some very difficult decisions to be made in terms of what to leave out, and there is scope – and more than enough correspondence – for several further volumes. To give just a couple of examples: I have omitted most of the correspondence with his sister Shirley (including a large number of letters, mostly undated, written while she was a student at Mount Holyoke College) and from his brother Burton. A book of Bernstein family letters could make for fascinating reading. Many of them, however, concern family matters, and I had already decided that my principal focus for this book should be on correspondence that told us something about Bernstein himself, and particularly his life as a musician. It is for a similar reason that I have omitted most of the letters from Martha Gellhorn – many of them have little to say about music – though I have included a splendid letter about West Side Story and a most revealing one about her marriage to Ernest Hemingway.1
Illuminating a Musical Life
Anyone interested in Bernstein has the great advantage of Humphrey Burton's superbly researched and beautifully written biography. Twenty years after its first publication, it remains definitive as well as enthralling, and subsequent writers on Bernstein owe Humphrey Burton a great debt of gratitude. The present book would have been unthinkable without his work, but it sets out to do something different. While Burton quotes from a good deal of correspondence, his main purpose is to tell a life story. In The Leonard Bernstein Letters I have aimed to allow the letters mostly to speak for themselves, rather than to be woven into a linear biographical narrative. In addition, a number of letters have emerged or become available since Burton's book was published in 1994.
One of the delights of the Bernstein Collection is its astonishing breadth: there's extensive correspondence not only with those working in music, but also with writers, politicians, film stars, artists, journalists – and long-standing friends who offered Bernstein support at times when he needed it. I have tried to reflect something of the range of these friendships. Even so, it is as a gigantic musical personality that Bernstein is remembered, and this has been my primary criterion for choosing the letters to include in what is the first published volume devoted to Bernstein's correspondence. In terms of other composers, Bernstein was in very close contact with Aaron Copland from the end of the 1930s onwards, and he also had an extensive correspondence with David Diamond stretching over five decades – a group of letters sometimes marked by tetchiness on Bernstein's part, and by a tendency to over-sensitivity on Diamond's. Such is the volume of the correspondence that I have had to omit letters from other close musical friends such as Paul Bowles and Irving Fine. These deserve to see the light of day in a future publication. In addition to correspondence with composers and performers, I have also aimed to include letters that chart the genesis of Bernstein's compositions. Two of his first big successes were collaborations with Jerome Robbins: a ballet (Fancy Free) and a musical (On the Town). In the case of Fancy Free, much of it was conceived and composed while Robbins and Bernstein were working away from home. As a result, there was detailed discussion by letter. It's frustrating that Robbins’ letters to Bernstein about this ballet seem not to have survived. (Bernstein was constantly moving house at the time – and it was just before the arrival on the scene of his assistant, Helen Coates, who ensured that everything thereafter was carefully saved.) However, Bernstein's letters to Robbins constitute a fascinating chronicle of the work's composition. On the Town is a very different case: a collaboration where those concerned were working in the same place at the same time. As a result, there is no substantial correspondence about it with any of the collaborators (Bernstein, Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolp
h Green) – indeed, in 1945, just after the show had opened on Broadway Comden mentioned in a letter to Bernstein that it was the first time she had written him since 1941.
West Side Story presents a more complex case – partly because it took so long to get started. A fascinating letter from Arthur Laurents, undated, but probably written in April 1949, raises some detailed points responding to what had evidently been a difficult phone conversation with Bernstein. A follow-up letter from Laurents (Letter 283) reveals that Bernstein considered pulling out of the project altogether. In 1955, the collaboration was revived, with greater determination on all sides to see it through. Again, there are some revealing letters, especially one from Robbins in which he responds in detail to Laurents and Bernstein about a draft scenario. Stephen Sondheim joined the creative team just after this, but there is no correspondence with him about the show until the opening night on Broadway (26 September 1957; Letter 402); then, a few weeks later, a marvelous description of the sessions for the original cast recording and the trials and tribulations of the show early in its run. Sondheim and Bernstein were not only in the same town but often in the same room while they were working on West Side Story, so the lack of correspondence during its creation shouldn't come as a surprise. That it was a happy creative partnership from the start, we learn from letters sent to other people: Bernstein wrote to his brother Burton in October 1955 that “Romeo proceeds apace, with a new young lyricist named Steve Sondheim, who is going to work out wonderfully” (Letter 363). The final stages of West Side Story are described by Bernstein in an engrossing series of letters to his wife Felicia, full of interesting details as well as his excitement, frustration, exhaustion, and optimism.
The Leonard Bernstein Letters Page 1
