The Leonard Bernstein Letters

by Leonard Bernstein

  106 Chronochromie was composed in 1959–60 and first performed on 16 October 1960 by the Orchestra of South-West German Radio conducted by Hans Rosbaud. The New York Philharmonic performed two movements (“Strophe” and “Antistrophe”) at a concert on 24 July 1965 conducted by Lukas Foss.

  107 Written in French; English translation by the editor.

  108 Written in French; English translation by the editor.

  109 In a marginal note, Bernstein has written: “Jack [Gottlieb] misrepresented my reaction.” Bernstein performed (and recorded) Feldman's Out of Last Pieces with David Tudor and the New York Philharmonic in February 1964 as part of an extraordinary programme that included “Autumn” from Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony in the first half, and music by Cage (Atlas Eclipticalis with Winter Music), Earle Brown (Available Forms II) and Feldman's Out of Last Pieces. Bernstein was fascinated by Feldman's music even if he wasn't particularly sympathetic towards it.

  110 Though the recipient of this letter has not been identified, this pencil draft of Bernstein's letter has been included because of his interesting comments on some of the legendary pianists of the past.

  111 John Cage (1912–92), American composer and musical pioneer.

  112 Bernstein did place the orchestral improvisation at the start of the second half of this programme, which was given on 6, 7, 8, and 9 February 1964. The first half included “Autumn” from Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony. According to Harold Schonberg's review in The New York Times (7 February 1964) it was an unusually long evening, ending at around 11.05 p.m. Of the second half, Schonberg wrote: “these pieces, with their new sounds, apparent chaos and weird textures, shook the audience quite a bit. Not unexpectedly, the most unconventional was Mr. Cage's [Atlas Eclipticalis]. He used an orchestra of more than 80 players, and each instrument was equipped with a contact microphone that led into a little preamplifier on the floor. This preamplifier led into an electronic mixer, which fed into six amplifiers, which went to six loudspeakers scattered through the hall. The piano was amplified, and on the podium was, instead of a conductor, a mechanical affair with a spoke that slowly revolved. When eight minutes were up, the piece was over. In the Brown piece, though, two live conductors were needed –Mr. Bernstein and the composer. One might think that Mr. Cage's piece, and the others, would have caused some kind of demonstration. What happened was that during the progress of the work, people walked out. When it was over, there was a more general exodus. There were a few lusty boos, a few counter-cheers, but on the whole the music fell flat. So did the music of Mr. Feldman [Out of Last Pieces] and Mr. Brown [Available Forms II]. The audience, the part that remained, seemed more amused than anything else. Its amusement had started with a demonstration of IBM music, and an improvisation by full orchestra that lasted a minute and a half.”

  113 Draft reply written in pencil on the verso of Cage's letter.

  114 Claudio Abbado (b. 1933), Italian conductor. In 1963 he won the Dimitri Mitropoulos Prize, which enabled him to work for several months with the New York Philharmonic. Abbado has kindly supplied this reminiscence: “For the 1963–64 season, I was assistant conductor at the New York Philharmonic, an opportunity given me by the Mitropoulos Prize, which I won that year. So I had the opportunity to watch and conduct major concerts, working with George Szell, Josef Krips and soloists such as Arthur Rubinstein and David Oistrakh, as well as with Bernstein. Just to mention one episode, I remember very well during the rehearsal of Mahler's Second Symphony that Bernstein went to sit in the hall and asked me to get on the podium. He wanted to hear the very complex part, in the finale, where the principal ideas are played by the small orchestra offstage. Bernstein was surprised and very happy that I was aware of how difficult this passage was, though he didn't know that I had actually already done that symphony in Europe” (Claudio Abbado, personal communication).

  115 President Kennedy was assassinated on 22 November 1963.

  116 Walter Hussey (1909–85) was Dean of Chichester Cathedral from 1955 to 1977, and before that was vicar of St. Matthew's, Northampton. In both these posts he commissioned an extraordinary range of new music, literature, and works of art for the Church. In Northampton these commissions included Benjamin Britten's Rejoice in the Lamb, Gerald Finzi's Lo, the full, final sacrifice, W. H. Auden's Litany and Anthem for S. Matthew's Day, Graham Sutherland's Crucifixion, and Henry Moore's Madonna and Child. At Chichester, he continued his commissions, notably stained-glass windows by Marc Chagall, a magnificent tapestry by John Piper – and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.

  117 Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001), Greek composer and architect.

  118 On 2 January 1964 (repeated on 3, 4, and 5 January), Bernstein conducted the first US performances of Pithoprakta by Xenakis and Atmosphères by Ligeti.

  119 Musiques formelles was published in Paris in 1963.

  120 Harpo Marx (1888–1964; born Adolph Marx), American comedian and actor, the second-oldest of the Marx Brothers (Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo). He was famous for never talking during performances or on screen (though in fact he had a deep, rich speaking voice). Harpo was also a regular of the Algonquin Round Table (with the likes of Dorothy Parker, Alexander Woolcott, George S. Kaufman, and Robert Benchley). He wrote this letter just before his decision to retire from public life, and he died on 28 September 1964.

  121 This letter is written on a sheet of manuscript paper, decorated with treble and bass clefs, rests, a fermata, and a double bar at the end of the last sentence. The titles at the head of the sheet have been filled in by Harpo Marx as follows: Prod.: “Maybe”, Title: “Letter to Maestro Bernstein”, Page: “3,472”, Arranger: “Harpo Marx”.

  122 Marc Blitzstein was murdered in Martinique by three Portuguese sailors on 22 January 1964.

  123 The Blitzstein Memorial Concert took place at Philharmonic Hall on 19 April 1964. Bernstein included “With a Woman to Be” from Sacco and Vanzetti, extracts from Regina and other songs, and a complete performance of The Cradle Will Rock narrated by Bernstein and directed by him from the piano.

  124 A reference to the Boston premiere of Kaddish, conducted by Charles Munch on 31 January 1964, the first performance of the work in the United States.

  125 Dr. Cyril [Chuck] Solomon was Bernstein's doctor for many years and a personal friend.

  126 Bernstein and Copland were both awarded honorary doctorates of music by the University of Michigan, conferred on 19 September 1964 (the date of Bernstein's sonnet), as recorded in The Proceedings of the Board of Regents (1963–1966), University of Michigan, p. 577 (electronic edition: Ann Arbor, MI:University of Michigan, Digital Library Production Service, 2000).

  127 The concerts of Diamond's music took place along the lines discussed here: Bernstein conducting the world premiere of Diamond's Fifth Symphony followed by Diamond conducting his Piano Concerto with Thomas Schumacher as the soloist. In the second half, the eventual choice was Sibelius' Second Symphony.

  128 The saga of The Skin of Our Teeth is an unhappy one, though it did eventually provide some of the musical material used in the Chichester Psalms. As long ago as 12 September 1962, Sam Zolotow reported in The New York Times that “the Broadway association of Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Adolph Green and Betty Comden will be renewed with the song and dance version of Thornton Wilder's fantastic comedy, The Skin of Our Teeth, winner of the 1943 Pulitzer Prize” and announced that everything would be “ready for a Broadway presentation during the 1964–65 season. […] As explained yesterday by Mr. Bernstein, the reason for the long-range project is that ‘we haven't started work on it yet.’ Miss Comden said: ‘We have been meeting on and off whenvever we can. Intensive work, however, will be done during the 1963–4 season.’” A year later, on 29 August 1963, Zolotow wrote of it as “an early 1965 entry,” to which Robbins would turn his attention after the upcoming “Tevye” – not yet called Fiddler on the Roof. Another year later, on 4 September 1964, Zolotow wrote
of the $400,000 investment in the project from CBS (following the success of their backing of My Fair Lady and Camelot) and promising that Columbia Records would be making the cast recording of The Skin of Our Teeth. But by the New Year, the whole project had fallen apart and the persistent Zolotow delivered the bad news on 5 January: “Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Adolph Green and Betty Comden have cancelled their plans to do a musical version of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize play, The Skin of Our Teeth,” adding that Bernstein “had told a friend that six months of work had gone in the wastebasket due to a dispute with his colleagues.”

  Bernstein himself wrote about this project in the poem he composed for The New York Times as a report on his sabbatical in 1964–5, published on 24 October 1965:

  Since June of nineteen-sixty-four

  I've been officially free of chore

  And duty to the N. Y. Phil. –

  Fifteen beautiful months to kill!

  But not to waste: there was a plan,

  For as long as my sabbatical ran,

  To write a new theatre piece.

  (A theatre composer needs release,

  And West Side Story is eight years old!)

  And so a few of us got hold

  Of the rights to Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth.

  This is a play I've often thought was made

  For singing, and for dance. It celebrates

  The wonder of life, of human survival, told

  In pity and terror and mad hilarity.

  Six months we labored, June to bleak December.

  And bleak was our reward, when Christmas came,

  To find ourselves uneasy with our work.

  We gave it up, and went our several ways,

  Still loving friends; but still there was the pain

  Of seeing six months of work go down the drain.

  The “loving friends,” Comden, Green, Robbins and Bernstein – who remained the closest of friends even after this harrowing project – had a tough time trying to recapture the success of earlier collaborations such as On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1953). The surviving musical material is fairly desultory: a couple of numbers that were reworked for the Chichester Psalms, and Sabina's opening aria (“Oh! Oh! Oh!”), which survives in a pencil sketch.

  129 Printed in Hussey 1985, p. 113.

  130 Never one to waste a good idea, Bernstein used almost all of “Mix!,” a cut number from West Side Story, in the second movement of the Chichester Psalms. His recycling of the music originally written for “Mix!” had uncanny parallels with the idea of conflict in the original song: “Lamah rag'shu goyim” (“Why do the nations rage”), a passage from Psalm 2 about the futility of nation fighting nation. Hussey's “hint” of West Side Story (see Letter 497) turned out to be a very apt choice.

  131 Printed in Hussey 1985, p. 116.

  132 Hussey has written “1963” but this is an error. The Times article to which Hussey refers appeared on 19 July 1965, three days before he wrote this letter.

  133 Quita Chavez was classical promotions manager for CBS Records in London.

  134 Printed in Hussey 1985, p. 118.

  135 Printed in Hussey 1985, pp. 118–19.

  136 Printed in Hussey 1985, p. 119.

  137 A note in Helen Coates' hand at the top of the letter reads: “Sketch of Psalm XXIII (Chichester Psalms) sent to him Nov. 15th.” This sketch was requested by Cage as part of his Notations project, started in 1965. Cage donated all the manuscripts he collected to Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) in 1973, where Bernstein's sketch now forms part of the John Cage Notations Project collection.

  138 Printed in Hussey 1985, pp. 119–20.

  139 George Szell (1897–1970), Hungarian-born conductor who was Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra from 1946 until his death.

  140 The same day that Szell wrote this letter he conducted the first of four concerts with the New York Philharmonic (28, 29, 30 October, and 1 November 1965), which included Mussorgsky's Prelude to Khovanshchina, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto No. 3 (with Gary Graffman as the soloist), and Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony. He remained with the orchestra until 22 November, conducting three further weekly programs in the subscription series.

  141 Yo-Yo Ma (b. 1955), American cellist; he had already played for Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy as a child prodigy by the time he wrote this letter to Bernstein.

  142 John Adams (b. 1947), American composer, who was a student at Harvard in 1966. Adams writes about the circumstances of this letter in Hallelujah Junction: “Despite my hunch that Boulez's was the wrong way to make art, I continued to try embracing the beast. Still in my freshman year, and by way of venting my frustration with the direction contemporary music was heading, I wrote a letter to Leonard Bernstein. I had never met him, but for some reason I felt the need to prick such a famous superstar to see if he might possibly bleed. I thought maybe that sharing my own frustration would perhaps sting him enough to elicit a response. Composed more in the negative spirit of a heckler at a baseball game than in any true seriousness […] it was prompted by my hearing of his most recent piece, Chichester Psalms. […] In my letter I chided him, asking ‘What about Boulez?’ A week later there in my mailbox at Wigglesworth Hall was a letter – from Leonard Bernstein” (Adams 2008, p. 32).

  143 Draft letter written in pencil, unsigned.

  144 Bernstein was in Vienna to conduct Falstaff at the Vienna State Opera.

  145 Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sang Falstaff in this production. See Letter 546.

  146 The conductor Josef Krips and his wife.

  147 William Weissel was the Viennese-born assistant manager of the New York Philharmonic.

  148 “Mendy” was the nickname of the actor Michael Wager (1925–2011). The play mentioned by Bernstein is Where's Daddy? by William Inge, produced by Wager and directed by Harold Clurman. It ran for just 22 performances in March 1966.

  149 Victor de Sabata (1892–1967), Italian conductor, renowned not only for his operatic conducting (especially at La Scala, Milan), but also for his performances of twentieth-century orchestral repertoire and for his phenomenal musical memory. When Bernstein first saw de Sabata conduct in London in 1946, he described him in a letter to his sister Shirley as “a wildman” (see Letter 225), but once Bernstein came to know him at La Scala in the 1950s he developed a warm admiration for de Sabata. In 1977, he wrote a short tribute entitled “Memories of Maestro de Sabata”:

  The first word that comes to mind as I call up memories of de Sabata is generosity. It seemed to me to inform and characterize all his actions: his abundant love for music and for the colleagues with whom he produced it; the abundance of his passions and of his patience; his profound gratitude for his own gifts; his kindness to young performers like me; his devotion to his public, whether in Milan or Pittsburgh – all of it generous, generous. It was also in the music he composed: the spirit of abbondanza.

  It was because of his sudden illness in 1953 that I was called upon to open the Scala season with Cherubini's Medea, Callas and all. There were only six days for me to learn an unknown score, to make cuts and repairs, to meet and cope with Callas (which turned out to be pure joy), to make a difficult debut alla Scala, and all with severe bronchitis. In all this Maestro de Sabata was intensely helpful and encouraging; he gave me the extra measure of courage that I needed. And two years later, when I returned to conduct a new performance of Sonnambula, he virtually saved my life. “Too slow! Too slow!” I can still hear him chiding. “Bellini was Sicilian; and Sicilian blood runs hot! Run with it! Run!” Who knows what a boring disaster I might have made without that affectionate warning!

  There was much other good counsel besides; and of course he was equally generous with his praise. And this abundance of spirit flowed through all his conducting: one has only to listen to his old recording of Tosca with Callas. I still believe it to be the greatest recording of an Italian opera I have ever heard. I have only to listen to it – any dozen bars of it – and the
spirit of de Sabata is in the room with me. Leonard Bernstein, May 1977.

  150 Robert Russell Bennett (1894–1981), American composer and arranger. After studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, Bennett began working as an arranger and orchestrator on Broadway, collaborating with Kern (Showboat), Gershwin (Girl Crazy, Of Thee I Sing), Porter (Anything Goes, Kiss Me, Kate), Rodgers (Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, The Sound of Music), and many others. He also composed extensively for symphony orchestra, concert band, and chamber ensembles.

  151 Georg Solti (1912–97), Hungarian conductor. This letter serves as a reminder of the dilemma that faced Jewish musicians working in Vienna during the 1960s. In dealing with anti-Semitism, Solti – himself a Jew – had an outlook that was a mixture of humanity and pragmatism: to look forward rather than back, with the aim of rebuilding Europe after the ravages of war. He established a productive working relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic during the 1950s that grew into a warm and enduring association. The same was to happen with Bernstein, but not until he had come to terms with the fact that Helmut Wobisch, the orchestra's manager (and also one of its trumpeters), had been an active Nazi during the Second World War. Solti played a crucial role in this: his advice to Bernstein – to give Wobisch a chance rather than to condemn him out of hand – was both wise and realistic: he knew the Vienna Philharmonic very well by 1967, whereas Bernstein had made his debut with the orchestra only the year before; and Solti's letter is also written by someone who had clearly learned to rise above the gossip-mongering that was a constant feature of the city's musical life.