Seckerson's Choice: Bernstein - The Composer
Leonard Bernstein had a favourite maxim: “To achieve great things, two things are necessary: a plan, and not quite enough time.” And for him there was never enough time. The most inspirational conductor/composer of ‘our’ time wanted, ‘needed’, to do it all. And as time ran out the realisation dawned that his lasting legacy should be the music he left behind. In a major cover feature I wrote for ‘Gramophone’ magazine exactly one year before he died he told me: “I think to myself, a great many people can conduct Mahler Symphonies well, some magnificently” (himself, perhaps?) “But I’m not really needed on this earth for another ‘Ring’ Cycle or another ‘Magic Flute’ or ‘Rite of Spring’ or whatever. Because nobody, for better or worse, can write my music except me.”
Read more…Those poignant words conceal a profound insecurity. Bernstein knew full well that for all the international success of pieces like his fabled Broadway musical ‘West Side Story’ - the show everybody wishes they’d written - that the contemporary music “establishment” regarded him as a crowd-pleasing populist who stood outside the cutting-edge trends of the day and did not belong amongst them. It took a great deal of soul searching on his part to realise that he could only be himself and that whilst he was the kind of composer who could pull a torch song out of a tone-row he had to follow his intuition - to write tonally, to write melodically. It was his ‘Chichester Psalms’ that marked that realisation, a piece as swaggering in its confidence as it is true to him and his Jewish roots.
Ironically, had Bernstein lived just a few more years he would have seen key compositions of his entering the core repertoire. Works like his ‘Serenade, for violin, strings and percussion’ inspired by Plato’s “Symposium” on the nature of love and a work full of intriguing compositional “gamesmanship”. The derivation of its beautiful slow movement “Agathon” is one of those small musical miracles that transform the modestly mundane into the sublime. Myriad transformations take place in his ‘Second Symphony “The Age of Anxiety”’ which uses variation form to affect a series of dazzling new beginnings, a constant sense of evolution. And speaking of “dazzling”, who but Bernstein could have written down what sounds like a free-ranging jam session for clarinet (the legendary Benny Goodman) and jazz combo in his ‘Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs’.
To some extent Bernstein was always “on stage” and beyond his five Broadway shows, his ballet ‘Fancy Free’, and the simply astonishing ‘Mass’, everything he wrote was innately theatrical. His word-setting was perhaps the most finely tuned of his many gifts and the sheer range of poetic response contained in his song confection ‘Songfest’ (written for the American Bicentennial) and his salon piece ‘Arias and Barcarolles’ is testament to that.
But if there is one work that personifies Leonard Bernstein and all he stood for it is ‘Mass’ - his theatre piece for singers, players, and dancers written for the opening of the Kennedy Center Washington in 1971. This was his rallying call to human kind, his celebration of music in all its many guises, and (true to the times) a protest piece to boot. Its mad, jubilant eclecticism (everything from 12-tone to rock, pop and soul) may have confounded and irritated critics since its inception but time is proving it to be the masterpiece I for one have always proclaimed it was. Perhaps Bernstein’s single most important piece.
- Edward Seckerson