Although we didn’t know it when we scheduled this concert anchored in the art of Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), our choice of timing turns out to be have been auspicious: Bradley Cooper’s new film about Bernstein’s marriage to Felicia Montealegre, Maestro, is scheduled to be released in the United States on November 22.

The program catches Bernstein at a high point in his career. Candide (1956) and West Side Story (1957) opened within less than a year of each other—and they confirmed ...

            Although we didn’t know it when we scheduled this concert anchored in the art of Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990), our choice of timing turns out to be have been auspicious: Bradley Cooper’s new film about Bernstein’s marriage to Felicia Montealegre, Maestro, is scheduled to be released in the United States on November 22.

The program catches Bernstein at a high point in his career. Candide (1956) and West Side Story (1957) opened within less than a year of each other—and they confirmed the 38-year-old Leonard Bernstein as our most protean musician. It’s not simply that he was already a world-famous conductor (he had made his New York Philharmonic debut in his early twenties and was appointed co-principal conductor in 1957) and a startlingly good concert pianist. After all, lots of conductors launched their careers early, and many were also first-rate instrumentalists. Nor was it simply that he wrote music as well. So did many of the other great conductors (including, of course, his idol Gustav Mahler). No, what distinguished Bernstein was the astonishing range of his sympathies, in terms of both genre and mood.

            He’d already written symphonic music, popular musicals like On the Town (source of the song “New York, New York”), ballets, and even a blues song, “Big Stuff,” for Billie Holiday. He was equally at home in radiant music evoking innocent love and in rough music bristling with working class grit (his film score for On the Waterfront). What made Candide and West Side Story stand out in particular was the skill with which he managed to combine all those different voices into works that were staggering in their variety, yet simultaneously consistent in their vision—works in which high-toned classical procedures (for instance, the fugue in West Side Story’s “Cool”) rubbed up against vernacular idioms.

            Besides their eclecticism, Candide and West Side Story had another quality in common: Both were politically committed. Candide was based on Voltaire’s novel from 1659, a bitterly satiric attack on a wide range of social ills that still plague the world more than 350 years later. West Side Story, based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, was less satiric, more direct—but it was no less bitter in its depiction of racial and ethnic violence, and (more important still) in its searing indictment of the ways in which the powers-that-be use (and even encourage) that animosity for their own ends.

            The spirit of their literary sources certainly helped fuel the spirit of the two works. At the same time, though, Bernstein and his collaborators (including writers Lillian Hellman and the young Stephen Sondheim) drew on a rich tradition of eclectic, socially engaged musical theater that, in the mid-20th century, included such works as the Kern/Hammerstein Show Boat, Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle will Rock (a work Bernstein conducted), and especially the Blitzstein version of Weill and Brecht’s Threepenny Opera (a work that Bernstein also conducted and that was still in the middle of its unprecedented five-year off-Broadway run when Candide and West Side Story opened). Add to this the sheer genius of the creators, and both “musicals” took this tradition to new heights—and radically influenced the history of musical theater.

            I put the term “musicals” in quotation marks because, in a sense, they reformulated the conventions of the genre. Candide may have opened on Broadway as a musical, but Bernstein titled it a “comic operetta” (a slippery term), and in fact, it has had (like Threepenny) tremendous success in opera houses around the world. The work has been subject to numerous revisions over the years, with changes in its orchestration, in its libretto, and even in what songs are included, who sings them, and what order appear in. It sometimes seems as if no two productions are musically identical. But whatever version you hear, it always begins with the bubbly, Rossini-esque Overture: a “playful” introduction, in the words of conductor Larry Loh. It was the first Bernstein work that Larry ever conducted—indeed, while at Aspen, he cajoled a group of friends to form an orchestra just so he could perform it. His enthusiasm is not hard to understand: The Overture to Candide is so widely beloved, in fact, that it has probably become the most popular 20th-century overture on classical concerts.

            West Side Story has been successful in the opera house, too—as well, of course, as in two wildly popular screen versions. In the concert hall, it’s usually represented by the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, which was compiled in 1960. The title is significant. West Side Story is, as the score puts it, “based on a conception of Jerome Robbins.” Robbins, a Balanchine protégé, was, among other things, a dancer and choreographer who shared Bernstein’s range, working in classical ballet, Broadway, and film. He had already collaborated with Bernstein on several works, including the ballets Facsimile and Fancy Free—and dance was always integral to the conception of West Side Story.

That dance element dominates the Symphonic Dances, which, as Larry points out, sidesteps many of the show’s most popular songs. Still, for all the youthful kinetic energy of the score, it ends—as the show ends—soberly. In Romeo and Juliet, of course, both main characters die; in West Side Story, Maria remains after the death of her brother and her lover, offering a possibility of hope for the future. It’s an ambiguous possibility, however—the heartbreaking final measures, perhaps modeled on Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, leave us up in the air.

            Anna Clyne (b. 1980) may not have been directly influenced by Bernstein, but she shares some of his musical sensibility. Her brilliantly orchestrated tone poem This Midnight Hour (2015) merges ferocity and rapture in a way that may bring West Side Story to mind; and it certainly reveals the eclectic resistance to stylistic constraints that we hear in both Bernstein scores. Then, too, like the Bernstein works, it has a literary foundation, having been inspired by two poems. One is a three-line snapshot by Juan Ramón Jiménez that describes music, in Robert Bly’s translation, as “a naked woman running mad through the pure night”; the other is the opening of Charles Baudelaire’s troubling “Harmonie du soir” (see Appendix).

            The resulting work we might well be called “cinematic”—in several ways. As Larry points out, the macabre opening sets a cinematic mood; and although it’s not entirely soaked with the lush Hollywood sound we get from blockbusters scored by Korngold and John Williams (although there is a bit of that here), it does engage in rapid cutting among different moods. The piece is only 14 minutes or so long, but from the opening, marked “Ferocious with drive” to the final measure marked “Aggressive,” Clyne shifts emotional landscape more than twenty times, interleaving the “Feverish” with the “Regal,” alternating the “Soaring and Passionate” with the “Skittish.” There are some folk inflections, too; and toward the middle, rhythmically driving music  collides against what the composer called a “Parisian-esque waltz,” with half the violas playing a quarter-step off from their colleagues to help imitate the sound of an accordion. Clyne hopes that the music will “evoke a visual journey”—and there’s no doubt that it provides an uneasy but thrilling sense of adventure.

            The 1850 Cello Concerto by Robert Schumann (1810–1856) is an ideal complement to Bernstein and Clyne, for two reasons. First, Bernstein was a devoted advocate of Schumann’s music, especially of the Cello Concerto, which he performed often and recorded with four different cellists in the course of his career. Second, the work provides a needed contrast to its hyperkinetic companions. Written late in the composer’s life, it’s an inward, slightly melancholy piece, largely without exhibitionist flash (although still extremely difficult to play) until the finale. Indeed, it’s so restrained that while his wife Clara Schumann loved it from the beginning, it took a while for it to catch on more widely. Even as late as the middle of the 20th century, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was sufficiently frustrated with the sound of the orchestration that he had his friend Shostakovich re-orchestrate it for him, although he eventually came around to the original version.

            In form (although not in spirit), the Concerto is reminiscent of the Violin Concerto by the Schumanns’ good friend Mendelssohn, which we heard at our first Masterworks this year. It’s in three linked movements, tightly unified in its thematic content; and perhaps taking a cue from Clara’s Piano Concerto (which we presented last year), Robert showcases the orchestra’s principal cellist, who has a major role in the second movement.

            Heard on its own, it would be easy to see the Concerto as a reflection of, even submission to, the encroaching syphilis-caused mental illness that clouded his final years. But as I’ve said often, there’s no easy connection between composers’ biographical situations and their music—and by all accounts, this was a relatively happy period in his life. He composed it, astonishingly, within a two-week burst of energy in 1850—and a week later, he was at work on his Symphony No. 3, one of his most life-affirming works. Then, too, in his final days of lucidity, before his suicide attempt and his decision to enter a sanatorium, he found the act of correcting proofs for the piece a source of solace. No surprise: as Clara recognized, it’s a work of tremendous beauty and strength.

And don’t forget: more music by Robert Schumann—his Symphony No. 1 (“Spring”)— will be featured on our first Casual Concert, on Sunday afternoon, November 12, at St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Peter J. Rabinowitz

Have any comments or questions? Please write to me at prabinowitz@ExperienceSymphoria.org

APPENDIX

Harmonie du soir – by Charles Baudelaire

Voici venir les temps où vibrant sur sa tige
Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir;
Les sons et les parfums tournent dans l’air du soir;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!

Chaque fleur s’évapore ainsi qu’un encensoir;
Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu’on afflige;
Valse mélancolique et langoureux vertige!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir.

Le violon frémit comme un coeur qu’on afflige,
Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir!
Le ciel est triste et beau comme un grand reposoir;
Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige.

Un coeur tendre, qui hait le néant vaste et noir,
Du passé lumineux recueille tout vestige!
Le soleil s’est noyé dans son sang qui se fige…
Ton souvenir en moi luit comme un ostensoir!

Harmonie du soir
translated by William Aggeler:

The season is at hand when swaying on its stem
Every flower exhales perfume like a censer;
Sounds and perfumes turn in the evening air;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!

Every flower exhales perfume like a censer;
The violin quivers like a tormented heart;
Melancholy waltz and languid vertigo!
The sky is sad and beautiful like an immense altar.

The violin quivers like a tormented heart,
A tender heart, that hates the vast, black void!
The sky is sad and beautiful like an immense altar;
The sun has drowned in his blood which congeals…

A tender heart that hates the vast, black void
Gathers up every shred of the luminous past!
The sun has drowned in his blood which congeals…
Your memory in me glitters like a monstrance!