The Leonard Bernstein Letters (5 page)

Acknowledgments

My largest debt of gratitude is to Mark Horowitz of the Library of Congress. I am immensely grateful to him for planting the idea for the project in the first place, and for all his subsequent help and advice, his constant support and encouragement, and his friendship. During many visits to the Performing Arts Reading Room of the Library, every single member of the staff I've encountered has been helpful and as done a great deal to make my research easier.

Marie Carter, Vice-President of Licensing and Publishing at the Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc., has been encouraging from the start, and extremely helpful throughout. I am deeply grateful for her patience in answering my numerous queries and the wisdom of her replies, and for allowing me access to newly released correspondence at the earliest possible opportunity.

Mervyn Cooke offered a number of invaluable suggestions after reading an early draft of the text. His wisdom and experience have done much to improve the book.

Sophie Redfern shared the fruits of her own research on Bernstein's early ballets with overwhelming generosity, and also read the text from start to finish with a most careful and discriminating eye. I am enormously grateful to her.

For various acts of kindness – large and small – there are many people I need to thank, including Mark Audus, Peter and Mary Bacon, Stephen Banfield, Adam Binks, Humphrey Burton, Marius Carney, William Crawford, Lauren Doughty, Barry Irving, Libby Jones, Barbara Kelly, John McClure, Dominic McHugh, Richard Marshall, Gary O'Shea, Tom Owen, Robert Pascall, Caroline Rae, Catherine C. Rivers, Reggie and Josephine Simeone, Máire Taylor, John Tyrrell, and, most importantly, my extraordinary wife Jasmine.

The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce copyright material in this book. Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions, and would be grateful for any corrections, which will be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book. For kind permission to quote letters, I thank the following individuals and institutions: The Leonard Bernstein Office, Inc., Ellen Adler, Marin Alsop, the Richard Avedon Foundation, the Britten-Pears Foundation, Humphrey Burton, Victor Cahn, the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., Christopher Davis (Marc Blitzstein), Sam Elliott (David Diamond) Martin Fischer-Dieskau Cornelia Foss (Lukas Foss), Very Rev. Nicholas Frayling (Walter Hussey), David Grossberg (Alan Jay Lerner), the Barbara Hogensen Agency (Thornton Wilder), Janis Ian, Pat Jaffe (David Oppenheim), Jay Julien (Farley Granger), Caroline Kennedy, Marko Kleiber, Alexandra Laederich (Centre international Nadia et Lili Boulanger), Maureen Lipman, Sandy Matthews (Martha Gellhorn), Michael Merrill (Bette Davis), Laurie Miller, Phyllis Newman (Adolph Green), Tom Oppenheim, Christopher Pennington (Robbins Rights Trust), Shirley Gabis Perle, Eddie Pietzak (Elia Kazan), Menahem Pressler, André Previn, Harold Prince (Saul Chaplin), Sid Ramin, Mary Rodgers, Isabella de Sabata, Gunther Schuller, Anthony and Andrea Schuman, Lady Valerie Solti, Stephen Sondheim, Stockhausen Stiftung für Musik, John Stravinsky, Margaret Styne, the Music Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; and Stanford University Library.

At Yale University Press, my proposal for this book was taken up with the sort of enthusiasm that would warm any writer's heart. When I first presented the project to Robert Baldock and Malcolm Gerratt, their eagerness did much to spur me on, and Malcolm has calmly nurtured the book throughout. Tami Halliday's eagle-eyed reading during the book's final stages was of the greatest assistance. Candida Brazil has overseen the editing of my unwieldy manuscript with kindness and skill. Steve Kent devised the attractive layout and design of the book. Thanks are also due to Lauren Doughty for compiling the index. The text has been improved beyond recognition by the copy-editing of Richard Mason and the proof-reading of Vanessa Mitchell. All its faults, however, are mine.

Nigel Simeone

Rushden, Northamptonshire

June 2013

1

Early Years

1932–41

Leonard Bernstein was born on 25 August 1918, the first child of Jennie and Samuel Bernstein, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 25 miles north of Boston. He attended the William Lloyd Garrison Elementary School in Roxbury, 35 miles from Lawrence, then, from 1929 to 1935, the prestigious Boston Latin School – founded in 1635. The oldest public school in the United States, its distinguished alumni included five Founding Fathers of the United States (among them Benjamin Franklin), the author Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the Puritan preacher Cotton Mather. The most famous musician to attend Boston Latin School before Bernstein was Arthur Fiedler (1894–1979), conductor of the Boston Pops for half a century. It was here that Bernstein's interest in languages and literature began to flourish, but what already obsessed him as a teenager was music. His first piano lessons (in 1928) were from Frieda Karp, the daughter of a neighbor, who charged $1 an hour for a lesson. Bernstein remembered her as “unbelievably beautiful and exotic looking,”
¹
and his musical progress under her tutelage was swift. By 1930, he was taking lessons from Susan Williams at the New England Conservatory of Music, and in 1932 he auditioned with a former pupil of Theodor Leschetizky, Heinrich Gebhard, a distinguished soloist and the most sought-after piano teacher in Boston at the time. Gebhard believed that there was still fundamental technical work to be done, so he suggested Bernstein first take lessons with his assistant, Helen Coates. Bernstein's first communication with Miss Coates – who became his devoted secretary in 1944 until her death in 1989 – is also the earliest letter in this book. She taught him until 1935, when she sent him on to Gebhard, but by then they had become firm and devoted friends. Other friends and contemporaries with whom Bernstein corresponded regularly during his years at Boston Latin School, and later Harvard, included Sid Ramin, Beatrice Gordon, and Mildred Spiegel. Bernstein's letters to Sid Ramin are overflowing with shared enthusiasm for new musical discoveries – and talk of girlfriends – while to Beatrice Gordon he is passionate, self-revealing, and poetic. With very few exceptions, Bernstein's correspondence with Mildred Spiegel (later Mildred
Zucker) has not been made public, but as this book goes to press the Library of Congress anticipates adding these letters to its collection shortly. They document an important and lasting friendship. Descriptions of this correspondence can be found in Appendix Two.

Bernstein mentions difficulties with his father in a number of his letters from the 1930s. A one-page essay written by Bernstein on 11 February 1935 entitled “Father's Books” begins: “My father is a very complicated human being. A man of irregular temperament and unusual convictions, he is a rare combination of the shrewd businessman and ardent religionist.” He was also an implacable opponent of Bernstein's pursuit of a career in music, and relations between father and son were often strained. His mother, by contrast, provided a warm, supportive household in which her son's ambitions flourished.

It was while studying music at Harvard University (1935–9) that Bernstein made some of his most important friendships: three of them in 1937. In January that year, he met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, an encounter that left a deep impression on him. Then, as a music counselor at Camp Onota near Pittsfield, Massachusetts in the summer, Bernstein instantly formed a close bond with Adolph Green, who was to give him some of his first paid work (as pianist for The Revuers, nightclub performers of songs and comedy material, including Betty Comden, Green, and Judy Holliday) and who collaborated with him on two Broadway shows (
On The Town
and
Wonderful Town
). Finally, on 14 November, during a chance encounter at a dance recital in New York, Bernstein met Aaron Copland – father figure, confidant, and the closest Bernstein came to having a composition teacher.

Though it was as a pianist that Bernstein first attracted the attention of the local press, he confided to some of his closest friends that his real interest was conducting. In 1936 he wrote to Beatrice Gordon about auditioning to be assistant conductor of Harvard's Pierian Sodality (founded in 1808, and now known as the Harvard–Radcliffe Orchestra); at Camp Onota in 1937 he was photographed for the local paper conducting a group of children. In 1939, during his Senior Year at Harvard, Bernstein appeared for the first time as a composer–-conductor (directing his incidental music for a production of Aristophanes’
The Birds
), and he directed Marc Blitzstein's musical
The Cradle Will Rock
from the piano.

After graduating from Harvard, Bernstein was uncertain about his future. He spent the summer of 1939 looking for a job in New York (sharing an apartment with Adolph Green), and explored the possibility of studying conducting at the Juilliard School (but he had missed the deadline). His only realistic option was to audition for the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia – specifically for the conducting class taught by Fritz Reiner – and he was admitted. From 1939 to 1941, he studied with teachers who were all at the top of their respective fields: conducting with Reiner, the piano with Isabelle Venegerova, orchestration with Randall Thompson, counterpoint with Richard Stöhr, and score-reading with Renée Longy Miquelle.

Finding Philadelphia a grim and dirty place, Bernstein would escape to New York for weekends at the slightest opportunity. His years at Curtis were marked by some important firsts, including his earliest professional recordings. These demonstrated his versatility, playing improvised incidental music and song accompaniments for
The Girl with the Two Left Feet
by The Revuers, and recording a Prelude and Fugue by David Diamond (less than five minutes of music about which Bernstein received long, anguished letters from the composer while preparing for the recording). In the summer of 1940 – midway through his studies at Curtis – Bernstein attended the inaugural summer course of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, to study conducting with the legendary Serge Koussevitzky. Mentor and pupil quickly became friends, and that summer Bernstein conducted the Second Symphony by Randall Thompson. Before the end of his studies in Philadelphia, Bernstein's first musical publication had also appeared in print: his solo piano transcription of Copland's
El Salón México
. He received his conducting diploma from Curtis in May 1941 – not a moment too soon, as he had been desperate to get away from the stifling atmosphere of Philadelphia.

At the first opportunity, Bernstein headed to Boston, where his years of study came full circle: he returned to Harvard to conduct the new incidental music that he had composed for a production of
The Peace
by Aristophanes. With war raging in Europe, it was a poignant choice. Back in January 1941, one of Bernstein's closest friends at Harvard – his room-mate, Al Eisner – had died in his early twenties. Eisner's letters from Hollywood are among the funniest and the most brilliant of all Bernstein's correspondents during his time at Curtis, while there was also a lively correspondence with Kenneth Ehrman, another Harvard friend, with whom Bernstein shared hopes, fears, and doubts about what his future in music might be.

1. Leonard Bernstein to Helen Coates
²

8 Pleasanton Street, Roxbury, MA

15 October 1932

2. Leonard Bernstein to Sid Ramin
⁴

17 Lake Avenue, Sharon, MA

26 June 1933
⁵