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PORTSIDE CULTURE

LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S RADICALISM  
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Peter Dreier
February 2, 2024
Dissent
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_ Bernstein used his status as a public figure both to popularize
classical music and to support civil rights, the antiwar movement, and
other political causes. _

Leonard Bernstein at the piano, Al Ravenna/PhotoQuest/Getty Images

 

Bradley Cooper’s new biopic _Maestro_ is masterful in many ways.
Cooper embodies Leonard Bernstein’s persona, his dramatic conducting
style, his many talents, and even his voice and looks. (Much was made
of Cooper using a prosthetic nose to more closely resemble Bernstein.)
The film has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best
picture.

If the film introduces a new generation to Bernstein and inspires them
to learn more about the man and his music, that alone will be an
important legacy. But _Maestro_ itself focuses almost exclusively on
Bernstein’s personal life—including his troubled relationship with
his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre, and his affairs with
men—while downplaying his music, his politics, and his enduring
presence as a public figure.

Bernstein is the most important classical conductor in American
history. He was hugely influential because he crossed so many musical
boundaries—classical, folk (a legacy of his friendship with Aaron
Copland), musical theater, choral works, ballet, opera, chamber music,
and piano pieces. Throughout his career, Bernstein was also notable
for linking his work to his progressive political beliefs—for civil
rights, nuclear disarmament, peace, workers’ rights, and AIDS
research and awareness.

Bernstein was the first classical conductor to reach a large audience
through television, most notably with his Young People’s Concerts
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broadcast live on CBS television, which introduced baby boomers to the
world of classical music. They turned Bernstein into a celebrity.
During his first Young People’s Concert program in 1958 (called
“What Does Music Mean?”), accompanied by the New York Philharmonic
orchestra, he playfully demonstrated the joy of music starting with
the theme song of the popular _Lone Ranger_ TV show (“Hi-Yo
Silver”) before explaining that it was written in the 1820s as
the _William Tell Overture_ by Gioachino Rossini, who had no
knowledge of the American West.

Over fourteen years and fifty-three concerts, Bernstein taught young
Americans about harmony, rhythm, notes, scales, chords, and
syncopation, and about great composers like Brahms, Beethoven, Bach,
and Copland. He discussed jazz, boogie-woogie, folk music, and other
musical styles. He insisted that music was about emotions and feelings
that words could not express. Bernstein communicated his infectious
enthusiasm for music without condescension.

Bernstein planned the programs based on the New York Philharmonic’s
regular concert season, and he wrote the scripts himself. He continued
to lead these programs until 1972, three years after he had stepped
down as the Philharmonic’s director.

_Maestro_ suggests that Bernstein’s most enduring conflict was over
how much of his genius to devote to composing classical music and
conducting versus his desire to shape popular culture and influence a
wider audience. Some of his critics believed that Bernstein was
wasting his talent writing scores for Broadway shows and movies. In
fact, Bernstein’s more popular work—such as the music for _West
Side Story_ and _On the Town_—was infused with classical elements.
During most of his adult life, Bernstein was constantly and
simultaneously engaged in writing for Broadway, film, and classical
orchestras; making recordings; conducting orchestras around the world;
appearing on TV; and teaching in various venues, including Brandeis
University, Harvard, Tanglewood, and the Young People’s Concerts.

_Maestro _mostly skips over Bernstein’s most famous
co-creation, _West Side Story_—a 1957 Broadway hit that won two
Tony awards, and four years later a film that won ten Oscars. The
musical and the movie were the result of a collaboration between four
prodigiously talented gay Jewish men: Bernstein, director and
choreographer Jerome Robbins, writer Arthur Laurents, and lyricist
Stephen Sondheim. Robbins had the idea of making a modern musical
based on _Romeo and Juliet_ about a conflict between two
working-class families—one Catholic, the other Jewish—living in
Manhattan’s Lower East Side during the Easter–Passover season. The
Jewish daughter had survived the Holocaust and immigrated to New York
from Israel. The antisemitic Catholic street gang (the Jets) fought
with their Jewish counterparts (the Emeralds)—reflecting tensions
that were pervasive in New York and other big cities during the 1930s
and 1940s.

Eventually, Robbins, Bernstein, Laurents, and Sondheim changed course
and set the conflict on the Upper West Side between the Puerto Rican
Sharks and the white Jets (with no obvious ethnic identity). The film
directly confronts the racism endured by Puerto Ricans living in New
York’s slums. It also addresses the obstacles faced by working-class
teenagers regardless of race. _West Side Story_put a human face on
the teenagers who were cast out by and alienated from mainstream
society, at a time when “juvenile delinquency” was considered a
serious social problem. In the song “Gee Officer Krupke,” the Jets
make fun of oversimplified psychological explanations for their
rebellious behavior.

_West Side Story_, incorporating a tragic love story, remarkable dance
scenes, barrier-breaking songs, and sociological sensitivity about
class and race, was a major turning point in musical theater.
In _Maestro_, we are only exposed to a small part of the wonderful
prologue to _West Side Story,_ as the backdrop to a scene of
Bernstein arriving at his home in Connecticut.

This is in keeping with the film’s treatment of most of
Bernstein’s music. When he gets a phone call inviting him to step in
as conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1943, we hear the drums
from the opening of his suite from _On the Waterfront. _We see a
snippet of a dance number from _Fancy Free_, a 1944 ballet (written
in collaboration with choreographer Robbins) about three young sailors
on leave in wartime New York City. The show was later expanded
into _On the Town_, a production that broke racial barriers on
Broadway (with its multiracial cast and a Black concertmaster, Everett
Lee) and later became a 1949 film starting Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly,
and Jules Munshin. The film’s only sustained musical moment is not
one of Bernstein’s own compositions but of him conducting
Mahler’s _Symphony No. 2_ at England’s Ely Cathedral in 1973.

Bernstein’s political activity is similarly seen only as backdrop
for the interpersonal drama of _Maestro_. Many people are familiar
with a fundraising party he and his wife held for the Black Panthers
at their apartment in 1970—an event that journalist Tom Wolfe
covered in a long, derisive article in _New York_magazine. Bernstein
became inescapably associated with what Wolfe called “radical
chic.” That image was and is unfair, more a reflection of Wolfe’s
cynical conservatism than Bernstein’s lifelong left and liberal
political commitments.

While at Harvard between 1935 and 1939, Bernstein was associated with
the American Soviet Music Society and other radical groups. During his
senior year, he staged the controversial pro-union opera, _The Cradle
Will Rock_, by the left-wing composer Marc Blitzstein, who attended
the performance. Soon after he graduated, Bernstein occasionally
accompanied a musical group called the Revuers, which performed
satirical and politically oriented songs championing unions and the
working class, on the radio and in progressive nightclubs with
mixed-race audiences.

At some point in the 1940s, the FBI began keeping a record of his
political activities and affiliations, including with the American
Committee for Yugoslav Relief, the Civil Rights Congress, the Southern
Negro Youth Congress, the _Morning Freiheit_ (a leftist Yiddish
newspaper), the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and the Joint
Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. After the war, Bernstein also raised
funds for striking workers and embraced Henry Wallace’s 1948
presidential bid on the Progressive Party ticket. In his first TV
appearance, in 1949, Bernstein conducted the Boston Symphony
Orchestra at Carnegie Hall at a concert that celebrated the first
anniversary of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and
featured an address by that document’s leading proponent, Eleanor
Roosevelt.

At the height of the Red Scare, Bernstein was a target of the
anticommunist witch hunters. The FBI put Bernstein on its Security
Index, identifying him as a communist who posed a threat to national
security. He was also named in a widely read 1950 pamphlet
called _Red Channels_, which purported to identify Communist Party
members and sympathizers. That year, the State Department banned the
performance of Bernstein’s music at its overseas events. In 1952,
while teaching at Brandeis, Bernstein organized its Festival of the
Arts and picked, as its major work, _The Threepenny Opera_, a biting
satire by two well-known radicals, Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. The
performance, along with a glowing review in the _New
York Times_, led to the musical’s revival, including a nine-year
run on Broadway.

In 1953, the State Department refused to renew Bernstein’s passport,
the FBI pressured CBS to keep him off television, and he was either
fired from or voluntarily quit the New York Philharmonic as a result
of the blacklist. Eventually he got his passport back and returned to
TV and the New York Philharmonic, but he remained under FBI
surveillance at least through the 1970s. Nevertheless, Bernstein
continued to express his political convictions throughout his life, as
reflected in his 800-page FBI file, which documented his leftist views
on racism, war, and inequality.

The FBI kept tabs not only on his political views and affiliations but
also on his sex life. During the McCarthy era, gay people were
considered a security threat because, the FBI and State Department
claimed, they could be blackmailed by communist forces. The FBI used
the same logic to pressure some well-known gay people, including
Robbins, to secretly testify and name other communists and fellow
travelers. During the “Lavender Scare,” the federal government
fired many gay employees, as depicted in the recent Showtime TV
series _Fellow Travelers_. Homosexuals who were also left-wing
radicals were considered doubly dangerous.

Collaborating with left-wing writer Lillian Hellman, Bernstein wrote
the music for an operetta of _Candide_. Their original treatment drew
clear parallels between Voltaire’s novel and the anticommunist
hearings by the House Un-American Activities Committee. By the time
the show premiered on Broadway in 1956, the producers had watered it
down to avoid making a political statement. Still, some of its best
songs have survived and become popular.

Bernstein used his talents for other political purposes, too. In 1965
he joined Martin Luther King Jr. on the march from Selma to
Montgomery, Alabama, and participated in the Stars for Freedom Rally,
a makeshift concert organized by Harry Belafonte that brought together
famous entertainers to inspire the marchers. A few years later,
Bernstein and actor Paul Newman co-hosted Broadway for Peace at
Lincoln Center. The event, featuring major celebrities, raised funds
to support antiwar candidates for Congress. Bernstein accompanied
Barbra Streisand, who sang “So Pretty” (not to be confused with
“I Feel Pretty” from _West Side Story_) with music by Bernstein.
The song’s message was unmistakable:

We were learning in school today
All about a country far away
Full of lovely temples painted gold,
Modern cities, jungles ages old.
And the people are so pretty there
Shining smiles, and shiny eyes and hair . . .
Then I had to ask my teacher why
War was making all those people die.
They’re so pretty, so pretty.
Then my teacher said, and took my hand,
“They must die for peace, you understand.”
But they’re so pretty, so pretty.
I don’t understand.

That June, Bernstein, Streisand, and a number of other famous artists
headlined an event that raised $900,000 for Senator Eugene
McCarthy’s antiwar presidential campaign. Bernstein also raised
money for the legal defense of six antiwar activists, including
radical Catholic priest Philip Berrigan, who had been arrested for
protests against the Vietnam War.

In 1971, Bernstein met with Philip’s brother, Daniel Berrigan—a
Jesuit priest who had been imprisoned for destroying draft files—as
part of his research for _Mass_, a major composition with elements of
jazz, gospel, blues, rock, folk, and symphonic music, and with a
libretto that included parts of Latin and English Catholic liturgy as
well as Hebrew prayer. The FBI informed Nixon’s staff about the
meeting, and the president’s advisors successfully urged him not to
attend the world premiere at the newly built Kennedy Center.

Bernstein continued to stage politically charged performances
throughout his life. On the eve of Richard Nixon’s second
inauguration in 1973, Bernstein organized a Concert for Peace at the
Washington National Cathedral, conducting Haydn’s _Mass in Time of
War_. The concert began at the exact time that inaugural concerts for
Nixon were scheduled at the Kennedy Center. Bernstein’s event
attracted an audience of about 18,000 people. And in 1989, a year
before his death, Bernstein conducted a performance
of Beethoven’s _Symphony No. 9_ in Berlin to celebrate the fall
of the Berlin Wall.

Like his politics, Bernstein’s Jewishness is likewise an understated
aspect of _Maestro_. It is the unspoken context for one early-career
scene, where we see Serge Koussevitzky, one of Bernstein’s mentors,
encouraging him to change his name from Bernstein to Burns. (Toward
the end of the film, Bernstein also wears a sweatshirt that spells
“Harvard” with Hebrew letters.)

The son of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine, Bernstein was not a
religious man, but he was well-versed in Jewish liturgy and committed
to his Jewish identity. Some of his best compositions are based on
Jewish or Biblical themes, including his 1942 _Symphony No. 1:
Jeremiah_; his 1963 _Symphony No. 3: Kaddish_ (the Jewish prayer for
the dead, dedicated in this case to “the beloved memory of John F.
Kennedy”); and his 1965 _Chichester Psalms_, a composition for
orchestra and chorus whose text, in Hebrew, comes from the Book of
Psalms. In the 1970s, Bernstein again collaborated with Robbins on a
ballet called _Dybbuk_, a Jewish folklore story about people
possessed by a malicious spirit. Bernstein conducted its premiere with
the New York City Ballet in 1974.

Like most U.S. leftists and liberals after the Second World War,
Bernstein supported the creation of the Israeli state, and he felt a
strong connection to Israel as a refuge for Jewish people. In 1947,
Bernstein conducted the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (later called the
Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) in Tel Aviv, beginning his long
association with the nation and its musical institutions. The
following year he conducted an open-air concert for Israeli troops in
the desert town of Beersheba. In 1957, he conducted the inaugural
concert at Tel Aviv’s Mann Auditorium. He later conducted
Mahler’s _Symphony No. 2_ and Mendelssohn’s _Violin
Concerto_ (with celebrated violinist Isaac Stern) at a concert on
Mount Scopus. But Bernstein was not a blind loyalist to Israel’s
government. In 1979, he joined fifty-eight other prominent Jewish
artists, intellectuals, and rabbis in signing a statement
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Prime Minister Menachem Begin protesting Israel’s occupation of the
West Bank.

_Maestro _is mostly concerned with the private life of a very public
figure. For the millions of people around the world who have admired
Bernstein, what endures is his music and his commitment to harnessing
his talent to help improve the world.

PETER DREIER is the E.P. Clapp Professor of Politics at Occidental
College.  Among his nine books are The 100 Greatest Americans of the
20th Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame, We Own the Future:
Democratic Socialism, American Style, and Baseball Rebels: The
Players, People, and Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and
Changed America.

* Film. Film Review
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* Maestro
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* Leonard Bernstein
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