Photograph: Ted Spiegel/Corbis via Getty Images Barry Seldes: Bernstein the activistįrom his early childhood until his death Bernstein was unwavering in his support for liberal causes. Leonard Bernstein in discussion with students. John Mauceri is the author of Maestros and their Music: the Art and Alchemy of Conducting. One of the things I miss most about him is his ability to tell a joke, because of his timing. He’d come out onto the stage, bow, shake hands with the orchestra’s leader, and wait, wait for the audience to be paying attention. All conductors are storytellers and Lenny was one of the best. If Lenny’s performances were a collaboration between his live audience and his live musicians, when he recorded he became Lenny the rabbi - the docent who wanted to illuminate the ancient texts. He loved the wit and balance of Haydn, though, and was particularly celebrated for his interpretations of Mahler, a composer very close to his heart. He was uncomfortable conducting Wagner: as a Jewish man, he found it difficult to separate his music from his anti-semitic writings and way it was used by the Nazis. Beethoven never lets you down, he said, because everything he wrote sounds inevitable.
He told me he hated the way he looked when he conducted, adding “but when I do it I get the sound I want.”įor him, Beethoven was the greatest composer of all time - his very first TV show was on Beethoven’s 5th symphony. “I’ve yet to have anyone demonstrate,” said Pierre Monteux, “that an orchestra plays louder because you jump higher.” His was certainly a unique way of expressing music, historically closer to how Beethoven or Berlioz were described as conducting. He would leave the ground on the upbeat - his style was not to everyone’s taste. The first thing he told me, as we sat down for a sandwich, was that he believed that every masterpiece was built on a single tempo, and all the speeds of the music through the entire work are related to that central spine. I became his assistant, then editor, and I conducted many of his works.
Photograph: Bettmann Archive John Mauceri: Bernstein the conductor That Mahler feeling … Leonard Bernstein conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1970. Marin Alsop conducts the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in Bernstein’s Slava! (A Political Overture) and his Second Symphony at the Proms on 27 August. He remains the benchmark for outreach and engagement. West Side Story is one of the most skilfully written musical pieces of all time. He ascribed to Duke Ellington’s view: there are two kinds of music, good and bad. There were so many important things he taught me: that our first priority as conductors is as a messenger for the composer that every piece has a narrative, a story, often with a moral that it is our responsibility to discover that story and convert it convincingly.īernstein was the consummate amalgam of high-brow, low-brow and every other brow. In fact, I studied with him at the Schleswig-Holstein festival in northern Germany in 1987 and then at Tanglewood, before I accompanied him to Japan. I would have gone to the moon to work with Bernstein. After one of these, when I was about nine, I said to my parents: “I want to be a conductor.” He was the consummate amalgam of high brow, low brow and every other brow I remember seeing him on TV on Sunday afternoons and going to hear New York Philharmonic Young People’s concerts.
When I was growing up in New York, Bernstein was an integral part of the city’s life. Education as a whole was important to him: information as food, nutrition, a source of power and, most importantly, possibility. He was at the forefront of interdisciplinary learning - both a radical new concept and a harkening back to the Greeks.
Bernstein did not think about education and music as being separate entities for him, they were part of a systemic, organic, whole-person educational approach.
He had passion, enthusiasm and intense and boundless curiosity about our world.