MTT & Bernstein at the Danbury State Fair in 1974.
A version of this article appeared in the New York Times on Sunday, September 21, 2008
by Michael Tilson Thomas
He didn’t sleep much. That worked out well since so many nights were show nights. The show was much more than a concert. It was an intricate evening-long routine that had developed over his lifetime. By the last decade it went something like this.
It began, if he were lucky, as he awoke from a nap and performed his ablutions. You could hear the splashing, singing and kvetching over the whole apartment. It was a ritual for shaking off fatigue and the dread of having to push everything up hill all over again. The washing helped him to reconnect with the ‘spotless servant of music’ persona — one of his most treasured. There followed a light supper, some light conversation and maybe a quick glance or two at the score as he quietly gathered strength. In the limo he was starting to feel the zone of his performance testing it by means of talmudic pilpuls or perhaps snatches of old songs or punch lines. By the time he hit the stage door he was full of cheery greetings and waves for whoever was in sight, with plenty left over for all the visitors in his dressing room. When he got his call he would stand, just off the stage, saying his mantra, kissing his Koussevitzky cufflinks, taking the last drags of his cigarette, sucking in its essential dreadfulness a bit hunched over as if shielding it from a wind. At the last possible second he handed it to a stagehand or cup-bearer and he was on.
He made an entrance. He presented the audience with a special version of himself designed to welcome them, bless them, and to prepare them for the music’s first sounds. There was the “Gee I’m glad to see ya, let’s party” Bernstein, and the “it’s only for you that I would even consider scaling this summit ever again” Bernstein, and so many others. He turned towards the orchestra, acknowledging them as old comrades. He sat them and used the opportunity to look at them, at each one of them, right in the eyes. He waited for the audience to settle down, for the silence to feel just right. Then he gave his upbeat.
Those near to him on the stage might hear his upbeat as well as see it. He was quite vocal. He hummed, moaned, grunted, ground his teeth and breathed heavily. He used to say, “You should conduct exactly as you would play the piano.” It was a physical thing. He launched into the stream of the work pulling all the instruments under his fingers. If it were a first night, the piece, while painstakingly rehearsed, might never have been played through completely. The players weren’t sure of exactly what he was going to do, how it all fitted together, and were obliged to watch him every second. He liked that. He knew that musicians can get buried in their parts, looking fixedly at those same notes they’ve played thousands of times before. He wanted the whole band to be “out there” with him in an experience that felt more like improvisation. He liked fun and a whiff of danger and he always went for it.
MTT and Bernstein in the 80s
His conception of a performance was that it should reveal the emotional states that the composer had experienced as the work was created. For him, that meant being totally emotionally and physically involved. It was compulsive! He felt he wasn’t really doing his best unless he was swaying on the precipice of his endurance. Whether he was conducting Mahler or playing a Haydn trio it was the same; oceans of sweat, fluttering eyes, hyper-reactive athleticism. He’d get a bemused far away look that seemed to gaze off beyond the horizon into the spirit of the music itself. It was extreme, but he’d been like this for such a long time no one noticed anything strange about it. It’s what they expected. But, make no mistake. None of this was put on. It was his authentic essential experience of music and of life. It couldn’t be otherwise. Whatever he had to do to achieve it, maintain it, he did. The public loved it, understanding it was all part of the supreme sacrifice of himself he was making for them.
After the final number, the stagehand and cup-bearer were waiting, handing him a lit cigarette and a silver tumbler filled with Scotch the second he got off the stage. A few puffs, a few gulps, and he bounded or staggered on again. When the ovation finally died down, another performance began.
Legions of autograph seekers thronged to him snaking their way though the backstage meanders. They had to be patient. Inside the greenroom he sized up his supplicants with a deftness Lord Chesterfield would have admired, shifting his roles between counselor, classmate, rake. It took a long time and likely there were still receptions and suppers ahead. As the hours grew late sponsors and staffers might look furtively for an opportunity to sneak out, but he always spotted them and bellowed, “Sit down and shut up!” So it progressed through the hoopla, banter, reunions and random sightings. There was a certain low key recklessness about it all. His attitude seemed to be, “After all I’ve given, I deserve anything I can get.”
It was all a part of an essential rite in which his sharing of himself could make his demons go away — at least for a while. But, he knew that what he most desired to do he could only do alone. Conundrum. If only he or anyone else would ever let him be alone. But being alone was, well, lonely and scary and it was in the lonely moments that he realized how much it was costing him to be himself and more essentially that he wasn’t, by his standard, composing enough. If he were writing this article today, I know he would have begun it with “He didn’t compose enough.”
He knew that his own music was his greatest gift and message. There was a time when composing was easy for him, but it got harder as the years went on. To write the kind of music he dreamed of required time. Usually, there was never enough time. In the early years music could come to him in a flash, effortlessly. Since the days of the Revuers, he knew that as the occasion demanded, a new song or dance would pop into his head captivating everyone with brashness and tenderness. Right back to those earliest notes from the Notebook from the City of Sin, the notes that became the “Imaginary Coney Island Scene” in On The Town, we can hear that achy, soaring 2 ½ octave croon that says “Here I am world, I feel so much, I need so much, be my friend.”
Of course it’s made of equal parts of Rhapsody in Blue, Appalachian Spring, and Mahler Symphony No.10; just as later West Side Story would concoct El Salon Mexico, Sacre du Printemps, Peter Grimes and Also sprach Zarathustra into a heady brew. But the whole was much more than the sum of its parts. It all added up to an instantly recognizable and authentic him. The references came completely ingenuously and they didn’t bother him. In fact they amused him. He’d grin, shrug, and say: “Everybody steals, but you gotta steal classy!”
He knew how much his music mattered to people. He knew that it evoked their affection, that it charmed them. But, what he was yearning for and seeking was reverence. After all Copland, his most immediate mentor/model, had managed it. Copland’s much beloved populist pieces like Rodeo were balanced by thorny ones like the Piano Variations and Short Symphony that won the enduring respect of even the toughest professor. Their message was hard, uncompromising. But, for Bernstein the composer, compromise and collaboration seemed essential, inescapable. He thrived and suffered in his artistic partnerships. Robbins, Laurents, Sondheim … none of them was a pushover. Robbins especially could get under his defenses and make him doubt that anything he had done was worthy. He put so much of himself into his writing and when nothing came of it, it was an unbearable torture. I saw all of this in the first night out in New York we spent together.
A car picked us up at the 79th street apartment and took us downtown to see the Living Theatre’s production of Dionysius in 69. As we made our journey south, he was a bubbly tour guide, identifying landmarks of his life and weaving in bits of New York Show Biz lore. Entering the theatre the audience buzzed with the excitement of spotting him and he basked in it all, whispering to me, “Right now they’re saying ‘Can it be him? He’s so much shorter than I imagined.’ But, yes folks. It is! It is!” After the show the semi-stoned/nude cast lined up to greet him. Their appreciation and affection for him was total. They welcomed him as a kindred spirit, as a pioneer. He was glowing. And then, someone asked him about the progress of the Brecht-based theatre piece, The Exception and the Rule, on which he was then working. There followed a complete stop. He gulped and croaked that it now appeared, owing to differences of conception between him and Robbins, that the piece was probably not happening.
As he said this he shut down. His face went ashen, his shoulders slumped, and he looked suddenly 200 years older. He turned on his heel and left. We rode back uptown in total silence. Somewhere around 57th Street he opened the door and said “Well, I guess you can get out here. See you.” It was over. I’ve never forgotten the depth of despair I saw in him that night, and I think the sorrow he felt over all his “lost children”, as he sometimes called his unachieved projects, always haunted him.
He had set himself a difficult task as a composer. First of all, he was writing for people. So the music had to be tuneful, rhythmic, expressive, streetwise. But, he also wanted it to be confrontational, cryptic, elegant, austere and of course intellectually impregnable. Conundrum! It led him to tricky little voice leadings, sez you harmonies and abstractions of the kinds of riffs he had transcribed from Coleman Hawkins’ improvisations as one of his very first musical jobs. It brought his most characteristic works into a specialized genre similar to Gershwin’s symphonic pieces. They had the feeling of being free and spontaneous, but they were intricately contrived and couldn’t be tossed off, nor could they be played literally as they were written. They depended on very specific balances, inflections, and on the player’s savvy of all the pop and ethnic styles they referenced.
His music has a right guy, right place, right time quality, that says even tough things with a breezy confidence. He was that guy. Anything he desired was only a phone call away. Want an orchestra - call Arthur Judson; a TV series - Bill Paley; a record deal - Goddard Lieberson; want a special plate of pasta - have the Oak Room maitre d’ phone La Scala di Milano for the recipe. It all happened. He became the presiding Maestro of the Free World’s victory parties. After World War II it was Bernstein in Prague, Paris, Vienna… premiering Copland’s Third Symphony. After the Six Day War it was Bernstein in Israel doing Mahler on Mt. Scopus. It was Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in South America batting cleanup after Vice President Nixon’s disastrous motorcade. And in the Cold War, it was Bernstein hugging Shostakovich, and later Bernstein at the Berlin Wall. He was always there proclaiming America’s cultural mandate with himself as chochum-in-chief. He reconnected with all nations, friend and foe alike. He brought American music to Europe; he brought European music here. His festivals of Mahler and Nielsen caused their music to be valued in their own lands at a whole new level. And then, talk about confidence, he brought European music back to the Europeans. I can still hear him announcing, “I’m going to Budapest to teach the Hungarians how to play Bartók.” And he did, and the Austrians Mahler, the French Ravel, and even, with some considerable grumbling, the English Elgar.
It was thrilling, but it fed on itself. Over the years his music, his concerts, and even more the products made of them, became marketable assets. Everybody wanted a piece of the action and interests in growing the catalogue began to be in conflict with the interests of the man himself. He stood at the center of a cultural empire with everyone looking to him as the arbiter of taste and acceptance. For a while he felt that the answer to everything was within his reach, that he could do anything: conduct, compose, make videos, bridge the generation gap, champion justice for radical political causes, no matter what the cost. Then, like the nation whose spirit he epitomized, he began to flinch. He feared he was being subsumed by the trappings of his fame, by the agendas and in-house costs of the organizations he served. By the early 70’s, he was realizing the danger. This is what Mass was really about. He still carried on, the bravest of old campaigners, never losing his faith in the ideals of his youth and thrilled to see them reborn in new generations. But of himself, in the interludes between the relentless fetes, he’d say, “I’m at the very peak of my decline.”
These were the years of the Tours from Hell. Where was he? Vienna, Rome, Tel Aviv, Paris, Tanglewood, Sapporo. Why was he there? Old friendships, new projects, bigger deals, sincere concern for a young artist or cultural organization, because white asparagus was in season, because his Loden coat had worn out, because his wife and his boyfriend were dead. And he wasn’t composing enough.
What he was composing had taken a darker cast. The major pieces of the last years like A Quiet Place, Dybbuk and Arias and Barcarolles largely foreswore heart-on-the-sleeve confessions and flirted with the hermetic procedures of the 12-tone system. His way with the row was games-driven. His anagram skills made lattices of notes that yielded quartets, twisted torch songs — anything he desired. They sound like him, but their prevailing mood is turgid, despairing, even desperate. Perhaps now, after all we’ve lived through in the last twenty years, we’re better able to appreciate the urgency of their message. There’s a relentless search in these works for emotional honesty, intellectual rigor and at the same time for reconciliation, simplicity, and for what he called his last opera… A Quiet Place. He talked about this “quiet place”, a place he sought in his life, art and spirit where he could be generous, vulnerable, simple. It was hard for him to let himself be simple. Usually he felt that he needed to put himself and everyone else through some major test before he could relax. Composition had become another test, an agon. But, if it were a piece for somebody he loved, it was a different story. Seeing him possessed by the perfect vision for a birthday or anniversary song was like witnessing a minor miracle.
It was always about people. He wrote his music for them, gave his performances for them. He wanted to teach them, touch them, include them. He wanted them to be a part of the family and he was such a family guy. He adored his own family, relishing its complex mythology, accepting the brickbats of his siblings, the challenges of his children and the love and counsel of his wife. Felicia had warmth and easy elegance that made so much of his world possible. She created the generous and welcoming tone of their home and set the standard of what was fitting. When she told him, “Pull up your socks!” he listened and he did.
There was easy banter and brilliance at their table and silliness and lots of love. There was a regular crowd of relatives and mishpocha, largely from Jewish show biz intelligentsia. Naturally the table was international, erudite and streetwise enough to make any visitor feel at home. But the general tone was Yiddishkeit. Shtick skills were a definite asset and snappy patter, erudite comebacks and plays on words were always relished. The atmosphere was competitive but the feeling was above all warm and inclusive. From the first moment you pulled up a chair you felt you were home. I think he wanted you to feel that same way in the very first bars of his music.
Sometimes the pile up of responsibilities was too much to bear. When that happened, he fell into the habit of turning night into day. He would stay up all night, go to sleep at 6 in the morning, breakfast in the late afternoon. This way he could avoid people and stay in his own space without giving too much offense. Everybody wanted his benediction and it was too much. He’d throw up his hands reading through the piles of correspondence. “How can I do something for the one and not the other? They all ask in the name of friendship. That’s the problem. Everybody thinks I’m his friend.”
But, put him back in front of an audience and he was back on again, in search of new friends. Man, could he work a room! Some of his greatest performances were given at post-concert parties for audiences of a few dozen it was his mission to charm. He’d settle himself at the piano and begin a sequence of killer numbers. Movie production spectacles like “The Continental”, “The Carioca” or “Singing in the Bathtub”; Victorian tear-jerkers like “Comrades”, or understated supper club rarities like “PS I Love You.” And how about operatic coloratura show stoppers like Delibe’s “Filles de Cadiz” or Hollander’s cabaret classic “Johnny” both sung in a sub-vocal rumble that Marlene would have envied.
The set was dazzling, manipulative, seductive. Children of all ages had no choice but to submit. He knew he had everyone in his power and relished it. Never more so than the night in our nation’s capital when an esteemed critic came forward to say a wobbly goodnight and collapsed at his feet. Said Bernstein, “Look. There he is. One of America’s most distinguished journalists, passed out, helpless before me. Why couldn’t you be Harold Schoenberg?”
But, even in the midst of the whirlwind of his life he found time to be with young artists. Mostly, he had to be a kind of “hit and run” mentor, dispensing maxims and anecdotes in brief masterclasses in the back seats of limos. When he did have enough time, he tried to introduce the essence of his process of learning, which was basically how to ask the right questions and how to give yourself permission to do something special with the answers, something that meant something to you. He asked questions like “What exactly is happening in these bars? Now right here Schumann says ‘go a little slower’ Why does he say go slower? Give me 5 possible reasons. OK! Now, which of those reasons do you believe is right?” In the first such conversation we had, he must have asked 15 questions on every page. Nothing made him happier than when the answer was another question.
But, once he felt you understood the process, he left you to get on with it. So much of his own experience had been thinking and learning on his feet in front of a hundred or a few thousand people, that he knew the drill. So, after an early performance of Mahler 5 I gave, the conversation went something like this. MTT: “What do you think about the Adagietto?” LB: “What do I think? I think that when you’ve made up your mind about what it really means to you, it won’t matter what I or anyone else thinks. You’ll just know.”
So what can you say about a guy like this? So nurturing, so confrontational. He gave so much. He cared so much. I once asked him, “Did anyone ever get so much done and have so much fun as you have?” “I don’t know,” he replied. “Mozart, maybe.”
But, he always needed more, so much more. He tried to find more with the big performing projects and their distractions. But, they didn’t adequately provide the artistic fulfillment or the personal companionship he needed. Who could keep up with him? He needed someone who could give him more love, more attention, possessing more knowledge, more languages, more energy. Someone needing less sleep, or better still, no sleep at all. The ideal companion he just missed was the internet — and maybe, as a guide to it, an ace hacker with a big, well, let’s say heart for openers.
In the last years, he was playing a game of chicken with his spirit and breath. The time ran out and, as he feared, he hadn’t composed enough. But, in what he did compose, he left us a real tracing of the places his spirit had been. Even if you never met him or never saw him, his music tells you how life tasted to him and that’s what he really wanted. He wanted his music to be a part of people’s lives and this he truly achieved. We all wish there were more pieces, but we understand that a large part of what he was working on was feelings about music and about people… feelings that we share, thanks to him. On many levels he helped us by example, to overcome thresholds of embarrassment in music and in ourselves.
That was the thing with him. His impeccably crafted notes and words were offset by outrageous out-takes that could leave you gasping, laughing, cringing. But there was never any question of what he believed, what he championed. It was the joy of music. He believed it. He lived it. He wanted us to get it and to pass it on.
