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August 25, 1918– Leonard Bernstein:
“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”
Sometime during the beautiful New England autumn of 1973, I appeared as the Street Singer, the character who sings the iconic Ballad Of Mack The Knife, in an inventive production of The Threepenny Opera at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge, Mass. At the same time, Leonard Bernstein was giving a series of lectures at Harvard University titled The Unanswered Question, which I attended. Always absorbing and frequently brilliant, Bernstein’s lectures were comprehensible discussions about Music History and its forms with a particular emphasis on modern music. Bernstein addressed the average listener like me, who had some training, but wanted to know what really makes music work and what is meant by “tonal” and “atonal”, stuff that only serviceable musical talent would have to grapple with.
It required some concentration, but Bernstein, a superb speaker, kept technical terms to a minimum. I was lucky enough to go to four of the six lectures, having been invited by the maestro personally after he thrillingly talked to me, giving advice about singing Kurt Weill’s songs in The Threepenny Opera after he attended a final dress rehearsal of our production.
Even at 18 years old, I already understood Bernstein’s place in Musical Theatre History, especially for his scores for West Side Story (1957), On The Town (1944), Wonderful Town (1953), and Candide (1956). But, I didn’t expect to find him so totally sexy hot, but then, I often find men who are supremely talented to be attractive and I have always been crazy for Jewish guys, especially charismatic ones who were of a kind major 20th century talent, with a flowing mane of beautiful hair and the ability to look me in the eye and touch my hand while telling me what he thought I was getting right and what I was missing in my performance. I went home that night simply swooning and with my head spinning with dreams of becoming the lover of one of history’s most important musical figures.
Bernstein may well be more famous among the general public than any other orchestra conductor in history before or since. He also composed three symphonies, two operas, five musicals, a mass, three film scores and numerous other pieces including popular songs.
Throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Bernstein was undoubtedly the most visible proponent of classical music in American culture. Like many kids of my generation, I became acquainted with Bernstein from watching his CBS television series Young People’s Concerts. For over a decade, Bernstein and his New York Philharmonic Orchestra introduced and popularized classical music to a generation of us Baby Boomers. It held special interest for me as a young player of a string instrument in my school’s orchestra. His style of conducting always had me mesmerized when I saw him on television, with its extreme emotion and balletic movements. Through his charismatic personality, good-looks and resourceful uses of the media, particularly television, Bernstein introduced “highbrow” culture to the homes of middle-Americans like mine, while at the same time defending Rock and Roll, while supporting radical political causes.
His career began in the late 1930s. When he first moved to NYC, Bernstein shared an apartment with his friend, lyricist and performer Adolph Green. He hung out with Green and pals, writer Betty Comden, and actor Judy Holliday, in a comedy troupe called The Revuers who performed in clubs in Greenwich Village. Bernstein, Comden and Green would later create the classic musical On The Town (revived on Broadway just last season) while they were only in their mid-20s. He also started a long string of affairs with men.
Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim were four very smart, young gay Jewish guys, all at the very heights of their talents, when they created West Side Story, one of the most groundbreaking and important musicals of the 20th century.
Bernstein was unafraid to be outspoken on the issues of Civil Rights and the Vietnam War, but he was, for much of his career, unwilling to risk exposing his gayness. Indeed, life in NYC in the 1950s and 1960s, even in the arts, meant that revealing his homosexuality would probably have destroyed the celebrity and influence he had worked so hard to gain.
Typical for his era, Bernstein was simply another gay guy who got married to a woman because that was what you did. Like many gay men of his generation, Bernstein appeared as a devoted husband and father in public while carrying on a promiscuous homosexual life behind the scenes. There was an arrangement with his wife that as long as he did not embarrass her publicly, he was free to pursue his affairs with other fellas. Among his many lovers: famed conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos, fellow composer Aaron Copland, a hot Israeli soldier Azariah Rapoport, musical director Tom Cothran, and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.
At one point, he actually left his wife, the Chilean born American actor Felicia Cohn Montealegre, for Cothran. He had fallen so hard for him that he didn’t hide their affair and even allowed his wife to catch them in bed together. No longer able to pretend otherwise, his wife threatened to “make a public scandal.” NYC society, who really should have known better at this point, was shocked when Bernstein moved into an apartment on Central Park South with Cothran, who he proclaimed the love of his life.
But, he moved back with his wife when she was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1978. After her passing, Bernstein was known to be rather brazen about his sexcapades with hot young guys, often involving drugs and backroom bars.
Pianist William Huckaby wrote that after performing at the White House, he was talking with President Jimmy Carter when:
“I felt these hands clamped on my shoulders, I was whirled around and engaged in a deep kiss with Bernstein. Lenny then said: ‘I haven’t heard such virile piano playing for fifteen years. It was magnificent.’ President Carter watched all this with his mouth open and then walked away. I was charmed in a way, but in retrospect one had to concede he was rather crude.”
In his last decade, Bernstein was surrounded by beautiful boys, each one as intoxicated, drug-addled and wild as he was. Bernstein was busy making up for lost time. He was finally comfortable with his gayness as his collaborators Laurents and Sondheim. It is even possible that he would have settled down into a long-term relationship with another man.
Bernstein announced his retirement in 1990. He took his last breath just five days later, gone from a heart attack. He was 72 years old. On the day of his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan, the people on the streets removed their hats and yelled “Goodbye, Lenny”. He had dominated postwar NYC society, rivaled only by Andy Warhol.
Bernstein is buried in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery, with the score to Gustav Mahler‘s Fifth Symphony lying across his heart.
“Music can name the unnameable and communicate the unknowable.”
![36-year-old composer Leonard Bernstein, holding musical score with lighted auditorium behind him. He has written two symphonies, a song cycle, jazzy ballet Fancy Free, two Broadway shows (on the Town, Wonderful Town) and is preparing a musical of Candide. (Photo by Gordon Parks//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)]()
Bernstein left behind an unprecedented amount of recordings and videos, plus his films and stage revivals, leaving a legacy to be experienced for generations to come, and the memory of one 18 year old boy who melted at having simply having been in his presence. My crush on him has never diminished. He would have celebrated his 98th birthday today.
The post #BornThisDay: Composer/ Conductor, Leonard Bernstein appeared first on The WOW Report.
