Remembering the Maestro, Leonard Bernstein

He was a walking--sometimes gyrating--paradox.

He could be petulant, witty, self-indulgent, generous, bitter, tender, incredibly energetic, deeply depressed.

A compulsive artist who wanted to go on creating forever, he also persisted in smoking even when he knew the fatal dangers it posed.

A proud Jew, he also loved the music of the notoriously anti-Semitic Richard Wagner and created a philosophically penetrating musical/theater setting of the Roman Catholic Mass.

An erudite discourser on culture, politics and world affairs, he also could recite an amazing repertoire of deliciously dirty limericks.

A devoted husband and father, he also had numerous gay affairs.

A short man, he cast a huge shadow.

It all added up to a magically cohesive, irresistible, irrepressible, irreplaceable package named Leonard Bernstein.

He would have turned 82 last Friday. Instead, the music world is taking note of what will be the 10th anniversary of his death, in October. A decade without Bernstein is a very long time.

It’s not that he was the greatest conductor in history--passionate arguments could be made on behalf of a few other candidates for that distinction, starting with one of Bernstein’s heroes, Gustav Mahler. And it’s not that Bernstein was the greatest American composer--his friend Aaron Copland is the more likely candidate.

But when Sony Classical recently reissued dozens of his CBS recordings under the logo “The Bernstein Century,” it really wasn’t a presumptuous marketing ploy. True, his conducting and composing careers spanned only about 50 years, but few musicians have left such an indelible mark on their own time.

Even people with no interest in classical music knew who he was, respected what he was. Innumerable others owe their initial appreciation of classical music to his televised “Young People’s Concerts” with the New York Philharmonic, which had an almost hypnotic appeal. He electrified the genre of the Broadway musical with the score he wrote for the 1957 hit “West Side Story.”

If he never composed the ultimate, universally embraced masterpiece he longed to achieve, he produced more than enough quality music in his lifetime, each piece with “Bernstein” stamped unmistakably over all the notes. Some pieces--the “Candide” Overture, for example--were assured of immortality from the start; others will, inevitably, go through periods of varying popularity in the years to come. But it’s not likely that any generation hence will not know that Bernstein was a significant composer, as well as an important conductor.

His reputation as a conductor has had its ups and downs. He was lionized as the great American hope for the conducting field after his sensational, last-minute substitution for an ailing Bruno Walter at a nationally broadcast Carnegie Hall concert with the New York Philharmonic in 1943 at the age of 25. But when, 15 years later, he was named music director of that orchestra, the news was not greeted enthusiastically in every corner. Some saw Bernstein as too shallow, too flashy and, with his penchant for ecstatic leaps (the self-described “Lenny dance”), too distracting on the podium.

But Bernstein and the Philharmonic were made for each other, and his 11-year tenure was filled with adventure and excitement. The survey of Mahler’s symphonies they made together is but one example; their recordings of these works in the 1960s became the epicenter of the Mahler revival, the first compelling evidence that Mahler’s famous prediction, “My time will come,” had been realized.

Bit by bit, Bernstein won over many of the skeptics who questioned his depth. This wider respect emerged especially after he left the New York job and began intensive collaborations with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Like many an artist, Bernstein grew more and more compelling as he aged, and by the 1980s, he was universally recognized as a maestro at the peak of his creative powers. Whether leading the Viennese or guest-conducting the New Yorkers and any number of other orchestras, he kept proving that he had much to reveal, much to impart, even in the most familiar scores of Beethoven and Brahms, or his beloved Mahler.

But as his first CBS recordings demonstrate so powerfully, the young Bernstein was a remarkably mature musician, too, one with a rare genius for tapping the essence of a composition, infusing it with a palpable, expressive fire. If his tempos got slower over the years, that fire only burned hotter. His ideas about phrasing got more provocative and, depending on the listener’s taste, more enriching and profound.

Bernstein understood from his earliest days that a work of music is like a statue of perpetually soft clay--its overall shape and outline are clearly visible, but the softness allows you to leave your own fingerprints on it as you pick it up and study it. You can mold it, bend it, change the expression on its face. When you’ve finished, it reverts to its original state, still pliant, ready for the next fresh hands, fresh ears, fresh mind and heart.

Maybe Bernstein dug his fingers into that clay deeper than most. Maybe he twisted a few pieces almost to the breaking point, taking nearly twice as long with some works as anyone else ever had, for example. But no matter how much wailing and gnashing of teeth such liberties engendered, the original music was never damaged. Bernstein simply reveled in the plasticity of the art form and the feeling that he was composing a score on the spot while conducting it.

That heady experience was one he savored right up to his final public concert, at Tanglewood, the verdant summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the Berkshires, where in August 1990 he led a transcendent account of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. He nearly didn’t get through it. At one point, he was stricken by a coughing fit and forced to grasp the podium rail for support, while the orchestra carried on without much more than a few cues from his eyes, a few motions from his shoulders.

The result was another quintessential Bernstein performance--individualistic, revelatory, loving. There was an underlying propulsion in it, but tempered by a gripping, emotional weight. The second movement, to which Beethoven gave an “Allegretto” tempo marking (a little slower than “Allegro”), became nothing less than a wrenching funeral march. Bernstein may not have known it would be his swan song as a conductor, but he could not have left a more telling farewell.

To some, Bernstein’s interpretive style will always seem terribly pretentious, calculated, splashy. To me, he was an ear-opening, mind-opening guide into a marvelous, rarefied sound world, filled with surprises, questions, answers, more questions, rapture, tears, giddiness, storms, consolation. If some of Bernstein’s persona was manufactured, his conducting was the real thing. In an age filled with play-it-safe baton-wavers, his risk-taking seems more valuable than ever.

Bernstein didn’t merely make music when he conducted; at his best, which was most of the time, he turned music into a life-giving force, a sort of aural oxygen. Ten years after he died, we’re still breathing it in, deeply.