Leonard Bernstein (/ˈbɜːrnstaɪn/ BURN-styne;[1] August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer, and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the U.S. to receive worldwide acclaim. According to music critic Donal Henahan, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."[2]
His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, Peter Pan,[3] Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town, On the Waterfront, his Mass, and a range of other compositions, including three symphonies and many shorter chamber and solo works.
Bernstein was the first conductor to give a series of television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. He was a skilled pianist,[4] often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard. He was also a critical figure in the modern revival of the music of Gustav Mahler, the composer in which he was most passionately interested.[5]
As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and critical success of West Side Story.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
2.1 1940–1950
2.2 1951–1959
2.3 1960–1969
2.4 1970–1979
2.5 1980–1990
3 Personal life
3.1 Death and legacy
4 Social activism
4.1 Philanthropy
5 Influence and characteristics as a conductor
6 Recordings
7 Influence and characteristics as a composer
7.1 Anecdotes
8 Works
8.1 Ballets
8.2 Operas
8.3 Musicals
8.4 Incidental music and other theatre
8.5 Film scores
8.6 Orchestral
8.7 Choral
8.8 Chamber music
8.9 Vocal music
8.10 Piano music
9 Bibliography
10 Videography
11 Awards
12 References
13 Further reading
14 External links
Early life[edit]
He was born Louis Bernstein in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the son of Ukrainian Jewish parents Jennie (née Resnick) and Samuel Joseph Bernstein, a hairdressing supplies wholesaler originating from Rovno (now Ukraine).[6][7][8]
His family spent their summers at their vacation home in Sharon, Massachusetts. His grandmother insisted that his first name be Louis, but his parents always called him Leonard, which they preferred. He legally changed his name to Leonard when he was fifteen, shortly after his grandmother's death.[9] To his friends and many others he was simply known as "Lenny".[10]
His father, Sam Bernstein, was a businessman and owner of a hair product store (no longer standing) in downtown Lawrence on the corners of Amesbury and Essex Streets. Sam initially opposed young Leonard's interest in music. Despite this, the elder Bernstein took him to orchestral concerts in his teenage years and eventually supported his music education.
At a very young age, Bernstein listened to a piano performance and was immediately captivated; he subsequently began studying the piano seriously when the family acquired his cousin Lillian Goldman's unwanted piano. Bernstein attended the Garrison Grammar School and Boston Latin School.[11] As a child, he was very close to his younger sister Shirley, and would often play entire operas or Beethoven symphonies with her at the piano. He had a variety of piano teachers in his youth, including Helen Coates, who later became his secretary.
After graduation from Boston Latin School in 1935, Bernstein attended Harvard University, where he studied music with, among others, Edward Burlingame Hill and Walter Piston. Although he majored in music with a final year thesis (1939) entitled "The Absorption of Race Elements into American Music" (reproduced in his book Findings), Bernstein's main intellectual influence at Harvard was probably the aesthetics Professor David Prall, whose multidisciplinary outlook on the arts Bernstein shared for the rest of his life.
One of his friends at Harvard was philosopher Donald Davidson, with whom he played piano four hands. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for the production Davidson mounted of Aristophanes' play The Birds in the original Greek. Bernstein reused some of this music in the ballet Fancy Free.
During his time at Harvard he was briefly an accompanist for the Harvard Glee Club.[12] Bernstein also mounted a student production of The Cradle Will Rock, directing its action from the piano as the composer Marc Blitzstein had done at the premiere. Blitzstein, who heard about the production, subsequently became a friend and influence (both musically and politically) on Bernstein.
Bernstein also met the conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos at the time. Although he never taught Bernstein, Mitropoulos's charisma and power as a musician were a major influence on Bernstein's eventual decision to take up conducting. Mitropoulos was not stylistically that similar to Bernstein, but he probably influenced some of Bernstein's later habits such as his conducting from the keyboard, his initial practice of conducting without a baton and perhaps his interest in Mahler.
The other important influence that Bernstein first met during his Harvard years was composer Aaron Copland, whom he met at a concert and then at a party afterwards on Copland's birthday in 1938. At the party Bernstein played Copland's Piano Variations, a thorny work Bernstein loved without knowing anything about its composer until that evening. Although he was not formally Copland's student as such, Bernstein would regularly seek advice from Copland in the following years about his own compositions and would often cite him as "his only real composition teacher".[13]
After completing his studies at Harvard in 1939 (graduating with a B.A. cum laude), he enrolled at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. During his time at Curtis, Bernstein studied conducting with Fritz Reiner (who anecdotally is said to have given Bernstein the only "A" grade he ever awarded), piano with Isabelle Vengerova,[14] orchestration with Randall Thompson, counterpoint with Richard Stöhr, and score reading with Renée Longy Miquelle.[15] Unlike his years at Harvard, Bernstein appears not to have greatly enjoyed the formal training environment of Curtis, although often in his later life he would mention Reiner when discussing important mentors.[13]
Career[edit]
1940–1950[edit]
Lenny Bernstein and Benny Goodman in rehearsal, ca. 1940–1949
After he left Curtis, Bernstein lived in New York. He shared an apartment with his friend Adolph Green and often accompanied Green, Betty Comden, and Judy Holliday in a comedy troupe called The Revuers who performed in Greenwich Village. He took jobs with a music publisher, transcribing music or producing arrangements under the pseudonym Lenny Amber. (Bernstein in German = Amber in English.) In 1940, Bernstein began his study at the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer institute, Tanglewood, in the conducting class of the orchestra's conductor, Serge Koussevitzky.
Bernstein's friendships with Copland (who was very close to Koussevitzky) and Mitropoulos were propitious in helping him gain a place in the class. Other students in the class included Lukas Foss, who also became a lifelong friend. Koussevitzky perhaps did not teach Bernstein much basic conducting technique (which he had already developed under Reiner) but instead became a sort of father figure to him and was perhaps the major influence on Bernstein's emotional way of interpreting music. Bernstein later became Koussevitzky's conducting assistant[16] and would later dedicate his Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, to him.[17]
Photo of Bernstein by Carl Van Vechten (1944)
Carnegie Hall playbill, November 14, 1943
Radio announcement:
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On November 14, 1943, having recently been appointed assistant conductor to Artur Rodziński of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, he made his major conducting debut at short notice—and without any rehearsal—after guest conductor Bruno Walter came down with the flu.[18] The program included works by Schumann, Miklós Rózsa, Wagner and Richard Strauss's Don Quixote with soloist Joseph Schuster, solo cellist of the orchestra. Before the concert Bernstein briefly spoke to Bruno Walter, who discussed particular difficulties in the works he was to perform. The next day, The New York Times carried the story on its front page and remarked in an editorial, "It's a good American success story. The warm, friendly triumph of it filled Carnegie Hall and spread far over the air waves."[19][20] He became instantly famous because the concert was nationally broadcast on CBS Radio, and afterwards Bernstein started to appear as a guest conductor with many U.S. orchestras.
From 1945 to 1947, Bernstein was the Music Director of the New York City Symphony, which had been founded the previous year by the conductor Leopold Stokowski. The orchestra (with support from the Mayor) was aimed at a different audience than the New York Philharmonic, with more modern programs and cheaper tickets.[21] Also in regard to a different audience, in 1945 Bernstein discussed the possibility of acting in a film with Greta Garbo—playing Tchaikovsky opposite her starring role as the composer's patron Nadezhda von Meck.[22]
In addition to becoming known as a conductor, Bernstein also emerged as a composer in the same period. In January 1944 he conducted the premiere of his Jeremiah Symphony in Pittsburgh. His score to the ballet Fancy Free choreographed by Jerome Robbins opened in New York in April 1944 and this was later developed into the musical On the Town with lyrics by Comden and Green that opened on Broadway in December 1944.
Bernstein conducting the New York City Symphony (1945)
Bernstein had asthma, which kept him from serving in the military during World War II.[23] After the war, Bernstein's career on the international stage began to flourish. In 1946, he made his overseas debut with the Czech Philharmonic in Prague. He also recorded Ravel's Piano Concerto in G as soloist and conductor with the Philharmonia Orchestra. On July 4, 1946, Bernstein conducted the European premiere of Fancy Free with the Ballet Theatre at the Royal Opera House in London. In 1946, he conducted opera for the first time, with the American première at Tanglewood of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, which had been a Koussevitzky commission. That same year, Arturo Toscanini invited Bernstein to guest conduct two concerts with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, one of which again featured Bernstein as soloist in the Ravel concerto.[24]
In 1947, Bernstein conducted in Tel Aviv for the first time, beginning a lifelong association with Israel. The next year he conducted an open-air concert for troops at Beersheba in the middle of the desert during the Arab-Israeli war. In 1957, he conducted the inaugural concert of the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv; he subsequently made many recordings there. In 1967, he conducted a concert on Mount Scopus to commemorate the Reunification of Jerusalem. During the 1970s, Bernstein recorded his symphonies and other works with the Israel Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. The city of Tel Aviv added his name to the Orchestra Plaza in the center the city.[citation needed]
On December 10, 1949, he made his first television appearance as conductor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. The concert, which also included an address by Eleanor Roosevelt, celebrated the one-year anniversary of the United Nations General Assembly's ratification of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and included the premiere of Aaron Copland's "Preamble" with Sir Laurence Olivier narrating text from the UN Charter. The concert was televised by NBC Television Network.[25]
In 1949, he conducted the world première of the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Part of the rehearsal for the concert was recorded and released by the orchestra. When Koussevitzky died two years later, Bernstein became head of the orchestra and conducting departments at Tanglewood.
1951–1959[edit]
Bernstein, c. 1950s
In 1951, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in the world première of the Symphony No. 2 of Charles Ives, which was written around half a century earlier but had never been performed. Throughout his career, Bernstein often talked about the music of Ives, who died in 1954. The composer, old and frail, was unable (some reports say unwilling) to attend the concert, but his wife did. He reportedly listened to a radio broadcast of it on a radio in his kitchen some days later. A recording of the "premiere" was released in a 10-CD box set Bernstein LIVE by the orchestra, but the notes indicate it was a repeat performance from three days later, and this is perhaps what Ives heard. In any case, reports also differ on Ives's exact reaction, but some suggest he was thrilled and danced a little jig. Bernstein recorded the 2nd symphony with the Philharmonic in 1958 for Columbia, and in 1987 for Deutsche Grammophon. There is also a 1987 performance with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra available on DVD.
Bernstein was a visiting music professor from 1951 to 1956 at Brandeis University, and he founded the Creative Arts Festival there in 1952.[26] He conducted various productions at the first festival, including the premiere of his opera Trouble in Tahiti and Blitzstein's English version of Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera. The festival was renamed after him in 2005, becoming the Leonard Bernstein Festival of the Creative Arts. In 1953 he was the first American conductor to appear at La Scala in Milan, conducting Maria Callas in Cherubini's Medea. This opera had been virtually abandoned by performers and he learned it in a week. It was to prove a fruitful collaboration, and Callas and Bernstein went on to perform in Bellini's La sonnambula in 1955. That same year, he produced his score to the musical Wonderful Town on very short notice, working again with his old friends Comden and Green, who wrote the lyrics.
In 1954 Bernstein presented the first of his television lectures for the CBS arts program Omnibus. The live lecture, entitled "Beethoven's Fifth Symphony", involved Bernstein explaining the work with the aid of musicians from the former NBC Symphony Orchestra (recently renamed the "Symphony of the Air") and a giant page of the score covering the floor. Bernstein subsequently performed concerts with the orchestra and recorded his Serenade for Violin with Isaac Stern. Further Omnibus lectures followed from 1955 to 1958 (later on ABC and then NBC) covering jazz, conducting, American musical comedy, modern music, J.S. Bach, and grand opera. These programs were made available in the U.S. in a DVD set in 2010.
Bernstein with members of the New York Philharmonic rehearsing for a television broadcast
In late 1956, Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic in concerts that were to have been conducted by Guido Cantelli, who had died in an air crash in Paris. This was the first time Bernstein had conducted the orchestra in subscription concerts since 1951. Partly due to these appearances, Bernstein was named the music director of the New York Philharmonic in 1957, replacing Dimitri Mitropoulos. He began his tenure in that position in 1958, having held the post jointly with Mitropoulos from 1957 to 1958. In 1958, Bernstein and Mitropoulos took the New York Philharmonic on tour to South America. In his first season in sole charge, Bernstein included a season-long survey of American classical music.[citation needed] Themed programming of this sort was fairly novel at that time compared to the present day. Bernstein held the music directorship until 1969 (with a sabbatical in 1965) although he continued to conduct and make recordings with the orchestra for the rest of his life and was appointed "laureate conductor".
He became a well-known figure in the United States through his series of fifty-three televised Young People's Concerts for CBS, which grew out of his Omnibus programs. His first Young People's Concert was televised a few weeks after his tenure began as principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He became as famous for his educational work in those concerts as for his conducting. The Bernstein Young People's Concerts were the first and probably the most influential series of music appreciation programs ever produced on television, and they were highly acclaimed by critics.[27] Some of Bernstein's music lectures were released on records; a recording of Humor in Music was awarded a Grammy award for Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording (other than comedy) in 1961.[28] The programs were shown in many countries around the world, often with Bernstein dubbed into other languages. All of them were released on DVD by Kultur Video (half of them in 2013).
Bernstein at the piano, making annotations to a musical score
Around the time he was appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic, and living opposite Carnegie Hall at The Osborne,[29] Bernstein composed the music for two shows. The first was for the operetta Candide, which was first performed in 1956 with a libretto by Lillian Hellman based on Voltaire's novella. The second was Bernstein's collaboration with the choreographer Jerome Robbins, the writer Arthur Laurents, and the lyricist Stephen Sondheim to produce the musical West Side Story. The first three had worked on it intermittently since Robbins first suggested the idea in 1949. Finally, with the addition of Sondheim to the team and a period of concentrated effort, it received its Broadway premiere in 1957 and has since proven to be Bernstein's most popular and enduring score.
In 1959, he took the New York Philharmonic on a tour of Europe and the Soviet Union, portions of which were filmed by CBS Television. A highlight of the tour was Bernstein's performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, in the presence of the composer, who came on stage at the end to congratulate Bernstein and the musicians. In October, when Bernstein and the orchestra returned to the U.S., they recorded the symphony for Columbia. He recorded it for a second time with the orchestra on tour in Japan in 1979. Bernstein seems to have limited himself to only conducting certain Shostakovich symphonies, namely the numbers 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 14. He made two recordings of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony (No. 7), one with the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s and another recorded live in 1988 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (one of the few recordings he made with them, also including the Symphony No. 1).
1960–1969[edit]
In 1960 Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic held a Mahler Festival to mark the centenary of the composer's birth. Bernstein, Walter and Mitropoulos conducted performances. The composer's widow, Alma, attended some of Bernstein's rehearsals. In 1960 Bernstein also made his first commercial recording of a Mahler symphony (the Fourth) and over the next seven years he made the first complete cycle of recordings of all nine of Mahler's completed symphonies. (All featured the New York Philharmonic except the 8th Symphony which was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra following a concert in the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1966.) The success of these recordings, along with Bernstein's concert performances and television talks, was an important, if not vital, part of the revival of interest in Mahler in the 1960s, especially in the U.S. Bernstein claimed that he identified with the works on a personal level, and once said of the composer: [He] showered a rain of beauty on this world that has not been equaled since.[30]
Leonard Bernstein during a visit to Finland, 1959
Other non-U.S. composers that Bernstein championed to some extent at the time include the Danish composer Carl Nielsen (who was then only little known in the U.S.) and Jean Sibelius, whose popularity had by then started to fade. Bernstein eventually recorded a complete cycle in New York of Sibelius's symphonies and three of Nielsen's symphonies (Nos. 2, 4, and 5), as well as conducting recordings of his violin, clarinet and flute concertos. He also recorded Nielsen's 3rd Symphony with the Royal Danish Orchestra after a critically acclaimed public performance in Denmark. Bernstein championed U.S. composers, especially those that he was close to like Aaron Copland, William Schuman and David Diamond. He also started to more extensively record his own compositions for Columbia Records. This included his three symphonies, his ballets, and the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story with the New York Philharmonic. He also conducted an LP of his 1944 musical On The Town, the first (almost) complete recording of the original featuring several members of the original Broadway cast, including Betty Comden and Adolph Green. (The 1949 film version only contains four of Bernstein's original numbers.) Bernstein also collaborated with the experimental jazz pianist and composer Dave Brubeck resulting in the recording Bernstein Plays Brubeck Plays Bernstein (1961).
In one oft-reported incident, in April 1962 Bernstein appeared on stage before a performance of the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with the pianist Glenn Gould. During rehearsals, Gould had argued for tempi much broader than normal, which did not reflect Bernstein's concept of the music. Bernstein gave a brief address to the audience starting with "Don't be frightened; Mr Gould is here..." and going on to "In a concerto, who is the boss (audience laughter)—the soloist or the conductor?" (Audience laughter grows louder). The answer is, of course, sometimes the one and sometimes the other, depending on the people involved."[31] This speech was subsequently interpreted by Harold C. Schonberg, music critic for The New York Times, as abdication of personal responsibility and an attack on Gould, whose performance Schonberg went on to criticize heavily. Bernstein always denied that this had been his intent and has stated that he made these remarks with Gould's blessing.[32] In the book Dinner with Lenny, published in October 2013, author Jonathan Cott provided a thorough debunking, in the conductor's own words, of the legend which Bernstein himself described in the book as "one ... that won't go away". Throughout his life, he professed admiration and friendship for Gould. Schonberg was often (though not always) harshly critical of Bernstein as a conductor during his tenure as music director. However, his views were not shared by the audiences (with many full houses) and probably not by the musicians themselves (who had greater financial security arising from Bernstein's many TV and recording activities amongst other things).
In 1962 the New York Philharmonic moved from Carnegie Hall to Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall) in the new Lincoln Center. The move was not without controversy because of acoustic problems with the new hall. Bernstein conducted the gala opening concert featuring vocal works by Mahler, Beethoven and Vaughan Williams, and the premiere of Aaron Copland's Connotations, a serial-work that was merely politely received. During the intermission Bernstein kissed the cheek of the President's wife Jacqueline Kennedy, a break with protocol that was commented on at the time. In 1961 Bernstein had conducted at President John F. Kennedy's pre-inaugural gala, and he was an occasional guest in the White House. Years later he conducted at the funeral mass in 1968 for President Kennedy's brother Robert Kennedy, featuring the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th Symphony. Jackie Kennedy famously wrote to Bernstein after the event: When your Mahler started to fill (but that is the wrong word — because it was more this sensitive trembling) the Cathedral today — I thought it the most beautiful music I had ever heard.[33]
Bernstein in Amsterdam, 1968
On November 23, 1963, the day after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Leonard Bernstein conducted the New York Philharmonic and the Schola Cantorum of New York in a nationally televised memorial featuring the "Resurrection Symphony" by Gustav Mahler. This was the first televised performance of the complete symphony. Mahler's music had never been performed for such an event, and since the tribute to JFK, Mahler symphonies have become part of the Philharmonic's standard repertoire for national mourning.[34]
In 1964 Bernstein conducted Franco Zeffirelli's production of Verdi's Falstaff at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In 1966 he made his debut at the Vienna State Opera conducting Luchino Visconti's production of the same opera with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau as Falstaff. During his time in Vienna he also recorded the opera for Columbia Records and conducted his first subscription concert with the Vienna Philharmonic (which is made up of players from the Vienna State Opera) featuring Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with Fischer-Dieskau and James King. He returned to the State Opera in 1968 for a production of Der Rosenkavalier and in 1970 for Otto Schenk's production of Beethoven's Fidelio. Sixteen years later, at the State Opera, Bernstein conducted his sequel to Trouble in Tahiti, A Quiet Place, with the ORF orchestra. Bernstein's final farewell to the State Opera happened accidentally in 1989: following a performance of Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, he unexpectedly entered the stage and embraced conductor Claudio Abbado in front of a cheering audience.
With his commitment to the New York Philharmonic and his many other activities, Bernstein had little time for composition during the 1960s. The two major works he produced at this time were his Kaddish Symphony, dedicated to the recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy, and the Chichester Psalms, which he produced during a sabbatical year he took from the Philharmonic in 1965 to concentrate on composition. Wanting to make more time for composition was probably a major factor in his decision to step down as Music Director of the Philharmonic in 1969, and to never again accept such a position elsewhere.
1970–1979[edit]
Leonard Bernstein by Allan Warren
After stepping down from the New York Philharmonic, Bernstein continued to appear with them in most years until his death, and he toured with them to Europe in 1976 and to Asia in 1979. He also strengthened his relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic—he conducted all nine completed Mahler symphonies with them (plus the Adagio from the 10th) in the period from 1967 to 1976. All of these were filmed for Unitel with the exception of the 1967 Mahler 2nd, which instead Bernstein filmed with the London Symphony Orchestra in Ely Cathedral in 1973. In the late 1970s Bernstein conducted a complete Beethoven symphony cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic, and cycles of Brahms and Schumann were to follow in the 1980s. Other orchestras he conducted on numerous occasions in the 1970s include the Israel Philharmonic, the Orchestre National de France, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
In 1970 Bernstein wrote and narrated a ninety-minute program filmed on location in and around Vienna as a celebration of Beethoven's 200th birthday. It featured parts of Bernstein's rehearsals and performance for the Otto Schenk production of Fidelio, Bernstein playing the 1st piano concerto and conducting the Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic, with the young Plácido Domingo amongst the soloists. The program was first telecast in 1970 on Austrian and British television, and then on CBS in the U.S. on Christmas Eve 1971. The show, originally entitled Beethoven's Birthday: A Celebration in Vienna, won an Emmy and was issued on DVD in 2005. In the summer of 1970, during the Festival of London, he conducted Verdi's Requiem Mass in St. Paul's Cathedral, with the London Symphony Orchestra.
Bernstein's major compositions during the 1970s were his Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players, and Dancers; his score for the ballet Dybbuk; his orchestral vocal work Songfest; and his U.S. bicentenary musical 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue written with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner which was his first real theatrical flop, and last original Broadway show. The world premiere of Bernstein's MASS took place on September 8, 1971. Commissioned by Jacqueline Kennedy for the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., it was partly intended as an anti-war statement. Hastily written in places, the work represented a fusion not only of different religious traditions (Latin liturgy, Hebrew prayer, and plenty of contemporary English lyrics) but also of different musical styles, including classical and rock music. It was originally a target of criticism from the Roman Catholic Church on the one hand and contemporary music critics who objected to its Broadway/populist elements on the other. In the present day, it is perhaps seen as less blasphemous and more a piece of its era: in 2000 it was even performed in the Vatican.
In 1972 Bernstein recorded Bizet's Carmen, with Marilyn Horne in the title role and James McCracken as Don Jose, after leading several stage performances of the opera at the Metropolitan Opera. The recording was one of the first in stereo to use the original spoken dialogue between the sung portions of the opera, rather than the musical recitatives that were composed by Ernest Guiraud after Bizet's death. The recording was Bernstein's first for Deutsche Grammophon and won a Grammy.
Bernstein was appointed in 1973 to the Charles Eliot Norton Chair as Professor of Poetry at his alma mater, Harvard University, and delivered a series of six televised lectures on music with musical examples played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. However, these lectures were not televised until 1976. Taking the title from a Charles Ives work, he called the series The Unanswered Question; it was a set of interdisciplinary lectures in which he borrowed terminology from contemporary linguistics to analyze and compare musical construction to language. The lectures are presently available in both book and DVD form. The DVD video was not taken directly from the lectures at Harvard, rather they were recreated again at the WGBH studios for filming. This appears to be the only surviving Norton lectures series available to the general public in video format. Noam Chomsky wrote in 2007 on the Znet forums about the linguistic aspects of the lecture: "I spent some time with Bernstein during the preparation and performance of the lectures. My feeling was that he was onto something, but I couldn't really judge how significant it was."
Bernstein played an instrumental role in the exiling of renowned cellist and conductor, Mstislav Rostropovich, from the USSR in 1974. Rostropovich, a strong believer in free speech and democracy, was officially held in disgrace; his concerts and tours both at home and abroad cancelled, and in 1972 he was prohibited to travel outside of the Soviet Union. During a trip to the USSR in 1974, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and his wife Joan, urged by Bernstein and others in the cultural sphere, mentioned Rostropovich's situation to Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet Union Communist Party Leader. Two days later, Rostropovich was granted his exit visa.[35][36]
Chevy Chase stated in his biography that Lorne Michaels wanted Bernstein to host Saturday Night Live in the show's first season (1975–76). Chase was seated next to Bernstein at a birthday party for Kurt Vonnegut and made the request in person. However, the pitch involved a Bernstein-conducted SNL version of West Side Story, and Bernstein was uninterested.[37]
In October 1976, Leonard Bernstein led the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and legendary pianist Claudio Arrau in an Amnesty International Benefit Concert in Munich. To honor his late wife and to continue their joint struggle for human rights, Leonard Bernstein established the Felicia Montealegre Bernstein Fund of Amnesty International USA to provide support for human rights activists who have few resources beyond personal dedication.[38]
In 1978, Bernstein returned to the Vienna State Opera to conduct a revival of the Otto Schenk production of Fidelio, now featuring Gundula Janowitz and René Kollo in the lead roles. At the same time, Bernstein made a studio recording of the opera for Deutsche Grammophon and the opera itself was filmed by Unitel and released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon in late 2006. In May 1978, the Israel Philharmonic played two U.S. concerts under his direction to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Orchestra under that name. On consecutive nights, the Orchestra, with the Choral Arts Society of Washington, performed Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and at Carnegie Hall in New York.
In 1979, Bernstein conducted the Berlin Philharmonic for the first time, in two charity concerts for Amnesty International involving performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The invitation for the concerts had come from the orchestra and not from its principal conductor Herbert von Karajan. There has been speculation about why Karajan never invited Bernstein to conduct his orchestra. (Karajan did conduct the New York Philharmonic during Bernstein's tenure.) The full reasons will probably never be known—reports suggest they were on friendly terms when they met, but sometimes practiced a little mutual one-upmanship.[39] One of the concerts was broadcast on radio and was posthumously released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon. One oddity of the recording is that the trombone section fails to enter at the climax of the finale, as a result of an audience member fainting just behind the trombones a few seconds earlier.
1980–1990[edit]
Bernstein received the Kennedy Center Honors award in 1980. For the rest of the 1980s he continued to conduct, teach, compose, and produce the occasional TV documentary. His most significant compositions of the decade were probably his opera A Quiet Place, which he wrote with Stephen Wadsworth and which premiered (in its original version) in Houston in 1983; his Divertimento for Orchestra; his Ḥalil for flute and orchestra; his Concerto for Orchestra "Jubilee Games"; and his song cycle Arias and Barcarolles, which was named after a comment President Dwight D. Eisenhower had made to him in 1960.
Bernstein with Maximilian Schell on PBS Beethoven TV series (1982)
In 1982 in the U.S., PBS aired an 11-part series of Bernstein's late 1970s films for Unitel of the Vienna Philharmonic playing all nine Beethoven symphonies and various other Beethoven works. Bernstein gave spoken introduction and actor Maximilian Schell was also featured on the programs, reading from Beethoven's letters.[40] The original films have since been released on DVD by Deutsche Grammophon. In addition to conducting in New York, Vienna and Israel, Bernstein was a regular guest conductor of other orchestras in the 1980s. These included the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam, with whom he recorded Mahler's First, Fourth, and Ninth Symphonies amongst other works; the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, with whom he recorded Wagner's Tristan und Isolde; Haydn's Creation; Mozart's Requiem and Great Mass in C minor; and the orchestra of Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, with whom he recorded some Debussy and Puccini's La bohème.
In 1982, he and Ernest Fleischmann founded the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute as a summer training academy along the lines of Tanglewood. Bernstein served as artistic director and taught conducting there until 1984. Around the same time, he performed and recorded some of his own works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon. Bernstein was also at the time a committed supporter of nuclear disarmament. In 1985 he took the European Community Youth Orchestra in a "Journey for Peace" tour around Europe and to Japan.
In 1984, he conducted a recording of West Side Story, the first time he had conducted the entire work. The recording, featuring what some critics felt were miscast opera singers such as Kiri Te Kanawa, José Carreras, and Tatiana Troyanos in the leading roles, was nevertheless an international bestseller. A TV documentary The Making of West Side Story about the recording was made at the same time and has been released as a DVD. Bernstein also continued to make his own TV documentaries during the 1980s, including The Little Drummer Boy, in which he discussed the music of Gustav Mahler, perhaps the composer he was most passionately interested in, and The Love of Three Orchestras, in which he discussed his work in New York, Vienna, and Israel.
In his later years, Bernstein's life and work were celebrated around the world (as they have been since his death). The Israel Philharmonic celebrated his involvement with them at festivals in Israel and Austria in 1977. In 1986 the London Symphony Orchestra mounted a Bernstein Festival in London with one concert that Bernstein himself conducted attended by the Queen. In 1988 Bernstein's 70th birthday was celebrated by a lavish televised gala at Tanglewood featuring many performers who had worked with him over the years.
During summer 1987, he celebrated the 100th anniversary of Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau. He gave a prodigious masterclass Inside the castle of Fontainebleau.[citation needed]
In December 1989, Bernstein conducted live performances and recorded in the studio his operetta Candide with the London Symphony Orchestra. The recording starred Jerry Hadley, June Anderson, Adolph Green, and Christa Ludwig in the leading roles. The use of opera singers in some roles perhaps fitted the style of operetta better than some critics had thought was the case for West Side Story, and the recording (released posthumously in 1991) was universally praised. One of the live concerts from the Barbican Centre in London is available on DVD. Candide had had a troubled history, with many rewrites and writers involved. Bernstein's concert and recording were based on a "final" version that had been first performed by Scottish Opera in 1988. The opening night (which Bernstein attended in Glasgow) was conducted by Bernstein's former student John Mauceri.
On December 25, 1989, Bernstein conducted Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in East Berlin's Schauspielhaus as part of a celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had conducted the same work in West Berlin the previous day. The concert was broadcast live in more than twenty countries to an estimated audience of 100 million people. For the occasion, Bernstein reworded Friedrich Schiller's text of the Ode to Joy, substituting the word Freiheit (freedom) for Freude (joy).[41] Bernstein, in his spoken introduction, said that they had "taken the liberty" of doing this because of a "most likely phony" story, apparently believed in some quarters, that Schiller wrote an "Ode to Freedom" that is now presumed lost. Bernstein added, "I'm sure that Beethoven would have given us his blessing."
In the summer of 1990, Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas founded the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo, Japan. Like his earlier activity in Los Angeles, this was a summer training school for musicians modeled on Tanglewood and is still in existence. At this time, Bernstein was already suffering from the lung disease that would lead to his death. In his opening address Bernstein said that he had decided to devote what time he had left to education. A video showing Bernstein speaking and rehearsing at the first Festival is available on DVD in Japan. In the same year, Bernstein received the Praemium Imperiale, an international prize awarded by the Japan Arts Association for lifetime achievement in the arts. Bernstein used the $100,000 prize to establish The Bernstein Education Through the Arts (BETA) Fund, Inc.[42] He provided this grant to develop an arts-based education program. The Leonard Bernstein Center was established in April 1992, and initiated extensive school-based research, resulting in the Bernstein Model, the Leonard Bernstein Artful Learning Program.[43]
Bernstein made his final performance as a conductor at Tanglewood on August 19, 1990, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Benjamin Britten's "Four Sea Interludes" from Peter Grimes, and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7.[44] He suffered a coughing fit during the third movement of the Beethoven symphony, but continued to conduct the piece until its conclusion, leaving the stage during the ovation, appearing exhausted and in pain.[45] The concert was later issued on CD as Leonard Bernstein – The Final Concert by Deutsche Grammophon (catalog number 431 768).[46]
Personal life[edit]
After much personal struggle and a turbulent on-off engagement, Bernstein married actress Felicia Cohn Montealegre on September 10, 1951. One suggestion is that he chose to marry partly to dispel rumors about his private life to help secure a major conducting appointment, following advice from his mentor Dimitri Mitropoulos about the conservative nature of orchestra boards.[39] In a book released in October 2013, The Leonard Bernstein Letters, his wife acknowledges his homosexuality. Felicia writes: "you are a homosexual and may never change—you don't admit to the possibility of a double life, but if your peace of mind, your health, your whole nervous system depend on a certain sexual pattern what can you do?" Arthur Laurents (Bernstein's collaborator in West Side Story) said that Bernstein was "a gay man who got married. He wasn't conflicted about it at all. He was just gay."[47] Shirley Rhoades Perle, another friend of Bernstein, said that she thought "he required men sexually and women emotionally."[48] But the early years of his marriage seem to have been happy, and no one has suggested Bernstein and his wife did not love each other. They had three children, Jamie, Alexander, and Nina.[49] There are reports, though, that Bernstein did sometimes have brief extramarital liaisons with young men, which several family friends have said his wife knew about.[48]
A major period of upheaval in Bernstein's personal life began in 1976 when he decided that he could no longer conceal his homosexuality and he left his wife Felicia for a period to live with the musical director of the classical music radio station KKHI-FM in San Francisco, Tom Cothran.[50] The next year Felicia was diagnosed with lung cancer and eventually Bernstein moved back in with her and cared for her until she died on June 16, 1978.[39] Bernstein is reported to have often spoken of his terrible guilt over his wife's death.[39] Most biographies of Bernstein state that his lifestyle became more excessive and his personal behavior sometimes more reckless and crude after her death. However, his public standing and many of his close friendships appear to have remained unaffected, and he resumed his busy schedule of musical activity.
His affairs with men included a ten-year relationship with Kunihiko Hashimoto, a Tokyo insurance employee. The two met when the New York Philharmonic was performing in Tokyo. Hashimoto went backstage and they ended up spending the night together. It was a long distance affair, but according to letters, they both cared about each other deeply. Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro by Mari Yoshihara (Oxford University Press, 2019) goes into detail about their letters and relationship including interviews with Hashimoto. The book also includes other letters Bernstein received from Japanese fans.[51]
Bernstein's grave in Green-Wood Cemetery
Death and legacy[edit]
Bernstein announced his retirement from conducting on October 9, 1990,[52] and died at his apartment at The Dakota of a heart attack five days later, brought on by mesothelioma.[53] He was 72 years old.[2] A longtime heavy smoker, he had emphysema from his mid-50s. On the day of his funeral procession through the streets of Manhattan, construction workers removed their hats and waved, calling out "Goodbye, Lenny."[54] Bernstein is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York,[55] next to his wife and with a copy of Mahler's Fifth Symphony lying across his heart.[56] On August 25, 2018 (his 100th birthday), he was honored with a Google Doodle.[57] Also for his centennial, the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles created an exhibition titled Leonard Bernstein at 100.[58][59] [60]
Social activism[edit]
While Bernstein was very well known for his music compositions and conducting, he was also known for his outspoken political views and his strong desire to further social change. His first aspirations for social change were made apparent in his producing (as a student) a recently banned opera, The Cradle Will Rock, by Marc Blitzstein, about the disparity between the working and upper class. His first opera, Trouble in Tahiti, was dedicated to Blitzstein and has a strong social theme, criticizing American civilization and suburban upper-class life in particular. As he went on in his career, Bernstein would go on to fight for everything from the influences of "American Music" to the disarming of western nuclear weapons.[61]
Like many of his friends and colleagues, Bernstein had been involved in various left-wing causes and organizations since the 1940s. He was blacklisted by the US State Department and CBS in the early 1950s, but unlike others his career was not greatly affected, and he was never required to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee.[62] His political life received substantial press coverage though in 1970, due to a gathering hosted at his Manhattan apartment at 895 Park Avenue[63] on January 14, 1970. Bernstein and his wife held the event seeking to raise awareness and money for the defense of several members of the Black Panther Party against a variety of charges, especially the case of the Panther 21.[64] The New York Times initially covered the gathering as a lifestyle item, but later posted an editorial harshly unfavorable to Bernstein following generally negative reaction to the widely publicized story.[65][66] This reaction culminated in June 1970 with the appearance of "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's", an essay by journalist Tom Wolfe featured on the cover of the magazine New York.[67] The article contrasted the Bernsteins' comfortable lifestyle in one of the world's most expensive neighborhoods with the anti-establishment politics of the Black Panthers. It led to the popularization of "radical chic" as a critical term.[68] Both Bernstein and his wife Felicia responded to the criticism, arguing that they were motivated not by a shallow desire to express fashionable sympathy but by their concern for civil liberties.[69][70]
Bernstein was named in the book Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television (1950) as a Communist along with Aaron Copland, Lena Horne, Pete Seeger, Artie Shaw and other prominent figures of the performing arts. Red Channels was issued by the right-wing journal Counterattack and was edited by Vincent Hartnett, who was later found to have libeled and defamed the noted radio personality John Henry Faulk.[71][72][73]
Philanthropy[edit]
Among the many awards Bernstein earned throughout his life, one allowed him to make one of his philanthropic dreams a reality. He had for a long time wanted to develop an international school to help promote the integration of arts into education. When he won the Praemium Imperiale, Japan Arts Association award for lifetime achievement in 1990,[74] he used the $100,000 that came with the award to build such a school in Nashville, that would strive to teach teachers how to better integrate music, dance, and theater into the school system which was "not working".[75] Unfortunately, the school was not able to open until shortly after Bernstein's death. This would eventually yield an initiative known as Artful Learning as part of the Leonard Bernstein Center.[76][77]
Influence and characteristics as a conductor[edit]
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Leonard Bernstein in rehearsal of his "Mass", 1971
Bernstein was one of the major figures in orchestral conducting in the second half of the 20th century. He was held in high regard amongst many musicians, including the members of the Vienna Philharmonic, evidenced by his honorary membership; the London Symphony Orchestra, of which he was president; and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he appeared regularly as guest conductor. He was probably the main conductor from the 1960s onwards who acquired a sort of superstar status similar to that of Herbert von Karajan, although unlike Karajan he conducted relatively little opera and part of Bernstein's fame was based on his role as a composer. As the first American-born music director of the New York Philharmonic, his rise to prominence was a factor in overcoming the perception of the time that the top conductors were necessarily trained in Europe.
Bernstein's conducting was characterized by extremes of emotion with the rhythmic pulse of the music conveyed visually through his balletic podium manner. Musicians often reported that his manner in rehearsal was the same as in concert. As he got older his performances tended to be overlaid to a greater extent with a personal expressiveness which often divided critical opinion. Extreme examples of this style can be found in his Deutsche Grammophon recordings of "Nimrod" from Elgar's Enigma Variations (1982), the end of Mahler's 9th Symphony (1985), and the finale of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony (1986), where in each case the tempos are well below those typically chosen.
Bernstein performed a wide repertoire from the Baroque era to the 20th century, although perhaps from the 1970s onwards he tended to focus more on music from the Romantic era. He was considered especially accomplished with the works of Gustav Mahler and with American composers in general, including George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Roy Harris, William Schuman, and of course himself. Some of his recordings of works by these composers would likely appear on many music critics' lists of recommended recordings. A list of his other well-thought-of recordings would include, among others, individual works from Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Nielsen, Sibelius, Stravinsky, Hindemith, and Shostakovich.[78] His recordings of Rhapsody in Blue (full-orchestra version) and An American in Paris for Columbia Records, released in 1959, are considered definitive by many, although Bernstein cut the Rhapsody slightly, and his more 'symphonic' approach with slower tempi is quite far from Gershwin's own conception of the piece, evident from his two recordings. (Oscar Levant, Earl Wild, and others come closer to Gershwin's own style.) Bernstein never conducted Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F, or more than a few excerpts from Porgy and Bess, although he did discuss the latter in his article Why Don't You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?, originally published in The New York Times and later reprinted in his 1959 book The Joy of Music.
In addition to being an active conductor, Bernstein was an influential teacher of conducting. During his many years of teaching at Tanglewood and elsewhere, he directly taught or mentored many conductors who are performing now, including John Mauceri, Marin Alsop, Herbert Blomstedt, Edo de Waart, Alexander Frey, Paavo Järvi, Eiji Oue, Maurice Peress, Seiji Ozawa (who made his American TV debut as the guest conductor on one of the Young People's Concerts), Carl St.Clair, Helmuth Rilling, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Jaap van Zweden. He also undoubtedly influenced the career choices of many American musicians who grew up watching his television programmes in the 1950s and 60s.
Recordings[edit]
Audio recording for CBS of the Symphony No. 3 by Danish composer Carl Nielsen in Copenhagen, 1965
Bernstein recorded extensively from the mid-1940s until just a few months before his death. Aside from those 1940s recordings, which were made for RCA Victor, Bernstein recorded primarily for Columbia Masterworks Records, especially when he was music director of the New York Philharmonic between 1958 and 1971. His typical pattern of recording at that time was to record major works in the studio immediately after they were presented in the orchestra's subscription concerts or on one of the Young People's Concerts, with any spare time used to record short orchestral showpieces and similar works. Many of these performances were digitally remastered and reissued by Sony Classical Records (the successor to American Columbia/CBS Masterworks following Sony's 1990 acquisition of Columbia/CBS Records) between 1992 and 1993 as part of its 100 volume, 125-CD "Royal Edition", as well as its 1997–2001 "Bernstein Century" series. The rights to Bernstein's 1940s RCA Victor recordings became fully owned by Sony following its 2008 acquisition of Bertelsmann Music Group's (BMG), and now controls both the RCA Victor and Columbia archives. The complete Bernstein Columbia and RCA Victor catalog was reissued on CD in a three-volume series of box sets (released in 2010, 2014, and 2018, respectively) comprising a total of 198 discs under the mantle "Leonard Bernstein Edition".
His later recordings (starting with Bizet's Carmen in 1972) were mostly made for Deutsche Grammophon, though he would occasionally return to the Columbia label. Notable exceptions include recordings of Gustav Mahler's Song of the Earth and Mozart's 15th piano concerto and "Linz" symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic for Decca Records (1966); Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy (1976) for EMI; and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1981) for Philips Records, a label that like Deutsche Grammophon was part of PolyGram at that time. Unlike his studio recordings for Columbia Masterworks, most of his later Deutsche Grammophon recordings were taken from live concerts (or edited together from several concerts with additional sessions to correct errors). Many replicate repertoire that he recorded in the 1950s and 60s.
In addition to his audio recordings, many of Bernstein's concerts from the 1970s onwards were recorded on motion picture film by the German film company Unitel. This included a complete cycle of the Mahler symphonies (with the Vienna Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra), as well as complete cycles of the Beethoven, Brahms and Schumann symphonies recorded at the same series of concerts as the audio recordings by Deutsche Grammophon. Many of these films appeared on LaserDisc and are now on DVD.
In total Bernstein was awarded 16 Grammys for his recordings in various categories, including several for posthumously released recordings. He was also awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 1985.
Influence and characteristics as a composer[edit]
Bernstein was an eclectic composer whose music fused elements of jazz, Jewish music, theatre music and the work of earlier composers like Aaron Copland, Igor Stravinsky, Darius Milhaud, George Gershwin, and Marc Blitzstein. Some of his works, especially his score for West Side Story, helped bridge the gap between classical and popular music. His music was rooted in tonality but in some works like his Kaddish Symphony and the opera A Quiet Place he mixed in 12-tone elements. Bernstein himself said his main motivation for composing was "to communicate" and that all his pieces, including his symphonies and concert works, "could in some sense be thought of as 'theatre' pieces."[79]
Place Léonard-Bernstein, a square in the 12th arrondissement of Paris
According to the League of American Orchestras,[80] he was the second most frequently performed American composer by U.S. orchestras in 2008–09 behind Copland, and he was the 16th most frequently performed composer overall by U.S. orchestras. (Some performances were probably due to the 2008 90th anniversary of his birth.) His most popular pieces were the Overture to Candide, the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, the Serenade after Plato's "Symposium" and the Three Dance Episodes from On the Town. His shows West Side Story, On the Town, Wonderful Town and Candide are regularly performed, and his symphonies and concert works are programmed from time to time by orchestras around the world. Since his death many of his works have been commercially recorded by artists other than himself. The Serenade, which has been recorded more than 10 times, is probably his most recorded work not taken from an actual theatre piece.
Despite the fact that he was a popular success as a composer, Bernstein himself is reported to have been disillusioned that some of his more serious works were not rated more highly by critics, and that he himself had not been able to devote more time to composing because of his conducting and other activities.[54] Professional criticism of Bernstein's music often involves discussing the degree to which he created something new as art versus simply skillfully borrowing and fusing together elements from others. In the late 1960s, Bernstein himself reflected that his eclecticism was in part due to his lack of lengthy periods devoted to composition, and that he was still seeking to enrich his own personal musical language in the manner of the great composers of the past, all of whom had borrowed elements from others.[81] Perhaps the harshest criticism he received from some critics in his lifetime though was directed at works like his Kaddish Symphony, his MASS and the opera A Quiet Place, where they found the underlying message of the piece or the text as either mildly embarrassing, clichéd or offensive. Despite this, all these pieces have been performed, discussed and reconsidered since his death.
Bernstein's works were performed several times for Pope John Paul II, including at World Youth Day in Denver on August 14, 1993 (excerpts from MASS), and at the Papal Concert to Commemorate the Shoah on April 7, 1994, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (Chichester Psalms and Symphony No. 3, Kaddish [excerpt]) in the Sala Nervi at the Vatican. Both performances were conducted by Gilbert Levine.
Although he taught conducting, Bernstein was not a teacher of composition as such, and he has no direct composing heirs. Perhaps the closest are composers like John Adams, who from the 1970s onwards indirectly adopted elements of his eclectic, theatrical style.
Anecdotes[edit]
Samuel Josef Bernstein, Leonard's father, was sometimes criticized for allegedly not giving more encouragement to his talented son. "How was I to know he would grow up to be Leonard Bernstein?" Samuel replied.[82]
Once, arriving at an airport, Leonard was importuned by a journalist who wanted to photograph him astride a motorcycle. Bernstein declined: "Sorry, I do not ride a motorcycle ... it would be phony." The photographer insisted and showed him the controls, explaining how to operate them. Bernstein then climbed onto the machine and – to the horror of colleagues – shot off at top speed across the airfield. After a few maneuvers he returned, grinning broadly. "Now you can take your picture ...I am a motorcycle rider."[83]
At an opera rehearsal in Vienna, Bernstein was confronted with an uncomprehending singer. After much repetition and patience, Bernstein remarked: "Sir, I know it's the historical prerogative of the tenor to be stupid ... but you are abusing that privilege."[84]
Works[edit]
Main article: List of compositions by Leonard Bernstein
Ballets[edit]
Fancy Free, 1944
Dybbuk (ballet), 1974
Operas[edit]
Trouble in Tahiti, 1951
Candide, 1956 (new libretto in 1973, operetta final revised version in 1989)
A Quiet Place, 1983, revised in 1986
Musicals[edit]
On The Town, 1944
Wonderful Town, 1953
West Side Story, 1957
The Race to Urga (incomplete), 1969
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, 1976
A Party with Betty Comden and Adolph Green, 1977
The Madwoman of Central Park West, (contributed to) 1979
Incidental music and other theatre[edit]
Peter Pan, 1950
The Lark, 1955
The Firstborn, 1958
MASS (theatre piece for singers, players and dancers), 1971
Side by Side by Sondheim* 1976
Film scores[edit]
On the Town, 1949 (only part of his music was used)
On the Waterfront, 1954 (soundtrack)
West Side Story, 1961
Orchestral[edit]
Symphony No. 1 Jeremiah, 1942
Symphony No. 2 The Age of Anxiety, (after W. H. Auden) for piano and orchestra, 1949 (revised in 1965)
Serenade after Plato's "Symposium" for solo violin, strings, harp and percussion, 1954
Prelude, Fugue, and Riffs for solo clarinet and jazz ensemble, 1949
Symphony No. 3 Kaddish, for orchestra, mixed chorus, boys' choir, speaker and soprano solo, 1963 (revised in 1977)
Songfest: A Cycle of American Poems for Six Singers and Orchestra, 1977
Slava! A Political Overture for orchestra, 1977
Ḥalil, nocturne for solo flute, piccolo, alto flute, percussion, harp and strings, 1981
Choral[edit]
Hashkiveinu for cantor (tenor), mixed chorus and organ, 1945
Missa Brevis for mixed chorus and countertenor solo, with percussion, 1988
Chichester Psalms for boy soprano (or countertenor), mixed chorus, and orchestra, 1965 (Reduced version for organ, harp and percussion)
Chamber music[edit]
Piano Trio, 1937
Sonata for Clarinet and Piano, 1942
Dance Suite, 1988
Vocal music[edit]
Big Stuff, sung by Billie Holiday
Opening Prayer for baritone and orchestra, 1986, opening of Carnegie Hall after restoration
Piano music[edit]
7 Anniversaries, 1944
4 Anniversaries, 1948
5 Anniversaries, 1952
13 Anniversaries, 1988
Bibliography[edit]
Bernstein, Leonard (1993) [1982]. Findings. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0-385-42437-0.
— (1993) [1966]. The Infinite Variety of Music. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN 978-0-385-42438-7.
— (2004) [1959]. The Joy of Music. Pompton Plains, New Jersey: Amadeus Press. ISBN 978-1-57467-104-9.
— (2006) [1962]. Young People's Concerts. Milwaukee; Cambridge: Amadeus Press. ISBN 978-1-57467-102-5.
— (1976). The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-92001-5.
— (2013). The Leonard Bernstein Letters'. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-17909-5.
Videography[edit]
The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard. West Long Branch, New Jersey: Kultur Video. VHS ISBN 1-56127-570-0. DVD ISBN 0-7697-1570-2. (videotape of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures given at Harvard in 1973.)
Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts with the New York Philharmonic. West Long Branch, New Jersey: Kultur Video. DVD ISBN 0-7697-1503-6.
Bernstein on Beethoven: A Celebration in Vienna/Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1. West Long Branch, Kultur Video. DVD
Leonard Bernstein: Omnibus – The Historic TV Broadcasts, 2010, E1 Ent.
Bernstein: Reflections (1978), A rare personal portrait of Leonard Bernstein by Peter Rosen. Euroarts DVD
Bernstein/Beethoven (1982), Deutsche Grammophon, DVD
The Metropolitan Opera Centennial Gala (1983), Deutsche Grammophon, DVD 00440-073-4538
Bernstein Conducts "West Side Story" (1985) (retitled The Making of West Side Story in re-releases) Deutsche Grammophon. DVD
"The Rite of Spring" in Rehearsal
Mozart's Great Mass in C minor, Exsultate, jubilate & Ave verum corpus (1990), Deutsche Grammophon. DVD 00440-073-4240
"Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note" (1998) Documentary on his life and music. Originally aired on PBS's American Masters series. DVD
Awards[edit]
Leonard Bernstein receiving the Edison Classical Music Award in 1968
Main article: List of Leonard Bernstein awards
Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1951[85]
Sonning Award (Denmark), 1965
Ditson Conductor's Award, 1958
George Peabody Medal – Johns Hopkins University, 1980
Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, 1987
Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal (UK), 1987
Edward MacDowell Medal, 1987[86]
Knight Grand Cross Order of Merit (Italy), 1989
Grammy Award for Best Album for Children
Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance
Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance
Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording
Grammy Award for Best Classical Vocal Performance
Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance
Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition
Grammy Award for Best Classical Album
Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award
Tony Award for Best Musical
Special Tony Award
Japan Arts Association Lifetime Achievement Award
Gramophone Hall of Fame entrant[87]
Commandeur de la Légion d'honneur, 1986
Leonard Bernstein is also a member of both the American Theater Hall of Fame,[88] and the Television Hall of Fame.[89] In 2015 he was inducted into the Legacy Walk.[90] **** Leonard Bernstein
AMERICAN COMPOSER AND CONDUCTOR
WRITTEN BY: The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
See Article History
Leonard Bernstein, (born August 25, 1918, Lawrence, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 14, 1990, New York, New York), American conductor, composer, and pianist noted for his accomplishments in both classical and popular music, for his flamboyant conducting style, and for his pedagogic flair, especially in concerts for young people.
Bernstein played piano from age 10. He attended Boston Latin School; Harvard University (A.B., 1939), where he took courses in music theory with Arthur Tillman Merritt and counterpoint with Walter Piston; the Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia (1939–41), where he studied conducting with Fritz Reiner and orchestration with Randall Thompson; and the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts, where he studied conducting with Serge Koussevitzky. In 1943 Bernstein was appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic; the first signal of his forthcoming success came on November 14, 1943, when he was summoned unexpectedly to substitute for the conductor Bruno Walter. His technical self-assurance under difficult circumstances and his interpretive excellence made an immediate impression and marked the beginning of a brilliant career. He subsequently conducted the New York City Center orchestra (1945–47) and appeared as guest conductor in the United States, Europe, and Israel. In 1953 he became the first American to conduct at La Scala in Milan. From 1958 to 1969 Bernstein was conductor and musical director of the New York Philharmonic, becoming the first American-born holder of those posts. With this orchestra he made several international tours in Latin America, Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan. His popularity increased through his appearances not only as conductor and pianist but also as a commentator and entertainer. Bernstein explained classical music to young listeners on such television shows as Omnibus and Young People’s Concerts. After 1969 he continued to write music and to perform as a guest conductor with several symphonies throughout the world.
Leonard Bernstein at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
Bernice B. Perry/Courtesy of The MacDowell Colony
As a composer Bernstein made skillful use of diverse elements ranging from biblical themes, as in the Symphony No. 1 (1942; also called Jeremiah) and the Chichester Psalms (1965); to jazz rhythms, as in the Symphony No. 2 (1949; The Age of Anxiety), after a poem by W.H. Auden; to Jewish liturgical themes, as in the Symphony No. 3 (1963; Kaddish). His best-known works are the musicals On the Town (1944; filmed 1949), Wonderful Town (1953; filmed 1958), Candide (1956), and the very popular West Side Story (1957; filmed 1961), written in collaboration with Stephen Sondheim and Jerome Robbins. He also wrote the scores for the ballets Fancy Free (1944), Facsimile (1946), and Dybbuk (1974), and he composed the music for the film On the Waterfront (1954), for which he received an Academy Award nomination. His Mass, written especially for the occasion, was performed at the opening of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., in September 1971. In 1989 he conducted two historic performances of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D Minor (1824; Choral), which were held in East and West Berlin to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. In 1990 Bernstein was awarded the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music.
Bernstein published a collection of lectures, The Joy of Music (1959); Young People’s Concerts, for Reading and Listening (1962, revised edition 1970); The Infinite Variety of Music (1966); and The Unanswered Question (1976), taken from his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (1973). ****
the genius of Leonard Bernstein
Composer, conductor, inspiration, FBI suspect … Leonard Bernstein was born 100 years ago this August, and this summer’s Proms will celebrate his work. Musicians, critics and his own family remember an astounding talent
Watch Bernstein’s one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti
Interviews by Imogen Tilden, Fiona Maddocks
Thu 12 Jul 2018 06.00 BST
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Leonard Bernstein conducting rehearsals at London’s Royal Albert Hall, for the Igor Stravinsky Memorial Concert. Photograph: PA/EMPICS
Marin Alsop: Bernstein the inspiration
Bernstein was impossibly brilliant in so many different areas: a genius conductor, composer, author, pianist, thinker, activist, educator and entertainer. But for me, his genius was in connecting the dots between all of these. Everything he read and experienced influenced everything he thought and did. I think he once said that he didn’t know whether he loved music or people more.
He had passion, enthusiasm and intense and boundless curiosity about our world. 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 was at the forefront of interdisciplinary learning - both a radical new concept and a harkening back to the Greeks. Education as a whole was important to him: information as food, nutrition, a source of power and, most importantly, possibility.
When I was growing up in New York, Bernstein was an integral part of the city’s life. I remember seeing him on TV on Sunday afternoons and going to hear New York Philharmonic Young People’s concerts. 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 would have gone to the moon to work with Bernstein. In fact, I studied with him at the Schleswig-Holstein festival in northern Germany in 1987 and then at Tanglewood [the Massachusetts festival centre], before I accompanied him to Japan. 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.
Bernstein was the consummate amalgam of high-brow, low-brow and every other brow. He ascribed to Duke Ellington’s view: there are two kinds of music, good and bad. West Side Story is one of the most skilfully written musical pieces of all time. He remains the benchmark for outreach and engagement.
Marin Alsop conducts the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in Bernstein’s Slava! (A Political Overture) and his Second Symphony at the Proms on 27 August.
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That Mahler feeling … Leonard Bernstein conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood in 1970. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
John Mauceri: Bernstein the conductor
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I first met Bernstein in 1971. I became his assistant, then editor, and I conducted many of his works. 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.
He was a very physical conductor. He would leave the ground on the upbeat - his style was not to everyone’s taste. “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 told me he hated the way he looked when he conducted, adding “but when I do it I get the sound I want.”
For him, Beethoven was the greatest composer of all time - his very first TV show was on Beethoven’s 5th symphony. Beethoven never lets you down, he said, because everything he wrote sounds inevitable. 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. 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.
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. All conductors are storytellers and Lenny was one of the best. 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. One of the things I miss most about him is his ability to tell a joke, because of his timing. Timing is everything in classical music.
John Mauceri is the author of Maestros and their Music: the Art and Alchemy of Conducting.
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Leonard Bernstein in discussion with students. Photograph: Ted Spiegel/Corbis via Getty Images
Barry Seldes: Bernstein the activist
From his early childhood until his death Bernstein was unwavering in his support for liberal causes. He was politically active all his life. As a student in the 1930s, he directed a production of The Cradle Will Rock, Marc Blitzstein’s opera about corruption and corporate greed. The local police reported him to the FBI, whose file on the young musician grew over the subsequent 15 years as the McCarthy era approached. Not only was Bernstein subject to FBI spying for his support for wartime Russian relief, and postwar support for refugees from fascism, but also for his support for civil rights for African Americans.
In 1949, Bernstein was labelled a communist and blacklisted, his music banned by the CBS network and from the movies. Only in 1953, when he signed an 11-page affidavit saying he was not a communist, was he allowed his passport back. He was removed from the blacklist, hired by Warner Bros to compose the music for the film On the Waterfront, and appeared on CBS. By 1957, as music director of the New York Philharmonic, he was fully rehabilitated.
Under President Kennedy, a personal friend, Bernstein was emboldened to speak publicly on behalf of the civil rights movement. He was part of the Stars for Freedom rally, a concert organised by Harry Belafonte to inspire the 25,000 marching from Selma to Montgomery to demand voting rights. He marched against the Vietnam war, but when, in 1970, he hosted a party to raise funds for Black Panther associates charged with criminal activity, and, moreover, supported the anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan, he found himself on the wrong side of not just the FBI but most of the liberal media. Luckily for Bernstein, Watergate destroyed Nixon, and Hoover died, before they could destroy the conductor’s career.
Barry Seldes is the author of Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician (University of California Press, 2009)
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Teacher … one of Bernstein’s televised Young People’s Concerts, in 1965. Photograph: Alamy
Humphrey Burton: Bernstein the TV star
I was often in the US in the early 1960s making films for [BBC arts programme] Monitor, so I saw at first hand how Lenny Bernstein’s outsize personality dominated the American television screen. He came over as warm-hearted, clever, inclusive, exciting. His was the greatest influence on us programme-makers when we started BBC2 and expanded six-fold the amount of classical music on television. Younger readers can have no idea of the influence he wielded, how he created an appetite for classical music among the general public.
For a decade from 1954 he delivered televised essays intended for grown-ups. Beethoven’s sketchbooks, the development of American musical comedy, what makes opera grand? Such subjects were grist to his mill: he was a born communicator and he had stimulating, jargon-free things to say about a broad range of musical subjects. When music director of the New York Philharmonic (in 1958, the first American in that post) he insisted on a clause ensuring four televised Young People’s Concerts each season. With only three TV channels on the air, those YPCs could pull in a prime-time audience of 30 million.
He certainly changed my life – I hope for the better – and I count the writing of his biography, along with the creation of Young Musician of the Year, as the most useful things I have done with my four score years and seven.
Humphrey Burton’s biography of Leonard Bernstein (1994) was recently republished by Faber with a new introduction.
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Attentive … young Jamie Bernstein helps her father with his work in the 1950s. Photograph: Bettmann Archive
Jamie Bernstein: Bernstein the father
He was an incredibly attentive and affectionate father. Of course there were many prolonged absences when he was travelling, and sometimes I found it frustrating to share him with the rest of the world, but when he was at home he was always really present. We’d have big dinners and play word games and have proper family time, my parents, my younger brother and sister and I. He loved to share anything he was excited about, and that was everything from Lewis Carroll to Gilbert and Sullivan to vaudeville routines he remembered from his childhood.
It was like he was two different people trapped in one body. There was the gregarious side who was always the last one standing at the party – that was the conductor and teacher in him; but then there was the composer side – and to compose you need solitude. Composing was always a tortuous process. He hated being alone, but he had to do it.
He thought of himself primarily as a composer and I think he’d have been particularly thrilled to find how his music is being performed and celebrated around the world in this centenary year. And it sounds better than ever - as fresh as a daisy. During his lifetime a “serious” composer was supposed to write 12-tone music - but because he kept writing those pesky melodies he was never embraced by academia and recognised as the great composer that he was. He’d have liked to have been celebrated more for his music during his lifetime but it wasn’t to be - it used to sometimes make him mad, but never for long. He accepted how things were, and he spent his life trying to make the world a better place. He wanted to use his music to say what was true, to raise consciousness and be an advocate for peace. Today’s young musicians are so different from their predecessors – there is no longer the premium on their being in the ivory tower, and they’re so much more involved in the world about them. They’re called citizen artists – an expression I love, and I think my father was Citizen Artist No 1.
Jamie Bernstein is the author of Famous Father Girl: A Memoir of Growing Up Bernstein.
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Spine-tingling … On The Town at the Open Air theatre, Regent’s Park. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Drew McOnie: Bernstein’s musical theatre
When I was young we would play cassettes of musical theatre in the car. I had two favourite songs I would play again and again: New York, New York (from On the Town) and West Side Story’s Dance at the Gym. It was only years later that I came to realise that they were both in fact written by the same person! Like so many people, the first Bernstein work I got to know well was West Side Story. I was thrilled by its combination of emotional expression through the music and the choreographic genius of Jerome Robbins. There can have been no better example of pure collaboration, of both art forms truly inhabiting the other. Bernstein’s music theatre always tells you a story. He doesn’t ever give you a toe-tapping tune just because the audience expect one at that point. He created fully formed emotional intelligent worlds in which his characters can truly live. It’s still today rare that the danced elements of shows take on any meaningful narrative responsibility. Bernstein and Robbins created huge moving dance sequences that, along with the almost operatic vocal requirements, put total confidence in each of the respective disciplines and say: “Go on ... you can do it ... we believe in you.”
His work certainly requires a level of discipline of its performers that is off the chart. I directed and choreographed On the Town for Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre last summer. It was terrifying to approach technically, but so thrilling to dance even if he’s cruel to choreographers’ brains! Before we started rehearsals I worried it was going to be challenging to get an entire company to hear and feel the music in the same way, but the music is so startlingly instinctual it was not a problem. Bernstein has that thing – in bucketloads – that makes a dancer’s spine tingle. The key to directing his work is simply to listen the inspiration that the music gives you. He believed that music theatre can be art of the very highest form. If we all led with our hearts rather than our minds and our concerns about what others might think, we might all get a little closer to his brilliance.
Drew McOnie is currently directing and choreographing Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom in the West End, and King Kong on Broadway.
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The European Community Youth Orchestra perform Kaddish, conducted by Bernstein, in 1985
Antonio Pappano: Bernstein the symphonist
I wanted to celebrate Bernstein’s centenary differently and decided on the symphonies as a cycle, works I hugely admire. I’ve recorded all three with the Orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia, and bring one to the Proms. Bernstein loved the colour and warmth of the orchestra. His compositions were maligned by many of his contemporaries – he didn’t fit into the music of Darmstadt, of Boulez, of the avant garde – but Lenny did more for American new music than all the rest put together.
Bernstein describes his symphonies as a crisis of faith, but always looking for redemption, for renewing that faith. Look what God throws down at us - it’s tough to be Jewish, tough to be Christian, tough to be religious - is the overriding theme of the cycle. His first symphony, Jeremiah, was written in 1942 - a time when the world was in a very dark place. His third and final symphony, Kaddish (1963, rev 1977) is a response to the assassination of JF Kennedy, the text of its narration written by Bernstein himself and conceived for his wife.
I watched him conduct Copland’s Third Symphony with the youth orchestra in Tanglewood. His relationship with the older composer was close, and it was a very important piece for him, the work was somehow so inside him that he copied shamelessly from it. Many gestures, in Bernstein’s first symphony and also at the end of his second, The Age of Anxiety, come from that Copland symphony. The falling fourths, certainly, but you can hear them in Mahler’s Symphony No 1 too, another composer who influenced Bernstein profoundly. Bernstein’s reputation as a conductor has, for some, overwhelmed his identity as a composer. He probably remained bitter about that, but he’s one of those composers where you can take every bar of his music and reference it back to something else and yet, like other great composers, you play three notes and you know it’s Bernstein.
Antonio Pappano conducts the Orchestra of the Academy of Santa Cecilia in Bernstein’s first symphony at the Proms on 10 August. Pappano’s Bernstein: The 3 Symphonies is out on 10 August on Warner Classics.
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Scarlett Strallen sings Glitter and Be Gay
Scarlett Strallen: Bernstein the singers’ favourite
I don’t think I fully appreciated the true genius of Bernstein until I came to learn the Candide score. Cunegonde is easily the favourite character I’ve ever played. She starts out as a tragic victim and then there’s this delicious flip, and things get simply hysterical. Her most famous aria, Glitter and Be Gay, her embrace of all things sparkly and glittery, is the very height of her madness, reflected in the music – which goes up a high E-flat. It’s incredibly difficult to sing, you need to be completely accurate, but also make it sound effortless.
But it’s all there in the music - all a singer needs is to get out of the way and deliver what Bernstein wrote in the score and the character comes to life. It’s all done for you in the writing. For me, Bernstein’s genius is like Shakespeare or Sondheim’s – every single note or word is intentional for the character. He understood singers completely, and asks all his musicians to push themselves to ridiculous limits, but it always feels so natural. It’s almost like it happens without you even knowing it. I think of it as using your voice to dance with the music. I love to watch footage of Bernstein conducting. He’s dancing about and having such fun.
Scarlett Strallen performs with John Wilson and the Oslo Philharmonic in the Best of Bernstein gala concert on 22 and 23 November 2018 at Oslo Konserthus.
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Candour … Leonard Bernstein in his New York apartment, 1947. Photograph: AP
Alex Ross: Bernstein and America today
Bernstein’s musical reputation seems more elevated today than it was in the years immediately following his death. As the works emerge from the huge shadow of his personality, they show their quirky virtues: the command of multiple musical languages, the daring juxtapositions of genre and style, the political outspokenness, and, of course, the sheer fluency of invention. Mass, in particular, is in the ascendant: whatever one might think of it, the conceit is extraordinarily original, even avant-garde. A Quiet Place is also slowly making its way. I wasn’t entirely convinced when I saw the New York City Opera stage the work in 2010, but the new Decca recording of a reduced chamber version, with Kent Nagano conducting, makes a strong case for the piece as a raw, honest, almost seismographic record of the fractures at the heart of the American dream.
Bernstein’s candour, his inability to say anything other than what he really meant, is what we miss most today. One can only imagine what yawps of rage the spectacle of Donald Trump would have elicited from him. The outward-looking, all-embracing America that Bernstein knew, loved and embodied seems very far away.
Alex Ross is the New Yorker’s music critic and the author of The Rest is Noise and Listen to This.
Leonard Bernstein’s music is celebrated throughout this year’s BBC Proms, which run from 13 July-8 September. Details: bbc.co.uk/proms
Exclusive: Watch Opera North’s acclaimed production of Bernstein’s one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti ***
First Decade (1936 - 1946)
On 26 December 1936, The Palestine Orchestra was born. The great Polish-born Jewish violinist and musician, Bronislaw Huberman, who foresaw the Holocaust, persuaded 75 Jewish musicians from major European orchestras to immigrate to Palestine, creating what he called the “materialization of the Zionist culture in the fatherland” on the sand dunes of Tel Aviv.
Huberman invited the greatest conductor of the time, Arturo Toscanini, to conduct the opening concert, performed at the Levant Fair in Tel Aviv on 26 December 1936. Toscanini abandoned his renowned NBC Orchestra for several weeks “to render paternal care to the newly born…” The great Maestro, who had previously escaped the rise of Fascism in his homeland of Italy, said: “I am doing this for humanity…”
The first decade saw intensive work on the musical crystallization and unity of the orchestra, whose excellent players had brought with them diverse styles. The primary languages spoken at this time were German, Polish, Hungarian and Russian. The young members spoke a little bit of Hebrew. The orchestra already hosted great conductors in its first decade, including Molinari, Steinberg, Dobrowen and Sargent. Its own artists were also invited to appear with the orchestra, among them conductors Michael Taube, George Singer, Mark Lavri and Paul Ben-Haim; soprano Bracha Zefira; pianist Pnina Salzman; cellist Thelma Yellin and others. The orchestra’s attempt to integrate into the Middle East scene led to tours in Egypt in 1940-43 (with Huberman as soloist), conducted by Toscanini and Molinari. During World War II, it appeared in a concert before Allied Forces in the Western Desert for soldiers of the Jewish Brigade, conducted by the Concertmaster at the time, Joseph Kaminski.
Second Decade (1947 - 1956)
This decade was one of the greatest and most significant in the history of the orchestra; the state of Israel was born. The orchestra changed its name to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and immediately became an integral part of the life of the Jewish nation reborn in its ancient land. It was only natural that the orchestra would play “Hatikvah” at the official ceremony of the Declaration of Independence of 14 May 1948 at the Tel Aviv Museum. On 20 November 1948, a few days after Israel’s liberation, the IPO performed a moving concert on the dunes of Beer Sheba. Senior orchestra members remember the young Leonard Bernstein playing and conducting the orchestra before 5,000 soldiers, within earshot of the retreating Egyptian forces.
The orchestra also traveled in armored cars to besieged Jerusalem, raising the morale of civilians and soldiers alike. This was also the decade in which some of the world’s most renowned artists came to identify with the State of Israel through their relationships to the orchestra: conductors Koussevitzky, Markevitch, Celibidache, Klecki, Paul Paray (who was the Music Director from 1949-51), Fricsay, Giulini, violinists Heifetz, Menuhin, Elman, Milstein, Stern, Francescatti (who did not leave Israel even upon the outbreak of the Sinai War in October 1956); pianists Arthur Rubinstein and Claudio Arrau; cellist Paul Tortellier; singers Jan Peerce and Jennie Tourel; and many others. Israeli works were also performed, and composers Lavri, Partos, Ben-Haim, Boskivitch, Avidom and Steinbers were regular guests on the orchestra’s stage. One must not forget to mention the IPO’s first tour to the USA in December 1950, conducted by Koussevitzky, Bernstein and Izler Solomon, a tour that brought much pride to the American Jewry. Later, the orchestra toured Europe, which was also exciting for the orchestra members and European Audiences alike.
The IPO released its first recording: Mahler’s symphonies conducted by Paul Klecki for Decca.
Third Decade (1957 - 1966)
The main event of this decade was the inauguration of the orchestra’s home, the Mann Auditorium. The initiator and principal benefactor was IPO American Friend Frederic R. Mann. The orchestra, which until then had been performing before thousands of subscribers in the small and tattered “Ohel Shem” Hall, seating 620 people, moved into its new hall with 2,800 seats. As a result, the orchestra’s subscribers grew into the tens of thousands. This wonderful and loyal audience is second to none and the backbone of the orchestra to this day.
The third decade also brought many of the world’s great artists. A crack in the Russian Iron Curtain allowed artists such as violinist David Oistrakh and cellist Msislav Rostropovich to join the orchestra for the first time. Conductors such as Josf Kripps, Istvan Ketesz, Jean Martinon (who was Music Director for one year), Solti, Dorati, Celibidach, Ormandy, Mitropulos and other giants enriched the orchestra and the audience with unforgettable experiences.
This was also the decade in which several young and promising artists made their debuts to much success: violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, pianist Daniel Barenboim and conductor Zubin Mehta, who continues his close connection with the orchestra to this day. Other IPO debuts were made by pianist Glenn Gould, violinist Henryk Szeryng, and Israeli artists Frank Peleg, Bracha Eden, Alexander Tamir, Yahli Wagman, and many others. Throughout this decade the orchestra continued to record with conductors George Solti and Lorin Maazel.
Fourth Decade (1967 - 1976)
The fourth decade was undoubtedly one of the most heroic decades in the orchestra’s history. On the eve of the Six Day War, with our neighbors threatening to annihilate us, a renowned conductor stopped conducting in the midst of a concert series and left Israel. The soloists of that series, soprano Roberta Peters and tenor Richard Tucker, did not panic and stayed. The war broke out and Zubin Mehta arrived from Europe on a plane full of ammunition. He was later joined by Daniel Barenboim and cellist Jacqueline du Pre, who were married in liberated Jerusalem. Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony in one of the IPO’s most moving concerts ever, in the Amphitheatre on Mount Scopus (July 1967). Isaac Stern was the soloist in this concert, and all of the nation’s heads of state were present. The IPO performed Verdi’s Requiem in Bethlehem, conducted by Mehta, and for IDF soldiers in Sharm-e-Sheikh, conducted by Shalom Ronly-Riklis. Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Platigorsky returned to Israel for performances with the orchestra, and were enthusiastically received. For the first time, in 1971, the IPO was invited to take part in the prestigious European festivals in Salzburg, Lucerne, and Edinburgh. Loud arguments were made as to whether or not the orchestra should play in Berlin; finally, the decision was to play. The German audience responded enthusiastically to Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 and demanded an encore. Mehta declared: “Hatikva,” and thus our national anthem was played 500 meters from the Reichstag, the site from which the orders for the massacre of the Jewish people came. In 1973 the Yom Kippur War broke out, and the orchestra continued to perform for IDF soldiers, from the Golan Heights to Sinai.
The great pianist Arthur Rubinstein, who had lost his eyesight, made his final recording with the orchestra: Brahms’ First Piano Concerto conducted by Zubin Mehta (April 1976).
Fifth Decade (1977 - 1986)
This decade was filled with extraordinary events. In 1982, “Huberman Week” took place, celebrating 100 years since the birth of the orchestra’s founder and featuring the world’s greatest violinists. In 1986 the IPO celebrated its Jubilee with an exceptional festival featuring renowned conductors and soloists; Leonard Bernstein wrote his work “Jubilee Games” especially for the occasion. A short while thereafter the orchestra celebrated 100 years since the birth of Arthur Rubinstein with distinguished pianists who travelled to Israel to perform in memory of the great maestro. In this decade Zubin Mehta was appointed Music Director for Life, and excitedly declared, “I will stay as long as the players want me.”
This was a decade of successful tours. The orchestra received enthusiastic reviews of Beethoven’s “Fidello” and Mahler’s 5th Symphony with Mehta and Bernstein’s “Kaddish” Symphony in memory of the Holocaust victims, conducted by the composer in Berlin. Bernstein took the orchestra to Europe, USA, Mexico and Japan, and Zubin Mehta conducted a moving concert at the “Good Fence” on the Lebanese border, with a mixed audience of Israelis and Lebanese on both sides of the fence.
The IPO recorded many works for major labels: Sony, EMI, Deutsche Gramophone, Teldec and others, conducted by Mehta, Bernstein, Walter Weller and Raphael Kubelik.
Sixth Decade (1987 - 1996)
This decade was also adorned with exciting moments. The IPO embarked on its first tour of Poland, and how symbolic it was: an orchestra founded by musicians who escaped the Nazis at the last moment, performing in the country which suffered the greatest human loss in the German death camps. It felt like a proclamation: “We are here, and the Jewish people, culture and heritage cannot be annihilated.”
The gates of the USSR were also opened to the orchestra, which performed with conductor Zubin Mehta and soloist Itzhak Perlman. The connections between the USSR and Israel were immense. It was the only dream of the Jews from this country to immigrate to Israel—a dream that came true and led to many new immigrant musicians joining the orchestra’s ranks. The orchestra also made its first tour of China and India, the homeland of Zubin Mehta.
In the sixth decade the IPO named Leonard Bernstein Laureate Conductor of the IPO, for his 40 years of activity with the orchestra, and the celebrated musician shed a tear upon receiving the honorary title (May 1988). Conductor Kurt Masur made his Israeli debut, and after an enthusiastic reception, toured with the orchestra in the USA. In 1992 he received the title of Honorary Guest Conductor. Other moving events were the world premieres in May 1987 of Noam Sheriff’s “Mehaye Hamelin” (“Ressurection of the dead”), depicting the revival of the Jewish people, performed at the inauguration of the Jewish-Historic Museum Amsterdam, in the presence of the Queen of Holland and many European Prime Ministers, and the performance of Sheriff’s Spanish Passion” in Toledo (1991), in a concert conducted by Zubin Mehta dropped everything and rushed to conduct the orchestra amidst the Scud missile attacks. 25 members of the orchestra spent the war as reservists in the IDF. James Levine made his IPO debut in festive and successful concerts. In April 1996 the IPO celebrated Mehta’s 60th birthday in an exciting and eventful tour of the USA, in which the American Friends of the IPO proved yet again their continuing support of the orchestra.
Under the auspices of the IPO Foundation, associations of friends to aid the orchestra were founded throughout the world. The orchestra continued to “change form” with senior members, the pillars of the orchestra, retiring, new young blood ran through its veins, many coming from the ranks of the Young Israel Philharmonic.
This was also the case with the audience: our efforts to attract new and younger subscribers to our concert halls, were successful. Exciting musical programs, new series and focused activity for youth lead the IPO into its seventh decade, yet another decade of cultural and musical activity.
Seventh Decade (1997 - 2006)
In the seventh decade, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s fortunes reflected the political turmoil of the Middle East. In the days of the Oslo Accords, a period of unprecedented optimism in Israeli society, the IPO saluted Israeli’s own finest artists and performers, Moshe Wilensky, Sasha Argov, Naomi Shemer, Nurit Hirsch, Esther Ofarim and Yoni Rechter, with special concerts. Bestselling recordings featuring the IPO accompanying Isareli artists Achinoam Nini, David D’Or and Yehudit Ravitz appeared alongside those of the “Mediterranean” sound by Greek greats Dalares and Glikeria.
Zubin Mehta was asked to lead the IPO in a historic concert bringing Palestinian and Jewish children together in the concert hall. Orchestra members shuffled between Bethlehem in the Palestinian Authority and Beit Shemsh, a typical Israeli development town, to prepare 500 youngsters for an orchestra concert. Finding “neutral territory” for children from Deheshe, a refugee camp, and Beit Shemesh was not an easy task, but when Mehta finally brought the baton down in Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Jerusalem YMCA, 500 children had an unforgettable experience. This event sparked the imagination of the American Friends of the IPO, and within months, “Keynote,” the education department of the orchestra, was founded. Through their support, the Keynote Program continues to develop, embracing 20,000 youngsters annually, from kindergarten to university.
These happy days were soon to end. With the outbreak of the Second Intifada, last minute cancellations threatened each and every concert. Foreign artists, frightened by suicide bombers and unrelenting reports in the press, abandoned the orchestra and the Israeli audience when their commitment was most needed. The IPO audience responded by showing unfailing loyalty, filling the Mann Auditorium nightly. New friends were found: Valery Gergiev, Fazil Say, George Pehlivanian, Gustavo Dudamel, Joshua Bell, Maxim Vengerov, and Lang Lang. Many veteran artists never cancelled: Kurt Masur, Yoel Levi, Daniel Oren, Rafael Frunbeck de Burgos and, of course, Maestro Mehta. As the new millennium began, the IPO also began to re-invent itself. New series were created nearly every season in order to present a more attractive product to the audience: “Jeans,” a late-night informal concert; Friday afternoon matinee; 7:00 in the Evening; “Intermezzo” – coffee and concert of Friday morning for both Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem audiences.
Maestro Mehta, who during this decade was also Artistic Director of the Bayerische Staatsoper, created a valuable bridge to Tel-Aviv University by founding the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music, an academy where the Philharmonic’s leading players are coaching tomorrow’s musicians.
Eighth Decade (2007 - 2016)
The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra’s eighth decade began with celebrations of the orchestra’s 70th birthday: three weeks of festive concerts at Heichal Hatarbut in Tel Aviv, a birthday celebration with an audience of 24,000 music fans! Artists and friends of the IPO Foundation in Israel and across the world participated in post-concert events in the upper foyer. The orchestra and Maestro Mehta were honored when they visited the Knesset prior to the IPO’s gala concert in Jerusalem. As a special tribute to the founders of the orchestra, the descendants of the original 65 members of Bronislaw Huberman’s Palestine Symphony Orchestra were invited to Heichal Hatarbut. The list of artists and guests who took part in the orchestra’s 70th as well as 75th birthday celebrations included Valery Gergiev, Daniel Barenboim, Radu Lupu, Pinchas Zukerman, Gil Shaham, Gustavo Dudamel, Evgeny Kissin, Kurt Masur and his son Ken-David, Mischa Maisky, Christoph von Dohnanyi, Yefim Bronfman, Maxim Vengerov, Murray Perahia and Yuja Wang.
Other milestones of the eighth decade were the celebration of Israel’s 60th Independence Day; Zubin Mehta’s 40th anniversary as the Philharmonic’s Music Director; his 50-years in collaboration with the Philharmonic and his 75th birthday.
The major issue of the day was the renovation of Heichal Hatarbut, which was originally built in 1957. After many years of planning and hopeful expectations, the orchestra was deeply disappointed when the original renovation plan was rejected. The renovation of Habima Theater, Heichal Hatarbut’s neighbor, and the building of an underground car park got underway and four years of dust and constant construction passed while the IPO’s plans remained on the drawing board. Renewed dialogue between Tel Aviv Municipality and the IPO bore fruit and, in August 2011, the long-awaited renovations began. The IPO’s 76th season of concerts was divided between Tel Aviv University’s Smolarz Auditorium and Hangar 11 at the Tel Aviv Port, before the orchestra returned to its renovated premises.
As always, the orchestra did not forsake its concert tours abroad, during which there were several highpoints such as New Year’s Eve celebrations in the People’s Republic of China (2007)! Zubin Mehta and the orchestra offered the Chinese audience a taste of the new year with pieces such as “An Evening in Vienna” when they recreated the atmosphere of the city’s famed Musikverein Hall. In October 2008, Mehta honored the memory of his father, Mehli Mehta, on the centenary of his birth, with an amazing week-long program of concerts in Mumbai. Placido Domingo, Barbara Fritolli, Pinchas Zukerman and Daniel Barenboim joined the Philharmonic’s festivities.
On the IPO’s tour of European festivals, to mark its 75th birthday, the orchestra visited 18 cities and gave 21 concerts in 30 days. The orchestra was received with great warmth and excelled in its performances. Paris, London, Madrid, Milan and Bucharest were just some of the high points. The tour will also undoubtedly be remembered for the disruption caused by a small but well-organized group of anti-Israel demonstrators, which took place during the orchestra’s “Proms” concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall, which was broadcast live on the BBC. Mehta, soloist Gil Shaham and the Philharmonic waited patiently while the audience of IPO fans shouted “get out! get out!” at the demonstrators who were then escorted out of the hall.
As usual, the IPO continued its tour in the U.S. and also sent a stream of chamber music ensembles to the U.S., which helped strengthen the orchestra’s relationship with its most dedicated supporters.
The IPO entered the digital age when it launched live broadcasts on its website during its 75th birthday celebrations. The site also serves as a platform for tour blogs, interviews with musicians, online ticket sales and a flow of general information for subscribers and concertgoers.**** Shimon Rudolf "Rudi" Weissenstein (Hebrew: רודי ויסנשטין; February 17, 1910 in Jihlava, Bohemia – October 20, 1999 in Tel Aviv) was an Israeli photographer. He was best known for his extensive photo documentation of the everyday life of Jewish immigrants in the 1930s. The only photographs of Israel's declaration of independence by David Ben Gurion in 1948 are by Weissenstein, who built a collection of over a million negatives.[1]
Contents
1 Biography
2 Legacy
2.1 Exhibitions
3 Bibliography
4 References
Biography[edit]
Rudi Weissenstein was born in 1910 in the Bohemian-Moravian town of Jihlava and grew up as one of four children. From 1929 to 1931 he completed an apprenticeship as a book printer at the Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt in Vienna. He then completed his military service in the Czechoslovak army and then worked as a photographer at the Prague and Vienna newspapers. Since 1934 Weissenstein planned his emigration to Palestine and he left Europe in the late 1935, reaching Haifa in January 1936. He continued to work as a photographer and journalist and in 1940 married Miriam Arnstein (1913-2011), who had studied dance and acrobatics in Vienna and had emigrated to Palestine before Weissenstein. Together they opened Photo House Pri-Or in Tel Aviv on Allenby street in 1940. Weissenstein documented the Jewish everyday and cultural life in Tel Aviv, including numerous prominent personalities - artists and politicians, such as Marc Chagall, Max Brod, Eleanor Roosevelt, Isaac Stern and the painter Nahum Gutman. He photographed for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra since the first concert conducted by Arturo Toscanini. Weissenstein's most well-known photograph is that of the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel on May 14, 1948, by David Ben Gurion, where he was the only accredited photographer.[2]
Legacy[edit]
Rudi Weissenstein died in 1992 and his estate - a photo archive of more than 250,000 negatives was managed and maintained by his widow until her death in 2011. Since 2011, the archive and Photo House is managed by his grandson Ben Peter Weissenstein in a new store on Tshernichovski Street, received from the Tel Aviv municipality. Miriam Weissenstein and Ben Peter Weissenstein were part of the documentary film "Life In Stills" by Tamar Tal, dealing among other things with the history of the photo house, which Rudi Weissenstein had opened.[3]
Exhibitions[edit]
Weissenstein's photographs have been shown and awarded numerous prizes in Israel and abroad, among others in 1961 with the award at the International Photography Exhibition in Moscow for the recording "Working Hands". His works were exhibited in Heussenstamm Gallery in Frankfurt, Germany; Eckhart Gallery, The Hague; The Jewish Museum in Munich, Germany.[4] The last exhibition in Germany "Your happy eyes" in 2010 was opened by Miriam Weissenstein. ***
RUDI WEISSENSTEIN your happy eyes
Sep 6 - Oct 20, 2013
"My picture archive grew every day," wrote Rudi Weissenstein (1910-1992) in retrospect. Today, more than twenty years after his death, not all of the photographs by the photographer from Jihlava / Jihlava (now the Czech Republic) have been seen: With over a million negatives, he has created the largest private image archive in Israel - the visual memory of his country.
Passers-by in Tel Aviv heard the news of the outbreak of the Second World War on September 1, 1939.
Equipped with a camera, press card and ten lira, Weissenstein emigrated to Palestine in 1936, where he worked as a freelance photojournalist for newspapers and the press abroad. The choice of motifs was correspondingly varied: Weissenstein's photographs, mainly taken between the 1930s and 1970s, depict a multifaceted Israel during the construction years. While traveling through the country, he documented the arrival of Jewish immigrants, the construction of new settlements and industries, the collectives in the kibbutz, Arab Bedouins as well as military parades, cultural events and everyday scenes. In addition, Weissenstein accompanied the work of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra for more than forty years and worked temporarily for the United Nations.
In 1940, when World War II had already reached the Middle East, Weissenstein founded the Photo House Pri-Or in Tel Aviv. The archive can still be viewed there today. His first customers were English, Australian and Canadian soldiers. Personalities followed who later ranked among the leading minds of Israel: Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and many others. Weissenstein portrayed them all, because soon it was said: "Anyone who is on display in the Pri-Or shop window will win the next elections."
Construction of a housing estate by the construction company Solel Bonen, 1951.
Weissenstein has rarely photographed the country's political events. Nevertheless, he was invited to the Tel Aviv Museum on Rothschild Boulevard on May 14, 1948: as the only officially licensed photographer, he was allowed to photograph the proclamation of the State of Israel. His recording of David Ben-Gurion reading the Israeli Declaration of Independence went around the world.
The exhibition YOUR HAPPY EYES presents a documentary and artistic excerpt from Rudi Weissenstein's work, with which the photographer became one of the most important chroniclers of Israel. ***
Rudi Weissenstein Documents a State in the Making
By Hana Kofler | 2002
Shimon Rudolph Weissenstein was born in 1910 in the Moravian city of Iglau in Czechoslovakia. His father Richard, the owner of a carton factory, was an amateur photographer, and in his laboratory Rudi made his first steps as a young photographer, having received from his father at the age of eight a wooden Tuchlauben 9 camera which was invented by Moll and purchased in 1890. His mother, Emma, played the piano, and it was from her that Rudi inherited his great passion for music, a love which accompanied him throughout his life. Weissenstein grew up in a Zionist home infused with European culture. His mother tongue was German, and in his youth he was active in the German-Jewish youth movement Blau Weiss. In the high school which he attended in the city of Bergreichenstein, Rudi was exposed to anti-Semitism which gradually became more widespread, and due to which he left Europe when a decision was necessary. In 1928 he was admitted to the Kunsthochschule in Vienna, where he expanded his knowledge in the fields of graphic design and printing, chemistry, photography, retouching, optics and archive management, as well as in the humanist subjects which included music, psychology and philosophy. Upon graduating in 1931, he was hired as press photographer for the Czech Foreign Ministry journal in Prague, and concurrently worked in the European Photography Center which operated in the city. Between 1933 and 1934 he served in the Czech Army. His parents, who envisioned his future as a hotelier, enrolled him for studies in Switzerland, but having independently contacted Omanut press in Tel Aviv, he decided to travel to Palestine despite his parents' objection.
In January 1936 Weissenstein arrived at Jaffa Port, with a press photographer's certificate and a set of cameras. He went to a kibbutz but stayed only one day before deciding to leave for Tel Aviv. With the little money he had he rented an apartment which served him as both a home and a photo lab. His sister, Helli, seven years his senior, had already been in the country a year. The fate of the remaining family members who stayed behind was sealed with the outbreak of the war. His brother Theodore passed away in a work camp, his sister Bertha fled to France and was active in the French Resistance. His mother died in Theresienstadt, and his father, who survived the Holocaust, arrived in the country at the age of 75.
1936 was a very busy year in the life of photographer Rudi Weissenstein. Shortly after his arrival he chanced upon Miriam Arnstein in Tel Aviv. Miriam had immigrated to Palestine with her family from Czechoslovakia in 1921. Her father built their home in a Tel Aviv neighborhood, where he established an ice factory. Three years after their meeting, Miriam and Rudi were married in a modest ceremony. Miriam was his partner in the photography businesses, the mother of his three children, a private chauffeur on occasion, and a close assistant for 55 years. Since Rudi's passing in 1992 she has continued with the enterprise of documenting the photograph archive, despite her age. Her grandson, Ben Peter, has recently joined her, and been entrusted with the tasks of preserving the rare negatives and digitizing all the visual and textual information gathered in that archive.
Weissenstein documented the reality of the mid-1930s that he saw after his arrival in the country with a creative intensity that corresponded with the pace of the events in his new homeland. In those years the economic state in the country was in decline, and the papers reported on pogroms in Poland and the persecution of Jews in Europe. The British mandatory government separated the Jewish community (yishuv), which was divided in its views and positions about the land of Israel and its local Arab inhabitants, from the Arab majority at the time, which demanded that the British government stop Jewish immigration to Palestine, cease the transfer of land to Jewish hands, and constitute autonomous institutions with an Arab majority. In April 1936 a general strike was declared, and the armed anti-British, anti-Zionist Arab Revolt broke out, continuing for three years. In the local Jewish community, as well as among the many European Jewish communities in distress, acute disputes arose between the various Zionist streams, between those who sided with partition of the country and those who objected to it, between Zionists and anti-Zionists, between adherents of Greater Israel and supporters of bi-nationality or the region's division into cantons – ideologies whose voice was heard ever more forcefully as the power of the British mandate in Palestine waned.
In the second half of the 1930s clear signs of bourgeois tendencies became discernible, affecting the working public in the country. During these years tens of thousands of men of means and entrepreneurs, technicians, skilled workers and "working intelligentsia" came to the country. The immigration waves were largely urban, and concentrated mainly in the three big cities. Tel Aviv grew rapidly into a metropolis of 150,000 inhabitants. Urban development was tied with the development of industry. Established factories grew and expanded, and many new ones emerged by their side. Investment in the industry and electricity production increased substantially in comparison to the previous decade. The immigration of scholars and students raised the levels of education and research in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and at the Haifa Technion. The Palestine Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in Tel Aviv, and publishing houses and newspapers multiplied.
As a photojournalist by training, Rudi Weissenstein perceived himself as a quintessential press photographer, a field in which he had gained experience during his early years of work in Prague. He was an independent photographer and wanted to set up an archive. The circumstances of the time and place furnished him with fascinating photographic materials which occupied all the period's photographers, many of whom hailed from Germany and Central-Eastern Europe, and arrived in the country during those years. The institutional demand for documentation of the Zionist enterprise, the intense nature of the events in those days, and the personal initiative of the many photographers yielded an accurate recording of an existential, political, ideological, social, and artistic state of affairs, providing fertile ground for the research of local photography.
Weissenstein started operating in every possible field: he followed media coverage of news events from the country, which were mainly disseminated by the Jewish Agency, the JNF, Keren Hayesod Foundation Fund, WIZO, etc. in the Jewish communities overseas. He traveled throughout the country and photographed new settlements, the fifth wave of immigration, the civil unrest in Tel Aviv, the developing construction in the country, parades and processions, art events in all creative fields, industry, cityscapes and pastoral vistas, cafés and cinemas, urban life, national propaganda, immigrant ships, portraits, the first concert of the Palestine Philharmonic conducted by Toscanini, street scenes, and so on. Weissenstein's photographs started appearing on postage stamps and banknotes; they were awarded various prizes and merit certificates, and were presented in exhibitions locally and internationally.
In the summer of 1939, as the Arab Revolt subsided, the British published the White Paper, which stirred the Jewish community in the country. Tel Aviv became the focal point of the struggle against the plan that would have put an end to the Balfour Declaration. On August 28 that year the illegal immigrant ship Parita reached the country's shores and ran aground on Tel Aviv's Frishman beach; September 2, one day after the outbreak of World War II, saw the arrival of the immigrant vessel Tiger Hill.
The war temporarily stopped the struggle against the mandatory government, and many joined the British Army. All these events were captured by Weissenstein's lens. In the autumn of 1940 Italian planes bombed Tel Aviv. Many left the city, among them Rudi and Miriam Weissenstein, who were married that year, and rented a one-room apartment with a communal kitchen in Herzliya. Rudi used to travel to Tel Aviv on his motorbike every day. That same year he opened Photo Prior. In the wake of World War II the Jewish struggle against the British Mandatory government was resumed with excessive strength. Concurrent with the tension in the country in the 1940s, however, cultural life, and specifically the café culture, flourished in Tel Aviv. On November 29, 1947, the city's residents flooded its streets in anticipation of the UN decision concerning the country's partition. The next day Weissenstein reported with his camera at Mograbi Square, perpetuating the outbursts of joy and the Horah dancing. The war that followed the decision was inevitable. After months of bitter struggle waged by the Arabs of Jaffa and the surrounding villages, Jaffa was captured on May 13, 1948, as the last British left.
On the day of Jaffa's surrender, Weissenstein received an official invitation to attend the State of Israel Declaration of Independence signing ceremony the next day, May 14, 19`48, 4 p.m., at the Tel Aviv Museum, 16 Rothschild Boulevard. Weissenstein was asked to keep the contents of the invitation and the time of the session a secret. He was also asked to arrive in dark festive clothing. He was the only still photographer invited to document the ceremony (a claim disputed to this very day), and the historical photographs he took were published the world over. When he left the Museum building at the end of the ceremony, Weissenstein took pictures of the great crowd that waited in the concourse, and of the photographers who were left outside, cameras in hand, in the front rows. The next day the city of Tel Aviv was attacked by Egyptian bombers.
Weissenstein did not document wars, and shunned all political involvement. Beginning in 1936 he would travel throughout the country and photograph the exotica of Jewish and Arab life for his own pleasure, as well as distinctive cityscapes in Jerusalem. In 1938 he perpetuated the settling of Kibbutz Hanita and the Arab neighbors coming to greet its founders. In 1942 he was commissioned to photograph the residents of the Arab village that provided water for members of Kibbutz Dorot in the Negev. In the 1950s his photographs frequently touched upon the interaction between the Israeli establishment and the Arab citizens of Nazareth, Lod, Ramla, Haifa, the Galilee, Beersheba and the Negev. The commissioned photographs were intended to present the ostensible coexistence between the Arab inhabitants and the Jewish authorities and settlers. After the establishment of the State, Weissenstein continued to photograph the unique atmosphere in the nascent country: the first anniversary celebrations of the immigrants who settled in Jaffa, Communist Party gatherings, May Day demonstrations, pictures from the transit camps (ma'abarot), and the construction boom throughout the country. The austerity policy implemented in the State's first years, due to the massive immigration and rapid population growth, limited consumerism in favor of crucial national goals. The government's food rationing policy and its side-effects were likewise perpetuated by Weissenstein. He documented the steel workers' strike, Knesset elections, demonstrations, the job hunting market in the city streets, job seekers in the employment offices, shops for rationed provisions, relief work, road paving, construction and industry, inauguration of the train station in Tel Aviv, the opening of the first supermarket, numerous cultural events, concerts of the Philharmonic Orchestra with the greatest conductors and soloists who arrived from overseas, fashion shows, the inauguration of Tel Aviv Museum's Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, etc.
In the wake of the Six Day War, Weissenstein photographed landscapes and local figures in East Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Beit Jala, Nablus, Hebron, and Jericho. Toward the 1960s he used to go to Jaffa to capture the city's romantic-mysterious facet, with its churches and alleys, the mosque, the Clock Tower, the fishermen returning from sea at nightfall, and the Tel Aviv shoreline and promenade.
On Allenby Street that curves to the sea new businesses opened constantly; Mograbi Square saw days of wild excitement, and Mograbi cinema house which had been the focal point of cultural life in Tel Aviv was razed, Herbert Samuel Square was renovated over the years, but remained rather negligible in the general cityscape, and the centers of events shifted location. Only Weissenstein's Studio remained in place, as a reminder of other times when the city's heart throbbed around it.
The time that passed only reinforced Weissenstein's consciousness of the value of preservation and the importance of registering and operating his photographic archive on which he continued to toil every spare moment. A comprehensive perusal of Weissenstein's archive illustrates his being a total and complete photojournalist, who left behind a record of rare and fascinating chapters of an Eretz-Israeli reality. ebay 4855