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Robin Lynam

Leonard Bernstein: American Original
by Burton Bernstein and  Barbara  Haws
Collins, HK$240
'Another book on Leonard Bernstein? Aren't there enough already?' asks Barbara  Haws, researcher and co-compiler of this collection of essays, photographs and reminiscences. The answer to that question is probably yes, but this is not a bad addition to the pile.
While it can hardly be said to contain any revelatory scholarship, or to represent a comprehensive or balanced account of the life and work of a remarkable and complex man, Leonard Bernstein: American Original is an absorbing scrapbook and contains some thoughtful writing on the artist's life and times. It is an appropriate publication to mark what would have been Bernstein's 90th birthday on October 14, and the half-century of his taking over the Music Director's position with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1958.
The book is as much about the pictures as the words. American Original  is full of black and white images of Bernstein at work and play - he had a sideline supervisory involvement with the orchestra's baseball team and enjoyed his nightlife - and of programmes, letters, annotations to scores, even pages from his FBI file, which eventually ran to nearly 700 pages.
Haws and Bernstein's brother, former New Yorker staff writer Burton Bernstein,  commissioned nine essays from writers well qualified to assess different aspects of the man but who were not close to him personally.
The heart of the book in every sense, however, is provided by Burton's  own contributions. As well as writing the foreword and afterword he contributes a chapter on the philharmonic's 1960 visit  to Berlin, adapted from a piece that  he wrote at the time for Esquire magazine, and five shorter pieces, each titled A Brother's Recollection, juxtaposing his own slant and anecdotes with the theoretically more objective essays.
This is a book to dip into rather than read from cover to cover, particularly if you are not one of those people who sincerely believes New York is the centre of the universe, because the recurring assumption that it must be even-tually becomes a little wearing.
The book deals with Bernstein largely in the context of the city. The first essay, by music critic Alan Rich, is a memoir of life in New York during Bernstein's philharmonic years, punctuated by attendance at his concerts and the filing of favourable and not so favourable reviews. 'Might as well be titled 'chutzpah'' he wrote of Kaddish, Bernstein's third symphony, after the first performance in 1963.
There is no doubt about Bern-stein's centrality to the cultural life of the city - he was after all the composer of West Side Story - but to accept uncritically the premise of the book's subtitle, How a modern renaissance man transformed music and the world during his New York Philharmonic Years, 1943-1976, requires the blinkered cast of mind of a certain type of New Yorker.
Bernstein was not a polymath, as the term 'renaissance man' implies, but there is no doubt  he was exceptionally gifted in several areas of music: as a conductor, composer, pianist and musical educator he left an indelible mark.
Perhaps his greatest gift though was for being in the right place at the right time. He was, famously, ready on November 14, 1943, as a recently appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic - a junior position at the time - to be a last-minute substitute for an ailing Bruno Walter  and to make a triumphant debut. That concert from Carnegie Hall went out across the nation on radio and he became an overnight star.
He also had the good fortune to rise to the top of the American musical establishment at the dawn of the television age and to become its first real television personality.
The same flawless timing brought him to prominence as a composer for Broadway during an era when the worlds of 'serious' music and the musical were willing to embrace. That On the Town and West Side Story paved the way for the age of Andrew Lloyd Webber was something he could hardly have been expected to foresee.
None of the essays adds much to what we already know about Bernstein - the artist was phenomenally hard working, meticulous, often inspiring and inspirational, flawed, that his career had troughs as well as peaks - but some do add perspective.
This is particularly true of Paul Boyer's contribution, Leonard Bernstein: Humanitarian and Social Activist. It is to a party thrown in 1970 in his Park Avenue apartment, attended by invited members of the media and controversially by members of the Black Panther party, that we owe the term 'radical chic'. Tom Wolfe,  one of the journalists present, coined it and references to the event turned up in just about all the Bernstein obituaries in 1990.
Boyer lays out Bernstein's record as an active liberal throughout  his adult life as an honourable  and useful one, stressing his contributions to making places in the philharmonic for black musicians and women, as well as his robust opposition to Nazism, McCarthyism, the Vietnam war, nuclear weapons and more. Despite William F. Buckley's dismissal of him as, in Lenin's phrase, 'a useful idiot',  Bernstein was never a communist sympathiser and there could have been no more appropriate choice of conductor to preside over the performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in December 1989 that marked the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It was Bernstein  who in the choral finale substituted the word 'Freiheit' - 'Freedom' - for the original 'Freude' - 'Joy' - of 18th-century German poet  Friedrich Schiller's poem, Ode to Joy.
Neither a rigorous critique of the man and his work, nor an outright hagiography - although some of brother Burton's contributions understandably tend that way - this is a refreshing look at a career of extraordinary achievement, breadth and variety.
Leonard Bernstein did not 'transform' either music or the world, but he contributed much to both. And he certainly qualifies as an American Original.



Leonard Bernstein: American Original