Leonard Bernstein by Allen Shawn

Author:Allen Shawn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-03-11T04:00:00+00:00

11

Chichester, Vienna, Mount Scopus

1965–1969

BERNSTEIN COMBINED INTROSPECTION and extroversion in equal measure, but his public side was so strong it was sometimes hard to believe that it wasn’t the whole man. In a sense, he needed an audience for his introspective side and, unlike the classic introvert who gets energy from solitude, needed to store that audience within him when he retreated to his inner world to compose or study music. When he reemerged into the public sphere, he had a burning need to discuss the joys of complex art and poetry, to share his internal states and mystical longings, to make the internal external. Although interaction with collaborators was essential to him when he was writing his theater music, he seemed to need to enter a special, private state of mind to produce other works. On many occasions he described ideas coming to him while lying down in contemplation, or sitting at the piano for hours on end in a kind of trance, from which he would awaken to find pages and pages of notes before him. These visionary trance states resembled those he entered while conducting, and from which he would have to return at the end of a performance.

For Bernstein, music was an interactive, social art. Addressing a hypothetical posterity was antithetical to his nature. Although sympathetic to his colleague’s frustrations and to his artistic idealism, he would certainly have differed with the brilliant composer Milton Babbitt, who wrote, “The composer would do himself and his music an immediate and eventual service by total, resolute and voluntary withdrawal from [the] public world to one of private performance and electronic media, with its very real possibility of complete elimination of the public and social aspects of musical composition.”1

Bernstein’s 1964–65 sabbatical from the Philharmonic afforded him, at least theoretically, an entire year to compose. The fall was taken up with work on a musical based on Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, with Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. When that project ran aground, he turned his attention to a sacred commission from the Very Reverend Walter Hussey, dean of the Chichester Cathedral in England. In his first letter approaching the composer about a work for the cathedral, Hussey had mentioned his devotion to the arts, specifically his having previously commissioned a Madonna and Child from sculptor Henry Moore, and a cantata from Benjamin Britten. After Bernstein agreed to compose a work for performance in summer of 1965, Hussey wrote expressing his delight and added that Bernstein should not feel stylistically encumbered in any way, even going so far as to say, “I think many of us would be very delighted if there was a hint of ‘West Side Story’ about the music.”2 In late February, the composer wrote Hussey that he planned a setting of three psalms, with additional verses from three more as commentaries—the only “hitch” being that he could “only think of these Psalms in the original Hebrew.” Hussey agreed to the use of Hebrew, merely requesting that the words be written phonetically for the choirs.

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