Writing my book, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician

Looking back to the post-war decades, one can understand why so many thought so highly of Leonard Bernstein as an artist and intellectual: music director of the New York Philharmonic and televised performer of Young People’s Concerts and the highbrow CBS show Omnibus; composer of symphonic works including one based on the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, an adaptation of Auden’s Age of Anxiety and a meditation on Plato’s Symposium; art song; an opera, Trouble in Tahiti with themes of suburban angst; musical score to the film On the Water Front with themes of urban angst; the works for dance, Fancy Free and – yet more angst -- Facsimile; and the Broadway shows On the Town, Wonderful Town, Candide, and West Side Story. His Harvard inflections only enhanced his reputation as a man of great artistic and intellectual cultivation. Small wonder that he was a virtual mentor to my generation of Americans.

I had seen him in performance over the years, but what has remains in my mind took place – I think it was 1959 -- at the City College of New York when, one afternoon, I came out of class to hear music across the street in Lewisohn Stadium, the wonderful amphitheater where we held gym classes during the semester but where the Philharmonic performed each summer. I ran over to the stadium and stood with a few other students within yards of the podium to see the visiting conductor, Josef Krips, rehearsing (again, if memory serves) the Beethoven Triple Concerto, with Bernstein in shirt and tie at the piano. It was noon, and the orchestral players were asking Krips for a lunch break. “Not yet!” said a heavily perspiring Bernstein, but Krips replied something like “Ach! Lenny, let them have lunch,” a cue for the musicians to put down their instruments and thereby preempt Bernstein’s attempt at rejoinder. When a few students approached him with pens and open notebooks in hand, a clearly irritated Bernstein barked “No autographs!” And that was that.

Did I think him petty? Not at all! I admired him for his discipline, his dedication to his art.

Now I also admired Bernstein for his politics, or at least what was rumored about his politics, but never elaborated, that he was a man of the political Left. In those days, to be on the Left was for me a matter of great honor, maintaining the memory of the now mystical (and rather romanticized) Popular Front while the McCarthy inquisitions were victimizing left-wingers and the Eisenhower regime was cozying up to Franco and ex- (or not so ex-) Nazis. This was the era when the blacklist was in full force, and when American political debate between Democrats and Republicans was virtually bipartisan because no Democratic politician dared support, for example, full employment or universal medical care policies, for fear of being labeled a communist. (You hear shrill reminders of those illiberal debasements of discourse these days from those who would stop debate on Obama’s policy proposals by labeling them with the scare term “socialist.”)

Years later, with my academic career well established, I was searching for a topic to sink my teeth into. I had done some writing on matters of civil liberties and cultural politics when, in 1995, I learned that the Southern California Civil Liberties Union had obtained Bernstein’s FBI dossier, a file of hundreds of pages apparently loaded with information about his political life. A week or so and thirty five dollars later – to cover costs of Xeroxing and mailing – I received a copy of those hundreds of pages of dossier material and discovered that the FBI had been collecting data on Bernstein’s multifarious political activities since the early 1940s. I learned from other sources that the Truman administration blacklisted him and that the Eisenhower administration had withheld his passport but, back to the FBI documents, then released it only after he signed an affidavit that he was not nor had been a member of the Communist Party. In that affidavit, which has never been published and which until now has been buried within the FBI documents, Bernstein repented his sins, claiming they were only the product of his youthful naiveté, testified that he had voted only for Democrats or Republicans, and that he was religiously observant – all the benchmarks of the loyal American citizen as defined by the witch hunters. As I would learn from Bernstein’s correspondence – more of which in a moment -- the affidavit was kept secret save for its circulation by Bernstein’s attorney amongst the vigilante groups that had the power to give or withhold clearance necessary for him to work in the film industry. Even with that clearance, however, J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was convinced that Bernstein had lied about his communist party membership, and now charged his agents to find the evidence to get Bernstein indicted for perjury. Hoover also listed Bernstein for incarceration in a detention camp in the event of a national emergency.

All of this FBI material had not yet seen the light of day. And I was lucky in another way: the Bernstein family had made available to researchers the hundreds of boxes of correspondence and other materials at the Library of Congress. Between this archive and the FBI dossier was a goldmine of materials; interpreting these together now permitted me to understand Bernstein’s intellectual and political preoccupations; his life under blacklist; to form a good hunch about why he was away from the podium of the Philharmonic from 1951 to 1956; his terror of having to appear before the Committee on Un-American Activities; how he came off the CBS blacklist; how his career was helped by those enlisted in the so-called cultural cold war. I was also able to understand his choice of texts to set to music, and his political philosophy as he expressed it in his 1973 Norton lectures, in fact, too see these all of a piece, rather than so many disparate elements as presented by, ignored by, omitted by, or unknown to, previous biographers. In this fashion I came to see Bernstein not simply as the exuberant and larger than life individual and celebrity, but a man deeply committed to a progressive political position which found expression not only in his public addresses, but in his compositions: he even went so far as to far as to visit the anti-war activist Daniel Berrigan in Danbury (Connecticut) Penitentiary as he prepared to compose his 1971 Mass – an act that Hoover jumped on to link Bernstein to a supposed Berrigan-led terrorist conspiracy, and that, along with Bernstein’s well-known support for the Black Panther Defense Fund, led Nixon to put Bernstein’s name on his enemies list.

As I noted above, much of Bernstein’s life comes into focus with the reporting and interpretation of the materials heretofore secreted in the FBI dossier and the Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress. So too did I come to understand Bernstein’s championing of the works of Gustav Mahler; so too his greatest frustration, his self-proclaimed failure to compose a work of the highest significance, a matter very much on his mind when he was dying in 1990. What I write in the book is that Bernstein was, in the end, seeking to find a compose a tragic work, but searched in vain for a libretto or other text to inspire such a work. That he was unable to compose that highly significant American operatic or a multi-genre work lies, I speculate, less in his supposed failure to concentrate – an explanation offered by a number of critics and even his friends -- than in the flux of social forces that configured American political life. I suspected that the fault lay not so much with Bernstein as with the progressive imagination. I worked up a method to understand his predicament. It turned out that Bernstein was not alone in this particular frustration: Neither Arthur Miller nor Norman Mailer, men of very different temperaments but men whose political outlook was similar to Bernstein’s, was able to find a way to address the American population’s decades-long departure from American progressive ideals through the Cold War and its march to the right from the seventies and into the Reagan-Bush years. In earlier decades, progressive writers such as Dreiser, Dos Passos and Steinbeck had studied the effects of economic forces and deeply embedded political power on social classes. Mailer very briefly, and Miller in two works, continued in this vein up to, but not beyond the late 1940s. But by the 1950s, and though the decades into the 1980s, progressive writers turned away from these issues to explore instead erotic themes, family tensions and breakup; absurdism, e.g., how runaway technology rules life; or the benumbing effects of war. Touching on those earlier themes had become virtually taboo, considered naïve by the liberal but aesthetic modernists who set the tone for the creative imaginative work in the post-war and Cold War years, and who thereby abetted the McCarthyite blacklisters. What resulted was a political language that assumed every American to be a member of a vast middle class America, thereby classless, and therefore no longer needing discussion of those older progressive themes. These were now repressed, their reality rendered inexpressible. I think that Bernstein was trying to find a way back those repressed themes. These would provide him with that long sought libretto, but he never found it. In short, Bernstein’s frustration was due, not to personal idiosyncrasy but to the lasting power of those forces that inhibited the progressive imagination.

In the end, I understand Bernstein as a man who lived in what Bertold Brecht and Hannah Arendt called dark times. If he were unable to express in musical-theatrical composition his deep brooding over the crisis of his times, he did find another way to express himself, and that was at the podium, bringing to life and championing the music of Gustav Mahler. To Bernstein, Mahler’s music sounded deep areas of crisis and tragedy. Bernstein found in Mahler a man at the dark crossroads of politics and culture. But in this case Mahler was Bernstein's predecessor. Of course this was the case in terms of both as composers and former music directors of the New York Philharmonic. But Bernstein saw in Mahler a prophet of catastrophe; as surveys of Bernstein's essays and lectures will reveal, so Bernstein was himself.

West Side Story in revival

West Side Story is back on Broadway, and is getting an extraordinary review by the New Yorker critic John Lahr.

The Art of the Void at the Pompidou

Opening at The Pompidou Centre in Paris is an extraordinary show that is all about .... nothing! Is this a Cagean (as in John Cage) program, a show fit for family membership with those works that Susan Sontag wrote of in her essay of 1967, "The Aesthetics of Silence" ? Or is this project a curator's inspiration in the face of budgetary collapse? The answers to these questions, or at least a clue to them, may reside in the cost of admission. Will the Pompidou folks charge less because there's nothing to see in nine rooms? Or will they charge the usual rates, arguing that vacuity is artwork? Minimalists have promoted the disappearance of content. Others, and I think that Artaud was in the foreground, argued for the virtual nullification of the work of art. Has Paris thus taken back the lead in modern art that it had apparently surrendered to New York after W.W.II? That was the time when representation gave way to abstraction, and the center of gravity of the art world came to reside in New York's art galleries and the Museum of Modern Art. But we now live in crisis times. Is it now, then, that as goes Wall Street, so goes 53rd Street?

(Of course it can be argued that the real center of painterly activity over the last decades has been in Germany, but that's another story.)

Homo Neanderthal in the US Congress

That cultural neanderthalism still abides in certain quarters of the US government was evident this week during the Senate debate over inclusion of arts funding in the new stimulus bill. As reported by Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times of Monday, February 16, 2009, in attacking the stimulus bill "Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, had grouped museums, theaters and arts centers with implied frivolities like casinos and golf courses."

Another representative of contemporary atavism, Representative Jack Kingston, Republican of Georgia, stated that "'I just think putting people to work is more important than putting more art on the wall of some New York City gallery frequented by the elite art community.'" Kingston went on to suggest that the arts are "the favorite of the left," and added as justification for his opposition to funding the arts a populist-demogogic "Call me a sucker for the working man."

Countering Kingston was Representative David R. Obey, Democrat of Wisconsin, who noted that "Arts workers ... have 12.5 percent unemployment" and asked his Republican colleagues if they were "suggesting that somehow if you work in that field, it isn't real when you lose your job, your mortgage or your health insurance?"

I'm happy to report that the arts survived Republican hand wringing and made it into newly passed stimulus plan.

On the down side: the article noted that even as the arts were untied from casinos and golf courses these two latter institutions, along with zoos, aquariums and swimming pools, were excluded from the stimulus program. Don't casino, golf course, zoo, aquarium and swimming pool workers have rent and health insurance costs? Don't zoos and aquariums have high values within our educational and cultural lives? And as for their inmates, are we not alive to the fact that animals have rights, and, moreover, that at the least we have an obligation to those we hold captive?

American Apocalyptic Literature

From the late 1960s on, Leonard Bernstein held a rather apocalyptic vision of America. How interesting to realize that a certain variety of Jewish-American authors writing in the sixties and early seventies, including Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Barry Malzberg, also wrote in apocalyptic terms. (Mailer called his particular outlook "existential," but it was in this vein.) Was this genre a secularization of the Jewish prophetic outlook now turned onto American civilization? Of course not all secular Jewish writers, e.g., Roth and Bellow, were of that outlook: Roth at that time epitomized the turn inward; and while Bellow later on was remorseful about not planting his novelistic characters within the forcefields of history and power, Mailer, Heller, and Malzberg certainly did so. So my question has to be somewhat altered: by writing about power and its multiform effects on human life, was the apocalyptic style inevitable?

I e-mailed Barry Malzberg about this, asking him about the theme of his 1969 short story “Triptych,” creeping madness amidst high-technology, as if there's an inverse correlation between instrumental reason and sanity: the more the former grows the more the latter regresses. He wrote back, ”Exactly right. You've got it. That's precisely my point. That story was written 40 years and a couple of months ago at a time when no one seemed to be cognizant of that paradox. Now of course it is deeply infiltrated in the culture (astronauts wearing diapers the better to drive cross-country on a murderous errand without bathroom break) and the stuff of comic strips and television comics' late night monologues.”

As to my question about the apocalyptic, Malzberg wrote, “It is of course the question with which my work was engaged … and my answer was at least a qualified ‘yes’.“ He went on: “Bellow, great writer, was working corners...his best novel, Humboldt’s Gift, is a joy to read and I wallowed in its pages in sheer pleasure long ago but it's trivial, utterly unengaging and Herzog turns angst and the apocalypse into absurdity and impotence the way that the Roth of Portnoy turned the entire horrific Jewish odyssey into whacking off. (He opened the argument somewhat later.)”


Malzberg then referred me to an essay he’s just written in response to my question:

"At the time (1968-1971) I was writing my three Crazy Astronaut novels [The Falling Astronauts; Revelations; Beyond Apollo] (there were about ten short stories, I didn't feel like a visionary at all. What was going on, the human dehumanization of space, the asepsis of the overwhelming, seemed absolutely clear and so did the outcome. Any dummy could have seen this coming, I thought. The Apollo Program was oxymoronic; it was an exercise in institutionalized denial. Also it had been funded and propagandized by the government as a distraction from the increasingly unpleasant and unpopular business of Vietnam. When our Vietnam involvement inevitably ended, when the Moon had been "conquered", when the distractive purposes had been solved, the Moon was certain to be abandoned and Apollo would collapse. In thrall to the Government it had been meant by the Government to be about power, not exploration. The astronauts had to know that too. There had to be a little crazy as they perceived that fundamental contradiction.

"Seemed clear enough to me and overseas to J.,G. Ballard who was (in The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, "The Terminal Beach") working similar territory; the mad incapacity of our culture to deal with the maddening implication of uncontrollable technology. The increasing gap between human motive and sprawling technological capacity could lead to collective insanity. Certainly Ballard's "condensed novels" limned that and in the colonies I was reaching the same conclusions in my humble work.”

"After Apollo 13, after Watergate, after the flight from Saigon, I made an assessment in an Afterword to the 1976 reissue of my 1972 novel, Revelations. … the middle novel of that Crazy Astronaut Trilogy) … and in some ways the most ambitious, dragging in confrontational television as the laboratory for my crazy astronaut. … This was how it looked to me 32 years ago:

"How right I was in seeing that the structure of the program and its administration would drive many astronauts crazy we have only been inferring in recent years...because I _was_right about that. I knew from the beginning that my insights were correct, I knew that the men going into those capsules, ostensibly as operators, actually as cargo, would be forced to come to terms with the devastating fact that they could serve only by being machinery and that many of them, sensitive and reflective in our better moments would wish them to be, could not easily deal with this. Only years later did we learn of the divorces, the breakdowns, the lurches into mysticism, the scattered children, the pain that the bureaucracy had inflicted on some of those astronauts.

"The Apollo program, in the hands of a venal, cynical government, was made absurd. It did not want to be absurd, it had serious purposes, millions of dollars was budgeted for the public relations which would make clear how very serious it was. We were after all embarked upon the greatest of human odysseys, one which Bradbury in The Martian Chronicles had called the justification for our existence. That little clock which ticked inside us was our signal to carry to the stars. Kennedy had said, "We will go to the Moon." Agnew had said, "We Will Go To Mars." John Campbell had written in 1945: "First sale of Astounding on the Moon in 1960!" In the tent of our fathers, all mysteries were to be explained.

Malzberg continues:

"But meanwhile, "There is to be no cursing in space" Control advises the three astronauts in one of my earliest stories ("Triptych", 1969). The transmission is on all the time, control your language." No cursing in space! If the War On Pornography was to be carried from the offices of the Citizens For Decent Literature to the spaceways, if the spaceways were an Interstate to the suburbs of the Moon, if the Reverend Donald Wildmon and his good citizens could sanitize the limitless and if no one in the National Aeronautics and Space Agency or the United States Government could state that this was absurd...then the program was doomed. Devoid of humility or realism, it would end in an ash heap of motive. The astronauts and engineers trapped by this mad oxymoron would be either insensible or driven toward madness. Pass the diapers; pass the mysticism please. John Glenn went into space a second time at the age of 75 but he had nothing to say that time, either. That was perhaps the only way to deal with it: say nothing.

There’s a lot to digest in what Barry Malzberg has been writing over these decades, something in the makeup of such otherwise disparate personalities as Norman Mailer and Malzberg that gave their writing in that period that sense of apocalypse. Of course there was the War in Vietnam (and think of the film Apocalypse Now) that more than anything else showed the madness of imperial thinking that was manifest behind the grandiosity of American financial, expansionist, and military policies, a grandiosity and hybris that so belied, and were on collisions courses with, the norms and values that we thought we prepared to follow. It took a generation to repress the horrific implications of these imperial assumptions; and then they came roaring back via the works of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, and the financial barons. Now we stand face to face with the slouching beast.

Emotional or Cooler Mahler?

In an earlier posting I raised the question of why in some periods audiences and other listeners will prefer a more emotional performance of a Mahler symphony, say, by Bernstein, and why at other times a cooler variety, say by Boulez, takes preference.

I once conducted a poll on the Mahler List as to why the Mahler boom had occurred, and the majority of respondents, I think maybe 20 people, said it was the advent of the LP and the new high fidelity and stereo sound systems. But the advent of the new technology would not fully suffice, because then any composer whose works appeared on LP and were playable on a terrific stereo system should have had his/her boom as well. No, something more than technology was behind the sudden popularity of Mahler. I think that in the decades of the 60s and the 70s, the emotional interpretation caught the imagination of a listening audience for whom the horrific tragedies wrought by the Nazis during WW II had immediacy, a people desperate to find expression for the traumas of mass murder, genocide, and the crushing of European humanism. The Mahler boom took off because, Mahler, even though he died in 1911, was victimized by anti-Semitism and could represent in music the victimization of millions during the European catastrophe. For Bernstein, Mahler's music in toto became a vast musical work in which the Knabenwunderhorn songs, the Wayfarer Songs, the symphonies, the Ruckert Lieder and the Kindertotenlieder, and Das Lied von der Erde, especially Der Abschied, all form a great work, at once, Mahler’s autobiography, at once, European Jewry's Great Memorial and Requiem, at once, a 20th century European tragedy. I think this is what drew so much attention in the 60s and 70s. What compelled audiences in those decades was the great emotional, tragic power that was realized by Bernstein and by Walter, Mahler’’s protégé, and others, among them Haitink, who, conducting the (as it was known then) Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra in its great concert hall, provided the Dutch with their own historic references to a great pre-war Mahler tradition and their own memorial to their horrors under the Nazi occupation.

Now as to Boulez: As time went on, the generations that had sought and attended this Mahlerian musical tragedy had perhaps exhausted their own needs for powerful cathartic release. Mahler's music had been long enjoying its high place in the canon, and audiences, older as well as younger members, were seeking new ways to enjoy Mahler. And so the less emotional, cooler Boulez and similar interpreters.

To conclude: Bernstein was a great tragedian who realized the tragic powers so manifest within Mahler's music. Boulez and the cooler approach satisfies others who for whatever reasons have less investment in the historical, tragic Mahler.

Hanns Eisler and the FBI

Apropos of the posting regarding Hanns Eisler, there is a very fine article by Jame Wierzbicki, "Hanns Eisler and the FBI," in the latest edition of the on-line journal, Music and Politics.

This issues contens include:

• Michael Beckerman, “The Dark Blue Exile of Jaroslav Ježek“

• Jame Wierzbicki, “Hanns Eisler and the FBI“

• Brana Mijatovic, “’Throwing Stones at the System’: 
Rock Music in Serbia during the 1990s“ 


• Damien Sagrillo, translated by Lee Rothfarb, “The Notion of Humankind According to the Music-pedagogical Conception of Former Socialist States, Exemplified in the Former German Democratic Republic“
  

• Dard Neuman, “Music & Politics in the Classroom:
 Music, Politics and Protest
“
  

• Eunice Schroeder, ”Recent Books on Music and Politics”

Regarding this journal, the editors write:

Music and Politics welcomes submissions of any length that explore the
interaction of Music and Politics. Areas of interest include, but are
not limited to, the impact of politics on the lives of musicians,
music as a form of political discourse, and the influences of ideology
on musical historiography. In addition, we seek articles that examine
pedagogical issues and strategies pertaining to the study of Music and
Politics in the undergraduate classroom. We also welcome suggestions
and/or submissions of articles on Music and Politics that have already
been published in another language and that would benefit from
dissemination in English translation. Submissions are encouraged from
both established scholars and graduate students. Because Music and
Politics is an on-line journal, authors are welcome to take advantage
of the media capabilities of the web (sound files, hyperlinks, color
images, and video).