Left Side Story: The Political Overtones of Leonard Bernstein
By Lucy Caplan
Review: Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician
296 pages, Hardcover, University of California Press, $24.95
To anyone who recently suffered through a grueling set of midterms, take heart: Leonard Bernstein received a C in one of his music classes as a Harvard undergraduate, and things worked out pretty well for him. As a conductor, a composer and an educator, Bernstein had an indelible impact upon the American musical community. In 1943, he made his conducting début with the New York Philharmonic, of which he would eventually become music director. Over the next five decades, he went on to compose some of the most famous works in the American repertoire, from musical theater to symphonies to ballets. He demonstrated his commitment to teaching in a variety of forms such as the Norton Lectures at Harvard and the New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concerts, joyous celebrations of musical expression that incorporated everything from Beethoven concertos to Beatles tunes.
But while Bernstein’s stunningly successful musical career makes for a rosy and inspirational story, it does not convey the whole of his life and work. Barry Seldes’ fascinating new book, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician, brings to light another essential element of Bernstein’s life: his interaction with the political landscape of his era.
The twentieth century, in Bernstein’s words, was “the century of death.” It was the century of “fifty, sixty, seventy years of world holocausts, of the simultaneous advance of democracy with our increasing inability to stop making war, of the simultaneous magnification of national pieties with the intensification of our active resistance to social equality.” As these sentiments make abundantly clear, Bernstein’s music-making did not take place in an aesthetic and cultural vacuum, but rather in conjunction with a deep awareness of the tumultuous political climate in which he lived. And from the beginning of his career, Bernstein linked his political views to his musical endeavors.
In 1937, while still a college student, he showed his solidarity with the Communist composer Marc Blitzstein by staging a production of Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, a pro-union allegory about corporate greed and corruption. Even liberal Cambridge banned the production, forcing Bernstein to move it from the city to the Harvard campus at the last minute. Bernstein’s leftist sympathies soon began to extend beyond musical statements to more explicitly political activities. Seldes’ book provides numerous examples of the causes Bernstein supported during the 1940s, which ranged from the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee to the National Council on American-Soviet Friendship to Daily Worker petitions supporting Communist political candidates. His actions did not go unnoticed; the accumulation of material for Bernstein’s FBI file had begun in 1937 and would eventually comprise over eight hundred pages. By 1950, he had been blacklisted by not only by CBS, which had broadcast his early New York Philharmonic concerts, but also effectively by the Philharmonic itself. Ultimately forced to sign a non-communist affidavit, Bernstein managed to salvage his career, but only at the price of what he referred to as a “ghastly and humiliating experience.”
His musical career revitalized, Bernstein’s commitment to political activity remained strong. The next major scandal to befall him came in the form of the fundraiser he hosted for the Black Panthers in 1970. This event is infamous, but Seldes supplements it with new detail about the FBI’s response, which included sending Bernstein antagonistic, anonymous letters.
But how did Bernstein’s politics interact with his music? Seldes offers the compelling argument for repeated correlation between Bernstein’s compositional projects and the political backdrop against which they were created. His 1964 Chichester Psalms is a choral symphony of texts that deal with the themes of peace and unity, a fitting counterpart to the Left’s political optimism in the early 1960s. But by 1977, Bernstein had shifted his focus to works like Songfest. Another choral symphony, this work expresses no sense of unity and peace. It is a fragmented collection of American poems set to various styles of music, many of them dark in tone and subject matter. With works like Songfest, Seldes asserts, Bernstein “made quite clear his ambivalence about American culture and politics.” Considering the conservative resurgence taking place around him, Bernstein’s choice to compose non-patriotic, non-celebratory music seems unsurprising.
While it may be tempting to dismiss these correlations as pure coincidence, Bernstein himself acknowledged a clear relationship between his musical and political views. His 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard University theorized that tonal music was worthwhile precisely because it could express shared human emotions and morality. The musically centerless form of atonality, he thought, paralleled the morally centerless world that could permit totalitarianism and war, and was thus unacceptable. Though this point of view alienated Bernstein from most of his musical contemporaries, he remained convinced that tonality was important not just for its aesthetic value, but for its moral and social importance in uniting people through music.
Despite the strength of this conviction, though, Bernstein never really succeeded in producing a work that melded musical greatness and sociopolitical significance. Why? For Seldes, the answer again lies in politics. Bernstein’s career was framed by the culturally hostile 1950s on one side and the Reagan conservatism of the 1980s on the other. These political climates were inhospitable to the composition of a grand, eloquent musical representation of American society. For Bernstein, music and politics would have to remain forever separate.
Ironically, the only notable weakness of Seldes’ book parallels Bernstein’s: like his subject, the author has difficulty finding the perfect balance between political background and the remainder of his work. Long sections that contain no mention of Bernstein or his story can feel like U.S.-history textbook chapters. But on the whole, the book takes a fascinating journey through Bernstein’s musical and political career. Seldes’ analyses of politics and music are equally elegant, and clear enough that one does not need a musical background to appreciate the story he tells. To anyone interested in American culture or American politics, Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician offers a compelling and intriguing account of an extraordinary man.