Bernstein Protégés

WRITINGS OF JOHN MAUCERI JOHNMAUCERI.COM Conversations about Bernstein Bernstein Protégés edited by William Westbrook Burton John Mauceri Printed by Oxford University Press 1995 John Mauceri, a Bernstein protégé, has a have done: he should have been a concert pianist; highly successful conducting career on both sides he should have composed more; if only he had of the Atlantic. He has been equally at home in stayed with the Philharmonic longer. And people the opera house or on Broadway, whether wouldn't let him live his own life. But he created conducting Wagner at Scottish Opera or the West his own career, in his own image. Side Story Dances at the Hollywood Bowl. He Since Lenny was so overwhelming - conducted the European premiere of Mass at the threatening to some people - he spent a lot of his Vienna Konzerthaus in 1973, which was recorded for television, and made his debut at La Scala in life getting to read unfavorable stuff in the press. And it would be naive for anybody to think that 1984, conducting Leonard Bernstein's opera, A there are any artists who are not hurt by negative Quiet Place. He was responsible or several reviews and unfair publicity. The critics who structural changes to A Quiet Place, with the destroyed Maria Callas, who destroyed George acquiescence of the composer, following its world premiere in Houston in 1983. He has also Gershwin, have a lot to answer for. All of us fight it, and pretend that it's not there, and get up and played a crucial role in restoring much of the say that's the way it is. But something does get original music to Candide, and has performed taken out of you, something does begin to bleed this and other Bernstein compositions extensively internally, something starts to happen. If you look in Europe, Israel, and the USA. at artists and the kinds of things they have to put Bernstein's critics have always held that be " up with, the stresses that they have to deal with read himself too thinly," that he spread should are enormous, both publicly, whether have settled for one particular speciality. Ned perform*mg music or writing it, and also Rorem has remarked that this would have personally, because that is a very lonely journey. crippled Bernstein, both musically and personally ... Bernstein seems to have bad a long-suffering attitude toward the New York critics. Did be ever Yes. I remember reading an interview with speak to you about this? Lenny in which he said that whenever he entered He talked to me about [Howard] Taubman or exited a country he would fill in on his and a little bit about Schonberg. He would say: passport form not composer or conductor, but musician. Of course people in the press spent a "Imagine what it was like to wake up on Friday morning after having conducted your first concert lot of Lenny's life telling him what he should BERNSTEIN PROTÉGÉS: JOHN MAUCERI © John Mauceri INVESTORWRITINGS NEWSLETTEROF JOHN MAUCERI ISSUE N°3 JOHNMAUCERI.COMFALL 2008 each week [on Thursday] and while you're having performance is a view of a piece of music; it isn't your breakfast to read all of that stuff and then to the piece of music. And most people get confused go to the concert hall and conduct the matinee." I with that. The confusion is that "the work is think it hurt him terribly. equivalent to my favorite recording of the work." In the last decade of his life, through, there I think there is something here with Lenny seemed to be a critical change of heart. that is rarely discussed and that is that Lenny in a recording studio and Lenny in a concert hall were Yes, in the last ten years he only got great two very different people. Very different in the reviews. Something happened. His hair went sense of how to use the room and also the white! Something changed, and one thing that we medium. Lenny in the studio tended to be slower, can say was that in the last ten years there was because, like A of us, he wanted to hear almost no demurral from anyone. Whatever he everything. It also depended, obviously, on the did, whatever exaggerated tempos, or acoustics of the room and the microphone experimentation, he was basically permitted by placement; if the room was dry he tended to his public and the critical community to do conduct faster; if the room was reverberant he whatever he wanted. And from that point of view, tended to conduct slower. This is why the last I suppose, we can all be happy for him, that the recordings, which are mostly based on live fight was over, that in one sense he outlived the performance, give one a better idea or image of older critics who set him up and then tried to how Lenny performed in public. destroy him. I don't think he was necessarily better in the last ten years than he was in the rest Many people have commented on the of his life as a performer. I just think that some memorable qualities of a Bernstein concert. How kind of international détente was reached! important do you think it was to bear him in the flesh? Bernstein's tempi as be grew older became markedly slower, sometimes exaggeratedly so, I think you can never understand any artist or Would you say that this slowing down applies to a musician unless you hear him or her live. And majority of older conductors? this was particularly true of Lenny. Recordings simply document a day that was had in the studio No. I don't know whether generalizations are - or five days. Erich Leinsdorf once said, and possible here. Toscanini probably got faster. My brilliantly so, that the most powerful tool a first conducting teacher, Gustav Meier, said that conductor has is silence. And in a recording that the ones who start out fast end up slow and vice is meaningless. A performance is an agreement versa. Lenny did become slower, but he also between an audience and the performers. It has to admitted to me that, for example, the Brahms be. You cannot have a great performance without Third [with the Vienna Philharmonic] was too the acquiescence of the audience. slow, that it was an experiment. He conducted that in six as opposed to in two, and that was a How about the Unitel videos? Do you thin k "Lenny six" with all the subsidiary beats. He felt they capture any of the crackle a Bernstein in retrospect that it was too slow, but that it was performance? just a view of it. I think Lenny understood that a BERNSTEIN PROTÉGÉS: JOHN MAUCERI © John Mauceri INVESTORWRITINGS NEWSLETTEROF JOHN MAUCERI ISSUE N°3 JOHNMAUCERI.COMFALL 2008 I don't think the particular aura, or humanity, music theatre Mass was Lenny's creation and as of Lenny that was experienced *in a live such he had authority over it, even though he had performance can ever be captured either by been helped with some of the words by Stephen recordings or by television or videotape. Schwartz. Television is the medium that comes directly into Mass Las been described as a "melange of our homes, but is by the same token the most styles" (Harold Schonberg). Do you think it holds removed from us and the most detached. There's to together, structurally? a three-inch speaker and a twenty-inch screen, and you can watch how Lenny perspires, or how Well, Mass is in a sense an accumulation of he smiles, or how he ages, but you're detached. fragments; for example, "Simple Song" was There was a danger involved in a live originally conceived for a film about St. Francis performance of Lenny's. Lenny, for example, by Franco Zeffirelli which became Brother Sun, might conduct Mahler Nine and it would be ten Sister Moon. Lenny never went ahead with that minutes longer than you had ever heard it before, project, because the more he and Franco talked due to the extraordinarily slow tempos he chose about it, the more it seemed they were talking to use. These performances were dangerous, they about two different works. Then there is risked chaos, and don't forget that. There was no "Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus," which Lenny wrote necessarily implied happy ending. for Helen Coates [Bernstein's secretary] for her To move on now to the compositions, you birthday; it is really "Happy Birthday, Helen Coates." All of us who knew Lenny well would have probably performed more of Leonard either get a poem or a song for our birthdays, and Bernstein's music than any other living sometimes these would reappear in larger pieces. conductor and have acted as a catalyst in the completion and / or alteration of works such as Mass began my work on editing his music, Mass, A Quiet Place and Candide Could we and what was a surprise . se to me was the bad begin with talking about Mass? state his music was in, in the sense of dynamics, articulations, and the state of the parts - just I think the creative process of Mass was very getting an instrumentation list for Mass seemed complicated. Lenny had a sort of writer's block to be impossible; were there five trumpets or during the period of its composition. It's a huge work and a difficult and painful experience four, for example? putting it on. You can say: "Sing God, a Simple I am fully prepared that there will be those Song" [the words of the opening number of who tomorrow, or in thirty years' time, may feel Mass, sung by the celebrant], with two church that my influence on Lenny perhaps confused his organs, a children's choir, a band, a string section, artistic vision.

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